The Woman Who Defied Kings | Andree Aelion Brooks | Talks at Google

Good afternoon and welcome everybody to the women at Google and authors at Google. I want to thank all of you for attending. I also wanted to thank Debbie and Kiki and Josh for helping plan and coordinate this. It was a lot more complicated than we all expected. So my piece in this story started about two months ago. I was back east visiting my sister in the lovely cool and snowy. Maybe it wasn't snowing, but it was cold Princeton. And my sister said, oh hey, do you want to come to Jacob, my nephew's Sunday school? There'd be a talk on the inquisition. And we all know, you know, we know you like history so you'll find it interesting. I said, okay, I go along and let me tell you, it's pretty hard to have a lecture that both appeals to fifth graders who are not only go to school five days a week but also go to Sunday school as well as adults who are listening on. And Andre treaded that quite well. But I figured it'd be nice if I, if we could bring her out here and do something tailored more to adults. And so I wanted just a brief introduction and then I'll turn it over. Andre has a very impressive resume. She's been in the journalist world writing columns for the New York Times. She's an associate fellow at Yale University. In addition to her studies in history, she was also the founder of the campaign school at Yale. Correct me on anything I'm wrong on which has already managed to place two women in Congress. It's a non partisan training program for women in politics. She's written extensively on European history, Jewish history, as well as on children of high achieving parents. And she also has some fascinating insights as an author of multiple books on the publishing world as well as the newspaper world. So I just want everyone to give a very warm welcome to Andre Books Brooks and her fascinating topic for today, Donna Gracia Nasi. And I'll let her say okay, more.

