The Spanish Inquisition

The conversions of Jews in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century Spain were totally unexpected. They were the unplanned result of a strange combination. Anti-Semitic uprisings, death threats, stage- managed debates, top class preaching and eviction of Jews from Christian areas brought about the only mass conversion of Jews so far known to history. How were all these converts to be absorbed and properly evangelised? Henceforth Spain was to be divided between the old Christians and the new. Even their remote descendants were to be known as the conversos. Less than a century later, after mounting social unrest at converso social, commercial and political success, the Inquisition was created. Until the 1550s these converted Jews were to be its principal targets, the confiscation of their property its sole source of income.