On 19 January 1543 the tranquil, though undoubtedly harsh and uncertain, world of Juan Herrador, called the Elder, a villager from Bolaños in the Campo de Calatrava, changed radically when he found himself before the inquisitors of the Tribunal of Toledo, accused of being ‘a heretic and apostate of our Holy Catholic faith’ for not eating pork or drinking wine. As with so many other Old Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava, Juan Herrador had just fallen into the net of the inquisitor Juan Yanes, who had been in La Mancha since January 1538 investigating the customs of the Moriscos. Juan Herrador was just one more of the many Moriscos who suffered inquisitorial persecution during those years.

We do not know what exactly had drawn Juan Yanes to the Campo de Calatrava (he had been there before, in the summer of 1530, examining the baptismal records of 1502 as a result of the royal decree of the Catholic Monarchs demanding the conversion or exile of all the Moriscos of Castile), but, once settled in the Five Towns, Yanes did not stop until he found, in his own eyes, clear evidence of Islamic practices among the Moriscos who had been settled there, some for many centuries. Towards November 1538 he decided to arrest Lope de Hinestrosa, one of the principal figures in the region and considered the ringleader of the resistance that the Moriscos of the Five Towns had been putting up against the inquisitor.