The Morisco Revolt and Expulsion

I. From Mudéjars to Moriscos

The Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia included substantial Muslim populations living under Christian rule. These communities, known as Mudéjars, had remained in the territories conquered during the centuries of the Reconquista, especially in Aragon, Valencia and Castile. They were permitted to practise their religion, maintain their mosques and be governed by their own law in internal matters, in return for paying taxes and accepting the authority of the Christian kings. In Valencia they formed perhaps a third of the population and worked largely as agricultural labourers on the estates of the nobility, while in Aragon they were concentrated in the river valleys of the Ebro and its tributaries. The site's page on Mudéjar art and science describes something of their cultural legacy.

The conquest of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1492 brought several hundred thousand further Muslims under Castilian rule. The capitulations of Granada guaranteed them the free practice of their religion, the retention of their mosques, their own judges and their property. In the same year, by the edict of 31 March 1492, the Jews of Castile and Aragon were required to accept baptism or leave, as described on the site's page on the expulsion of 1492. The guarantees given to the Muslims of Granada were soon tested.

The first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, sought to convert the Muslims by persuasion. He learned some Arabic, encouraged his clergy to do so, and commissioned an Arabic vocabulary and catechism compiled by Pedro de Alcalá, published in 1505. In 1499 the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, arrived in Granada and adopted more forceful methods, including mass baptisms and the burning of Arabic books. His actions provoked a revolt in the Albaicín quarter of Granada in December 1499 and a wider rising in the Alpujarras mountains in 1500. The crown treated the revolt as a breach of the capitulations, and the Muslims of Granada were required to accept baptism or emigrate. Most accepted baptism.

In 1502 the crown of Castile ordered all Muslims in its territories to convert or leave, and in 1525–26, under Charles V, the same requirement was imposed in the crown of Aragon, including Valencia, where many Muslims had already been forcibly baptised by the Germanías rebels in 1521–22. From 1526 Islam was formally prohibited throughout Spain. The baptised Muslims and their descendants became known as Moriscos, a term that distinguished them from the "Old Christians" and from the conversos of Jewish descent.

II. The Moriscos as New Christians

The Moriscos were Christians in law but in many cases continued to practise Islam in secret. Their baptism had been compelled, and the Church provided little instruction. The Moriscos of Granada, Valencia and Aragon retained their language, Arabic in Granada and Valencia and Romance in Aragon and Castile, their dress, their customs of diet, bathing and marriage, and in many cases their religious practices, including prayer, fasting in Ramadan, and the observance of Muslim festivals.

A legal opinion issued in 1504 by a North African jurist, known as the mufti of Oran, advised the Muslims of Spain that they could outwardly conform to Christianity while inwardly remaining Muslims, under the principle of taqiyya, precautionary dissimulation. The opinion permitted them to attend mass, to eat pork and drink wine when compelled, and to say Christian prayers, provided that they maintained their inner faith. This opinion circulated among the Moriscos and contributed to the persistence of crypto-Islam.

The Moriscos also developed a distinctive literature known as aljamiado, written in Romance languages using the Arabic script. These writings included translations and summaries of the Qur'an, legal manuals, prayers, prophetic stories, and narratives of the lives of the prophets, including figures from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Scriptures such as Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Solomon and Jesus as they appear in Islamic tradition. Manuscripts of aljamiado literature have been found hidden in walls and under floors of houses in Aragon, where they had been concealed to escape the Inquisition. The site's page on aljamas describes the organisation of minority communities in medieval Spain.

The Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478 to investigate conversos suspected of secretly practising Judaism, extended its attention to the Moriscos in the sixteenth century. The tribunals of Valencia, Zaragoza and Granada prosecuted thousands of Moriscos for Islamic practices. However, the crown and the Church also negotiated with Morisco communities, and in 1526 the Moriscos of Granada obtained a forty-year suspension of measures against their customs in return for a large payment. This suspension expired in 1566.

