Sevilla y los conversos: los «habilitados» en 1495

Abstract

After the riots of 1391 against the Jews and as a result of the intense doctrinal activity carried out during the years 1407 to 1416, Seville, as some other cities of Andalucía, went on to have a large community of Jewish converts that became the target of hostilities and several aggressions between 1433 and 1474, for religious reasons that hid or implied other socio-economic or plainly xenophobic motives. The Inquisition was established, among other reasons, to work out a legal way to that problem and prevent it to jeopardize royal authority. The conclusions of the present work, based on a list of 1750 converts and habilitados in Seville during the last months of 1494 and the biginning of 1495, permit to specify some questions that, until now, had been misunderstood or wrongly known.