Is this on? Can you hear me? Thank you, Larry. That is great. Maybe you can do it. Every time I'm feeling low I should give you a call and you'll repeat it. And I know the world's in such a bad place. We all think we're so smart, don't we? Well, we do but. And we think that really what we invented, we invented yesterday, as it were, as we go into the 21st century. So. So I think it's humbling and important for us to realize some of the great minds and the great doers of past centuries who didn't have a lot of the advantages that we do. But nevertheless, they stretched their minds to the limit in a way which is extraordinary. And this is as introduction to why I was interested in Donna Gracia Nasi. You've never heard of her? I can't believe anybody in this room. Well, I shouldn't say that anybody else. Anybody in this room ever heard of her. No, I'm not surprised because I didn't till I stumbled on her 10 years ago when I was doing a project in Mediterranean Jewish history. And here was a woman I just started the campaign school, political school for women. And here was a woman who exemplified what it meant to decide in your life as a woman that you wanted to do something and spend your life dedicated to that mission and accomplish it. And here was a woman in a time when, Honestly, in the 16th century, we don't think of women as leaders of multinational corporations, which essentially she was. And indeed she was. We think the only women that we can sort of conjure up are sort of Elizabeth I type of women. Royal. But I can assure you there were brilliant people throughout society. But my interest, as I got deeper into her story, which I think will interest you, is strategy. I mean, it's all very well to want to do certain things as, you know, as engineers and techies and whatnot, but it's another thing to make it happen. And sometimes making it happen, I think, is what they say, it's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Well, I think when one looked at her life, you said, all right, she did all these amazing things. She was the head of an international bank. She built an escape network that saved thousands of the victims of the Inquisition. She brought the port of Ancona in Italy to its knees when The Inquisition burned 23 of her people, she said, no more. I won't allow it. You may be the pope and you may be in charge of this city, but you're not going to get away with this. And how did she do it? And then she was a patron of the arts because this was a time of great achievement in all the forms of art. Art, architecture, literature, philosophy and politics. And she did that too. And she didn't have any more hours in the day than we have. And she certainly didn't have any mechanical aids to aid her people. Yes, but nothing. I mean, if she wanted to get a message from here, from Lisbon, where she lived, to Antwerp, she had no email, obviously. And finally she said, well, if I'm going to bring my refugees all the way to the other side of the world, which she did. And I'll show you how she did it. She said, well, that's not enough. I'm going to build a land for the back in the state of Israel, which she started. She tried to start a modern settlement there, which in its own day was groundbreaking. But she did it all, and she did it all with style. She did it all with finesse, she did it all with courage. And I felt that she deserved that. From the 16th century, a proper biography. How do you go about finding stuff on an unknown woman that nobody in this room, including myself, had ever heard of? You don't find them in the places that most historians find biography. You don't find letters and documents where you think they are because they're in a nice little folder wrapped up with her name on the front. So I can assure you the academics had long since dismissed her as not worth looking for because she wasn't there. What they knew about her a little bit, that was enough. But I come out of a discipline as a investigative reporter, and my argument was, well, if she did all of these wonderful things, how did she do them? And if she really did them, there's got to be a record of them somewhere. And if she didn't do them, let's expose her as a fraud. So I set about it with everyone saying, don't be such a fool, you're wasting your time, energy and money. And I said, no, I said, I think she deserves a biography. And I kind of got hooked. And it started about an eight year odyssey throughout Europe and surprises, surprises, surprises. I can assure you when you remove the filter of the historian or most historians, I won't say all historians or the academic type of historian. You see things in documents that you're reading that are 500 years old and that people didn't seem to care about. I mean, sort of traditional historians didn't care about. I mean, there was. I'll give you two things, and these are the key to her life, which I will begin in a minute. First of all, we found inventories of possessions when her sister died, for example, and nobody was interested, it seemed, but my goodness, you find the inventory of someone's possessions, you know how many furs they have, the jewels they have, the kind of silver pieces they wanted in their home. You build a whole image of the clothes they wear and the things that they like. I mean, it's like going into your closet. I wanted to know, of course, because being a journalist, you can't come back and say somebody drove a car. You have to say Somebody drove, you know, a 1998 Lexus, and it was getting a bit old or something, and it was, of course, it was white. So I wanted to know what she ate for breakfast and if she was widowed very early in life, she was. Well, as one of my research assistants, who spoke one of the 13 languages we needed, said, but she's got to have a lot of lovers. So I said, well, maybe she did so. Or she put herself on lover patrol. We had documents and we would classify them and say, does this suggest something or does this. Well, they didn't kind of lay it all out like Oprah today. You had to sort of read between the lines. So there's a lot, when you do modern biography and you are trying to recreate and provide. I mean, she's an inspiration to us all. She is an amazing inspiration. She has been to me, and I'm going to share that with you now, as to what she is, what she did, where she went and how it all happened. So let me take you back for a moment. It's no longer 2007, it's no longer March, but it is Spain, and it's 1492. And 1492, when all of us went to grade school, is only known for one thing. In America, you know who coming, you know where. So also at the same time that you know who came, you know where they had expelled the Jews from Spain. The Jews had been in Spain since time immemorial, since the time of the Romans, and some of them were quite well off, and they were very integrated and very assimilated. But for lots of reasons, Ferdinand and Isabel at the time decided it was time to get rid of them. And so most of them had to leave or convert to Christianity. So they did a bit of both. And the family that we're talking about, the Nassimandez family, had been a big commercial family in Spain, and they went to Portugal, they paid the entrance fee. The Portuguese king thought he could make money on this deal, so he charged them an entry fee. And a lot of them went into Portugal, nearest place. But they arrived in Portugal in a very interesting time. If you think that for the money that's been made in this area through the tech revolution in the last 10 to 15 years, this is what it was like at the beginning of the 16th century, the early 1500s. But the money was not in tech, of course, it was in spices. By spices. We all wonder, how could you have all these spices that we read about in the books? It made no sense. A little bit of Pepper on your meat. That wasn't it. Spices represented a whole array of things. Medicine, riches, and it included spices and jewels and all of the riches of the East. And at the time there was. I mean, they really shopped till they dropped. In the Renaissance, you have to only look at the paintings, to look at their carpets and their pieces and, of course, their spices and their clothes and everything. And what had happened was that Vasco da Gama, who was a great navigator, had found his way around the Horn of Africa to Asia, and he had started to be able to bring back a lot of these goodies without having to incur all of the problems of going through Arab, Muslim lands. And if you think this is the first time, it's actually the fifth time that the Muslims and the Christians were against each other. And they were at the height of their argument again around 15, beginning of the 1500s and 16th century. And Vasco Gama sort of did a real end run around them, literally an end run around them, and took his ships around the Horn of Africa and came back with all the goodies. Now, somebody had to finance those voyages and a look for the commercial prospects when all of this good stuff came back. And it was a little fishing TR country Portugal was. And so the family I talked about got into the financing of these voyages. They speculated in silver. They bought silver low when the flotilla went out twice a year, it went out after it went out, and they sold high just before it left, because you needed to. If you wanted to buy share and interest in the cargo that came back. You had to provide silver ingots to go into the ships because that's all they wanted out in the east was the silver. So they got to cut a long story short, they got rich on that. But they'd already brought a lot of money out because there must have been somebody, I don't know, doing the negotiations, who pulled the wool a little over Ferdinand's eyes. And you'll appreciate this, this kind of an audience, because the edict of expulsion, which I read, said, of course, you can't take out any of your property or gold and silver. We expect that to be there. But it says you can take out any assets and bills of exchange. And I always have this funny scene running in my head that one of the negotiators for the Jews who are being expelled, so sitting there with Ferdinand, and he's saying, what do you want in there? A bill of exchange? Well, what is it? And this guy says, well, it's a piece of paper. Oh, you can take out all the paper you want. But really, of course, it was a transfer of assets. And our family, the one we're going to deal with, had taken out a lot of their money and was able to get into this spice trade. And if you got into the spice trade, you kind of brought back maybe a pound of pepper at 5 cents for the pound, and you sold it for $500. It was almost like the cocaine trade. It was very, very, very, very lucrative. And they got very wealthy. And a few years after they arrived, the king, the new young king of Portugal, wanted to marry the daughter of Ferdinand Isabella. You ever hear about the daughter of Ferdinand Isabella? Do you? Anyway, they had quite a few daughters, and he wanted to marry the daughter because he wanted to be king of Spain as well, not because he liked the