A concept which lay at the heart of investigations by the Spanish Inquisition in Spain and elsewhere. Spaniards sought to prove their descent from families without Muslims or Jews in their genealogy. Cristianos viejos were those with a lineage uncontaminated by another faith, while cristianos nuevos were those whose forebears were moriscos or conversos, and whose loyalty to Roman Catholicism, and thus, to the Spanish monarch, was questionable. The rise of the picaresque novel may have been due to the nature of a society in which many people felt the need to conceal their origins and live by their wits, a respectable place in society being denied them; the classic instance of this is Pablos in El buscón by Quevedo.
Limpieza de sangre (in Spanish), Limpeza de sangue (in Portuguese), both meaning "cleanliness of blood" was a concept of Iberian Modern History.
After the end of the Reconquista and the expulsion of Sephardic Jews, the population of Spain and Portugal was all nominally Christian. However, the descendants of the Christian conquerors despised the New Christians, descendants of baptized Jews (Conversos or Marranos) or Mudejars (Moriscos).
This stratification meant that the Old Christian commoners could assert a right to honor even if they were not in the nobility. Upwardly mobile New Christian families had to either contend with their plight, or bribe and falsify documents attesting generations of good Christian ancestry.
The claim to universal hidalguía (lowest nobility) of the Basques was justified because the Arab invasion didn't reach the Basque territory, so it was believed that Basques had maintained their original purity, while the rest of Spain was suspect of miscegenation. Even in the 19th century, the Basque nationalism of Sabino Arana demanded a list of original Basque surnames to rule out mixes with Spaniards.
In spite of the abolition of the rules with the demise of the Ancien Regime, the discrimination was still present into the twentieth century in some places like Majorca.
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