ABSTRACT
During the civil war and the succession struggle that marked the politics of Castile in the 1460s and 1470s, violence directed against Jewish converts and their descendants – conversos , as they came to be known in contemporary sources – erupted in various urban centers. We know of at least ten Castilian towns in which conflicts between Old Christians and conversos broke out, resulting in plunder, deposition from public offices, injury, expulsion, and death. 1 Dozens of documents, notably responses to petitions of grievance brought before the Royal Council in the period between 1475 and 1480, bear witness to these events. But if these documents allow us to assess the scope of the hostilities, as well as their outcomes, they also tend to employ a formulaic legal language, only seldom describing events as conflicts between Old Christians and conversos . Even in cases for which we know, based on other sources, that victims were attacked as conversos , it is hard to distinguish the descriptions found in these documents from other contemporary accounts of urban strife.
