Introduction

The expulsion of the last Muslims of Spain, the nominally Christian Moriscos, in the years 1609 to 1614 was a massive event, of great interest for the history of humanity. It may not seem to amount to much, compared to the overwhelming magnitude of today’s forced migrations as a global phenomenon, with more than twenty million people living displaced because of armed conflict and persecution. It does not come close numerically to the state-enforced relocation of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and others after the Second World War.Footnote ¹ However, the expulsion of the Moriscos was an uncommonly large operation for early modern times. Although neither carefully planned nor well prepared, it was forcefully executed. In the first year alone, from September 1609 to August 1610, a quarter of a million human beings were driven from their homes, the majority to North Africa. Most of them were transported directly by ship, but many first walked into Southern France. By early 1614, 50,000 more had been deported, and hardly any Moriscos remained in Spain.

Only buildings were left as a reminder of seven centuries of Islamic presence in the Iberian peninsula. Al-Andalus had long been an important part of the Islamic world, but with the surrender of Granada in 1492 and subsequent forced conversions, it became an almost forgotten, and certainly neglected, periphery. It became increasingly difficult for Muslims to maintain their religion and culture, due to persecution and restrictions on contact with other Islamic regions.

The expulsion of 1609–14 tends to be described as something that had to happen due to the intransigence of both parties. The church was intent on securing a sincere and public conformity of the Moriscos to Catholicism, but the Moriscos were unwilling to conform, using whatever means they could to circumvent these efforts. In Fernand Braudel’s interpretation, the starting point was an unresolvable ‘conflict of civilisations’ that could only be remedied by ‘a gesture of cold anger’.Footnote ² This, however, is easy to say with hindsight, since we know the result. One might equally well claim that the expulsion could, or even should, have been avoided, as assimilation was close at hand, and the Moriscos would have become ‘good’ citizens within a few decades. In this article, I shun such counterfactual propositions, but I hope to show that, despite its clear-cut outcome, the expulsion from beginning to end was an uncertain process. This was so not only for the Moriscos themselves, forced as they were to leave for unknown destinations, but also for the Spanish authorities, as they strove to keep the process on track, never knowing whether it would erupt into rebellion. The event was imbued with indeterminacy, and all its stages deserve thorough treatment, although the emphasis here will be on two hitherto neglected aspects.

The first part of the article analyses the deviousness of the king and his council of state in late 1609 and early 1610, when thousands of Moriscos were tricked into believing that they would not be expelled. In April 1609, only Moriscos who lived close to the coast were earmarked for expulsion. Had it not been for the decisive intervention of King Philip III a few months later, the Moriscos of the interior might well have been allowed to stay.

The second part of the article interrogates the experiences of Moriscos arriving in the abode of Islam. They left Spain for North Africa with mixed feelings. Were they leaving home or going home? They were nominally Christian, a few of them sincerely so, and those who still practised Islam in secret had developed customs and concepts that might not be accepted in Muslim lands. Most of them, however, were well received in North Africa, and as a group they strengthened the region through their diverse skills. A curious combination of relief, nostalgia, and anger can be gleaned from contemporary declarations by Moriscos. As a group, however, they integrated quite well in their new surroundings, and were never as prominent in seeking revenge on Christendom as has often been alleged. The most dramatic statement to be found is one by a Moroccan rebel leader, Abu Mahalli, who in 1612 claimed that ‘a bridge should arise in the mouth of the Straightes for him and the Moores to passe into Spaine to reduce that whole countrie againe to the subjection of the Moores’.Footnote ³ This failed to happen, and in the following years only small groups of Moriscos tried to take revenge, with limited results.

In a global perspective, the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609–14 can be considered to be part of a consolidation of the ‘frontiers’ between Islam and Christianity, stretching chronologically from the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the siege of Vienna in 1683. It brought into sharp focus a major difference between the two civilizations, to use Braudel’s conception. Christians threw out an ‘alien’ ethnic group to cleanse an entire country, risking a major rebellion. In contrast, Muslims flexibly accepted thousands of refugees who were technically doubly apostates, without any certainty that they would ever adapt to their new homes. In the event, the operation had surprisingly few immediate political repercussions on either side of the religious border, even if it remained etched in the collective memory of both faiths.

