Plaza de las Tres Cruces: June 1391
Why is it significant?
In the middle of this little crossroads of lanes stand three slender columns, each one crowned with a cross. Nobody hurries past them. The lanes are too narrow, the walls too close, and the whole place feels like a small room open to the sky.
Key Facts
| Place | Plaza de las Tres Cruces: June 1391 |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaza de las Tres Cruces, Calle Cruces, 41004 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.38630, -5.98840 |
| Part of Walk | The Lost Judería of Seville: Santa Cruz, Susona and the Synagogues That Became Churches |
| Generated | Generated |
In the middle of this little crossroads of lanes stand three slender columns, each one crowned with a cross. Nobody hurries past them. The lanes are too narrow, the walls too close, and the whole place feels like a small room open to the sky.
The street is simply called Calle Cruces, the street of the crosses, and Sevillians love to argue about the columns: some say the shafts were reused from far older buildings, others that they marked a stop for prayer. What nobody disputes is where they stand... in the heart of what was once the Jewish quarter. And that makes this a good place to tell the story that changed the Judería for ever.
In the 1370s and 1380s, an archdeacon from the town of Écija, Ferrán Martínez, preached sermon after sermon in Seville against the Jews, urging Christians to destroy the synagogues. The archbishop and the Crown told him to stop. He did not. Then, in 1390, both the archbishop and the king died, and the new king, Henry the Third, was a child. There was no one left to restrain him. In March 1391 there was rioting. On the sixth of June, a mob broke into the Judería.
Houses were plundered and burned, synagogues taken, families killed in these very lanes. Chroniclers spoke of thousands of dead, and many of the survivors accepted baptism to save their lives. Within weeks the violence spread like a fire along the roads, to Córdoba, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona and dozens of smaller towns across Spain.
The Judería of Seville never truly recovered. Its synagogues became churches, and a new class of people was born: the conversos, Jews who had become Christians, often under duress, and who would be watched with suspicion for generations. Keep that word in mind, conversos, because the rest of this walk depends on it. Now head north-east through the lanes towards Calle Levíes and the church of San Bartolomé.