The ideal of convivencia – the cooperative coexistence of peoples of different faiths within the “republic” of a city or town – gradually collapsed in late medieval Christian Spain. Looking backward in time, this was a slow and progressive development, which began with persecutions and forced conversions in 1391 and continued on until the peninsula’s last free Muslim had been converted to Christianity in 1526. A period of negotiated tolerance extended this period until 1566, when the Crown began a crack-down on private-sphere Islam (addressed in Chapters 2 and 3) with severe results.

This chapter traces Christian subjects’ growing intolerance toward Jews and Muslims in their communities. One of the best-known consequences of this wave of intolerance was the breakdown of medieval aljama culture and the forced conversion of the peninsula’s religious minorities. As a product of the forced conversions and foreign-policy issues that were beyond the monarchy’s control, Christian authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries faced a wave of new challenges. The unification of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (1479) and their transformation into an exclusively Christian monarchy under the Trastámara (1369–1516) and later Habsburg (1516–1700) dynasties led to significant new expectations of subjects living on the peninsula.

The Crown’s perception that the health and survival of the empire depended on the Christianization of its subjects led it to grant increasingly more responsibility to the institutional Church. The period of combined rule under Queen Isabella of Castile (1474–1506) and King Ferdinand II of Aragon (1479–1516) witnessed the establishment of a permanent Inquisition tribunal (ca. 1480) that persecuted new convert communities. At the same time, certain Spanish dioceses also made the first incipient steps toward elaborating guidelines for educational outreach in their jurisdictions. This trend would continue under the first Habsburg king, Charles I (1516–1556), who as Holy Roman Emperor (Charles V) countenanced the fracturing of the Catholic world under pressure from the Protestant Reformation. His son and successor, Philip II (1556–1598), upped the ante, empowering a generation of activist bishops, who, with royal support, shaped a whole generation of ecclesiastical policy around Christian education, beginning in the 1560s. Empire-wide reforms required the improved training and hiring of priests, the mandatory education of children in the Christian catechism into their early teen years, and adult education through weekly sermons. The motivation for the new mid-century policies emerged from a growing awareness that a society built around Christian values was not necessarily organically self-perpetuating. This chapter examines policies around rights, privileges, education, and enfranchisement from the medieval period up until the 1550s.

1.1 The Medieval Legacy of Convivencia

Medieval Spain was famously known as the Land of Three Religions. The period stretching from the Christian conquest of Toledo (1085) to the conquest of Granada (1492) is often spoken about in terms of convivencia. Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted in numbers not reproduced anywhere else on the continent. Idealists have waxed poetically about idyllic coexistence.Footnote ¹ More skeptical scholars have rushed to point out that though members of the three religions found ways to live together during the age of the crusades and beyond, day-to-day life was punctuated by recurring confessional violence, often timed around meaningful dates on the Christian calendar.Footnote ² Nevertheless, the peace generally held and interspersed throughout the years were moments of real religious harmony.

The fabric of religious tolerance began to tear in the wake of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Villainized for their imagined connection to the plague, Jews in fourteenth-century Castile suffered harassment from the Christian community. In 1355, more than 1,000 Jews in Toledo died, targeted by enemies of the monarch during a civil war in Castile.Footnote ³ Anti-Jewish sentiment played out repeatedly in urban struggles between 1355 and 1390.Footnote ⁴ In 1391, Christians across Castile led a particularly violent wave of anti-Jewish violence. In order to save their lives or to protect their welfare, thousands of Jews converted to Christianity under duress. After the hostilities, many Jewish aljamas (semi-autonomous ethnoreligious governmental councils whose legitimacy was recognized by Christian authorities) ceased to exist.Footnote ⁵

Despite the massive destruction of the pogroms, they did succeed in forcing two segregated social groups to interact in ways they had not before. Conversos (new converts) entered numerous Christian professions that previously had been denied them.Footnote ⁶ While laws continued to restrict Jews from almost all municipal, royal, and ecclesiastical posts in mainstream Christian society, conversos entered them freely. And in fact, some recent converts from Judaism held very visible ecclesiastical careers, such as the friar Juan de Torquemada, bishops Pablo de Santa María (Burgos) and Alonso de Cartagena (Segovia), as well as innumerable canons, monks, and priests.Footnote ⁷

While persecution seemed to attenuate in the following decades, it did not abate. In 1412, the Kingdom of Castile published legislation prohibiting Jews from holding office, possessing titles, or changing their residence (though some scholars doubt whether the legislation was enforced). The legislation also prevented them from socializing with Christians, entering a number of trades (grocer, carpenter, tailor, or butcher), or wearing lavish clothing. In a clause meant to deprive them of public honor, the decree prohibited them from employing Christians or bearing arms in public.