The antecedents

As Christian troops ‘reconquered’ much of Iberia from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, many Muslim inhabitants left, but others stayed behind. Entire villages and towns remained under Christian rule, especially in the mountain regions of Valencia. Those who stayed, called Mudejars, were initially allowed to practise their religion, albeit with restrictions. However, clear signs of increasing political, religious and cultural intolerance appeared by the mid-fifteenth century.Footnote ⁴ With the Christian capture of the city of Granada in 1492, after years of fighting, conditions changed decisively. All Jews had been forced to leave Andalusia in 1483–84, and parts of Aragon in 1486. By a royal decree of 31 March 1492, signed in Granada by Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand, all Jews had to leave their joint kingdoms within three months, unless they converted to Christianity. As a result, more than one hundred thousand left Spain, and there is no way of knowing how many converted and stayed.Footnote ⁵ Five years later, King Manuel of Portugal, under pressure from Spain, expelled all Jews from his realm, as well as the small community of Muslims. In L. P. Harvey’s opinion, this was ‘the first indication that Castile envisaged putting an end within its territories to the medieval Mudejar dispensation according to which Christian rulers accepted Muslims as their subjects’.Footnote ⁶

Although agreements made after the fall of Granada implied freedom of religion for Muslim inhabitants, who were in the great majority in the city and its vicinity, church officials increasingly pushed for their conversion. In 1498 the city was divided into two residential areas along religious lines. In the last days of 1499, the Muslim townspeople rebelled, joined by inhabitants of the Alpujarra mountains, but the rebellion was quelled by February 1500. Thousands of Muslims fled to North Africa, and many more were baptised en masse. In a series of subsequent royal decrees, the last one promulgated in Seville on 12 February 1502, Muslims in Granada, and in other parts of the kingdom of Castile, were given a choice either to convert or to leave Spain, albeit only to Egypt by way of ports in the northern region of Biscay.Footnote ⁷ That route was not a sensible option for ordinary Muslims, implying a Spanish preference for conversion. Some twenty years later, a popular revolt against King Charles I, or Emperor Charles V, in Valencia led to the forceful conversion of thousands more Muslims. After consulting with theologians, the Inquisition and the Pope, Charles agreed in early 1525 that forced baptisms should be accepted as religiously valid. By September, he had decided that the Muslims of Valencia and Aragon should be given the choice of converting or leaving, this time only by way of the distant port of La Coruña in Galicia. The decree was published in Valencia on 9 December, giving Muslims of Valencia till the end of the month to choose, and those of Aragon till the end of January 1526.Footnote ⁸

Those who remained as nominal converts to Catholicism were known as Moriscos, and their uneasy existence as a quasi-religious or quasi-ethnic minority in sixteenth-century Spain has been described in a profusion of books and articles, with hundreds of items listed in recent bibliographies.Footnote ⁹ Despite living under a variety of circumstances, and in most regions of the country, this minority had an overarching identity of its own, recognized by dispersed individuals. Christian authorities, be it the Inquisition or royal or municipial officials, hardly ever wavered in their identification of a Morisco. It was not only a question of clothes or other external cultural markers, but also an issue of reciprocal knowledge or feeling. This was exemplified by the ease with which the author of The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of the Mancha (1605) found a Morisco in Toledo, after he had bought the continuation of that intriguing story, written in Arabic.Footnote ¹⁰

After a Morisco revolt was crushed, with protracted and fierce fighting in the Alpujarras in 1568–70, close to 80,000 Moriscos were deported from the kingdom of Granada, and somewhat haphazardly transported to various regions in Castile, one of every four or five dying on the road. A few thousand stayed behind, but many of these were deported in 1584–85.Footnote ¹¹ In March 1570, as the deportation of Moriscos from Granada had just started, the idea of expelling all Moriscos from Spain was first seriously discussed. The idea met with resistance and was abandoned, only to re-emerge with greater force twelve years later. In 1582, King Philip II seems to have changed his mind several times, but in the end chose to do nothing, perhaps because of a recent truce with the Ottoman sultan.Footnote ¹² Instead, the missionary efforts directed at Moriscos were intensified, especially in Valencia.

The issue of expulsion did not become politically relevant again until 1601, at the instigation of Juan de Ribera, archbishop of Valencia, who wrote a series of letters and memorials to King Philip III and the king’s favourite, the Duke of Lerma.Footnote ¹³ This renewed interest in the Moriscos at a high political level can be explained as a reaction to a frustrated attempt by Spanish naval forces to capture the city of Algiers in the summer of 1601.Footnote ¹⁴ Complicated discussions ensued, with no consensus emerging until after 29 October 1607, when the council of state decided to go through documents that had been produced on the issue since 1581. Three months later, on 30 January 1608, the council agreed to expel the Moriscos of Valencia, due to their obstinacy and broken promises. After that operation the council would discuss whether to expel Moriscos in Castile and Aragon too, or simply deport them to less populated regions. However, before proceeding with the expulsion of the Valencian Moriscos, there would be one further effort to ensure their true conversion. If they failed wholeheartedly to embrace the faith, the expulsion would be less difficult to justify, since they could then no longer be considered to be Christians.Footnote ¹⁵ A year later it was announced that no progress was being made, setting the scene for radical action.

