Emilio Mitre Fernandez presents an extended discussion of the Jewish population in Spain before the pogroms and of the numbers of those killed or converted in Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: el pogrom de 1391 (Valladolid, 1994), 50-54. See also B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, 1st ed. (New York, 1995), 1095-1102, and David Nirenberg, «Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities», Past and Present 174, (2002): 1-41, there 9-10. This article has recently been published in David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, 2014), 143-168. For discussion of population numbers of Jews and conversos on the eve of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain, see David Martin Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (1996; repr. Albuquerque, 2002), 73-76.

Other labels were used for the converts and their descendants, including confessos, marranos, nuevos cristianos, and other terms as we shall see. While the connotations of these terms are not identical, the terms were often interchangeable. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to the converts and their descendants as conversos unless quoting authors who use other terms.

See, for example, Juan I of Aragon's letter to Tortosa proposing segregatory measures and distinctions of dress for Jews on account of the fact that «natural Christians» could no longer tell who was still a Jew and who was a Christian. Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Royal Chancellery (hereafter ACA:C) 1964, fols. 108v-109v, 18 Aug. 1393, [ = Fritz Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1929/1936), 1:716-718, no. 456].

See, for example, Queen María of Aragon's annulment of legal distinctions between Christians «by nature» and converts and their descendants in 1433, and the same language in a 1437 effort by the notaries of Barcelona to prohibit conversos from holding that office found in ACA:C 3124:157r-v and ACA:C 2592:21r-22v, cited in David Nirenberg, «Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of "Jewish" Blood in Late Medieval Spain», in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon (Cambridge, 2009), 232-64, there 252. This article has recently been published in David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, 2014), 169-190. In 1434 the Council of Basel issued a decree affirming the converts' equality with «other Christians» in the eyes of the church. For the Latin text of the Council's decree see Giovanni Mansi, ed., Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, revised edition by Jean Baptist Martin and Louis Petit, 53 vols. (Paris, 1899-1927, repr. in Graz, 1960-1962), 29: 100. In 1437 Pope Eugene IV heard complaints from the conversos of Catalonia and Valencia about discrimination against converts and their progeny, and he duly issued a condemnation of such behavior. Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, «Las bulas de Nicolás V acerca de los conversos de Castilla», Sefarad 21 (1961): 22-47, there 37-38.

Pedro Sarmiento, «La Sentencia-Estatuto de Pero Sarmiento contra los conversos toledanos», in Defensorium unitatis christianae. Tratado en favor de los judíos conversos, ed. P. Manuel Alonso (Madrid, 1943), 357-365, there 358, 363-364. A new edition of this text has recently been published in Tomás González Rolán and Pilar Saquero Suárez-Somonte, De la Sentencia-Estatuto de Pero Sarmiento a la Instrucción del Relator (Madrid, 2012), 20-32. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of primary texts are my own.

Albert A. Sicroff, Les controverses des status de «pureté de sang» en Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1960), 32-36. Similarly, Sicroff argues that the treatise written by the bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, defending the conversos in response to the uprising at Toledo and the promulgation of the «Sentencia» would serve as a manual for other defenders of conversos over the next two centuries. Ibid, 62. See Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorium unitatis christianae. Tratado en favor de los judíos conversos, ed. P. Manuel Alonso (Madrid, 1943).

Netanyahu, for example, places the Toledan rebellion and its aftermath quite literally at the center of his narrative of the «origins of the Inquisition in fifteenth-century Spain». Netanyahu, Origins of the Inquisition (see above, n. 1).

Claude Stuczynski observes that Cartagena's Defensorium (see above, n. 6) shows how the debate about the conversos became intertwined with contemporary negotiations of Spanish identity and contending notions of the mystical body metaphor. Claude B. Stuczynski, «From Polemics and Apologetics to Theology and Politics: Alonso de Cartagena and the Conversos within the "Mystical Body"», in Conflict and Religious Conversation in Latin Christendom: Studies in Honour of Ora Limor, ed. Israel Jacob and Ram Ben-Shalom (Turnhout, 2014), 253-75, there 258-259.

Bruce Rosenstock tries to identify a distinctive «converso theology» in the works of Alonso de Cartagena and Juan de Torquemada in Bruce Rosenstock, New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile. (London, 2002). See also his «Against the Pagans: Alonso de Cartagena, Francisco de Vitoria, and Converso Political Theology», in Marginal Voices: Studies in Converso Literature of Medieval and Golden Age Spain (Leiden, 2012), 117-39. In both works he presents Cartagena as a defender of the Jews. Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez considers the converso debate as a struggle for power in «Prelude to the Inquisition: The Discourse of Persecution, The Toledan Rebellion of 1449, and the Contest for Orthodoxy», in Strategies of Medieval Communal Identity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Wout J. van Bekkum and Paul M. Cobb (Paris, 2004), 47-74. B. Netanyahu emphasizes racial hatred as well as political and economic motivations in B. Netanyahu, Origins of the Inquisition (see above, n. 1).

Bruce Lincoln, Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib (Chicago, 2007), xi.

Ibid., xv.