The social religious disorder at the late 1430s-1460s was just beginning to unfold as the Converso ascendancy in the kingdom of Castile abruptly collapsed. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly when and why Converso-social are religious position in society deteriorated. It appears likely due to a series of mid-15th century events that began to cast them as outsiders in Castilian societies. Those who consider themselves to be Old Christians increasingly viewed Conversos as fundamentally different and disparagingly referred to them as New Christians. Old Christians targeted their wrath particularly on elite Conversos, especially when King Juan the second relied on this group to implement unpopular measures, such as his efforts to raise taxes to fund the war with Islamic or another. Until 1448, when the King turned to his powerful Converso advisor and royal favorite, Alvaro de Luna, to oversee the collection of one million maravedis from the city of Toledo for the Andalusian war, the city's leaders, inhabitants revolted. Not only did Pedro Sarmiento, the mayor of Toledo, lead the charge against de Luna's hand-selected Converso tax collector, Alonso Cota, but the mayor and the angry mob burned Cota's house down. Furthermore, from the mid to late 1400s, new forms of societal and institutionalized discrimination focused on Conversos. In the aftermath of the 1449 roits in Toledo, the local city council implemented new Limpieza de Sangre ordinances to exclude Conversos from prominent and profitable offices. These discriminatory statutes spread across Iberia to other municipalities, church institutions and even the royal bureaucracy, complicating the environment for late Conversos, with the internal battle lines drawn between Constable Alvaro de Luna who counted on the Santa Maria family for support during his darkest days, and the new noble Estuñiga clan, which was determined to see de Luna fail. Rising to the defense of his family and other Conversos during this era, was Bishop Alonso or Alfonso de Cartagena, the son of Bishop Pablo de Santa Maria and brother of Gonzalo Garcia de Santa Maria, the former Bishop of Plasencia. Alfonso was a powerful voice for the fair treatment of Conversos, arguing in a letter known as In Defense of Christian Unity to King Juan the second, that not only were all Jews and Christians part of a common humanity, but the Jews who converted to Christianity were fully sanctified by the act of baptism. Realtor Fernandez de Toledo, a fellow Converso and royal secretary, extended the line at these arguments in his 1449 letter to a friend Lope de Barrientos, Bishop of Cuenca, for an idea stated that "secret law dictated that Conversos and Old Christians were 'brothers'." He further argued that the Castilians held misguided positions on blood purity because Old Christians and Jewish families had heavily intermarried in the preceding decades, as demonstrated within the ranks of the new nobility. This point was firstly articulated 100 years later by Cardinal Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla, El Tizón de la Nobleza or the Stain of the Spanish Nobility, a memorial that was published in 1560 that indicted the nobility for its hypocrisy on longstanding Jewish ancestries. Contextualizing these historical events is a complicated task. But Sephardic historian Jane Gerber expertly explains that 15th century Conversos lived in a perpetual state of cultural marginality. She identified three groups of Spanish Jews that existed after 1391: those who openly continued to practice Judaism, those who became Conversos and remain so, and those who privately renounced their forced baptism, secretly maintaining their adherence to Judaism. Gerber's position is critical because she accurately describes how, by the mid 1500s, many Old Christian Castilians viewed Conversos as Jews. The author adds "by the middle of the 15th century, there simply was no easy answer to the question of who was a Jew or a Christian. But for most of the population, the conviction began to spread that Jewish ancestry or race, not professed religious belief, define who was a Jew after the purity-of-blood statutes. These Conversos were now isolated as a new class, neither Jewish nor Christian, that could not be assimilated and could not be redeemed." Jane Gerber's position, one that I subscribe to, exposes the troubled identities of Conversos. Conversos, and for that matter Maurice Gaus, Muslim convert to Christianity, can only be described as hybrid identities that drew from a mixture of religious lineage and racial identifiers. For the Santa Maria family, the Alvarez de Toledo family or the Señor de Oropesa, and even the Estuñiga de clan, the Condé de Plasencia , their identities no longer could easily be delineated or categorized because of the Jewish question. It should be noted that by the late 15th century, many noble families began a systematic process of hiding and destroying evidence of their conversion and their Converso ancestries. In fact, it was not until the early 17th century that the descendants of the Santa Maria family received a special Papal dispensation from Pope Clement the Eighth, who ruled from 1592-1605, granting them limpieza de sangre or cleanliness of blood.