Duplicity and dissimulation

Simplifying a little, it can be said that during 1609 and 1610 the Spanish government published five decrees concerning the expulsion of Moriscos: on 22 September 1609 for Valencia; on 9 December 1609 for Granada, Murcia, Andalusia, and the village of Hornachos in Extremadura; on 28 December 1609 for Old Castile, New Castile, the rest of Extremadura, and La Mancha; on 17 April 1610 for Aragon and Catalonia; and on 10 July 1610 for Old Castile, New Castile, Extremadura, and La Mancha (again, curiously).

Scholars writing on the expulsion of the Moriscos describe this sequence of decrees as a smooth process, based on a clear-sighted decision in April 1609 to exile every single Morisco from the country.Footnote ¹⁶ In reality, the process was more ambivalent. In the decree of 22 September, the king justified his decision to expel the Moriscos of Valencia, saying that the efforts to truly convert them had been in vain. They were Muslims in their hearts, and accordingly he proclaimed their expulsion to the coast of North Africa.Footnote ¹⁷ Ten weeks later, on 9 December, the king decided to do the same with the Moriscos of Granada, Murcia and Andalusia, and also the inhabitants of Hornachos in Extremadura, because of their enduring disobedience.Footnote ¹⁸ On 28 December, however, he opted for a different approach, for there is a phrase in this decree that has not received the attention that it deserves. After claiming that the Moriscos of Old Castile, New Castile, Extremadura and La Mancha were ill at ease (se habían inquietado) because of the expulsion of Moriscos from other regions, he decided to give them permission to leave Spain if they so decided and go wherever they desired: ‘permito y doy licencia … a todos los que se quisieren yr … adonde bien visto les fuere’.Footnote ¹⁹ Why did King Philip grant the Moriscos permission to leave, instead of simply expelling them as he had done in terms of the two earlier decrees? Was he willing to let them stay, or was he trying to fool them?

In 1901, Pascual Boronat y Barrachina explained the wording as an indication of royal generosity, as if King Philip wanted to be kind by granting the Moriscos a possibility to leave voluntarily.Footnote ²⁰ Henri Lapeyre, in 1959, was more suspicious of this ‘solution singulière’, but only noted that the Moriscos were not explicitly thrown out, but rather allowed to leave if they so wished.Footnote ²¹ Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, perhaps naïvely, suggest that the king compassionately decided on this procedure in order to avoid the violence and horror of the expulsion in some areas of Valencia.Footnote ²² These renowned authors see the permission to leave as a euphemism for expulsion. There is, however, something here that requires an explanation. My suggestion is that as the Moriscos of Valencia and Andalusia were expelled from October 1609 to March 1610, the Spanish government successfully deceived the Moriscos of Castile, Extremadura and La Mancha with false statements, so that they would think that they could stay.

A letter from the state council, written on 24 March 1609 to Gregorio López Madera, a senior official in Madrid and a political thinker, reveals an approach that echoes the dispersion of the Moriscos from Granada in 1569–71. There is no talk of expulsion from Spain, but only of deportation within the country. In the autumn of 1608, López Madera had been sent to Hornachos, ‘un bourg perdu’ in Extremadura, as Lapeyre put it.Footnote ²³ In this village, forty kilometres north of Llerena and a hundred kilometres from Badajoz, there were more than four thousand Moriscos, disrespectful and subversive according to official standards. The council was shocked by reports from López Madera, and decided that the inhabitants of Hornachos should be sent into perpetual exile within Castile, as far from the coast as possible.Footnote ²⁴ The preferred destination would be the region surrounding Burgos, because so few Moriscos lived there, and there were more villages there than there were Moriscos in Hornachos.Footnote ²⁵

Less than two weeks later, on 4 April 1609, the royal secretary Andrés de Prada asked the state council to define what was needed to reach a conclusive decision on the Moriscos of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia.Footnote ²⁶ First to speak was Juan de Idiáquez, an experienced statesman, who had already participated in deliberations on the Moriscos in 1582. He first mentioned that there had been a proposal to expel the Moriscos of Castile, probably referring to a letter from Archbishop Ribera in 1602, but his main concern was with Valencia. In order not to disturb the Moriscos of the interior, he suggested that it would be best to define a certain distance from the coast, including the whole of Valencia and parts of other regions, and expel the Moriscos from there first, shameless and obstinate as they were. The risk was that other Moriscos would be perturbed, thinking that soon it would be their turn.Footnote ²⁷ The powerful Duke of Lerma agreed with Idiáquez that one should start with the Moriscos of Valencia, and that a certain distance from the coast should be defined, but he wanted the council to find ways of convincing the Moriscos of Castile, Aragon and Catalonia that they would not be expelled too, and thus would remain calm. Cardinal Sandoval, archbishop of Toledo, worried most about the Moriscos of Castile, who were dispersed and harder to reach than those of Valencia. He put great emphasis on the need to keep the preparations secret, and urged dissimulation (disimulación). Three other gentlemen of the council agreed with Idiáquez and Lerma, but the Duke of Infantado, like Ribera, wanted to start the process with the Moriscos of Castile.Footnote ²⁸