In 1449, social conflict in Toledo – one of the peninsula’s wealthiest and most diverse cities – developed new characteristics that would have a lasting impact on Spanish politics. Unrest over heavy taxation in wartime and violation of the city’s privileges (fueros) touched off a municipal repudiation of royal authority. Rioters directed their anger against the Jewish community, which paid its tribute directly to the king’s coffers and thus was seen as at least indirectly responsible for their financial woes. But in a new twist, rioters targeted not only Jews but also the city’s conversos, not coincidentally a number of whom were royal tax collectors.Footnote ⁸ In some ways, the 1449 ethnic violence in Toledo seemed like a predictable progression following earlier waves of anti-Jewish pogroms. But, in an additional twist, the conflict between rioters and converts became almost a proxy for the conflict between plebeians (rioters) and the court (converts).Footnote ⁹

The angry rioters would justify their actions as motivated by a grievance against what they saw as a newly coalesced social faction. In their eyes, the wave of conversions beginning at the end of the fourteenth century had created a pool of “New Christians,” whose language, dress, family ties, and social mores set them apart from the rest of society. And importantly, they saw this group as having gained too much power. Having labeled the convert community derisively as “New Christians,” it was only appropriate that they began to identify themselves as “Old Christians” in contrast.Footnote ¹⁰

The Church policies that coalesced in the wake of such political confrontations typically recognized as Old Christian those individuals who could demonstrate evidence of Christian birth and Catholic orthodoxy through their grandparents’ generation (the so-called cuatro costados). The rationale drew from the disquisitions of Church father St. Augustine and the famed Scholastic St. Thomas Aquinas, who had postulated that sinners’ world-views might realistically infect two, and perhaps three subsequent generations of family members.Footnote ¹¹ Church philosophers assumed that because a child could be “infected” by the heretical ideas of a parent or grandparent, an individual’s genealogy had the power to indicate his or her potential for activity that might threaten the good of society.Footnote ¹²

In the midst of this struggle between “Old” and “New” Christians, the town assembly proclaimed the Sentencia Estatuto, the first limpieza de sangre (blood purity) statute in Spain. Justifying their decision with a patchwork of civil and canon law, the members of the town council mandated that all conversos should be blocked from all public and private positions of public trust in the city of Toledo and its jurisdiction. Old Christian leaders accused the conversos of heresy and of having joined the Church and ascended its ranks merely in order to destroy the Catholic faith. At this moment, the conversos became the target of insults that in earlier generations had traditionally been lodged against the Jews.Footnote ¹³ Eager to restore order to his wealthiest city, the king signed the Sentencia Estatuto, which in theory made Jews and their descendants permanently ineligible for public office in Toledo.Footnote ¹⁴

The struggle unleashed polemics. Scripture and patristic sources were the preferred weapons. Old Christians celebrated their descendance from Mediterranean Gentiles, former pagans who recognized the divinity of Christ, while vilifying Jews (and by insinuation, New Christian conversos) because their precursors had rejected Jesus’ divinity.Footnote ¹⁵ Meanwhile, proponents of integration between Old and New Christians argued that Scripture identified baptism as the great equalizer.Footnote ¹⁶ Additionally, they pointed to precedent in secular and canon law. In canon law, the Council of Basel (1431) had both conceded to New Christians all the same rights as enjoyed by Old Christians and offered for their protection. Meanwhile, proponents also pointed out that in Spain, protection for the conversos was written into the Siete Partidas.Footnote ¹⁷ Such arguments swayed the papacy, when invoked as an arbiter. Pope Nicholas V in 1449 pronounced an anathema against the “schismatic tendencies of the anti-converso statute.”Footnote ¹⁸

The Pope professed worry about the splintering of the Christian community in a multi-confessional society. He wrote that “good Christians” (buenos cristianos) should be admitted to all, “ministries and benefices … with the same rights as Old Christians.”Footnote ¹⁹ In 1449, Jewish and Muslim communities, governed by their own aljamas, still coexisted with Christians.Footnote ²⁰ But a century later, after all the Jews and Muslims in Castile had been forced either to convert or to emigrate, the two categories in the Pope’s formulation – “good Christian” and “Old Christian” – would come to represent the two competing standards for enfranchisement within Castilian society.