daughter, of course. And Ferdinand as well said, okay, you can do that, that's fine, we'll accept you very nice offer and, you know, suitable match, but you've got to kick out your Jews too. So the king of Portugal says, well, I don't think I can do that, because they're making the country very rich. They're helping me with these long distance voyages. They know how to build the ships, they have the best navigators. No, I'm not going to get rid of them, but I want my cake and eat it. So you devise a Milan, he said to his people, you devise a plan and we'll make it work. So they devised a very clever plan. Sad, but clever. They invited all of the people they were going to expel into the center of Lisbon. I can't believe they all came, but according to historians, most of them did because they promised them ships and safety to somewhere where they could live, which was in Muslim lands. And then they surrounded them with troops and left them without any food and water for three days. And while they were gasping and begging for their lives, they came through, sprinkled them with holy water and baptized them forcibly, and said, go home. And then he sits down, the king, and he says, dear Ferdinand and Isabella, there isn't a Jew left in Portugal. Now may we go on with the wedding? And it took place. So they went back to their homes and they got on with their lives. They couldn't leave. They got on with their lives and they did fine. And then a few years later, into one of the households is born our heroine, Donna Gracia Nasi, 1510. And she grows up as the daughter among the wealthiest families in the city. She gets used to being at the palace, and I like to show this, because, you see, this is a later picture, not of her, but a recreation of what she looked like. And she was very regal and she knew all the ropes of dealing with the royals. And at 18, she was married off, as was the custom in those families, to her uncle, who was the wealthiest, according to King John, the wealthiest merchant in Lisbon, Mendez, who. He ran a bank called the House of Mendez, which in its way was probably bigger than the House of rothschild's would be 300 years later. They dealt in spices, they dealt in currency trading, they did everything. But they were a USB type of a bank. And his brother ran the northern office in Antwerp, and they were doing very well. But she marries him. And his whole emphasis at that point was devoted to trying to stop the Inquisition coming to Portugal. It had been in Spain for a while now. What is the Inquisition? The Inquisition is a regulatory arm of the Catholic Church designed to root out insincere behavior among the Catholic masses. You had to be a sincere Catholic and you had to follow all the dictums of Catholicism and otherwise. They didn't want you and they got rid of you and they put you in jail and in the dungeons and whatnot. Well, that's what it was supposed to be. In reality, it was kind of ethnic cleansing. They wanted to get rid of all of the Jews they'd asked to convert because they said they weren't sincere, which is a. You know, are they going to be sincere? No. Anyway, he was worried because it was. The other part was that you couldn't live if the Inquisition was likely to come after you. You couldn't work, you couldn't lend money, you couldn't be in business, you couldn't have a life. And you couldn't leave either, because one of the things the King said was that all these people could not leave. So he works on this and then he dies only a few years later. And they've just had a baby. She's now at her late 20s, and she's left with a sense of, do I hand over the business to the men in the family or do I take it on myself? And this is where it gets interesting, because we think now that the most obvious thing to do back 500 years would have been that she would have let. And there were many men in the families. He had brothers and all sorts of things and cousins and whatnot. There was lots of men, but she didn't. According to the laws of those days, she could run her late husband's business if she chose to do so, because she inherited half of his assets, and she chose to do so. She immediately takes over like she'd been doing it all her life. And she gets rid of the cardinals who are worried that they're not going to get their bribe on time because they had been bribing the Pope not to sign the necessary bull to allow the Inquisition to come to Portugal. The King had sent another delegation, another lobbyist. I mean, it's amazing. They all had lobbyists, they all paid off people. They had an incredible arbitrage system going. We are not so modern as they. In many ways, they invented so much. Anyway, going on with her story, she's left there a slip of A woman of 27 caught in one letter that we found from the city of Antwerp to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's minister. It's amazing to find these letters and read them in their ex. In their original. It really is. It's unbelievable. It's mind boggling that she's called a demoiselle. And anybody who speaks French knows that demoiselle is a very young lady, sort of a young chip of a girl. She's not considered, you know, a big mature woman yet. And she is going to travel. But to begin to show what we learn when we do her story, I think this first crisis in her life brings it forward and I, you know, I'm going to go into other things as well. In this first crisis in her life, she's left with carrying on the mission of her husband, which was to stop the Inquisition, to help to build the escape network which was already on his mind. Because if the Inquisition came, he'd have to get these converted Jews out in a hurry before the Inquisition started to arrest them on phony charges of not being sincere. Sincere or any other phony charges that they wanted to drum up. So they're beginning to formulate an underground railroad, as we would say in American terms. And so she's got a lot on her plate and she thinks that this is what she's going to concentrate on. Oh, no. Oh, no. See El Ray up there? I call him El Ray. He was the king, King John iii. He's not very swift because he does things like he pledges the entire revenues of his country, Portugal, as a dowry for his sister to marry the Holy Roman Emperor, when that's all the money he's got to run the country. So in comes her late husband. This was before he died. And they started to loan money to the king. Lots of benefits in loaning money to the king. And they did it by. And this for those of you who are interested in business or how these things operate, they guaranteed him an actual sum in ducats. Ducats are like euros. In those days they were called ducats every quarter. And they said, look, if we give you an infusion of this number of ducats every quarter at a certain time, certain, you don't have to worry whether you're going to make any money from the incoming spy ships, which could go down in a storm, could go down with pirates, anything. So we'll take the risk. We'll take the risk of the high seas and we'll guarantee you a certain sum. And then we will take this, the goods as they come in, and we will profit from your share of the goods, whatever we can make on them, it'll be our risk. And they made very good money doing that. So El Rey thinks about it for a minute. He looks a bit like a Disney king, but that's his portrait, his honest to goodness portrait. He thinks about it and he says, well, there's a lady over there, just the other side of the square in a beautiful mansion, and she's got a hell of a lot of money. And I want that money. And if her baby daughter is entitled to half of it, I think that's the way to get it. So he tells his minister, and this is where my movie opens. He tells his minister to gather together a few men and gallop over the cobblestones to the house of the widow, as he calls it in the letter, and tell the widow that I have decreed and so has my wife the queen, that the baby daughter shall be brought up in the palace almost like a princess, and she shall be the most happy mother in the land. Well, she knows what he's up to. And he says at the end of the letter, I know that she may not feel so great about this because that's the only way I can get her money, the daughter's money. So they go to the house of Donna Gracia, knock on the door, and we begin to see her brilliance. Do you think she gives in? But if she says no, she's defying the king. This is the first time she defies the king. And if she defies the king, he's going to set his dogs on her. Not literally, but he's going to send. He's going to get that inquisition rammed through the Pope, and he's going to make sure that she's not around anymore. So she's left with a quandary. Do I lose my daughter or do I lose my life? And here you See what she does repeatedly, she. And I've learned from this, she always has a plan A and a plan B. And she doesn't wait for plan A to crash before she institutes plan B. She learns something else very quickly. She learns that in life, this is for your personal life or your professional life, you've got to have an exit plan and most of us don't. And every time we try to exit from something, it's always much more messy than we try to enter something. And so she knows with the Inquisition that you must have an exit plan. It is absolutely vital. So what is her plan A and plan B here? The next thing we hear in order to solve this problem, and it's a very interesting way how she does solve it. And she does this time and time and again to get her way for her escape network, to get her way for her family when her sister stabs her in the back. But anyway, in this case she has a dilemma. And you may be already thinking about how you would approach it. I mean, you could give in, give up the daughter, that's easy. You could try to run away, that's not so easy because you're high profile and he knows who's leaving and they have to have a permit before they get a chance for a ship to take them away. So she's kind of trapped. So the next thing we know, she's written two letters, she's written one letter to her brother in law in Antwerp and said, in effect, get me the hell out of here. Send some spy ships ASAP and I'll find a way to get on the ship. She also writes a letter, her plan B, to the Pope, because she and her family have been bribing the Pope for all sorts of benefits. And the Papacy at this point is terribly corrupt. That's why Martin Luther is screaming and yelling up in the north of Europe at this very same time. And she tries to get what's called a safe conduct in those days. It's sort of like a super passport. If the Pope gives you a safe conduct to go from point A to point B, the local monarch really doesn't interfere with that. That is the Pope's. It's a super passport sort of thing. And of course it must have cost her quite a bit, but she hurries up to get it. But she's still got to find a way of persuading El Rey. He doesn't look very swift, does he, finding El Rey to let her go. And this is where you begin to start to love the woman she Is all woman, by the way. Absolutely all woman. Her biggest thing is