page_title: Marrano
section_title: Inquisition
hierarchical_section_title: Marrano / Spain / Inquisition
caption_attribution_description: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=138&amp;letter=C Caption: Execution of Mariana de Carabajal at Mexico, 1601.
context_page_description: Marranos were Spanish and Portuguese Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula who converted or were forced to convert to Christianity during the Middle Ages, yet continued to practice Judaism in secret.
  The term specifically refers to the charge of crypto-Judaism, whereas the term converso was used for the wider population of Jewish converts to Catholicism, whether or not they secretly still practised Jewish rites. Converts from either Judaism or Islam were referred to by the broader term of "New Christians".
  The term "marrano" came into later use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree, ordered by Inquisitor Torquemada, himself from a Converso family. Espina, the confessor of Queen Isabel, had been a rabbi. It prohibited the practice of Judaism in Spain and required all remaining Jews to convert or leave, under the premise that, "If they are not good Christians, their descendants will be."
  By then, the vast majority of Jews in Spain had converted to Catholicism, perhaps under pressure from the Massacre of 1391, and Conversos numbered hundreds of thousands.
context_section_description: Tens of thousands of Jews were baptised in the three months before the deadline for expulsion, some 40,000 if one accepts the totals given by Kamen: most of these undoubtedly to avoid expulsion, rather than as a sincere change of faith. These conversos were the principal concern of the Inquisition; being suspected of continuing to practice Judaism put them at risk of denunciation and trial.
  During 1492, about 12,000 conversos entered Navarre from Aragon's repression, where they were allowed to remain. Tudela in Navarre turned into a converso haven. The Tudelans had already proclaimed in 1486 that "if any inquisitor enters their city, he will be thrown into the Ebro river." Later the resistance to the inquisitors was so strong that its aldermen ordered commissioners and attorneys to ask the Catholic Monarchs to limit the power of the Inquisition in 1510.
  The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, however, the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped to 3% of the total. There was a rebound of persecutions when a group of crypto-Jews was discovered in Quintanar de la Orden in 1588; and there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition, founded in 1536. This led to a rapid increase in the trials of crypto-Jews, among them a number of important financiers. In 1691, during a number of autos-da-fé in Majorca, 37 chuetas, or conversos of Majorca, were burned.
  During the eighteenth century the number of conversos accused by the Inquisition decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Córdoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.
caption: Execution of Mariana de Carabajal in Mexico, 1601.
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