In the wake of the events of 1449, the combined efforts of the king, the papacy, and the pro-converso faction only proved able to restrain the prejudice against conversos, not to stymy it altogether. In the following decades, other municipal uprisings occurred. In Toledo, powerful conversos were again chased out of the city, only to return to their positions two years later.Footnote ²¹ Similar struggles were repeated elsewhere in the peninsula. In 1473, violence erupted in Córdoba between Old Christians and New Christian converts. Religious and economic issues intertwined as Old Christian artisans and agriculturalists in town for a religious festival attacked converso city-dwellers, whom noblemen joined in support.Footnote ²² The scene soon thereafter repeated itself in Palma, Écija, Jérez, Adamuz, Montoro, La Rambla, Cabra, Jaén, Úbeda, Baez, and Almodóvar del Campo.Footnote ²³ The pilgrimage town of Guadalupe became ensnarled in ugly social conflict during Holy Week of 1476.Footnote ²⁴ And in 1478, Seville’s Old Christian population rioted against conversos they accused of practicing Jewish rituals and ceremonies.Footnote ²⁵

The serious accusations of Judaizing in Seville, and the riot that followed, so concerned the Catholic Monarchs that they appealed to the papacy for inquisitors to investigate. A papal bull approving the establishment of the Inquisition arrived later that same year.Footnote ²⁶ After announcing the need for an inquisition, the Catholic Monarchs let it lie dormant until mid-1480, when it began to operate. Since the practice of Judaism and Islam were still permitted on the peninsula, its targets were only those “bad Christians” who, after conversion, still practiced their prior faith. Even so, a great many people fell victim to its persecution. In its first decade, the Inquisition may have condemned 2,000 people to death, and “reconciled” 15,000 others accused of minor heresies.Footnote ²⁷

During this crucial decade of the 1470s and 1480s, the renowned royal confessor and future archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, preached widely to converso audiences. Though evidence suggests he sympathized with the Inquisition prosecutions, he made an effort to channel popular fervor away from ethnic resentment and toward Catholic theological commitments. As part of that effort, he wrote a tract fulminating against Judaizing conversos and Jews. One of the polemical tract’s most memorable lines denied that Jews any longer belonged to the biblical “people of Israel.” But his writing also seemed to urge reconciliation between Old and New Christians in Spain, as had Pope Nicholas V’s affirmations in response to the events of Toledo in 1449. On a conciliatory note, Talavera wrote that following Christ’s revelation, though Jews had been replaced as God’s chosen people, their replacements included “‘good’ Christians of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ lineage.”Footnote ²⁸

Despite such efforts, ethnic resentment did indeed fester. The most important impact of the Inquisition was that it gave an official ideology to sentiments that had been gathering in isolated locations across the peninsula. Old Christians, who had at first supported the collapse of Jewish autonomy and the inclusion of converts within Christian society, became angered when they saw individuals imperfectly assimilated into Christian culture achieve respected positions within Christian society. The Inquisition provided a canonical basis – formal procedures in the place of the angry intuitions of Old Christian peasants – for punishing those conversos who enjoyed Christian privileges while not participating full-heartedly as Christians.

In this atmosphere of fear and distrust, the issue of limpieza de sangre appeared again. Municipal conflict brought the Inquisition into the town of Guadalupe, ruled by the Hieronymite order in señorio, in the 1480s. When investigations discovered that some priests continued to practice Jewish rituals, the prior of the friary asked Pope Innocent VIII to approve a limpieza statute for the order prohibiting conversos and their descendants from the offices of prior, vicar, and confessor, based on recent evidence of heresy among their ranks.Footnote ²⁹