the spa. She, whenever things get really bad, she always goes off to the spa. Nothing changes. No, really, really, really. And she uses these women's wiles as well. So she. We haven't got an actual document that says this, but circumstantial evidence is very strong for this next bit. But what she does is that she requests an audience with the King and he says, fine, you know, knows who she is, come see me. And he's been waiting not only to get the daughter, because by getting the daughter he gets half of the huge cash assets of the House of Mendes under his wing and to use as he will, but also for like, you know, when you die, there's an estate, the IRS requires you to file an estate tax for estate taxes. She was supposed to file the assets of the House of Mendez and the family in order that the assets of her husband should be duly taxed, which she's been stalling for 18 months already and saying, yes, next week it'll come, but we have to get this paper and that paper. I mean, nothing changes. Again, when you read these things, it's like you're reading something today. It really is. I mean, even one time when we found a lease, a lease where her niece is getting married and wants to live, this is in Italy now, and the niece has a clause inserted which says that if the landlord doesn't finish a certain renovation by a certain date, you know there's going to be penalties. The landlords were also never fixing up the properties even then. But anyway, back to this. She goes to see the King and she says something that must have gone something like this, according to circumstantial evidence. And I think we've got a lot to learn about negotiation here. She says to him, you're really trying to get a complete accounting of the assets of the House of Mendez so you can, you know, take the taxes to which you're due. Yes, he says, well, she says, my problem all these months has been that a very loose arrangement was in place between my husband and his brother, who was his partner in business. And I think that a lot of the information that is going to really give us a full accounting of the House of Mendes is lying in Antwerp with my brother in law. And unless I can go to Antwerp and visit on a business trip and see him and get all that I need to know, we are not going to be able to really give you all that. If you want to just take your share of whatever is Here in Portugal, that's fine, no problem. I'll just give you what's here. But that's not really where the assets are. You can imagine his eyes are opening wider and wider because he can almost. The cash register is going to. So she said, I think I need to go to Antwerp, so would you give me a temporary pass to leave here and go to Antwerp? And by the way, if I'm going to Antwerp, I think it's best if I accept your gracious offer of bringing my daughter to court, which of course is a great honor to me. You can imagine her with all Renaissance hyperbole there. And she was like that. When you read the letters, you see how you know all of the charm is there. But she's so young, she's only 18 months. And I think she should stay with her mother a little longer. So we'll take her with and we will make the arrangements as soon as we get back. And by the way, my sister is pledged in marriage to my brother in law in Antwerp. And she is a young single woman. And of course you wouldn't want her to go on the high seas all alone. Not a young woman in these times, not a well born young woman. So she'd better come too. And by the way, my two young nephews have been registered at the University of Louvain, which was one of the great universities of those days in Belgium, which was the Low Countries, where they're going in Antwerp. So I think they should come too. And so she goes on, because we know they all managed to leave, we know from later documents, so she leaves perfectly, legally, in the light of day with as much as she can. And off she goes to Antwerp with absolutely no intention of coming back. And she feels, I think at this point, because we know from later letters, that she will be able to run her escape network in greater safety from Antwerp. So off they go. And El Ray, he got screwed, okay? She leaves from Portugal, goes by way of London and probably met Queen Mary. Now, I kept saying, what we know is that she definitely spent three or four months in London on the way. Why would she have gone to England? Why would she have stopped in England of all the places if she needed to stop on the way? This is where it becomes fun to put history together like a jigsaw puzzle. Took the pieces together. Yeah. No, no, Spanish armada was about 40 years later. No, no, it wasn't under Mary. It was still under Henry VIII at this point. Under Henry viii, That's the clue. Under Henry viii, what has Henry VIII Just done. So you take the date. You take the date and you say 1537, and then you apply it to a chronology of Henry VIII's life. And bingo. You know why? Because two years early, he had applied for, well, several years earlier, applied to the Pope to be able to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, because he wants to marry Anne Boleyn. And they, you know, in the end, he gets so mad with the church that he quits the church. So if he quits the church, there's not going to be an inquisition or any of the Inquisition spies in England. He's kept them all out. He doesn't want anything to do with them. In fact, he has destroyed, as you know, the monasteries. So it's kind of a safe haven in England. But you wonder for a while why she went. And then you realize it was a safe haven. So you put these pieces together and just kind of the light bulb goes on. She goes through England and up there, and she goes on her way to Antwerp. And now I want you to see, because I think as Google people, you'd be interested in what we were doing. I'm just going to digress to the. You know, how you construct this narrative, how you put it together, the story, when you're dealing. 500 years ago, this is the kind of thing we found. What language you think it's in? Give me some. Give me some suggestions. English. English. Yes, it is in English. But if you think we also were dealing with 13 other archaic languages, you'll understand. All written in this kind of a script. Maybe the next thing Google needs to do for scholars is to find a way of giving us script from other eras. And all of a sudden, magically, we click our mouse and we get a typed page in modern script. But, you know, it's sort of like coming into focus. You'll see it's English. Look at that word in the middle here, Ladyship. Right. What's another one that I can give you? This is who the. It says. I'm going to read it to you in a minute. Not from here, but from my translation. This says Diogo Mendes. And they used Y for. I see. And you'll go on, you. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, this is. I think it's interfering with the. I think I need a tech person for a second. Why did it do that? What happened? I was still using my clicker and I think, okay, all right, we'll go back. I better not use it. I better use this one because it's okay. All right, there we have it. Do you want to know what it says? What happened was. And I got this. Don't think I'm a genius, But I had to hire people who had this kind of expertise. And it wasn't that easy to find them. But you begin to see how they accomplished their mission and how they twisted arms. This is a letter. Where is it? To a couple in Calais. They had to go by way of Calais. They crossed the channel and then went to Antwerp. And Calais was in British hands, English hands at the time. And it was run by a governor called lord lyell and his wife on a Lyell. And they have to stop there. So her agent in London, because she had agents all over the place in this document, is saying that he wants to find a way that they're put up in the style to which they're accustomed. And he has approached one of the courtiers at Henry viii's court, who is in the employ of the Lyles, and said, please do this. So he's writing to the lady of the house because they're to be put up. And this is. It's interesting. When you get down to letters of ordinary people. To ordinary people, pleaseth your ladyship. You can follow it if you can. That Bastian Rodriguez Pinto, merchant of Portugal. Where are we? Like the second line desired me to write unto your ladyship to be good unto these gentlewomen, which he saith, are of a principal house of Portugal and doth now repair towards Flanders, for one of them shall marry with a rich merchant in Flanders called Diogo Mendes. And so. But the payoff is so that if it may please my lord and your ladyship to be good unto them, to put them up and make them squid cheer. He just simply means put them up. The said Pinto is minded, Pinto, being the agent of Donagracia, to give my lord and your lady a present of spices which shall be worth 20 ducats in the least, because spices were currency. What she does is she takes all this money and she begins to build the escape network for her refugees that are being hounded by the inquisition. And it's a remarkable tale because she takes from the hands of the monarchs and she gives to the people, almost in a Robin hoodish sort of a way, to the people who are being screwed by these monarchs. So it's actually a very interesting scheme that they work out what they do when she gets to Antwerp. And by the way, lady Lyle says, absolutely, because she buys all her clothes in Antwerp and she wants plenty of money to go to Antwerp, to go Shopping, which was the big sort of like shopping mall of the day in Europe. And we know that because if you look up the. Then again, what you do is you look up the person. You look up Lady Lyle in the, you know, in the history books, and you see who was Lana Lyle and what did she do? And how is it we have a letter from her? I'm just digressing a bit just for the research because it's interesting. Interesting? No, it's not on Google. You don't. I mean, it's so specialized that you're, you know, it'll never be. I don't think any of this. Although so many archives are putting their collections online, which is absolutely wonderful. And by the way, thank you for that. Because about a year or so after they stay with the Lyles in Calais, Henry VIII decides that Lord Lyell is actually a papist and he's going to put him in the tower. So his soldiers come along and take off Lord and Lady Lyle to the Tower of London. But before Lady Lyle goes, she stuffs all her letters down a privy. Hooray for waterless privies. Because without them we wouldn't have all her letters. And it was the letters that got caught down the privy that contained a letter of Donna Gracia. And how do I find all these things? I mean, I guess nobody else would be nuts enough to want to solve a problem where you have to find somebody's life by going to these. All these, you know, diverse sources. But it becomes a true treasure hunt. You find little clues and so you go to the next level for the next clue and the next clue and suddenly you get. Why is it gone? Where's my techie guy? What did I.

