Chapter two examines how the foundations of Christian citizenship began to take shape in regional conciliar movements in Spain, coming into maturity with the Crown’s ratification of the Council of Trent in 1564. As the Christian republic of the Spanish Empire became more diverse, the Crown put its weight behind a legal revolution that would provide the Church with a more coherent set of policies. The Catholic Church conceived the Council of Trent (1545-63) as an answer to the Protestant Reformation and a device with which to effect a reform of the administration of the Church.The Spanish monarchy welcomed the Council’s reforms enthusiastically. However, the Spanish incarnation of Tridentine (adj., from Trent) reform was unique, in that it functioned as an instrument of political consolidation that provided the monarchy the tools necessary to create some semblance of uniformity within a growing empire.

The first chapter establishes the groundwork for thinking about social differences in society by reviewing the major political milestones that transformed multi-confessional medieval society. Reaching back to the first fourteenth century pogroms that drove Spanish Jews to convert en masse to Christianity, to be repeated again in the fifteenth century, the chapter explores how the terms “New Christian” and “Old Christian” emerged and later solidified as the primary divisions in sixteenth-century society.

In Reconquista Spain, a barely united state turned its anxieties inward with anti-Semitic laws on blood purity among converts from Judaism and Islam. The same insecure state turned outward to conquer Mexico, where Franciscans spent fifty years recording Aztec human sacrifice in codices and color drawings. Castilians and Aztecs alike marked their external bounds and internal bonds with blood. Ethnicizing ideas of blood purity crossed the Atlantic to ruddy Christian perceptions of Mesoamerican sacrifice. Two blood-obsessed cultures met to reveal disturbing resonances in Christian blood language. Uses Sircoff on limpieza de sangre and Timothy Radcliffe on cultic irony in Hebrews.