Though the Crown’s attitude toward Jews seems to have been benevolent, the monarchs seemed convinced that the “converso problem” that continued to resurface had no answer as long as Jews remained in Spain. The monarchy’s concern about the continued interaction between Jews and conversos had already led to the Jews’ forced relocation from lower Andalusia in 1483, and from parts of Aragon in 1486. In April 1492, the Jews received an official order of expulsion from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, with four months to liquidate their belongings and collect their debts. Perhaps 50,000 Jews (roughly one-fifth of the total population) chose conversion over expulsion.Footnote ³⁰

1492 was also famously the year when Christian forces finally overcame the defenses of Granada, the last standing Islamic emirate in Iberia. Many among the combined Christian armies celebrated the wealthy and populous conquered city as a “New Jerusalem.”Footnote ³¹ In its negotiated surrender, the fallen Nasrid dynasty of Granada managed to safeguard the estates of its former subjects, as well as the survival of their Islamic legal system (the so-called xara y çunna) for the resolution of disputes among Muslims.Footnote ³² Yet less than a decade had passed when the Crown used an uprising in the Albaicín (a Muslim neighborhood in Granada) in 1499–1500 as a pretext to renege on the capitulation agreement that had guaranteed granadinos religious freedom. Ultimately, all Muslims in Castile were given the same choice: conversion or expulsion. After 1501, unity in the Christian faith became a legal fact (albeit not a cultural reality) in the kingdoms ruled by Castile.

In subsequent decades, not satisfied by the mere disappearance of institutional Judaism and Islam, a number of Castilian institutions began to generate prejudicial bylaws against descendants of Jews and Muslims. In general, the Crown defended the right of private institutions to observe prohibitions stipulated by a founder at their foundation.Footnote ³³ However, under the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) and Charles V, the monarchy continued to employ conversos in its service and sometimes acted to curb or repeal statutes proposed by religious orders and cathedral chapters.Footnote ³⁴

The expulsions of Jews (1492) and Muslims (1501) from Castile deprived the two parties of their status as subjects of the king and as citizens (vecinos) of their municipalities. Conversion was necessary to safeguard their status and avoid their disenfranchisement. As the sixteenth century began, whether a New Convert or a Christian “since time immemorial,” being Christian sufficed to exercise rights and privileges at the municipal level. However, the depredations of the Inquisition formed part of a politics, encouraged by the “Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella, that gradually began to chip away at that equality.

Punishment by the Inquisition for heresy was widely stigmatized, leaving a record that could disqualify an immediate descendant from ecclesiastical and municipal offices. Leadership roles in society were reserved for “good Christians.” The Catholic Monarchs instituted a law in Granada, denying to “heretic, or son, or grandson of anyone condemned by the Holy Inquisition … public offices.”Footnote ³⁵ In the secular sphere, these policies may have been innovative, but they did adhere to established norms of canon law (law of the Church) long observed throughout Europe. Generally, throughout their realms, the Catholic Monarchs applied the traditional canon law restrictions, basing restrictions not directly on ethnicity, but whether an individual had been convicted by a church court of heresy. Such prohibitions banned from royal service sons and grandsons of heretics and apostates in the male line, and sons only in the feminine line.Footnote ³⁶ The Crown’s restrictions applied to the positions of “royal councilor, high court magistrate, secretary, municipal judge, constable, steward, treasurer, or any other honorable position or office.”Footnote ³⁷ Such individuals were also banned from passing to the Indies, wearing silk, and seeking degrees in the top universities.

But these bans were not absolute, extending only two generations, with potential for royal dispensation. In fact, King Ferdinand explicitly provided for composiciones, or rehabilitation, for those found to be ineligible because they had been punished by the Inquisition. In return for 20,000 ducats, in 1508 the king restored goods the Inquisition had confiscated from those convicted in Seville; he took 40,000 ducats in 1509 to permit conversos from Seville to go the Indies; he took 80,000 ducats in 1511 to approve that same group for all classes of public offices, except corregidor and municipal judge with criminal jurisdiction.Footnote ³⁸ The limpieza statute of the cathedral chapter in Seville (1515), which applied the same restrictions of canon law as mentioned above, has been identified by the historiography as an insidious portent.Footnote ³⁹ Pope Leo X approved the cathedral’s statute blocking heretics in 1516; Pope Clemente VII extended the interdiction to grandchildren of heretics in 1532 and Pope Paul III to their great-grandchildren in 1546.Footnote ⁴⁰ But given the evidence of the potential for composiciones, the successive iterations of the statute likely did little to block anyone’s entrance into the cathedral chapter. Perhaps more suggestive is an undated letter from Lorenzo Galíndez Carvajal, jurist and member of the Consejo Real, most likely penned in the late 1510s or early 1520s. The purpose of the letter was to provide short biographical data to the Emperor Charles V on the backgrounds of the fifteen members of the Consejo de Castilla, the royal government’s most important branch. According to Galíndez Carvajal, three members were known conversos, a fourth was suspected, and the grandfather of fiscal (attorney general) Doctor Prado had been publicly penanced as a heretic.Footnote ⁴¹

