When the king's men offered them a street of collapsing houses, the Jews of Inca said no. It was 1346, and King Peter IV of Aragon had just ordered them gathered into a quarter of their own — a call, in Catalan — at the urging of Christian neighbours who resented living among them. The first plot proposed, a rundown lane called Carrer d'en Prats, stood in such disrepair that the community appealed directly to the crown. Remarkably, the king agreed and told his governor to find them something better. That small act of refusal opened one of the longest and most bitterly negotiated property disputes in medieval Mallorca.
Jews had lived on Mallorca long before there was a call to contain them. When Jaume I conquered the island in 1229, he found a Jewish community already established in Inca — and their roots ran deeper still. Severus, the bishop of neighbouring Menorca, had recorded a Jewish presence in the Balearics as early as the 5th century, more than seven hundred years before the crown decided these families needed a wall around them. Inca sat at the fertile centre of the island, a town of traders and craftspeople, and its Jews were woven into that economy long before politics tried to pull them out of it. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Inca had long overlapped here, layered together street by narrow street.
The search for a better site dragged on for years. In 1353 a royal deputy, Guillermo de Lagostera, arrived with legal experts and, together with the town's officials and the secretaries of the aljama, settled on a lane called Carrer d'en Pascolet. Then the money troubles began. Houses on the chosen streets were confiscated from their Christian owners, who rejected the prices they were paid. The crown ruled that the University of Inca — the town council — must cover the shortfall, and for nearly a quarter-century the case ground through appeals, counter-complaints, and a full ten-year paralysis. A committee of two Christians and two Jews was named to weigh sale and rent prices in the call, only for the council to send yet another written complaint to the king that stalled everything again. Not until 1363, under a new governor, Bernardo de Tous, did fresh appraisers finally push the process forward.
By 1372 the community's leaders were pleading for protection. Christians were assaulting Jews in the streets, and families were leaving. Governor Tous ordered a second gate built so the quarter could be sealed at night; until then a single gate, called En Reboll, had been the only one. The Jews took possession of their long-contested call that autumn, between September and October. For a brief window the neighbourhood even flourished. From 1383, the great aljama in Palma began delegating authority to its counterpart in Inca, making this community of roughly three hundred people — most of them craftworkers and traders — effectively self-governing, a secondary capital of Jewish Mallorca.
It did not last. In 1391, as mobs swept through Jewish communities across Aragon and Castile, the violence reached Mallorca. In Inca and Palma alike, mobs burned homes and businesses, and most of those who survived were forced to convert to Christianity under threat of further violence. The self-governing call was gone within a decade of coming into its own. Yet traces remain for those who look. A convert named Bartomeua left a 1392 record claiming inheritance from her grandfather, described as a rabbi of the quarter's Jewish school — proof that a synagogue once stood here. On a town map drawn in 1808, the old quarter is still labelled simply "El Call," marked with the number 10. And when the owners of a house called Can Monroig restored it in recent years, their excavation turned up pottery and stonework reaching back to the call — and to the Muslim Inca that came before it. The streets that held it, among them Sant Francesc, El Call, and La Rosa, still trace its outline today.
Inca lies at 39.72°N, 2.91°E, near the geographic centre of Mallorca on the plain between Palma and the Serra de Tramuntana. From 3,000–5,000 feet the town reads as a dense inland grid ringed by farmland, with the mountains rising to the northwest and the Bay of Palma glinting to the southwest. Palma's LEPA sits about 30 kilometres to the southwest and handles most traffic to the island; Menorca's LEMH lies across the water to the northeast. The medieval call is a warren of narrow streets near the old centre — too fine-grained to pick out from altitude, but the compact historic core it belongs to stands out clearly against the surrounding fields.