Scholars frequently relate the decision to expel the Moriscos of Valencia to the so-called Twelve Years’ Truce with the Dutch, signed on 9 April 1609.Footnote ²⁹ There was a connection between the two events, as the prospect of peace in the north made it easier for the council of state to engage in other ventures. However, there was plainly no direct or causal link, because the treaty was signed five days after the council’s decision and it seems that King Philip was not notified until 15 April, in a letter from Ambrosio Spínola that must have taken a few days to reach its destination. The king signed this treaty on 7 July.Footnote ³⁰ Besides, the expulsion of the Moriscos was a small matter, compared to protracted and costly warfare in the Low Countries. The Duke of Lerma’s remark, made on 2 January 1617, that the expulsion had been decreed as a measure to counteract criticism of the truce, should therefore not be taken too seriously.Footnote ³¹

The decision to expel the Moriscos of Valencia was kept secret, and the preparations from May to August have not been studied thoroughly enough. In a meeting of the state council on 1 June, with the king presiding, the discussion centred on Valencia, with Andalusia marking the second phase in the imminent expulsion.Footnote ³² At this point there was no clearly defined policy of expelling all Moriscos from Spain. Those who lived close to the coast had to go, the council decided, as they threatened the security of the monarchy. However, Moriscos elsewhere were to be assured that they would be allowed to stay, as Pedro de Toledo explained in a letter to the king on 7 June 1609.Footnote ³³ Consequently, only the expulsion of the Moriscos of Valencia was prepared during the summer, and, on 4 August, King Philip signed instructions for the military.Footnote ³⁴ The day after, Prada wrote to Ribera and justified the expulsion by the threat of an imminent Morisco rebellion in Valencia and Castile. He was convinced that the Moriscos had no intention of really adopting Christianity, and the only remedy was to get rid of them before they got rid of the Christians.Footnote ³⁵

By 21 August, however, the king had decided that this was not enough. That day, in a letter to Antonio de Aróztegui, another royal secretary, Prada, explained that the king had thought more about the issue, and had come to the conclusion that all Moriscos ought to leave: ‘a resuelto que salgan todos’.Footnote ³⁶ The letter was read in the state council two days later, and the reaction of the king’s advisers shows that it contained something new. Idiáquez and Lerma did not attend the meeting, and the cardinal of Toledo merely wanted more information, but three other noblemen commented that the king had clearly decided that the expulsion should be universal, and that from now on he would only need their advice on details.Footnote ³⁷ Further research is needed in order to elucidate the reasons for this royal decision, quite radical and unexpected. Signing the truce with the Dutch may have been a factor, but other concerns may have been uppermost in his mind, such as Spain’s relations with the Ottomans, or the fear of an invasion from Morocco.

Five weeks later, King Philip had become impatient, and he started pressing for action. On 1 October, Prada told the state council that the king wanted to know how the Moriscos of Castile were to be expelled, and insisted that preparations should start. The council replied that it would be better to wait until it became known how the expulsion of the Moriscos of Valencia was proceeding. Only then could the situation be assessed adequately, and the next steps be defined. The king minuted that he wanted to know what was happening in Valencia, adding an apparently irritated comment that he would not ask again.Footnote ³⁸ At a meeting of the state council on 5 October, Idiáquez and Lerma defined the strategy that would be followed in the months to come. Idiáquez wanted details of the embarkation from Valencia, and was concerned that it would not be easy to get rid of other Moriscos at the same time. His idea was that the Moriscos of Castile should be expelled in two phases, beginning with the larger group of Moriscos, who had arrived from Granada four decades earlier, and continuing with the smaller communities, which had been there longer. Lerma agreed that the expulsion of the Moriscos of Castile would be a difficult process, but also had an innovative idea. As soon as news arrived from Valencia, a decree could be published ordering all Moriscos living within twenty leagues of the coast, approximately one hundred kilometres, to leave the kingdom. That would keep the Moriscos of Castile and Aragon calm, as they would think that they were being allowed to stay. In a second phase the Moriscos from Granada could be ejected, and after that, finally, the rest. Everything could not be carried out at the same time, Lerma argued, but this way the operation had a chance of succeeding. Idiáquez supported this plan, and agreed with the limit of twenty leagues, although the troublesome village of Hornachos ought also to be included, even though it was further inland. The king accepted this solution, and wrote a short comment that further measures would be adopted as events unfolded.Footnote ³⁹

