The edict of expulsion was signed at Granada in 1492 and is usually told as a bolt from the blue. It was not. In Seville the machinery had been in place for fourteen years, and the city had twice served as the testing ground: first for the tribunal, then for the expulsion itself. This is the story seen from here, from the port they sailed out of.
Seville, the first with a tribunal
Isabella I spent the winter of 1477-1478 in Seville. Out of that stay came the decision: **Seville was the first city in Castile and León with a tribunal of the Holy Office**, confirmed by a bull of Sixtus IV in 1478 and working from 1481, installed in the Castillo de San Jorge — today the Triana market. Unlike the old Aragonese church inquisition, this one answered directly to the Crown. Its first burnings and its first named victims are told in the legend of Susona, where the archive separates what is documented from what was invented.
1483: the dress rehearsal
Nine years before the general edict, the Jews of **Seville, Cádiz and Córdoba were expelled towards Extremadura**. It was not a local episode: it was a trial run. It established that entire communities could be displaced by administrative decision, and how long it took. The 1492 expulsion was not improvised; it was rehearsed here first.
Three months
The edict gave three months to be baptised or leave the Christian kingdoms. Three months to settle debts and sell house, workshop and land in a market where everyone knew the seller had to sell. Around a hundred thousand people left Spain, most of them for Portugal and North Africa. Whoever stayed, stayed baptised — and therefore under the tribunal's jurisdiction, which is, on the most widely accepted explanation, the ultimate point of the measure: Jews were **outside** the Inquisition's reach, and expulsion was the quickest way to cut their religious influence on the conversos.
Fifty thousand, from the port of Seville
From this port **some fifty thousand people** set sail, in Genoese and Basque ships. The first wave went to North Africa; a smaller part towards what is now Turkey. It is worth pausing on the date: in that same port and that same year the enterprise that would cross the Atlantic was being fitted out. Seville said goodbye on the same quay to those leaving for ever and to those about to widen the world.
Senior was baptised, Abravanel left
The court had Jews in its highest posts to the very end. **Abraham Senior**, chief rabbi of Castile, was baptised in June 1492, already an old man. **Isaac Abravanel**, royal counsellor, refused and left with his whole family; he had earlier offered an enormous sum for the monarchs to revoke the edict, without success. The two possible paths, taken by the two people best placed to avoid them.
The language that left on the ships
What went aboard with them was not only luggage. They took the **Castilian of the fifteenth century**, and mixed with Hebrew and later with Turkish and the languages of the places that took them in, it became **Ladino**, or Judeo-Spanish. It is the most living trace of all this: a language that left here in 1492 and went on being spoken, sung and printed for centuries in Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, Sarajevo, Amsterdam. The room Sephardic legacy gathers that inheritance: the language, the music, the food and the calendar that travelled with them.
What it cost
There is a detail that still troubles historians: **the expulsion was expensive**. The crown lost the tax revenue of the Jewish communities, and that loss far exceeded whatever was gained from liquidated property. Economically it was a bad decision, and this was known. Which is why the explanation that holds is not about money but about control: uniformity was the aim, and the tribunal had no reach over those who were not baptised.
The tribunal that began all this was not definitively abolished until **1834**, by royal decree published in the Gaceta de Madrid. That decree, the 1492 edict and the paths of the diaspora are gathered in the room Inquisition and diaspora; the quarter they left, in the Jewish quarter of Seville; and what is still standing today, in what remains of the Barrio de Santa Cruz.