III. The Pragmatic of 1567

In 1566 a council of theologians and officials meeting in Madrid recommended a series of measures to enforce the assimilation of the Moriscos of Granada. These were promulgated by Philip II on 1 January 1567 in a decree known as the Pragmatic Sanction. It prohibited the use of Arabic, spoken or written, within three years, required that all Arabic books be surrendered, forbade the wearing of Morisco dress and the veiling of women's faces, prohibited Moorish baths, songs, dances, ceremonies and names, and required that the doors of Morisco houses remain open on Fridays and feast days so that officials could verify that no Islamic rites were being performed.

The Moriscos of Granada protested. A leading Morisco, Francisco Núñez Muley, presented a memorial to the president of the royal Audiencia of Granada, in which he argued that dress, language and customs were matters of regional tradition rather than religion, pointing out that Christians in the East wore similar clothing and spoke Arabic, and that the measures would cause great hardship without serving any religious purpose. He also argued that it was impossible for older people to learn a new language. The memorial is an important document of Morisco thought and of the debate over the relation between religion and culture.

The protests were rejected, and the Pragmatic was put into effect. The Moriscos of Granada had also suffered from the decline of the silk industry, which was the basis of their economy, from taxes on silk, from the confiscation of land whose titles could not be proved, and from the jurisdictional disputes between the Audiencia and the military authority of the captain-general, the Marquis of Mondéjar, who had been more favourable to them.

IV. The Outbreak of the Revolt

On the night of 24 December 1568 Morisco conspirators entered the Albaicín quarter of Granada, but the population did not rise. In the Alpujarras, the mountainous region between the Sierra Nevada and the Mediterranean, the revolt broke out at the same time and spread rapidly. The rebels proclaimed as king a young Morisco nobleman named Fernando de Válor, who claimed descent from the Umayyad caliphs and took the name Muhammad ibn Umayya, known in Spanish sources as Aben Humeya.

The early weeks of the revolt were marked by violence against the Christian clergy and Old Christian settlers in the Alpujarras. Churches were burned, and priests, sacristans and others were killed, often after torture. The killing of the clergy was later commemorated by the Church as martyrdom. These acts provoked retaliation by Christian forces, and the war that followed was conducted with great brutality on both sides.

The revolt drew support from Moriscos throughout the kingdom of Granada and attracted volunteers from North Africa and support from the Ottomans, who sent arms and some men. The rebels used the mountain terrain to conduct a guerrilla war against the royal forces. At its height the revolt involved around thirty thousand fighters and controlled most of the Alpujarras and parts of the surrounding regions.

V. The War

The first phase of the war was conducted by the Marquis of Mondéjar and the Marquis of Los Vélez, who led separate campaigns with limited coordination. Mondéjar's campaign in early 1569 achieved some success in the western Alpujarras and attempted to negotiate surrenders, but his forces, composed largely of militia and volunteers seeking plunder, committed atrocities that undermined his efforts. In March 1569 Morisco prisoners held in the prison of the Chancery in Granada were massacred by Christian guards and townspeople. The war spread to the eastern part of the kingdom, around Almería and the Almanzora valley.

In April 1569 Philip II appointed his half-brother Don John of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles V, to command the war. Don John, then twenty-two years old, brought regular troops from Italy and imposed a stricter organisation. In the winter of 1569–70 he led a campaign in the eastern districts, capturing the fortified town of Galera in February 1570 after a siege in which the defenders, including women and children, were killed and the town was razed and sown with salt. The campaign was hard-fought, and the royal army suffered heavy losses.

Within the rebel camp there were divisions. In October 1569 Aben Humeya was murdered by a faction of his own followers and replaced by his cousin Diego López, known as Aben Aboo. In May 1570 Don John negotiated the surrender of many rebels through an agreement with the Morisco leader El Habaquí, who was subsequently killed by Aben Aboo's followers. The war continued in the mountains until March 1571, when Aben Aboo was killed by his own men and his body was brought to Granada. Military operations were declared at an end, though scattered resistance continued.

