[MUSIC] Under the typical constraints of most medieval European monarchs, we had titles and the power to grant titles, but lack financial resources. Enrique II and his three heirs devised an ingenious method to regenerate the noble class. Their approach and calculations were simple. In return for political loyalty and financial assistance, Enrique socially promoted lower class noble Christian families, and elite Jewish and new Christian ones, conversos clans, to become his new nobility. The social experiment was widely successful, even if it came at the expense of the traditional old nobility, ran counter to anti-Jewish polemics during the Civil War, and thus angered Christian commoners. At the heart of rebuilding the nobility was the rapid integration of elite conversos, Jews that had converted to Christianity, into royal and church institutions. Henceforth, conversos would rapidly secure new opportunities, and Jews who maintained their religion would face an uncertain future. The explosive 1390s, long characterized as one of the most prominent times in the decline of the Spanish Jewry, and the ensuing first decades of the 1400s, present a perplexing history that defies artful explanations. Jewish converts to Catholicism, especially those converts who had successfully intermarried and collaborated with Christian elite, experienced an unprecedented social and political ascendancy. On the other hand, it was both a period of intense communal pressure for the Sephardi, and of uneven outcomes across the Iberian peninsula. Many Jewish communities were annihilated. Others weathered the storm of Christian persecution under extreme distress. And yet some managed to survive due to an uncommon respect for convivencia, coexistence by all Christians and conversos. While the Sephardi suffered, their former co-religionists found new opportunities as a result of the political disintegration of the old nobility during the late 14th century. This was a significant transformation in the nobility during this era. As the crown bankrupted and disempowered the old feudal nobility prior to the 1370s, and replaced them by creating new elite families, such as the Mendoza, and de Toledo. While new elite nobles who were quite powerful themselves could spar with the crown for authority and resources. Lesser families, like the and Santa remained the creatures of the king. Prior to the world of Pedro I, the old christian noble families of Castile prospered through control of family feudal lands, which were not indissoluble [FOREIGN], or entailed lands. These territories, given to feudal families by the crown, generated rents and natural resources, and created the conditions for them to prosper financially. Likewise, these older noble families were responsible for contributing men, resources, and tax receipts to the Castilian crown. Pedro I's reign disenfranchised these families, by relying on local municipal administrations instead of his nobles. Preventing the Cortes, the parliament of Castile, from meeting, actively controlling military orders. And relying on foreign Genoese administers and Castilian Jewish advisors. These restrictions on the old noble families, in addition to the Castilian civil war between Pedro I and Enrique II, and the war with Aragon, left Castile in a vulnerable position. Enrique II's victory over his half brother, Pedro I, created novel opportunitis for a new nobility. Bartolome Clavero's seminal text on the [FOREIGN] system, [FOREIGN] 1369 to 1836, provides an expansive discussion of this heir to wealth protection system. Clavero argued that the Castilian development of the [FOREIGN] was built upon the preexisting concept of feudal concession. Through this system, the king granted vassals conditional dominion over their individual patrimonial villages and lands. And more critically, a right to benefit materially and financially for control over these territories. The first feudal concessions of Castile prior to 1374 were known as [FOREIGN] [LAUGH] which were later enhanced into their [FOREIGN] form by King Enrique II. On March 23, 1374, the King specified in the 23rd clause of his testament that his royal donations and [FOREIGN] made to his noblemen were to pass to the firstborn son of each man. Should one of his nobleman die without an heir, the rights to the land would revert to the Crown. Based on Enrique II's statement, from 1380 to 1488, eight elite new noble families individually collected and combined their royal rights, donations, and gifts, and formed familial [FOREIGN] entailed lands. The new noble families most important to this study, and inside of our course, those suspected and documented as conversos include the family foundations of Rodrigo Ponce de Leon started in 1392. Pedro Gonzales de Bendosa, 1380. Diego Lopez de Estroniga, 1397. And Rodrigo Alonso de Pimental, 1440. Uncovering the Jewish and converso heritages of the late Castilian families is by no means an inconsequential task. As the great majority of these families labored intensively to hide their problematic ancestries during the 15th and 16th centuries. With the arrival of the 15th century, the elite new nobility enjoyed an unprecedented oligopoly on political and economic power. The converso upper class were by no means alone, as other great noble houses benefited from the trust of [INAUDIBLE] concessions. Such as the Enriques, the [INAUDIBLE], Guzman, Manrique, Menichelli, Quinones, Velasco, and Vinena clans, boy, that's a mouthful. This disturbance in the old order led to waves of violence and instability, as the crown was consistently tested by its noble houses, and as they challenged each other. Therefore, it is at this historic moment that Spanish identity began to take on a fragmented characteristic. As elite clans became a dynamic mix of old Christian, new Christian, old nobility, new nobility. All of which used every political and cultural tool at their disposal to out compete each other.
