ABSTRACT
Jews and Muslims were the largest non-Christian groups with whom Europeans came into immediate contact. By 1800 the majority lived in Poland or under Islamic rule in the Ottoman Empire. Muslim culture had flourished in medieval Spain, which became the western bulwark of Christian Europe against Islam, but by the seventeenth century the Muslims had been forcibly converted or expelled. Jews led a separate existence because of the religious requirements of their own faith as well as of the Church. The Emperor Charles V protected the Jews in the Empire because the Protestant princes and Luther often attacked them, but as King of Spain he supported the work of the Inquisition against conversos, as against Muslim converts and Protestants. In Portugal the Portuguese and exiled Spanish Jews and conversos were able to live relatively unhindered despite the mass forced conversion of 1497 and the establishment of a Portuguese Inquisition. The conversos were important intermediaries between Christian and Jewish society.
