Moriscos (, ; ; "Moorish") were former Muslims and their descendants whom the Catholic Church and Habsburg Spain commanded to forcibly convert to Christianity or face compulsory exile after Spain outlawed Islam. Spain had a sizeable Muslim population, the mudéjars, in the early 16th century.
The Iberian Union mistrusted Moriscos and feared that they would prompt new invasions from the Ottoman Empire after the Fall of Constantinople, so between 1609 and 1614 they began to expel them systematically from the various kingdoms of the Union. The most severe expulsions occurred in the eastern Kingdom of Valencia. The exact number of Moriscos present in Spain before the expulsion is unknown and can only be guessed based on official records of the edict of expulsion. Furthermore, the overall number who were able to avoid deportation is also unknown, with estimates on the proportion of those who avoided expulsion or returned to Spain ranging from 5% to 40%.Trevor J. Dadson: The Assimilation of Spain's Moriscos: Fiction or Reality? . Journal of Levantine Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, Winter 2011, pp. 11–30
The large majority settled on the western fringe of the Ottoman Empire and in the Kingdom of Morocco. The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most receiving relatively light sentences.Már Jónsson, "The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614: the destruction of an Islamic periphery." Journal of Global History 2.2 (2007): 195–212.
In the Spanish language and unrelated to the Moriscos of Spain (who were European Muslims), the term Morisco was used In colonial-era documentation in Spanish America to denote mixed-race castas: the children of Spanish men and women of European-Mulata ancestry.Cook, Karoline P. Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1btc5zt.
Name and etymology The label morisco for Muslims who converted to Christianity began to appear in texts in the first half of the sixteenth century, though the use of the term at this time was limited. Usage became widespread in Christian sources during the second half of the century, but it was unclear whether Moriscos adopted the term. In their texts, it was more common for them to speak of themselves simply as muslimes (Muslims); in later periods, they may have begun to accept the label. In modern times, the label is in widespread use in Spanish literature and adopted by other languages, including .
The word morisco appears in twelfth-century Castilian texts as an adjective for the noun moro. These two words are comparable to the English adjective "Moorish" and noun "Moor". Mediaeval Castilians used the words in the general senses of "Muslim" or an "Arabic-speaker" as in the case of Muslim converts; the words continued to be used in these older meanings even after the more specific meaning of morisco (which does not have a corresponding noun) became widespread.
According to L. P. Harvey, the two different meanings have resulted in modern scholars misinterpreting historical texts. In the early years, the Christians called them "new Christians," "new converts", or "new Christians, converted from Moors" (nuevos christianos convertidos de moros; to distinguish from those converted from Judaism) to refer to this group.
In 1517, the word morisco became a "category" added to the array of cultural and religious identities that existed at the time, used to identify Muslim converts to Christianity in Granada and Castille. The term was a pejorative adaptation of the adjective morisco ("Moorish"). It soon became the standard term for referring to all former Spain Muslims.
In Spanish America, morisco (or morisca, in feminine form) was used to identify a racial category: a mixed-race casta, the child of a Spaniard (español) and a mulatto (offspring of a Spaniard and a negro, generally a lighter-complexioned person with some African ancestry). This was likely due to a perception that such individuals resembled North Africans and West Asians, appearing mostly “white.”Cook, Karoline P. Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1btc5zt. The term appears in colonial-era marriage registers identifying individuals, and in eighteenth-century casta paintings.Vinson, Ben III. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018, 133–137.
Demographics There is no universally agreed figure for the Morisco population. Estimates vary because of the lack of a precise census. In addition, the Moriscos avoided registration and the authorities and tried to appear as members of the majority Spanish population. Furthermore, populations would have fluctuated, due to such factors as birth rates, conquests, conversions, relocations, and emigration.
Historians generally agree that, based on expulsion records, around 275,000 Moriscos were expelled from Spain in the early 17th century. Historian L. P. Harvey in 2005 gave a range of 300,000 to 330,000 for the early 16th century; based on earlier estimates by Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, who gave 321,000 for the period 1568–75, and 319,000 just before the expulsion of 1609. Christiane Stallaert put the number at around one million Moriscos at the beginning of the 16th century. Recent studies by Trevor Dadson on the expulsion of the Moriscos propose the figure of 500,000 just before the expulsion, consistent with figures given by other historians. Dadson concludes that, assuming the 275,000 figure from the official expulsion records is correct, around 40% of Spain's Moriscos managed to avoid expulsions altogether. According to Dadson, a further 20% managed to return to Spain in the years following their expulsion..
Kingdom of Granada
The Emirate of Granada was the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula, which surrendered in 1492 to the Catholic forces after a decade-long campaign. Granada was annexed to Castile as the Kingdom of Granada, and had a majority Muslim population of between 250,000 and 300,000. Initially, the Treaty of Granada guaranteed their rights to be Muslim but Cardinal Cisneros's effort to convert the population led to a series of rebellions. The rebellions were suppressed, and afterwards the Muslims in Granada were given the choice to remain and accept baptism, reject baptism and be enslaved or killed, or to go into exile. The option of exile was often not feasible in practice, and hindered by the authorities. Shortly after the rebellions' defeat, the entire Muslim population of Granada had nominally become Christian.
Although they converted to Christianity, they maintained their existing customs, including their language, distinct names, food, dress and even some ceremonies. Many secretly practiced Islam, even as they publicly professed and practiced Christianity. This led the Catholic rulers to adopt increasingly intolerant and harsh policies to eradicate these practices. This culminated in Philip II's Pragmatica of 1 January 1567, which ordered the Moriscos to abandon their customs, clothing and language. The Pragmatica triggered the Morisco revolts in 1568–71. The Spanish authorities quashed this rebellion, and at the end of the fighting, the authorities decided to expel the Moriscos from Granada and scatter them to the other parts of Castile. Between 80,000 and 90,000 Granadans were marched to cities and towns across Castile.
Kingdom of Valencia In 1492, the Kingdom of Valencia, part of the Crown of Aragon, had the second largest Muslim population in Spain after Granada, which became nominally the largest after the forced conversions in Granada in 1502. The nobles of Valencia continued to allow Islam to be practiced until the 1520s, and, to some extent, the Islamic legal system to be preserved.
In the 1520s, the Revolt of the Brotherhoods broke out among the Christian subjects of Valencia. The rebellion bore an anti-Islamic sentiment, and the rebels forced Valencian Muslims to become Christians in the territories they controlled. The Muslims joined the Crown in suppressing the rebellion, playing crucial roles in several battles. After the rebellion was suppressed, King Charles V started an investigation to determine the validity of the conversions forced by the rebels. He ultimately upheld those conversions, therefore putting the force-converted subjects under the authority of the Inquisition, and issued declarations to the effect of forcing the conversion of the rest of the Muslims.
After the forced conversions, Valencia was the region where the remains of Islamic culture was the strongest. A Venetian ambassador in the 1570s said that some Valencian nobles "had permitted their Moriscos to live almost openly as Mohammedans." Despite efforts to ban Arabic, it continued to be spoken until the expulsions. Valencians also trained other Aragonese Moriscos in Arabic and religious texts.
Aragon and Catalonia Moriscos accounted for 20% of the population of the kingdom of Aragon, residing principally on the banks of the Ebro river and its tributaries. Unlike Granadan and Valencian Moriscos, they did not speak Arabic but, as vassals of the nobility, were granted the privilege to practice their faith relatively openly.
Places like Muel, Zaragoza, were inhabited fully by Moriscos, the only Old Christians were the priest, the notary and the owner of the tavern-inn. "The rest would rather go on a pilgrimage to Mecca than Santiago de Compostela." quoting Enrique Cock, Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe III en 1585 a Zaragoza, Barcelona y Valencia, Madrid, 1876, p. 314
In Catalonia, Moriscos represented less than 2% of the population and were concentrated in the Low Ebro region, as well as in the city of Lleida and the towns of Aitona and Seròs, in the Low Segre region. They largely no longer spoke Arabic, instead adopting Catalan, and to a lesser extent also Castilian-Aragonese in Lleida.Pablo Roza Candás, "Rasgos aragoneses orientales en un manuscrito aljamiado-morisco." Alazet: Revista de filología. . Nº 23, 2011, págs. 83–98.
Castile, Extremadura and the rest of Andalusia The Crown of Castile included, besides the Kingdom of Granada, also Extremadura and the rest of modern-day Andalusia (the Kingdoms of Seville, Córdoba and Jaén). The Morisco population in most of this territory was more dispersed except in specific locations such as Villarrubia de los Ojos, Hornachos, Arévalo or the Señorío de las Cinco Villas in the southwestern part of the province of Albacete, where they were the majority or even the totality of the population. Castile's Moriscos were highly integrated and practically indistinguishable from the Catholic population: they did not speak Arabic and a large number of them were genuine Christians. The mass arrival of the much more visible Morisco population deported from Granada to the lands under the Crown of Castile led to a radical change in the situation of Castilian Moriscos, despite their efforts to distinguish themselves from the Granadans. For example, marriages between Castilian Moriscos and "old" Christians were much more common than between Castilian and Granadan Moriscos. The town of Hornachos was an exception, not only because practically all of its inhabitants were Moriscos but because of their open practice of the Islamic faith and of their famed independent and indomitable nature. For this reason, the order of expulsion in Castile specifically targeted the Hornacheros, the first Castilian Moriscos to be expelled. They were exceptionally allowed to leave fully armed and were marched as an undefeated army to Seville and transported to Morocco. They maintained their combative nature overseas, founding the Corsary Republic of Bou Regreg and Salé in Morocco.
Canary Islands