Further, the hands-off attitude of the Holy See allowed the Old Christian establishment in Aragon and Castile to retain its position, a position it had worried about with the rise and expansion of the New Christians (Loomie 1999 356).

             The Inquisition remained a bureaucracy of the crown more than a service to the Church, with its activities in the hands of laity, trained in law, rather than of theologia" (Loomie 1999 356). This is not surprising, if one looks at documents produced decades earlier in Spain to deal legally with the problem of the Jews/New Christians. .

             The Seven Part Code, written in Castilian in about 1265, lay almost dormant until 1348 when at least parts of it were adopted in Castile, spreading across Spain and to Spanish possessions in the Far East (the Philippines) and to outposts in the New World, including Puerto Rico, Florida and Louisiana. While the code was not followed to the letter, that 'letter" had been derived from Visigothic and Roman law, and also Church law; all of these were hostile to Jews (Marcus 1938). When the Code was written, the Castilian state had only recently taken precedence on the Iberian peninsula, and, because the populations of Jews and Moors were numerous and too important to be mistreated by a nascent ruling organism, care was taken, in many cases, to protect Jews and Muslims from the letter of the law, rather than punish them by it (Marcus 1938).

             Still, even having the code on the books reveals that Jews and Moors were quite definitely second-class citizens. The code gave a rationale for putting Jews to death. The code noted that "we have heard it said that in some places Jews celebrated, and still celebrate Good Friday, which commemorates the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by way of contempt: stealing children and fastening them to crosses, and making images of wax and crucifying them, when they cannot obtain children" (Marcus 1938).