Samuel. Shortly afterward, though, he entered the service of the house of Castile. Together with his friend, the influential converso Don Abraham Senior, of Segovia, he undertook to farm the revenues and to supply provisions for the royal army, contracts that he carried out to the entire satisfaction of Queen Isabella I of Castile. During the Moorish War, Abarbanel advanced considerable sums of money to the king. When the Jews were ordered banished by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain with the Alhambra Decree, he did all in his power to induce the king to revoke the edict. He unsuccessfully offered the king 30,000 ducats ($68,400 nominal value). He left Spain with his fellow Jews and went to Naples, where, soon after, he entered the service of the king. For a short time, he lived in peace undisturbed, but when the city was taken by the French, bereft of all his possessions, he followed the young king, Alfonso, in 1495, to Messina, then went to Corfu; in 1496,settled in Monopoli, and lastly in 1503 settled in Venice, where his services were employed in negotiating a commercial treaty between Portugal and the Venetian republic. Several times during the mid- to late 15th century, he personally spent large amounts of his personal fortunes to bribe the Catholic monarchs to permit the Jews to remain in Spain. Abarbanel is claimed to have offered them 600,000 crowns for the revocation of the edict. Ferdinand also is said to have hesitated, but was prevented from accepting the offer by Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, who dashed into the royal presence, and throwing a crucifix down before the king and queen, asked whether, like Judas, they would betray their Lord for money. In the end, he managed only to get the date for the expulsion to be extended by two days. He died in Venice in 1508 and was buried in Padua next to its rabbi, Judah Minz. Owing to the destruction of the Jewish cemetery there during the Siege of Padua in 1509, his grave is now unknown. Bones from the cemetery were reburied in 1955, and there is a tradition that the remains of Abarbanel and Minz are among them. Claimed descendants of Abarbanel include Russian author Boris Pasternak. Works Abarbanel wrote many works during his lifetime which are often categorized into three groups - exegesis, philosophy, and apologetics. His philosophy dealt with the