Implementation and success

The general contours of the expulsion of the Moriscos had thus been decided by 5 October 1609. A royal letter to judges in Castile, six days later, can therefore be seen as a deliberate effort to mislead the Moriscos of the interior. The king claimed to have heard news from Valencia that some Moriscos in Castile had been mistreated and he ordered that those who did harm to them, or sang insulting songs, should be severely punished.Footnote ⁴⁰ A few days earlier the expulsion of the Moriscos of Valencia had started, and during the first three weeks of October at least 32,000 were deported. The only reason to fret, from the Crown’s perspective, lay in the danger of a Morisco rebellion in the highland regions to the west of the city of Valencia.Footnote ⁴¹ Despite these worries, and the initial resistance of some Valencian noblemen who stood to lose from the expulsions, there was no change in the official determination to enforce the expulsion of every Morisco from Spain.

In a second phase, on 7 November, the state council ordered troops to be sent to selected towns in Castile.Footnote ⁴² Six days later the two men in charge of the expulsion, the Count of Salazar and Alonso de Sotomayor, presented a detailed plan of routes and personnel.Footnote ⁴³ Rumours of impending expulsion abounded, it seems, and many Moriscos reacted by selling their belongings. That issue was discussed in the state council on 3 November, and a week later the king asked Idiáquez to write to the judges of Castile, prohibiting Moriscos from selling their lands and Christians from buying them, adding that there was no reason for the Moriscos to worry, and that they should not leave their homes. A public confirmation of this declaration was issued on 14 November.Footnote ⁴⁴ Officially, no expulsion of the Moriscos of Castile was being prepared. Eight days later, the king wrote to the city of Ávila about soldiers who were on their way there, adding that nothing should be done that would lead the Moriscos to despair.Footnote ⁴⁵ Given this context, there is no doubt that the words ‘permit and grant licence . . . to all those who wish to leave’, proclaimed on 28 December 1609, were part of a manoeuvre of calculated deception, which was meant to keep the Moriscos of the interior calm, while the Moriscos of Valencia, and then Andalusia, were being expelled.

The trick was successful, for the Moriscos of Castile and Extremadura appear to have been convinced that they would be allowed to choose for themselves whether to stay or leave. Their attitude toward their own situation can be gauged from numerous letters to King Philip from officials in various towns and cities, describing the reactions of local Moriscos. On 6 January 1610, the Marquis of Mondéjar wrote that the Moriscos were happy to stay.Footnote ⁴⁶ Two days later the royal representative in Guadalajara informed the king that nobody seemed to be leaving.Footnote ⁴⁷ Officials in Valencia de Alcántara wrote on 13 January that nobody had left, and two days later officials in Ciudad Real said the same.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the last days of January, there was a steady flow of such letters to the king. On 21 January, the corregidor of Palencia wrote that not a single Morisco wanted to leave, and two days later an official in Salamanca wrote that nobody had left. The following day the Marquis of Mondéjar repeated his first letter, claiming that the Moriscos were still celebrating. The day after that, an official in Tobarra claimed that the local Moriscos did not wish to leave. On 26 January, the corregidor of Olmedo wrote that none had left.Footnote ⁴⁹ Four days later, the city council of Badajoz explained that the local Moriscos had come from Granada after the war, and did not wish to leave.Footnote ⁵⁰ On 2 February, the royal representative in Cáceres wrote that no Morisco had asked for permission to leave, and as late as 27 February an official in Oropesa wrote that nobody showed signs of leaving.Footnote ⁵¹

At about this time, Moriscos appear to have got wind that King Philip and his government had other intentions than allowing the Moriscos to remain. Moriscos who did resolve to leave were obliged to go to Burgos for registration, and by the end of February, fewer than one thousand had passed through the city. Only a month later did the movement accelerate, with 4,000 Moriscos having registered by 22 March, almost 9,000 a week later, and more than 16,000 by the end of April.Footnote ⁵² The official statement of expulsion was finally published on 10 July 1610, stating that not all the Moriscos of the two Castiles, Extremadura and La Mancha had taken advantage of the royal permission to leave, and many still remained, showing no sign of changing their Muslim habits. The king had thus decided to expel them too.Footnote ⁵³ At last, he revealed in public the decision that he had taken a year earlier.