By the 1520s, though the Inquisition still prosecuted a steady trickle of cases against Judaizing, its anti-Jewish fervor appeared largely spent. Nevertheless, the question of lineage and eligibility for service in public offices continued to be a subject of public discussion. The Cortes of Segovia of 1532 asked the emperor to clarify what Old Christian meant because “according to the statutes and customs of certain religious orders, colleges, and confraternities, it was a necessary condition, in order to join the institution, to prove one’s calidad … .” The representatives suggested that proving that one’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents should be sufficient and that any proof to the contrary should come from reliable witnesses or writings. The emperor apparently declined to respond to the request.Footnote ⁴² When representatives in the 1542 Cortes de Valladolid requested that individuals whose parents or grandparents on either the male or female line had been punished by Inquisition be denied access to city council positions, Charles V closed his eyes and likewise refused to entertain the petition.Footnote ⁴³

The interaction between the king and the cortes represents a faithful portrait of the citizenship discourse at mid-century. Certain elitist institutions had adopted limpieza statutes, making distinctions that went beyond heresy and orthodoxy, barring applicants on a quasi-racial basis. But those cases were limited, and not supported by the Crown.Footnote ⁴⁴ Heresy, within the canonical statutes, continued to be grounds for disenfranchisement, but even that could be overcome. Charles V pursued a complex strategy. Though allowing private religious institutions to enact limpieza statutes,Footnote ⁴⁵ the emperor created opportunities for New Christians to secure important administrative posts in civil society. In practice, studies of Castile at the municipal level have shown that the prejudice against descendants of Jewish converts was real and enduring, but it was nowhere close to universal. The anti-converso discourse, and laws and bylaws supporting it, would fade for years, perhaps even decades at a time, only to re-emerge when its employment could affect or restore the balance of power between warring municipal factions.Footnote ⁴⁶

1.2 Limpieza, Municipal Politics, and the Church in the Mid-Sixteenth Century

The well-studied case of municipal politics in Murcia offers an example of the complexities of mid-century ethnic politics in Habsburg Spain.Footnote ⁴⁷ Throughout the final decades of the fifteenth century, and the first half of the sixteenth, numerous conversos attained positions of importance on the city council that governed the city. The process of renunciation allowed urban oligarchs to pass their city council seats to relatives or other individuals of their choosing. When Diego de Lara, member of an ascendant converso family, pledged his allegiance to the new Emperor Charles V in the 1510s, the emperor guaranteed Lara the right to pass on his office to another, as long as that person was not a foreigner or infame. Lara married the Old Christian Beatriz de Soto, member of one of two powerful clans who controlled the city.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1543 and 1544, the Crown offered many concejo seats in Murcia for sale, part of a plan to provide much-needed revenue for foreign wars.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was not confined to Murcia or to those years in particular; instead, it characterized the final decades of Charles V’s reign. Municipal offices were attractive because they did not require genealogies or probanzas. In the end, many conversos acquired municipal offices that they passed down for generations via renunciation.Footnote ⁵⁰ During this same period, the doors of nobility also opened to upwardly mobile conversos. In 1553, Bishop Suárez de Carvajal, president of the Consejo de Hacienda, proposed the sale of 175 noble titles (hidalguías) to conversos for the substantial sum of 3,000 ducats apiece – “since farmers would not be able to afford them … .”Footnote ⁵¹

Despite the symbolism of the overtures from the monarch, some Old Christians remained hostile to New Christians. Others merely recognized the inherent power, given the punitive reach of the Inquisition and the shadows it could cast on reputations, of accusations of Judaizing against professional adversaries. Each of these groups made an appearance in a memorable case in mid-century Murcia.