VI. The Dispersal of the Moriscos of Granada

On 28 October 1570, while the war was still in progress, Philip II ordered the deportation of the Moriscos of the kingdom of Granada to other parts of Castile. In the following months around eighty thousand people were taken under guard to the interior of Castile and to Andalusia, Extremadura and La Mancha. Many died on the march from exhaustion, cold and disease. The deportees were distributed among towns and cities where they were to be assimilated into the Christian population.

The kingdom of Granada was resettled by Old Christian colonists from other parts of Spain, but the resettlement was only partly successful, and many villages in the Alpujarras remained abandoned or sparsely populated. The silk industry declined. The dispersal of the Granadan Moriscos spread the Morisco question throughout Castile, where previously the Morisco population had been small, and created new tensions in the towns where they settled.

VII. The Chroniclers of the War

The War of the Alpujarras is documented in several contemporary histories. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a nobleman, diplomat and humanist who had been the son of the first captain-general of Granada, wrote La guerra de Granada, a history in the style of the Roman historians Sallust and Tacitus, which was published only in 1627. Mendoza was critical of the conduct of the war by the royal authorities and expressed some understanding of the grievances of the Moriscos. Luis del Mármol Carvajal, who had served as a soldier and had been a captive in North Africa, wrote the Historia del rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del reino de Granada, published in 1600, a detailed narrative drawing on his own experience. Ginés Pérez de Hita, who served in the war, wrote the second part of his Guerras civiles de Granada, a combination of history and romance.

These works show that the war was viewed from different perspectives even among Spanish Christians. Mendoza, in particular, presented the Moriscos as having been driven to revolt by misgovernment and described the atrocities of the royal troops alongside those of the rebels. The literary tradition of the "Moorish novel" and the romances of Granada, which idealised the Muslim nobility of the fifteenth century, coexisted with official policies of suppression.

VIII. The Mediterranean Context

The revolt of the Alpujarras took place at a time of intense conflict between Spain and the Ottoman Empire for control of the Mediterranean. The Ottomans had captured Rhodes in 1522, besieged Malta in 1565, and supported the corsair states of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, whose ships raided the coasts of Spain and Italy. The Spanish authorities feared that the Moriscos would act as a fifth column, assisting Ottoman or North African landings. The revolt seemed to confirm these fears, since the rebels appealed to the Ottoman sultan Selim II and to the ruler of Algiers, Uluj Ali, for aid, and received weapons and several hundred volunteers.

The Ottoman support for the revolt was limited, however, because in 1570 the sultan decided to attack the Venetian island of Cyprus rather than to intervene in Spain. The conquest of Cyprus led to the formation of the Holy League of Spain, Venice and the papacy, and in October 1571, a few months after the end of the Granada war, Don John of Austria commanded the fleet of the League in its victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto. The war in Granada thus served as the training ground for the commander of Lepanto, and the two conflicts were linked in the minds of contemporaries as parts of a single struggle.

The connection between the Moriscos and the Mediterranean world continued after the revolt. Morisco exiles and escapees joined the corsairs of North Africa, whose raids on the Spanish coast often relied on local knowledge. Spanish officials reported contacts between Valencian Moriscos and the Ottomans and, in the 1600s, with agents of Henry IV of France. These reports, whatever their accuracy, strengthened the case for expulsion in the deliberations of the council of state.

IX. Morisco Religious Life

The religious life of the Moriscos after their forced conversion has been reconstructed from the records of the Inquisition, from aljamiado manuscripts and from the writings of exiles. In many communities a network of teachers, known as alfaquíes, continued to teach the basic practices of Islam, the recitation of the Qur'an in Arabic, and the rules of ritual purity. Families observed the fast of Ramadan, prepared meat according to Islamic rules, and avoided pork and wine. Children were circumcised in secret, and the dead were buried according to Islamic custom where possible, sometimes after a Christian funeral had been held.