Anger or relief?

The overall impression is that most Moriscos accepted their lot, even if regretfully. Most Valencian Moriscos obeyed the order to abandon their homes, and went peacefully aboard ships that took them to the coast of Algeria in October and early November of 1609. Only small groups resorted to violence, and took to the mountains. In Seville too, all went ‘well’ for the Spaniards in the first months of 1610, as 20,000 Moriscos arrived from all over Andalusia. As for the inhabitants of Hornachos, they walked the two hundred kilometres to Seville in three weeks.Footnote ⁵⁴ Twenty years later, in 1631, some Hornacheros, now living in Rabat-Salé in Morocco, clearly missed their village of origin, as they suggested to King Philip IV that they should be allowed to return.Footnote ⁵⁵ The letters cited above also indicate that a great majority of Moriscos residing in the interior regions of Spain wanted to stay.

Moriscos generally strove to adapt to their new situation. Although integration could often be a lengthy and difficult process, many were assimilated quite quickly, and without too many problems, In 1628, Ibrahim Taybili, who had earlier lived in Toledo, wrote a long poem in the village of Testour in Tunisia. Writing in Castilian, he defined the expulsion as a liberation for Moriscos, who now lived amongst fellow Muslims.Footnote ⁵⁶

Scholars have emphasized the negative aspects of this diaspora situation, often assuming that there was a connection between the expulsion of Moriscos and an increase in privateering sorties from North African ports. In the words of Barbara Fuchs: ‘they there contributed to the expansion of corsair attacks against Spanish coasts in the Mediterranean and, increasingly, in the Atlantic as well’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the same vein, L. P. Harvey states that after the expulsion, Moriscos from Hornachos employed ‘their fighting skills for the part-Morisco communities of Tetuan and Sallee’ and ‘engaged in corsair activity, sailing out of many other bases in the Mediterranean, from Algiers, for example’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Last but not least, Ellen G. Friedman postulates a causal relationship between the expulsion and the rise of piracy:

However, simply to correlate the imagined anger of Moriscos with the increase of corsair activity results in an over-simplification. Friedman, despite the citation above, grasps the situation better when she says: ‘The role played by the expelled Moriscos in North African corsairing varied from region to region.’ She continues by saying that, in Tunis, Moriscos concentrated on agriculture, and also went into commerce and industry.Footnote ⁶⁰

North African corsair activity in the Mediterranean did not obviously increase significantly as a result of the expulsion of the Moriscos. Information provided by Friedman on the buying of Christian captives shows that in 1572–89 there were on average 25 cases each year. She does not show numbers for the following two decades, but in 1610–29 there were 41 cases per year, an increase of 64% compared to 1572–89. In 1630–59 there were 78 cases, an increase of 90%. José Antonio Martínez Torres indicates that Spanish ransom operations in North Africa peaked in 1575–87, 1612–17, and after 1640.Footnote ⁶¹ Taoufik Bachrouch has documented 29 such cases per year in Tunis in 1591–1600, and 40 in 1601–10, an increase of 38%. In 1611–29 the average was 61 cases, a further increase of 53%.Footnote ⁶² These numbers indeed indicate that corsair activity was on the rise during the first half of the seventeenth century, but they also show that this tendency had its origins well before the expulsion of the Moriscos, rather than immediately after that event. Already in 1580, the corsairs of Algiers were everywhere, as Braudel has shown, and in 1608 James I, the king of England, asked the Ottoman sultan to rein in the corsairs of Algiers and Tunis, who had ‘grown to such a multitude and strength of men and ships as no Merchants following the ordinary course of trade can avoid danger’.Footnote ⁶³

Chronologically, the growth of corsair activity in the Atlantic appears to correlate better with the expulsion of Moriscos. Friedman shows that during the years 1570–1609 only 1% of Spanish captives were taken in Atlantic waters. That proportion rose to 23% in 1610–19 and 33% in 1620–39.Footnote ⁶⁴ This fits with the results of Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar, who have information on five renegados taken by ‘Turks’ in the Atlantic before 1610, ten in the years 1611–20, twenty-six in 1621–30, and sixteen thereafter.Footnote ⁶⁵