When an activist dean undertook a reform of the cathedral of Murcia, he ran into opposition from obstinate chapter members unwilling to relinquish their concubines or their participation in civil affairs. In order to undermine the dean and stymy his reform plans, the chapter members invited the Inquisition to investigate the Judaizing of one of the dean’s close allies. The strategy worked. The dean was slowly removed from power.Footnote ⁵²

In 1541, a new bishop arrived – Juan Martínez Silíceo. Emperor Charles V had hand-picked Silíceo, who had been Prince Philip’s personal tutor, to lead a reform of the cathedral.Footnote ⁵³ The brilliant Silíceo came from a humble background of Old Christian commoners, and throughout his career he displayed a hatred and distrust of New Christians.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1544, Silíceo took advantage of his new position as bishop to revive a dormant limpieza statute that had been drafted but never enacted. At that point, the cathedral began a strict observance of the limpieza statute, at least until Silíceo’s promotion to the archbishopric of Toledo in 1546, at which point its enforcement became more sporadic.Footnote ⁵⁵

The application of the limpieza statute within Murcia’s cathedral chapter reflected the relationship between Old Christians and conversos more generally in mid-century Habsburg Spain. The prejudice against descendants of Jewish converts was real and enduring, but it was nowhere close to universal. The anti-converso discourse, and laws and bylaws supporting it, would fade for years, perhaps even decades at a time, only to re-emerge when their employment could affect or restore the balance of power between warring municipal factions.

In the following decade, animosity between the two major factions of the oligarchy in Murcia burst into public confrontation. Strategic accusations of Judaizing upended the balance of local politics. Over the course of investigations lasting nearly two decades, the Inquisition revealed evidence of heresy and apostasy, executing at least 165 people. But accusations circulated that inquisitors were partial and that the Inquisition had pushed numerous wearied and frightened witnesses to manufacture testimony. Only the outbreak of the War of the Alpujarras (1568), and the recognition of a new, shared, exterior enemy (the moriscos of Granada, in open rebellion) put an end to the local holocaust.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the dust began to settle, King Philip II convinced Pope Pius V to authorize the Grand Inquisitor (and the king’s top minister) Diego de Espinosa to absolve the surviving individuals who had been implicated, punishing them with only spiritual exercises.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the end, accusations of crypto-Judaism had served as a powerful and dangerous tool for oligarchs seeking to settle scores. Yet after 1570, numerous conversos still remained in positions of power in the city.

In 1546, the ambitious and opinionated bishop Silíceo was promoted to the archbishopric of Toledo (see Map 1.1), the sede primada of Castile and the kingdom’s most prestigious ecclesiastical post.Footnote ⁵⁸ He brought confrontational limpieza politics with him. When the Pope assigned to the cathedral a new canon whose father was a heretic convicted of Judaizing, Silíceo took advantage of the perceived insult from the Vatican to call a secret meeting of the cathedral chapter, which decided to establish for the very first time its own limpieza de sangre statutes.Footnote ⁵⁹ Silíceo wailed that the admission of “tal casta” would expose the Church to applications from all ranges of people, making the sede primada de España into a “second synagogue.” It was important, he argued, that the cathedral of Toledo, as the representative of Spanish Christendom, should admit only the most superlative candidates.

Map 1.1 Map of sixteenth-century Spain

(courtesy of Ben Pease)

A majority of the chapter members supported Silíceo’s proposal, but interpreting the motivations of those who voted with him is difficult. It is likely that some, like him, held longstanding distrust of the conversos for personal reasons. At the same time, the papal nomination seems to have violated both a sense of national autonomy within the Spanish Church – the 1523 grant of (limited) royal patronage that Charles had won from the Pope had seemed a safeguard against the nomination of such unpalatable candidatesFootnote ⁶⁰ – and canon law itself. Canon law, as a reminder, denied the direct descendants (sons) of heretics access to the priesthood.Footnote ⁶¹ This particular confluence of issues may have given Silíceo the support that he needed in order to secure a positive vote.

