“Qui ex Iudeis sunt”: Visigothic Law and the Discrimination against Conversos in Late Medieval Spain
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Abstract
This article studies how Visigothic legislation, both canon and civil, was used in fifteenth-century debates about the status of conversos. Using the 1449 Toledo rebellion as a case study, it considers how anti-converso factions justified discrimination and persecution through appeal to the Visigothic past. Through the concatenation of legal sources, they attempted to cast conversos as apostates, effectively identical with the forced converts of the early medieval period. Where the anti-converso party argued for the enduring relevance of this Visigothic precedent, their opponents rejected both the continuing applicability of early medieval law codes and the assigning of neophyte status to the New Christians of Toledo.