The Barcarrota library was one of the most significant bibliographic discoveries of the last century. It was found in 1992 by a married couple, Toni Saavedra and Raúl Cordón, when they decided to renovate their family home, an old house in the small town of Barcarrota, in the western Spanish province of Badajoz, near Portugal. The bricklayer’s pickaxe, in one of its strokes, unearthed paper instead of brick. In the carefully bricked-up space, in addition to the book pierced by the tool, they found 10 more books. All of them dated back to the 16th century and were written in various languages.
The most remarkable find was a 1554 edition of the famous satirical novella Lazarillo de Tormes, which, like its fellow walled-up books, had withstood the test of time almost unscathed. Now, according to new research by Professor Pedro Martín Baños, we know that the individual who hid them there was Fernão Brandão, a Portuguese nobleman who fled his country to evade the Inquisition. “He was quite a character,” says the researcher hesitantly. “That is to say, someone who deviated a bit from the nobility.” Or, as the inquisitors of the time put it: “An impious sodomite.”
The key clue that led to the new discovery, published in the book The Hidden Library of Barcarrota and the Portuguese Nobleman Fernão Brandão (available in Spanish), was a circular paper amulet found alongside the walled-up books, dedicated to Brandão and dated in Rome in 1551. “I saw that practically nothing had been done about the name that appears on the amulet,” says Baños. “I started searching, narrowing down by dates, exploring what might be interesting.”
He was lucky: he discovered that Fernão Brandão came from a “very well-known and prominent noble family,” one that had been extensively studied by genealogists since the late 16th century. The man had inherited the entire family fortune “at a relatively young age” and had “become accustomed to being surrounded by servants who agreed with everything he said.”
So what did the good Portuguese nobleman do to earn the name of “impious sodomite”? According to accusations made in the Inquisition courts, as recorded by Baños, he “ate fish and meat on Fridays, Sundays, and holy days of obligation; he never prayed; he played ball with his servants instead of going to Mass; he disappeared from the city during Lent; he did not go to confession; he blasphemed against God and the saints; and he possessed metal figurines with which he practiced certain rituals.”
But perhaps even more serious for the time: he was accused of having homosexual relations with his servants and possessing “a book of sodomy, in the form of a hymn book [that is, bound as if it were a religious book], in which there are depicted men riding each other from behind, unnaturally.”
The books found in the Badajoz village confirm this record. In addition to Lazarillo, there was an Alborayque, a fierce satire against Jewish converts to Catholicism — this is the book that was pierced by a pickaxe in 1992; two treatises on palmistry; a manual of exorcisms; a copy of a polemical work by Erasmus of Rotterdam; a small book of prayers in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; a very rare Prayer of the Walled-Up Woman (a type of superstitious prayer) written in Portuguese; and an erotic [if not downright pornographic] dialogue of a homosexual nature, La Cazzaria. Four of them were listed by name — including Lazarillo — in the index of banned books of the inquisitor Fernando de Valdés, published in 1559. This also helps to date the moment when the books were walled in, which must have been either late that year or in early 1560.
The fact that some of the books were not explicitly included on the list of prohibited titles confused some researchers, who didn’t understand why they were hidden alongside those that were clearly banned. This discrepancy gave rise to some theories, neither widely publicized nor substantiated, such as the one that they actually came from a confiscated bookstore. Baños refutes this. “What the Inquisition did was use a perverse method. The boundaries were very vaguely defined, and the gray areas were so broad that one didn’t really know whether the books one possessed could be considered dangerous or not: what wasn’t prohibited today might turn out to be two years later. All the topics covered in the Barcarrota library are controversial.”
Another mystery was the dating of the amulet — “pieces that must have been made by the thousands throughout Europe, and that people wore around their necks or in a small bag,” Baños explains — in Rome. The answer lies in the fact that before traveling to Badajoz, the nobleman visited Rome seeking absolution and likely acquired the amulet there. “In 1547, the Portuguese Inquisition launched a hunt for sodomites that had an enormous impact, especially in Lisbon. I found that several of them had gone to Rome to seek absolution from a tribunal called the Apostolic Penitentiary, [still in operation] for a certain price.” Most likely, Baños asserts, the nobleman did not obtain it, and that is why, “since denied absolutions were not recorded,” there is no record of it in the documents. However, there is one of them, Antonio Coello, who shares a name with one of Brandão’s servants cited in one of the complaints against the “sodomite.”
A miracle find
Finding the books was, according to Miguel Ángel Lama, a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Extremadura, and closely involved in the discovery in the 1990s, “a miracle.” The couple who owned the house and had started the reform work, decided not to report the find to the authorities, “likely for fear that their work would be halted,” and kept the books in a shoebox for four years.
Finally, the regional government of Extremadura ended up paying the couple who discovered the treasure 15 million pesetas (about $100,000). “But the bricklayer,” Lama recounts, “surely very well advised by a lawyer, was told that the heritage law states that when you find something, half of the profits go to the landowner and the other half to the actual finder.” So the bricklayer took legal action, won and ended up with half the money. To this day, out of sheer pride, Baños says, the couple insists to anyone who asks that the husband, who also helped with the construction work, was the one who actually drove the pickaxe into the treasure.
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