Silíceo’s move was widely interpreted as a power-play, meant to seriously diminish the power of the nobility within the Church. Many noble families had Jewish roots. The newly authored statutes stated that even its most humble members should be noble, well-educated, and “have no stain of Jewish, Moorish, or heretical blood in their lineage … without limpieza de sangre, nobility and letters are of no value … .”Footnote ⁶² Bans would only apply to future admissions to prebends or dignities, but all currently employed conversos would be frozen in their current positions. The statute set off a firestorm, led at first by the dignitaries within the cathedral who saw their positions threatened.

The conflict soon took on both national and international dimensions. The elite University of Alcalá, founded a few decades earlier by Archbishop Cisneros, threw its full support behind the dissenting members of the cathedral chapter.Footnote ⁶³ Two archdeacons, sons of the powerful duke of Infantado, decried the statute as contrary to law, synodal decree, and papal bulls. They added that it was an injustice to take the tithe from both Old and New Christians but allow only Old Christians to participate in Church governance. The confrontation spurred such violent confrontations that Prince Philip, regent of Castile (and future king), had to send to Toledo a royal magistrate, who ordered those promoting the statute to renounce putting it into effect. The two parties appealed, albeit to different authorities. The conversos went directly to the Pope, while the Old Christians went to Emperor Charles V.Footnote ⁶⁴

The emperor refused to countermand the cédulas that Prince Philip had sent to Silíceo, ordering a stay on the legislation. Yet he did allow the archbishop permission to appeal to Rome. Charles V also ordered the dissenters to take their case before the Consejo Real. Pope Paul III, after submitting the issue to discussion at the Vatican high court, signed a brief against the statute.Footnote ⁶⁵ Meanwhile, the Consejo Real reaffirmed Philip’s decision, and upheld the refusal of the statute.Footnote ⁶⁶ In September 1548, Prince Philip reaffirmed his position, reiterating that the statute should not be enacted.Footnote ⁶⁷

Though official rulings had been made, the case was not closed. Silíceo seems to have continued applying the statutes informally, while at the same time continuing to lobby at the Vatican. When the violently anti-Jewish former nuncio in Spain, Gian Pietro Caraffa, became Pope Paul IV in 1555, he almost immediately confirmed the limpieza statute that Silíceo had sought for the cathedral of Toledo. Surprisingly, upon becoming king in 1556, Philip II revoked his prior interdiction against the statute, allowing it to take effect. In Philip II’s explanation of his volte-face to the military orders, he blamed the extension of “heresy” in Spain, France, and Germany on the unorthodox proselytization of New Christians.Footnote ⁶⁸ The cathedral that formed the center of Iberian Catholicism would henceforward have a limpieza de sangre statute.

1.3 Conclusion

After mid-century, two broad, recognizable factions had begun to emerge in society, each pushing for a particular triangulation between religion, law, and ethnic politics in Habsburg Spain and its empire. Though, fifteenth-century political rivals in Toledo likely never expected as much, the fifteenth-century neologisms – Old Christian and New Christian – that arose out of their conflict would provide the frame through which Spaniards thought about difference for centuries to come.

Limpieza partisans, who argued that legitimate leadership within society could only rest in the hands of Old Christians whose purity of conscience was an inherited attribute, clashed against others who argued for a more open society. While Castile’s most liberal faction would once have argued for inter-faith religious tolerance, by mid-sixteenth century fewer and fewer individuals voiced such an opinion publicly.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nativist Old Christians in Castile and Aragon constantly militated for the adoption of limpieza de sangre statutes that would bar New Christians and their descendants (through varying generations) from cathedrals, cofradías, colegios, universities, and religious and military orders. Partisans of limpieza first sought to exclude converts – primarily from Judaism, but later also from Islam – from these positions in Iberia.

As Chapter 3 will illustrate, proponents of Tridentine Catholic reform, perhaps surprisingly, formed the majority within the bloc that countered partisans of limpieza. Over the preceding decades, the political center had shifted far enough that a great majority within society assumed that being a “good Christian” ought to be the basis for political enfranchisement. Limpieza proponents portrayed that identity as a racial one, inherited through biology. Proponents of Tridentine reform, on the other hand, were much more likely to view “good Christian” identity as cultural and thus teachable. The reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) not only gave clarity about religious orthodoxy in very uncertain times, but in the form in which they were adopted in the Spanish kingdoms also wildly expanded the ability of the Church to teach the citizenship that the Crown demanded of its subjects.