Alexander Bevilacqua

In June​ 1391, an anti-Jewish riot broke out in Seville, prompted by the incendiary preaching of a local priest. Four thousand Jews were murdered, and the violence soon spread to more than ninety Iberian cities. The events of 1391 remain the largest massacre of Jews in Iberian history. Over the following two decades, more than half the Jews of Aragon and Castile converted to Christianity,...

In the late 16th century​, a stream of Greek émigrés passed through the south German university town of Tübingen. After recounting the indignities they had suffered (or claimed to have suffered) under Ottoman rule, some were allowed to beg at the church door or offered money from church collections. Others were turned away: after all, there was no way to check their...

Some time​ in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where frescoes of the Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian had been painted on the wall. ‘Leaning on her faith as upon a stick’, she dug her fingernails into the plaster, then dissolved...

David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the...

Under​ what circumstances would you eat your pet? For Jean de Léry, a 16th-century French missionary, this wasn’t a hypothetical question. During a treacherous Atlantic crossing from Brazil to Europe, with supplies running low, some of his fellow passengers killed and ate their monkeys and parrots when hunger struck. Others waited until they had almost starved before putting...