Conversos, Power and the Intermediate Groups in Golden Age Spain

Enrique Soria Mesa s professor of Modern History at the University of Cordoba, he researches topics such as the nobility, Jewish converts and genealogy in Spain. He has supervised 19 doctoral theses and is author of books such as The Last Moriscos. Permanences of the population of Islamic origin in the kingdom of Granada (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), 2014; The Jewish Origin of Góngora, Cordoba, 2015; The reality behind the mirror. Social Ascent and Blood Cleansing in the Spain of Philip II (2016).Luis Salas Almela studied Early Modern History in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain). After having published his first book in 2002, he went to the European University Institute (Italy), where he obtained his PhD in History and Civilization (October, 2006) with a work devoted to the study of the most powerful Castilian noble house, that of the dukes of Medina Sidonia in the Early Modern period (published as Medina Sidonia: el poder de la aristocracia, 1680-1670, Madrid, 2008). Then he went to the Centro de História de Além-Mar, in Lisbon (Portugal), where he begun a new research line about the development of the Iberian ports during the expansion of the Atlantic trade with the Indies (16th Century). A line that he continued developing in the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos (CSIC, Seville) between July 2009 and December 2011. Since January 2012 he started a Ramón y Cajal contract in the University of Córdoba andwas appointed professor in the same institution in 2021.

• List of Figures and Tables Introduction – Enrique Soria Mesa and Luis Salas AlmelaThe Shifting Profiles of Privilege: Exemption, Status, and Social Categorization in Seville in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries  – José Manuel Triano MilánJudeoconversos, intermediate groups and social ascent in Golden Age Spain: the foundes of the University of Baeza  – Enrique Soria MesaHidden and reviled patricians?: Commercial mesocracy in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries southern Castile  – Rafael M. Girón Pascual“Merchants at the Consulado of the Indies (1535-55): Origins, association, and privilege” – Luis Salas AlmelaOver a century of “utmost loyalty and service” to the lords of the Alhambra. The network of clients of the Marquises of Mondéjar in Granada (16th and 17th centuries) – José María García Ríos“Images of power and the justification of orthodoxy: Early modern private chapels in the Córdoba Cathedral” – Clara Sánchez Merino Middle-class burials in early modern Córdoba: Patrimony, advance, and memory  – Gonzalo J. Herreros MoyaChapters by José Manuel Triano Milán, Luis Salas Almela, Clara Sánchez Merino and Gonzalo Herreros Moya are translated by Prof. Ruth MacKay and chapters by Enrique Soria Mesa, Rafael Girón Pascual and José María García Ríos translated by Dr. David Govantes-Edwards.