The knowledge of Arabic declined, especially in Castile and Aragon, and the aljamiado texts were produced in part to transmit religious knowledge to Moriscos who could no longer read Arabic. Among the most notable figures was the writer known as the Mancebo de Arévalo, a Castilian Morisco who travelled through Spain in the early sixteenth century and wrote several treatises on Islamic law and spirituality in aljamiado. Another was the anonymous author of the Tafsira, a work that reflected on the situation of Muslims living under Christian rule.

The Inquisition records show that the boundaries between Islam and Christianity among the Moriscos were complex. Some Moriscos were sincere Christians, some practised Islam in secret, and many combined elements of both. Some Morisco writers, such as the authors of the Lead Books, sought to reconcile the two traditions, and some exiles in North Africa were suspected by their Muslim hosts of being insufficiently Muslim. This complexity has led modern historians to question the simple division between sincere and false converts that dominated the debates of the sixteenth century.

X. The Debate over the Moriscos

In the decades after the revolt the crown, the Church and the Inquisition debated what should be done about the Moriscos. Some, including Archbishop Juan de Ribera of Valencia, initially supported a renewed effort at instruction and conversion. Catechisms were prepared, preachers were sent, and in Valencia a college for Morisco children was established. Ribera, however, became convinced that the Moriscos would not become sincere Christians, and from the 1580s onwards he advocated their expulsion. Others, including some members of the Valencian nobility who depended on Morisco labour, opposed expulsion.

The debate involved questions of theology and canon law. The Church taught that baptism, once validly administered, was permanent, and that baptised persons were subject to the Church's jurisdiction. Since the Moriscos were baptised Christians, their practice of Islam was treated as heresy or apostasy. At the same time, the Church acknowledged that forced baptism was contrary to its principles. Theologians debated whether the baptisms of 1500–1526 had been genuinely forced, whether the Moriscos' children, baptised in infancy, were bound by their baptism, and whether the expulsion of baptised Christians to Muslim lands could be justified.

Several proposals were made in these years for dealing with the Moriscos, including their dispersal throughout Castile, their transportation to Newfoundland, the separation of children from their parents, and more extreme measures. The proposals reflected the view, increasingly held at court, that the Moriscos formed a separate nation within Spain that could not be assimilated and that posed a danger to the security of the kingdom, particularly because of their perceived sympathy with the Ottomans and the corsairs of North Africa, and the discovery of contacts between some Moriscos and the French Protestants.

XI. The Lead Books of Sacromonte

A remarkable episode in the history of the Moriscos of Granada concerns the discovery of the so-called Lead Books of Sacromonte. In 1588, during the demolition of the old minaret of the mosque that had become the cathedral of Granada, workers found a lead box containing a parchment written in Arabic, Latin and Castilian, a relic of St Stephen and a cloth said to belong to the Virgin Mary. Between 1595 and 1599 a series of lead tablets inscribed in a form of Arabic were found in caves on the hill of Valparaíso outside Granada, later called Sacromonte, together with human remains identified as those of early Christian martyrs.

The tablets claimed to be the teachings of the Virgin Mary and of the apostle James, transmitted by Arab disciples who had come to Spain in the first century. Their content presented a form of Christianity that emphasised doctrines acceptable to Muslims, such as the unity of God, and avoided those most objectionable to Islam. The texts seem to have been forgeries composed by Moriscos, probably including the translators Miguel de Luna and Alonso del Castillo, in an attempt to establish an ancient Arabic Christian identity for the Moriscos of Granada and to bridge the gap between their heritage and the Christian faith.