This chronological ‘fit’ is misleading however, for it can be better explained by the crucial truce between England and Spain in 1604, which resulted in swarms of English soldiers, seamen, and privateers losing their employment. Many of these men became involved in piratical activities, from bases on the south coast of Ireland and in Morocco.Footnote ⁶⁶ In early 1607 there were English pirates in the port of Salé, and later that year Dutch warships tried to chase them out of Morocco.Footnote ⁶⁷ In April 1609, there were ‘Turkish’ men aboard an English pirate ship in the Mediterranean, and an English envoy in Spain thought that in this manner they would learn to navigate in the Atlantic.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ten years earlier English seamen were already reported in Tunis and Algiers.Footnote ⁶⁹ When Philip III received the port of Larache in November 1610 from Mulay Shaykh, one of the contenders for power in Morocco, the English and Dutch pirates installed there went south, settling in Mamora. In 1611, the latter port contained at least 40 English ships, with 2,000 men on board.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, the Spaniards occupied Mamora on 8 August 1614, beating the Dutch by only a few days. The latter were going to take the port in collaboration with Sultan Mulay Zidan, who had no ships at that point.Footnote ⁷¹

Henceforth, the port of Salé, under Moroccan control, became the only refuge for European renegades on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, acting as corsairs under the overall authority of the sultan of Morocco. In a letter to King Philip, a few days after the occupation of Mamora, Juan Ludovico Rodrigo of Tetuan suggested that Salé should be taken too, as it was a haven for French, Dutch and English seamen, who had joined forces with the local Moors against Spain.Footnote ⁷²

From 1616–17 Atlantic expeditions came to be organized in Algiers and Salé. In 1616, an unknown number of ships from Algiers arrived at the island of Santa María in the Azores, capturing a few hundred inhabitants.Footnote ⁷³ In June of 1617, a ship from Salé was taken in the Thames, close to London, and most of the men on board were Europeans.Footnote ⁷⁴ Later that summer, a Dutch ship was taken by corsairs, probably from Algiers, and brought to Salé.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the autumn, corsairs ravaged the village of Cangas in Galicia and in June 1618 twenty-eight ships from Algiers attacked Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, taking hundreds of captives.Footnote ⁷⁶ Corsairs from Algiers and Salé were in the English Channel in 1621 and 1622, close to Newfoundland in 1624 and 1625, in Iceland in 1627, in the Faeroe Islands two years later, and in Baltimore, Ireland, in 1631.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus, privateering activity did expand from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic in the first years of the seventeenth century, but renegades from northern Europe were largely to blame.

This is well known, and yet the image of corsairs keeps being superimposed on that of Moriscos in exile. An often-cited example is the description of Ibrāhim Ahmad Ghanīm, inhabitant of Seville before the expulsion. In Tunis he was put in charge of 200 men recently arrived from Spain, and given money, weapons and a ship. They went to sea for six months, returning in 1610 ‘with a small booty’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another example is an expedition to Sardinia in 1624, which was headed by a Sicilian renegado with some expelled Moriscos on board. Under torture by the Inquisition, the captain described his Moriscos as being only fit for gardening.Footnote ⁷⁹ It would seem that such stories about Morisco corsairs are exceptional, and scholars who have studied how the Moriscos reconstructed their livelihood in Tunis all agree on their mostly peaceful activities. Some played a part in the exchange or sale of captives, and in buying or selling slaves and weapons, but not in raiding as such.Footnote ⁸⁰

The same goes for Algiers. In 1610, an expedition of twelve ships from that city came close to Majorca, with several Moriscos on board, acting as soldiers and translators. Eight years later, three ships from Algiers with Morisco captains were captured by Spanish forces. The sailors were Moriscos too, dressed as Spaniards, and all speaking excellent Spanish. Friedman attributes this kind of participation to a ‘strong desire for vengeance among these exiles’, which may well have been true in these particular cases.Footnote ⁸¹ However, there is a difference between some, or even many, Moriscos contributing to corsair activity, and any general augmentation in such activity. Besides, exiled Moriscos had participated in corsair activities before the mass expulsions, for Friedman provides similar stories from 1582, 1583, 1595, 1601 and 1606.Footnote ⁸² They also played a significant part in the late-sixteenth-century Moroccan conquest of Songhay in West Africa.Footnote ⁸³

Not only did the expulsions have little influence on the stable but limited participation of Moriscos in Mediterranean privateering, but it also seems that corsairs and ship-owners in Algiers distrusted the Moriscos who had been expelled. When rumours of an imminent Spanish attack spread in 1618, the city authorities forced the local Moriscos to give up their weapons.Footnote ⁸⁴

