#The black legend debate full#

When Ferdinand became king of Aragon in 1479, the two kingdoms were effectively united. Isabella of Castile had married Frederick of Aragon in 1469. Spain in the 15th century was in the process of unifying the two traditional kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, while engaging in the final defeat of the Muslim stronghold of Granada. It was a strong mixture of racial prejudice against the conversos that would stir-up the Spanish Inquisition. Over the years the Old Christians saw these converso families as opportunists who secretly maintained the faith of their forefathers.

#The black legend debate full#

They were welcomed into a full participation in Spanish society and they would soon become leaders in government, science, business and the Church. To the converso families, such conversions were not without benefit. The converso identity would remain with such families for generations.

These Jewish converts would be called conversos or New Christians, to distinguish them from traditional Christian families. These riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. It exploded in the summer of 1391 with angry anti-Jewish riots. Spain began to experience an increasing anti-Jewish sentiment. In 1290, England expelled its Jews and France followed in 1306. In the 14th Century, however, anti-Jewish attitudes were on the rise throughout Europe. For centuries Jews and Christians had lived and worked together in a more or less peaceful though generally segregated co-existence. In addition to a large segment of Muslims, medieval Spain had the single largest Jewish community in the world, numbering some one hundred thousand souls in the 13th Century. Spain was unique in Western Europe for the diversity of its population. To many contemporary historians of the Spanish Inquisition, the story unfolds not as a “religious” persecution, but rather a racial pogrom.

It was only after the mid-fifteenth century that the Spanish Inquisition would develop, and its target would not be heretics in any traditional sense, but rather those whose Jewish ancestors had converted to Christianity and were accused of secretly practicing their old faith. It is a curiosity of history that the medieval Inquisition of the 13th and 14th centuries was little utilized in Spain. In many ways, the reality of the Spanish Inquisition has its own human tragedies, but it is not the tragedy presented in the common caricatures. It is the world of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, with vivid descriptions of burning heretics, ghastly engines of torture with innocent Bible-believers martyred for their faith. Most of the myths surrounding the Inquisition have come to us wrapped in the cloak of the Spanish Inquisition.