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A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin—prominent traders, merchants, bankers and men of letters—between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries In Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt provides the first comprehensive history of New Christians, the descendants of Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in late medieval Spain and Portugal. Bethencourt estimates that there were around 260,000 New Christians by 1500—more than half of Iberia’s urban population. The majority stayed in Iberia but a significant number moved throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, coastal Asia and the New World. They established Sephardic communities in North Africa, the Ottoman...
This fascinating history reassesses the consequences of Portugal's flourishing private trade with Asia, including increased tensions between the growing urban merchant class and the still-dominant landed aristocracy. James C. Boyajian shows how Portuguese-Asian commerce formed part of a global trading network that linked not only Europe and Asia but also—for the first time—Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spanish America. He also argues that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, nearly half of the Portuguese-Asian trade was controlled by New Christians—descendants of Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the 1490s.
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