New Christian

New Christian (Latin: Novus Christianus; Spanish: Cristiano Nuevo; Portuguese: Cristão-Novo; Catalan: Cristià Nou; Ladino: Kristiano muevo; Arabic: مسيحي جديد) was a socio-religious designation and legal distinction referring to the population of former Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and their respective colonies in the New World.

[1] The term was used from the 15th century onwards primarily to describe the descendants of the Sephardic Jews and Moors that were baptized into the Catholic Church following the Alhambra Decree of 1492.

[1] The Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, was an anti-Jewish law made by the Catholic Monarchs upon the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.

[1] Because these conversions were achieved in part through coercion and also with the threat of expulsion, especially when it came to the Jews, the Catholic Inquisition and Iberian monarchs suspected a number of the "New Christians" of being crypto-Jews.

According to António José Saraiva, a Portuguese literature teacher and historian, "The reality of the dichotomy between Old and New Christian only existed in the Inquisitorial taxonomy.

Portuguese New Christians were alleged to have been partners with an English factor in Italy in a notable 17th century marine insurance swindle.

[7] The related Spanish development of an ideology of limpieza de sangre ("cleanliness of blood") also excluded New Christians from society—universities, emigration to the New World, many professions—regardless of their sincerity as converts.

Even so, in the meantime, different waves of Andalusian Muslims and New Christians of Moorish origin left the Iberian Peninsula and settled across North Africa and in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire.