The concept of (), (, ) or (), literally "cleanliness of blood" and meaning "blood purity", was an early system of racialized discrimination used in early modern Spain and Portugal. The label referred to those who were considered "Old Christians", without recent ancestry from people who had not been Christian, such as Muslim or Jewish ancestors. In the context of the Spanish Empire, the concept defined castes of those of Spanish or Portuguese ancestry, as opposed to the non-Christian aboriginal populations of Asia, Africa and the Americas. After the Reconquista By the end of the Reconquista and the conversion or expulsion of Muslim mudéjars and Sephardi Jews, the populations of Portugal and Spain were all nominally Christian. Spain's population of 7 million included up to a million recent converts from Islam and 200,000 converts from Judaism, who were collectively referred to as "New Christians". Converts from Judaism were referred to as conversos and converts from Islam were known as Moriscos. A commonly leveled accusation was that the New Christians were false converts, secretly practicing their former religion as Crypto-Jews or Crypto-Muslims. The concept of purity of blood came to be focused more on ancestry than on personal religion. The Limpieza de Sangre statutes The first statute of purity of blood was enacted in Toledo, Spain, 1449, where an anti-converso riot succeeded in gaining a ban on conversos and their descendants from most official positions. Initially, these statutes were condemned by the monarchy and the Church; however, in 1496, Pope Alexander VI approved a purity statute for the Hieronymites. This stratification meant that the Old Christian commoners might assert a right to honor even if they were not in the nobility. The religious and military orders, guilds and other organizations incorporated in their by-laws clauses demanding proof of cleanliness of blood. Upwardly mobile New Christian families had to either contend with discrimination, or bribe officials and falsify documents attesting generations of Christian ancestry. The claim to universal hidalguía (lowest nobility) of the Basques was justified by intellectuals such as Manuel Larramendi (1690–1766). Because the Umayyad conquest of Hispania had not reached the Basque territories, it was believed that Basques had maintained their original purity, while the rest of Spain was suspect of miscegenation. The universal hidalguía of Basques helped many of them to positions of power in the administration. This idea was reinforced by the fact that, as a result of