Computer turned off.

It turned off. It won't turn on again. Are you sure? No, it's not. It's not plugged in. There's no the battery. So I'll have to go on without it. You'll have to excuse me. Maybe we can bring it back. I think the battery went. Just one second. Yeah, the battery went. Okay, we'll have it back. But anyway, where was I? I lost it with the privies in the privies? Yes. Nothing. Privies. We wouldn't have history, right? But anyway, she starts up an escape network from Antwerp when she gets there with her brother in law. And the thing about it is that I was told again by the traditional historians that you can't find anything. I said, all right, an escape network. That's not good enough for me. I mean, I want to Know how it operated, how it functioned. If I wanted to go on it, if I felt that the Inquisition was going to come and arrest me, what would I do? You know, whose door would I knock on? Who would I get hold of to say, I want to be helped out of this country in a hurry? I mean, you know, I wanted practical questions like you might ask. And so they said, you'll never find that because it's ordinary people doing ordinary things. And in those days, those things weren't written down, but they were. They were. Do you want me to just boot it up again? Just one second. Indeed they were. And what we found was. It was serendipitous. It was almost like she was trying to help me through all of this stuff because I happened to go to London and I was having lunch with historian friend. We're almost there. Just a second. Okay, I think we're back in business. Oh, no, something's happened here. Hold on. I need to get it into the. Oh, this is where it's gone. Which one? This one. Okay. All right. We're back. We're back. Excuse me for that. Okay, she's now in Antwerp. And how do they run the escape network? What I found was that I had lunch with this historian in London, and he says, oh, I'm working on a private. It's amazing where these things come from. He's working on a private assignment doing the history of a family called Agnes in London around that time. And he thought he'd seen in the archives in University College London some papers with a folder named Antwerp Marranos. I said, well, Marranos being what the force converts were called. I said, there may be something else for me there. He said, yes, I think there is something. And I sort of collared him, made him finish his coffee in a hurry, and off we went to University College archives that very moment, because he had the pass and I didn't. We get into the archives and we ask for the folders, and he says, it's going to be three days. And I say, I haven't got three days. I'm only here for a few more days. Have to do this afternoon. So finally they bring up the boxes, and it's like suddenly, you know, again, you find it's very exciting, the mother lode. They bring up not one or two boxes, but I think it was at least 3ft high of boxes. They were the raw archival stuff that a historian 100 years ago in England had gotten out of the archives in Brussels. And they contained pages and pages and pages of stuff on Antwerp at the time when she was there, including all her machinations to run her escape network. Because every time a refugee came in, they were interrogated, and nobody bothered to go through those pages of interrogations. And they were there. Well, you know, and I'll read you. They got on their ships at night. They got on after they got on the spy ships at night. The way they did it was that they let me go back on this and hope it doesn't crash again. They would load the refugees on the ships in Portugal. Some of them came out of Spain, but they all loaded in Lisbon on the spy ships. And the captains were in the pay of the bank, which was a shipper also, and they had to wait until that had been inspected. Every ship was inspected by the customs and the immigration and the Inquisition. But after the inspectors went away, they would go out in rowboats into the black of night, and they would row to the far side of the ship, not the side facing the dock, the side facing the river, because Lisbon harbor is in a river, the Tigris River. And they would clamber aboard. And we even know what they took. They would take bedding, they would take apples and be biscuits for along the way. And when they arrived, and of course, a few coins and stuff to keep them when they got there. When they arrived, they were sent to the house of Donagracia. We know this too, because some of them confessed under torture as well. And you could say that's not very satisfactory. But some of the things that they do talk about sound very real. So you get a sense of ordinary people running away from a terrifying possibility and arriving in Antwerp somewhere where they're going to get some help. And it was so well organized. The other thing that somebody found after I'd finished the book, so this particular thing is not in the book, but it was given to me right afterwards. Lots of things have been given to me since was instructions that somebody going. You see, the idea was to get them from here to safety here in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was the Muslims. And the Muslims were taking them in and they had to get out. But they couldn't sail this away, which is the most direct route, because guess what? The Muslims and the Christians were at war with one another. Isn't that something new? Nothing new. They were all at each other's throats. So you couldn't go from here to enemy territory. That wasn't possible. So you had to go a circuitous route. So they went the spice. Well, the spy ships went up there and they unloaded at Antwerp and sold their stuff in here. And so the refugees got off there. Antwerp was a very liberal city, so they didn't care. But they did interrogate them when they came in, just to see if they were okay. And they went over here, they went down, over the Alps, down to Venice. Venice would sell anybody anything. Venice was the kind of city where, you know, the business of Venice is business, as somebody said. Even, you know, during the Crusades, they were the ones who take anybody from any side anywhere. Pay me out front and I'll take you to the Holy city. Don't pay me out front. And the city isn't holy. So Venice. And then from there they went. And they, you know, they went to the. These cities which were. Okay, okay, now I want to read you. This is amazing when you think of what she did for this. And then she went on and did some other things. What is that, five more minutes? Oh, dear. Well, let me just. Just. Okay. All right. But just a little bit of the flavor of how they organized this escape route in the first place. Said this little notice, it was found in somebody's pocket. You will leave from here in a carriage which will take you to Cologne. The carriage costs around 12 ducats. Carriage and carter are prepaid and you must not pay them anything. The carter will take you to the inn called Viera Scarra in Cologne. He will also hire on your half a boat that will take you to Manse. The boat to go down the Rhine, by the way, will cost you six ducats. In Cologne, there is a man called Pedro Tonolero who speaks good Spanish. He will accompany you at his own expense. You need to take him along in case there might be guards inspecting the boats on the river. So you see how well organized it was. This is what you've got to do here. This is what you've got to do there. This is the money for that. And this is the money for that. And she got these refugees, hundreds and hundreds of them over there to safety, but not before she herself was told to get out of there for her activities. She was kicked out, but she wasn't quite kicked out. She was more like told to stop what she was doing and also imprisoned in a way. They didn't want to actually let her go physically because that wouldn't have been a good thing. But she has to leave because the other things that's happening, they're still trying to get her money. The local monarchs are still trying to get her money. That was the monarch of the day. There Queen Marie of Hungary. So she then uses her feminine wiles. And I think this is very interesting because so many women in business think that they have to behave like men. She used every arrow in her arsenal. She tells this queen one second that she's having a lot of her stomach pains, which she always has. She can't come and see her because the Queen wants to arrange a marriage with Donna Gracia's daughter, who's now 13. And again they're going to try and get the money away that way. So she puts her off for months and finally goes to see her and she said, look, she said, I really need a few days at the spa. There's a great spa at Aix la Chapelle just down the way. And if you just let me out of here, Same scenario. But of course, the Queen never spoke to the old king so she doesn't realize it's the same routine. You just let me out for a few weeks, I'll go to the spa and I'll be back and we'll arrange the marriage and everything will be fine and you've got nothing to worry about. And of course she doesn't come back. But I've got to stop now, so I can't tell you all the other things. But she does get these people to safety and, and she does really spit in the face of everybody on the way. And she has this big friend which we haven't got to in the Duke of Ferrara in Italy.

