The fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
In the fourteenth century in the year 1372 payment cards show the involvement of Jews in public revenue collection in Asturias; they acted as agents of the Treasury of the Kingdom. Also noted in the payment cards is the name of a Jewish notable among city dwellers. Five letters of payment are in the name of the noble Don Gonzalo Bernaldo de Quiros, the largest fundraiser in Asturias. Between 1377-1389, Don Gutierrez de Toledo, Bishop of Oviedo, sentenced anyone to the penalty of excommunication who opposed the expulsion of Jews and Moors from the churches during religious their celebration, who participate in their weddings and burials, and all Christians who support Jews or Moors or conduct business with them. He urged that no members of these two minorities serve in public office. In the fifteenth century in the year 1412, we have a very important document that appears to be the from the cemetery of the Jewish Community, a site near the convent of Santa Clara, outside the city, located about where the Teatro Campoamor currently.
In this paper, a sales letter, the physicist Don Yusaf, as well his daughter and her husband Mencia Fernandez Pedro Fernandez Carrio, sell their part in a land called the garden of the Jews.
We confirmed that this land was Jewish cemetery in a later document from the year 1053: a lawsuit between the Council of Oviedo and some neighbors as a result of the expulsion decreed by the Catholic Monarchs Council. The Council seized the cemetery but left it in a state of abandonment and some neighbors came in and tilled the soil. In this lawsuit, the neighbors state that many Jew were buried in the cemetery and there there were many monuments and tombs for them. One witness, Juan González de Lampajúa, mentions a conversation with somebody named Solomon, a Jew, in which he was told that this garden was the burial of Jews who used to live in the city and that there lay buried their ancestors. Another witness, Juan de la Podado, confirms that he heard that the garden had always been grave of Jews and that "he saw there six or seven monuments. Pedro Menendez Estanco said the same thing.
On March 31, 1492 the kings in Granada signed the Edict of Expulsion: within four months all those Jews who had chose not be baptized would have to leave their kingdoms. This marked the end of the medieval Jewish community in Asturias.
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