Inquisition trial against judaizers of Peru and New Spain

Following the union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal, families of Portuguese New Christians made their way to the viceroyalties of America, where trade was open and oversight more lax. The tribunals of Lima and Mexico City, established some years earlier, made them their principal target: chain denunciations, prolonged detentions, confessions extracted under torture, public autos-da-fé.

What the Inquisition called the *complicidad grande* designated those networks of kinship and commerce that the trials reconstructed step by step, each defendant being pressed to name his associates. The archives of these tribunals, preserved in Mexico City and Madrid, constitute today the most abundant source on the crypto-Judaism of the Americas.