Why don't we do questions and then finish up if people want to stay?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I'm sorry if I'm cutting it a little bit in the middle, but you can bring in to see the kind of life she's going to live all the way through to the day she dies, which is extraordinary. And she gets away with everything, absolutely everything. And I just want to tell you that in the front row, before I stop, is sitting a friend of mine who is putting on a one act play based on the life of Donna Grassia on August 15th. And the brilliance of it is, if you can come and see it, the fly should be on the chairs or in the books, is that the playwright has not tried to put all of these stories that I've been telling you into one act play, but had the brilliant idea, and I won't tell you the end of it, that if Donna Gracia did indeed defy all these kings and popes and monarchs and she even takes on, I mean, the Sultan Suleiman, which nobody else probably would have the guts to do, or the chutzpah to do, then at the end of her life, because we don't know exactly how she died in this play, and I won't tell you the final part of it, of course, because it's really tense. But in the final analysis, she is determined to die in Tiberius on holy ground, because Tiberius is a very holy place and it also has a spa, which makes it suitable for Donna Gracia. So in this play, it opens when she's in the desert and she's almost dead, but she's got to make it to Tiberius, and she doesn't think she is because there's trouble on the way, better winter attacks and so forth. So in the middle of the night, she has a conversation with what a friend of mine calls the Big G. Him up there, or her up there. And she's taken on all these other greats of the world. She's now going to take on the ultimate authority. And the play is that she is determined to make it to Tiberius to die on holy ground. He is determined that she won't, so she is going to have to persuade him otherwise. And if she's persuaded everybody else through her machinations, she doesn't think it's too much to try to take on the ultimate authority. But I'll leave it there August 15th, and I will open it to questions. Thank you, Larry. Yes, of course. Yes. All right. Our gatekeeper says 10 minutes for questions.

