1492 left Madrid without doctors and the Council begged them to return

1492 left Madrid without doctors and the Council begged them to return

Just a few months after the Edict of Granada of July 1492, Madrid ran into a problem nobody had sized up: there were no doctors. The departure of healthcare professionals of Jewish origin left the town without medical care, and the Council had to formally request the return of specific surgeons. The paradox speaks for itself: the same authority that signed the expulsion of the Jews later begged them to come back. Much of the online analysis of Isabella I of Castile revolves around this fact.

What peine to Madrid's doctors after the 1492 expulsion?

Madrid was left without them. In the 15th century, a notable share of the medicine, surgery and botany of the Iberian Peninsula was in the hands of professionals of Jewish origin, and the enforcement of the decree triggered an immediate healthcare crisis. Within months of the signing, local authorities noticed the gap and asked for the return of specific names. It was not an isolated case: the same pattern is documented in other Castilian cities. The episode, frequently cited, has become the favourite piece of evidence for those who argue the measure was taken without weighing its cost.

The human capital that left and the foreign banking that arrived

Here begins the core dispute. One school of thought holds that the absence of those financiers left the Habsburgs at the mercy of German and Genoese bankers, who would have taken a large share of the American silver and turned the kingdoms into mere intermediaries. The result, according to this reading, was impoverishment, inflation and an economy that bought almost everything abroad. Amsterdam was already the epicentre of world trade by 1600, and the paradox of waging war on the Dutch while buying everything from them is cited as a symptom.

Another line of analysis flatly denies this. It argues the collapse came not from the lack of that human capital, but from a rent-seeking parasitic nobility alien to any productive investment, and from a culture that despised work and trade. In other words: the problem was not who was missing, but who was in charge.

How many were there really: the numbers that don't add up

The estimates swing wildly. One of the most repeated figures speaks of 300,000 Jews before the expulsion, of whom 100,000 would have left and some 200,000 would have converted to Christianity. But the figures for those expelled range from 20,000 to 500,000 depending on the source, and more than a few warn that a good part of these numbers are pure conjecture.

The Inquisition in numbers: 2,000 executions up to the 18th century

The records of the Holy Office allow another approach. In its first two centuries, the Inquisition prosecuted some 30,000 conversos for judaizing, with 2,000 executions up to the 18th century. The bulk is concentrated between 1480 and 1520: some 20,000 prosecuted in those first decades, after which the pace drops markedly. These are the figures used to debate the real intensity of the repression.

The New Laws of 1542 and the struggle over the encomiendas

The third front is in the Americas. Some argue that the Crown and the clergy moved to limit the encomiendas (grants of indigenous labour to colonists) out of fiscal control and religious zeal, depriving the conquistadors of what they considered the legitimate fruit of the conquest. The New Laws of 1542, under Charles V, are the axis of that clash between central power and those who had won the land by force of arms. The debate over whether it was a brake or a sarracena correction is still alive.

The Spanish model versus the English model in the Americas

The comparison with English colonization structures the rest of the debate. One side defends mestizaje and the caste system as a formula that prevented something worse; the other argues that the English model, with fewer settlers and territories that were almost emptied, would have produced more homogeneous societies. In the south there were millions of people; in the north, few from the start. That simple starting fact reshapes any comparison.

And at the bottom of all this lies an uncomfortable figure: nobody knows how many actually left in 1492. The debate rests on a basis that is not settled.