Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain by Matthew Carr

which barred Conversos in the city from holding public office on the basis of their Jewish ancestry.
    The statute was passed in the midst of a civic rebellion that was aimed at the hated chief minister of Castile, Alvaro de Luna, who was of Converso origin, and it quickly became an anti-Converso pogrom. The rebels were strongly criticized by leading Spanish clergymen and by the pope, and the statute was annulled and its progenitors excommunicated, though they were later rehabilitated and the Toledo statute became a model for similar statutes that began to proliferate in Spanish religious orders, universities, and other institutions from the late fifteenth century onward. It paved the way for what Joseph Pérez has called “the insidious prejudice of blood purity . . . that eventually poisoned the very spirit of the Spanish public.” 6
    This process did not take place overnight. The vigorous denunciations of the Toledo statute and the impassioned arguments for and against the inclusion of the Conversos were an indication of the intensity of the struggle that was taking place within Christian society in the fifteenth century. And by the second half of the century, it was a struggle that was beginning to constitute a serious threat to Spain’s social and political stability.
     
    Even before the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Converso crisis had begun to assume dangerously destabilizing proportions. In Seville, where the Converso community was particularly prominent, there were pitched street battles between Conversos and Old Christians in 1465. In 1473, Conversos were driven out of Córdoba, after a battle in which they had mustered three hundred armed horsemen. Further anti-Converso riots took place in other Andalusian towns in the same period. In 1477 the king and queen visited Seville themselves, where local clergymen informed them that Marrano “Judaizers” were rife among the Converso community. According to legend, they were taken to the outskirts of the city one Friday evening, where it was pointed out to them that no fires were burning in the Converso district—a sign that its inhabitants were keeping the Sabbath. Ferdinand and Isabella were sufficiently alarmed by what they saw and heard to solicit a papal bull from Pope Sixtus IV, which authorized the establishment of an Inquisitorial tribunal in Castile to investigate heretics who had reverted to the “law of Moses.”
    In doing so, they ushered in a malignant institution that would dominate Spanish society for more than three centuries. The introduction of a Spanish Inquisition was a long-standing demand of the anti-Converso lobby, and it differed from its medieval predecessor in that its leading officials were appointed by Spain’s rulers rather than the Papacy. This meant that it functioned as a political instrument of the Spanish Crown, even as it waged war against heresy with the religious authority of the Papacy. In 1480, two Dominican theologians were empowered to undertake a full Inquisitorial investigation into the Marrano conspiracy in Seville. These investigations quickly turned to a reign of terror against the Converso community, when a Jewish merchant’s daughter, who subsequently became known as la hermosa hembra (the beautiful maiden) overheard her father and a group of neighbors discussing resistance and reported their conversations to her Christian lover. As a result of this indiscretion, hundreds of Conversos were arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake, including her father. Others were punished with fines and the sequestration of their property or obliged to wear the sambenito , or penitential tunic, for the rest of their lives as a mark of perpetual infamy.
    This onslaught decimated the Sevillian Converso community, and the Inquisition now extended its activities to other towns and cities in Castile under the direction of its fanatical Inquisitor General, Cardinal Tomás de Torquemada. In 1484 the Holy Office began to operate