New Christian

New Christian (Spanish: cristiano nuevo; Portuguese: cristão-novo; Catalan: cristià nou) was a law-effective and social category developed from the 15th century onwards, and used in what is today Spain and Portugal as well as their New World colonies, to refer to Sephardi Jews and Muslims ("Moors") who had converted to the Catholic Church, often by force or coercion. It was developed and employed after the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic Monarchs.

By law, the category of New Christian included not only recent converts, but also all their known baptized descendants with any fraction or quantum of New Christian blood up to the fourth generation, and then in Phillip II's reign it included any person with any fraction of New Christian blood "from time immemorial".

In Portugal, it was only in 1772 that Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquess of Pombal, finally decreed an end to the legal distinction between New Christians and Old Christians.

Although the category of New Christian is meaningless in Christian theology, it was nevertheless introduced by the Old Christians of "pure unmixed" Spanish European bloodlines.

The Old Christians wanted to legally and socially distinguish themselves from the New Christian conversos (converts to Christianity), who they considered to be tainted by virtue of their non-Spanish bloodlines, even though in the case of Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Spain's Muslims were also of indigenous Iberian stock, themselves the descendants of native Iberians who earlier converted to Islam under Muslim rule.

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