That said, Moriscos who went to Morocco were more likely than others to become involved in corsair activity. In January 1614, the Duke of Medina Sidonia claimed that there were 10,000 Moriscos in Tetuan alone.Footnote ⁸⁵ A few thousand went further south to Rabat-Salé, many of them from Hornachos, probably arriving in 1613. In the years 1614–17, Sultan Mulay Zidan asked them to provide soldiers.Footnote ⁸⁶ The town was already renowned for privateering, and in 1588 Sultan Mulay al-Mansur had seven or eight ships there dedicated to attacking Spanish ships.Footnote ⁸⁷ Corsairs from Salé ravaged Lanzarote and Fuerteventura in the Canaries in 1569, 1571, 1586, and 1593.Footnote ⁸⁸ After the Spanish occupation of Mamora in 1614, Salé became ‘the centre of military instability in the zone’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The following decades have already been described, and scholarly opinion has been well expressed, once again by Friedman: ‘The Moriscos of Rabat-Salé were engaged almost exclusively in piracy and related activities; from early in the seventeenth century this was the most important source of wealth for the region.’Footnote ⁹⁰

As for the participation rates of Moriscos, we know that among 6,500 corsairs from Algiers who ravaged Lanzarote in 1618, there were 250 Moriscos, that is 4%. One of them was captured, the eighteen-year-old Juan de Soto from Valladolid. Other members of his family died on their way to exile, and he ended up in Tunis. After seven years of wandering around, he settled in Algiers, working for a ship-owner.Footnote ⁹¹ Four years later, in two ships that attacked the Canary Islands, among 105 sailors, there were 54 ‘Moros’ from Morocco, 20 expelled Moriscos, 8 European renegades, and 23 Christian slaves. A Morisco who was captured turned out to have been born in Lucena, Andalusia. His family was expelled to Ceuta, and from there he went to Salé.Footnote ⁹² By collecting more of these stories, we might better understand the participation of Moriscos in corsair activities, but it seems that out of the thousands of Moriscos who came to live in Rabat-Salé, only a few had a part in corsair activities as ship-owners or seamen. They may have been more important as guides and translators, as had also occurred before the expulsions. A contemporary perception of this role appears in a letter from John Digby, the English ambassador to Spain, in April 1619:

Unfortunately, there are no detailed studies of ‘Turkish’ corsair activity on the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal, but my hypothesis is that the Moriscos expelled from Spain never played a preponderant role in privateering. Wider political and economic conjunctures at the end of the sixteenth century reinforced corsair activities, which were already blooming, often as a result of a successful collaboration of privateers in Tunis and Algiers with English and Dutch sailors. The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain changed little, if anything.

Conclusion

It is remarkable that a Muslim minority survived in a ‘peripheral’ Spain for more than a hundred years after the fall of Granada in 1491–92, officially Christian but never showing unequivocal signs of assimilation as a group. Protracted political discussions amongst Spanish rulers led to either evangelization or persecution, even both at the same time, but with no results. Some Moriscos quietly dissolved into Christian society and became an integral part of it, but most of them decided not to relinquish their religious and historical identity. There was thus a seemingly insoluble tension within the Spanish Monarchy, inherited from centuries of Muslim–Christian cohabitation.

The expulsion of 1609–14 can be seen as a logical consequence of the royal orders of conversion or expulsion decreed in 1502–25. It can also be regarded as a failure of the Spanish authorities to accept a multicultural society, similar to that in the Ottoman empire, which displayed a marked tolerance towards Jewish and Christian communities.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such thoughts, however, did not occur to Spanish officials during the debates that preceded the expulsion. The last remnants of the country’s Islamic past were to be removed, with force if need be, but mostly by subterfuge and deception, which was thought to be necessary to diminish a real or imagined risk of revolt. Having left Spain, Moriscos settled in Muslim lands that seemed foreign at first but gradually became their new home. A few of them vented their anger by participating in corsair attacks, but most opted for a more peaceful existence.

The mild reactions of the Ottoman sultan to the expulsion can be seen as corollary to this successful adaptation. The sultan wrote to the king of France on 5 October 1610, concerned with the fate of those Moriscos who passed through Southern France on their way to a Muslim country. Four years later, he wrote to the doge of Venice, concerning a group of Moriscos who had not been allowed to continue their journey. He had by then permitted some Moriscos to settle in southeastern Turkey, and, on 9 July 1615, he admonished the beylerbey in Tunis for not treating Moriscos well, whereas they deserved peace and an opportunity to remake their lives because of the injustice they had suffered for so long among the infidels in Spain.Footnote ⁹⁵ He accepted the expulsion, and only tried to assuage the damage done.

The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain can be assessed from different angles. It was a disaster for those who were forced to leave their homes, and their descendants have still not forgotten the tragic event. The Islamic societies that generously welcomed the exiles benefited from their skills and industry, notably in North Africa. The political fall-out of the expulsion at the time was less than might have been expected, for Christian–Muslim conflicts did not escalate as a consequence of the expulsions. However, in the longer term, this spectacular movement of peoples added yet another element of contention to relations between Christians and Muslims.