New Christian

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New Christian (Latin: Novus Christianus; Spanish: Cristiano Nuevo; Portuguese: Cristão-Novo; Catalan: Cristià Nou; Ladino: Kristiano muevo) was a socio-religious designation and legal distinction referring to the population of former Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and their respective colonies in the New World.^[1] The term was used from the 15th century onwards primarily to describe the descendants of the Sephardic Jews and Moors that were baptized into the Catholic Church following the Alhambra Decree of 1492.^[1] The Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, was an anti-Jewish law made by the Catholic Monarchs upon the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.^[2] It required Jews to convert to Roman Catholicism or be expelled from Spain.^[1] Most of the history of the "New Christians" refers to the Jewish converts, who were generally known as Conversos (or in a more derogatory fashion Marranos), while the Muslim converts were called Moriscos.^[1]

Because these conversions were achieved in part through coercion and also with the threat of expulsion, especially when it came to the Jews, the Catholic Inquisition and Iberian monarchs suspected a number of the "New Christians" of being crypto-Jews.^[1] Subsequently, the Spanish Inquisition and then the Portuguese Inquisition was created to enforce Catholic orthodoxy and to investigate allegations of heresy.^[1] This became a political issue in the kingdoms of the Portuguese-Spanish Union itself and their respective empires abroad, particularly in Spanish America, Portuguese America, and the Caribbean.^[1][2][3] Sometimes "New Christians" travelled to territories controlled by Protestant enemies of Spain, such as the Dutch Empire, the early English Empire, or Huguenot-influenced areas of the Kingdom of France such as Bordeaux, and openly practiced Judaism, which furthered suspicion of Jewish crypsis. Nevertheless, a significant number of those "New Christians" of converso ancestry were deemed by Spanish society as sincerely Catholic and they still managed to attain prominence, whether religious (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of Ávila, St. Joseph of Anchieta, Tomás de Torquemada, Diego Laynez, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez, and others) or political (Juan de Oñate, Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, Hernán Pérez de Quesada, Luis de Santángel, and others).

According to António José Saraiva, a Portuguese literature teacher and historian, "The reality of the dichotomy between Old and New Christian only existed in the Inquisitorial taxonomy. The religious or ethnic definition of the New Christians was, in the last analysis, merely formal and bureaucratic. Also, the label of the New Christian can be based on rumors originating from dubious genealogies, slander and intrigue."^[4] By law, the category of New Christians included recent converts and their known baptized descendants with any fraction New Christian blood up to the third generation, the fourth generation being exempted. In Phillip II's reign, it included any person with any fraction of New Christian blood "from time immemorial".^[5] In Portugal, in 1772, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquess of Pombal decreed an end to the legal distinction between New Christians and Old Christians.