Inquisition Trial of Francisco Gómez Robledo, 1663-1664

Sargento mayor Francisco Gómez Robledo was one of six prisoners sent from New Mexico to stand trial before the Inquisition in Mexico City in 1663. He was charged with making heretical statements and for practicing Judaism. Several scholars and researchers have described Gómez’s background and ordeal to varying degrees of detail, but now the full details of his story are available.

UC Berkeley’s Cibola Project has published my transcription (in Spanish, with a Preface in English) of the entirety of his inquisition case file. It includes the testimony of 19 witnesses; details of his indictment and incarceration; and transcripts from his hearings before the Inquisition judges. Genealogists will be particularly interested in Gómez’s description of his ancestry and living relatives (folios 341r-346r). Check out the name index at the end of the document for a list of everyone mentioned throughout the case file.

The Inquisition accused Gómez under 19 articles of evidence, but they centered around four principal charges: 1) his heretical belief that the sacrament of baptism did not confer a spiritual kinship between the child and the priest, or between the parents and the priest; 2) his heretical belief that striking an image of Christ was not a sin; 3) his assumed support for the heretical belief of his cousin Diego Romero regarding the obligations of two people involved in an illicit relationship; and 4) for being a practicing Jew (based primarily on allegations against his father, Francisco Gómez, who had been a partisan of the governors).

Though the judges ultimately acquitted him of all charges, there are lingering doubts about whether or not the Gómez family descended from Jews who had recently converted to Christianity or if the Franciscan priests of New Mexico fabricated the accusations because they had an axe to grind with the Gómez family. For further reading about the persistence of Jewish traditions among descendants of Spanish Sephardic Jews in the Southwest, see Stanley Hordes’ book To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (2005).