Once down into the Po Valley, yet more ordeals awaited, this time human and thus even more terrifying. Paranoid about the escape of those of ‘the Judaic fallacy’ to the Turks, along with their capital, merchandise and commercial knowledge, Charles V had established an office of ‘Marrano affairs’ at Antwerp, armed with exceptional powers of arrest, detention and interrogation, which in practice invariably meant torture and robbery. Its chief officer was Cornelis Schepperus but its most enthusiastic enforcer was his deputy Johannes Vuysting, who at Pavia and Milan (both in the Habsburg Duchy of
...more