Oh, no. Just a few minutes or questions.

Okay, fine. Okay.

Oh, just. Sorry again, thank you for staying here. So there's nothing scheduled next, but I realize some people need to leave and don't want to feel like they're rude. So if you have to go, or if you have a question and then need to go, feel free to ask it now.

And.

And for people who can stay, we'll give Andrea a few extra minutes to finish up the tale.

Thanks. Yes.

So I'm curious why they needed to leave Antwerp, because that was relatively a safe haven for Drew Spinoza was there.

They needed to leave. She needed to leave Antwerp because they reinterpreted her escape network as helping the enemy. The enemy which they called the Turk, but the Turk was the Muslims. If all these people were being sent to Muslim lands, was she sending them over with. By sending them over, was she creating any form of a spy system? Was she sending them over with information? One of the problems is that they have got knowledge of firearms that they don't have in Christian Europe and that sort of thing. So she was trucking with the enemy, essentially. And also that she refused to allow her daughter to marry the person that the monarchs had decided the daughter was going to marry. So she defied them and she cannot defy them. She has to, you know, do her thing. I mean, it's not a democracy. So essentially, you understand, she was really, you know, in league with the enemy as far as they were. Right. But.

Why were they not just staying?

Because this wasn't. No, it was the. Antwerp was part of the Low Countries that she ruled. Antwerp. Yes. Antwerp had its true. It had an independent status as a commercial city. And in fact, it fought a lot against this sort of bullying, but she didn't feel that it was going to succeed at that point. There was just too much stacked against her and she was afraid of arrest. Yes, they were. They were under the Holy Roman Emperor. Yes, they were under Spain, but in a way, they were a sort of an autonomous region, as we would call it today. They were officially under Spain. Absolutely. That's one of the reasons they. They were there. But not, you know, what happened there was very different. What happened in Spain itself. Yeah.

So it's clear that this woman is culturally, ethnically Jewish.

Was she religiously Jewish? Did we have any. I've left that out because I thought for a general audience that I shouldn't sort of go into that too deeply. She was the first generation of forcibly converted Jewish, the first generation being the children of those who had been forcibly converted. She was from a family called Nasi, which came from the considered of Davidic descent. So they were not only, I don't know whether you call it religious, they were very profoundly leaders of the Jewish people. Religious is a sort of a modern connotation on, you know, do you keep all the festivals, do you. Do you eat kosher food and all of that kind of stuff? In their life, it would have been not that relevant because they had to live a double life. But in her eyes, she had a mission to save the Jewish world. But the people, I mean. And then afterwards, in the end of her life, she does set up synagogues and things to bring them back to their faith. And by this time, I don't think a lot of them wanted to come back to their faith. But that's another story. But that's what she does. Do their children do, by the way, what happens is they get to the Ottoman Empire and very often they reintegrate into the Jewish world. Okay, I think that's it. No, no, no, no, I have one here. Yeah, I can go on. Sure.

My question was Just since Spain did have this.

