Religious Dissimulation

Abstract

The infamous Spanish Inquisition, which existed for approximately 350 years, was established precisely for the purpose of uncovering the innumerable “Christians in name and appearance only” who, according to the Catholic Monarchs in their appeal to Pope Sixtus IV in 1478, were endangering the integrity of Spanish society. Fear of religious dissimulation in early modern Europe — perhaps the most prevalent and most acute of all anxieties about impostors at the time — was mainly the result of the widespread phenomenon of forced conversions. Three major categories of people who had been coerced into changing their religious affiliation constituted the cause of this grave concern: New Christians: hundreds of thousands of men and women in the Iberian Peninsula who had converted to Christianity from Judaism or from Islam, mostly out of necessity and not out of conviction.