Story 19 · 6 May 1691Historical studies

Six Tarongí siblings at one auto-da-fé

On 6 May 1691 six Tarongí siblings appeared at the same auto-da-fé in Palma. Two were burned alive, two in effigy, two garroted. Catalina Tarongí, a symbol of Chueta memory.

Three women and a girl at a doorway on a stone street
Imagined illustration based on the sources. Not a real portrait.

The third auto-da-fé, on 6 May 1691, sent fourteen people to their deaths in person and seven more «in effigy or in their bones»: the dead or the fled, burned as figures.

Six of them were Tarongí siblings. Catalina, about 45, and the youngest, Rafael Benet, 21, refused to recant and were burned alive alongside Rafael Valls. Guillem Tomàs and Francesc Josep, who had managed to escape to Alexandria, were burned in effigy. Isabel, married to Agustí Cortès «Bruguea», and Margarita repented: they were garroted and their bodies then burned. A single family carried every form of sentence handed down that day.

That same day the Marquis of Leganés was passing through Majorca. He asked the inquisitors to spare Isabel Aguiló. They refused. According to Garau, she went to her death asking the women around her to pray for her.

Over time, Catalina Tarongí became the symbol of Chueta memory. Her name appears today in Majorca's official tributes to the victims of 1691.

SourceGarau, La fee triunfante (1691), third auto-da-fé; Ángela Selke, Los chuetas y la Inquisición (1972); Baruch Braunstein, The Chuetas of Majorca (1936).

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