Well, they were international traders, they were shippers, they were bankers. They kept their ties to everything. I mean, the fact that they had been expelled from Spain, that's a very curious and interesting question. Did not stop from trading with Spain and having agents in Spain and continuing business relations with Spain. You would think they would be so angry, they would cut off the whole thing. But they didn't. They didn't. There are many, many documents that suggest they continue to do this. I've only got a few people left. You want me to finish? I don't know if they. We can certainly go on. This is. Yeah, very quickly, this. I'll give you a little of the sideshow. This is a woodcut of the Bourse, the stock exchange in Antwerp, which Diogo Mendez had been part of creating, her brother in law. It was the first in the modern capitalism. They were developing model capitalism at that point. And her banking. I wondered, you know, when I first started this, talking of banking, whether she carried around the money in kind of pouches, sort of Robin Hood again style. But it was already banking in the modern idiom in that it was banking with transfers of credits and debits on paper you didn't physically take, although there was a lot of what they called plate, going back and forth that was pledged as collateral. Henry VIII pledges them some collateral in some of his collection of incredible silver and gold. But most of it was debits and credits. And they had quarterly, what they called settlement fares where they would settle their debts by trading their debts as they do today. You know, you take such and such a debt off me of 50% of its face value and I'll give you the cash right up front, exactly the same as today. It was all very sophisticated and the deals went on there. Now, for those of you who are interested in Renaissance art and architecture, particularly art, what is interesting here is around the top were the ateliers or the studios of the Flemish artists who were financed by these guys down there doing their deals. I mean, we kind of separate art from who funded it. I mean, you have to think of that. And the people who funded it were these guys down here. And they painted away like crazy. Up here, here. Let's go on to the next one. Oh, did I go? No, this is the next. Okay. I use this when I teach kids, when I give this story to kids of the courage, because this is Donna Gracia's niece, known also as Donna Gracia. She had this portrait medal made in Ferrara in 1557. Now this is Queen Elizabeth I, you know, Queen Elizabeth of England. And I like it because you see that even though here was a young 18 year old Jewish girl, which most of my students in the Sunday schools don't really relate to, she doesn't look like what they think she would have looked. She looks, I mean there is a parallel here, not necessarily features, but, but in the dress and the way in which she is, you know, you can see her as a high born or a well born girl. She was amazing. One story here, just one story. She. I was in Venice because she spent quite a bit of her time in Venice. And this young girl at 15 is brought before the Inquisition in Venice at the Doge's Palace. And I went into the room where they know the interrogations took place. You can go through the Doge's Palace. Many of you may have been when you visit Venice and you're walking through this incredibly paneled room with unbelievable ceilings and all the rest. And what had happened just blows you away. This young girl at 15, she's about 17 or 18 by then had been pulled before the Inquisition on her own because her mother had been accused of practicing Judaism. This was in Venice, which she wasn't supposed to the mother to do. And to find the truth, they'd taken the child away from the mother and asked the child questions privately. And so they bring her in. We have it because the Inquisition was unbelievably meticulous in keeping records. So you not only get the verbatim record of what everybody said, but if somebody rolled their eyes, it would be rolled their eyes, it would be in the record. So there's a record of her going into the room, 15 years old. And there's a panel of the inquisitors and they're saying to her, we believe that you wish to be taken away from home and brought up in a convent because you don't want to be tainted with the Jewish ritual that we think your mother is following in your home. How do you wish to be raised? And so, I mean, the testimony itself is almost amazingly dramatic. And there's kind of a pause and she whispers, I want to be raised according to the law of Moses. According to the law of Moses meant that I wanted to be raised as a Jew. Now here is this girl, nobody in the room, 15 years old, nothing to prevent anything happening. And she is not going to give in. And it's an audible sort of sigh among the clerics who are trying her case. And in the end they do not imprison her or kill her. They simply banish her from Venice. She gets banished from Venice and sent to Ferrara. So she is all right. But it's an unbelievable moment of drama and courage that she does this, and then she's getting married. At this point, just a little side story. I mean, you come across this side story of how these people lived. I mean, the things that happened to them, aside of the main mission, which of course gets accomplished. Anything else that I can tell you that you really want me to include? Which are you looking at? The Hebrew says Gracia Nasi. You see, I'll tell you what has happened with this. Everybody has always thought that she was her aunt, her famous aunt. They don't realize that in 1557 the art would have been 50. And they've used it. And I had it at the beginning, which I use with some of my audiences, where, you see, this was a stamp in 1992. It was a stamp commemorating the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. And when they were expelled from Spain, they wanted a stamp to go with it. So. Because no real scholarship had ever been done on the whole thing, and they could care less. And this is one of the things that made me so mad that I did the research was that they used a woman who was born in Portugal 10 years after the expulsion, which had nothing to do with the expulsion. And they not only took the picture not of her, but of her niece. So I'm just to show that, you know, that's about as far as they went. They could care less. But the. She had this portrait medal. Where is it? And that is. This is interesting because she goes through Ragusa and we have documents now of she made business deals on her way to the Ottoman Empire. She stops in and she said, well, I'm going to make a contract with the Ragusan authorities to bring all of my goods through here. And they had an exhibition of that recently. And that is. Oh, by the way, she was never called by her married name. This shows Beatrice de Luna was her baptized name. And she was never called Mrs. Mendes, which everybody has done in history. So that was. So these are some of the new documents. This is the will of that niece in the portrait we had found. No one has found the will. We found the will of the niece in Ferrara, which was interesting. And this is when she gets to the Ottoman Empire. The Duke of Ferrara wants to write her a letter. And she has now changed her name back to her original Jewish name, which was Gracia Nasi, and not her baptized name of Beatrice de Luna. So he writes to her, and he's not sure what he should call her, so he kind of crosses it out and he's calling her Beatrice de Luna, and then.