Talavera, Hernando, de Archbishop of Granada

Angus Mackay

Born of converso (Christian convert) parents around 1430, Talavera studied and taught at the University of Salamanca and then rapidly rose through the ecclesiastical hierarchy, becoming Isabel the Catholic's favorite confessor and archbishop of Granada after its reconquest. He was almost certainly of Jewish origin, and his converso status was at one point investigated by the Inquisition; but he was also well connected to the nobility (the Álvarez de Toledo) and to influential clerics.

Talavera for a time taught classes of moral philosophy at the University of Salamanca before withdrawing to the Jeronymite house of Alba de Tormes. Later, his religious reputation persuaded Isabel the Catholic to invite him to the royal court, and by 1476 he was a member of the royal council and a political councillor of extraordinary influence, playing a strategic role in the financing of Columbus's «enterprise of the Indies», and above all taking charge of the religious fate of the population of reconquered Granada (1492). Talavera approached the problem of the defeated Muslims in an evangelical spirit, attempting to convert the defeated by persuasion and peaceful means. In this, however, he was thwarted by Jiménez de Cisneros who, rejecting Talavera's pastoral approach, used brutal force in order to convert or expel the Muslims.

Toward the end of his life, the saintly Talavera also had to undergo the indignity of having his family investigated by the Inquisition, on the grounds of heretical associations relating to a Jewish background. Although the notorius and sinister inquisitor Diego Rodríguez Lucero was dismissed from his charge by the pope, it was already too late for Talavera who, on his deathbed, entreated the Catholic Monarchs to intervene againts the Inquisition. He died in May 1507. Talavera's concern with respect to the defeated Muslims of Granada damaged his reputation at the time but greatly enhanced it subsequently. By stressing teaching and persuasion rather than force, he anticipated later Counter-Reformation emphases of an evangelical nature. His reputation, even among the vanquished, was that of a truly religious man, even a saint.

• Azcona, T. de, La elección y reforma del episcopado español en tiempo de los Reyes Católicos, Madrid, 1960.