The lead books were accepted as authentic by the archbishop of Granada, Pedro de Castro, who founded the Abbey of Sacromonte on the site, but their authenticity was disputed by other scholars. They were sent to Rome for examination, and in 1682 Pope Innocent XI condemned them as heretical forgeries. The episode shows the importance of claims to scriptural antiquity in the religious politics of the period, and the ways in which the Moriscos attempted to find a place for themselves within the Christian history of Spain.

XII. The Decree of Expulsion

The decision to expel the Moriscos was taken by the council of state of Philip III in April 1609, on the initiative of the king's chief minister, the Duke of Lerma, and with the support of Archbishop Ribera. The decision was announced on 9 April, the same day on which Spain concluded the Twelve Years' Truce with the Dutch Republic, and some historians have seen the timing as an attempt to offset the loss of prestige involved in the truce. The expulsion was carried out region by region.

The decree for the kingdom of Valencia was published on 22 September 1609. It ordered all Moriscos to leave within three days and to go to designated ports for embarkation, taking only the movable property they could carry. Children under four could remain if their parents wished, and Moriscos who had lived as good Christians could apply to remain. Six per cent of the population was allowed to stay to maintain the agricultural economy and to teach the new settlers. The Moriscos of Valencia were transported on royal galleys and hired ships from the ports of Denia, Alicante, Valencia and Vinaròs to Oran and other ports in North Africa.

Revolts broke out in the Valencian mountains of the Vall de Laguar and the Sierra de Cortes in October and November 1609, where several thousand Moriscos held out for some weeks before being defeated. Many died in the fighting or of hunger, and the survivors were expelled. In North Africa the exiles were not always received well, and some were attacked and robbed by local populations after landing near Oran.

The Moriscos of Andalusia, Murcia, Castile, Aragon and Catalonia were expelled in a series of decrees in 1610. In Castile, where the Moriscos had been dispersed and partially assimilated, the expulsion was more difficult to carry out, and many were able to remain or return. The Moriscos of the Ricote valley in Murcia, who were regarded as largely assimilated, were expelled in 1613–14. By 1614 the expulsion was declared complete.

XIII. Numbers and Consequences

Historians estimate that around three hundred thousand Moriscos were expelled between 1609 and 1614, out of a total Morisco population of perhaps three hundred and twenty thousand. The kingdom of Valencia lost around a third of its population, and Aragon about a sixth. Many villages were abandoned, agricultural production declined, and the nobility of Valencia, who depended on Morisco labour and rents, suffered heavy losses. The crown compensated them partly with the lands of the expelled Moriscos.

Most of the exiles settled in North Africa, in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In Tunisia they were welcomed by the ruler and established communities in towns such as Testour, where their architectural and agricultural traditions survive. In Morocco some settled in Rabat and Salé, where they formed an autonomous corsair republic in the 1620s. Others settled in the Ottoman Empire, and some moved to France and other parts of Europe. The Morisco exiles in North Africa continued to write aljamiado and Spanish texts, and some of them, such as Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari, wrote accounts of their experiences in Spain.

The question of the economic consequences of the expulsion has been debated. Older historians regarded it as a major cause of the decline of Spain in the seventeenth century. More recent research has shown that the effects were concentrated in Valencia and Aragon, while the impact on Castile was smaller, and that the decline of the Spanish economy had several causes.

XIV. Scripture and the Morisco Question

The debates surrounding the Moriscos drew on Scripture in several ways. Advocates of expulsion compared the Moriscos to the Canaanites whom Israel had been commanded to drive from the land, citing passages such as Numbers 33:55, which warns that those who are allowed to remain will become thorns in the eyes and sides of Israel. Archbishop Ribera, in a memorial to the king, compared the expulsion to the actions of the kings of Judah who removed idolatry from the land, and to Abraham's expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 21:9-14, since the Muslims were often described in medieval Christian polemic as descendants of Ishmael.

Opponents of expulsion, and those who favoured patient instruction, appealed to other texts. They cited the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30, in which the master forbids the servants to pull up the weeds lest they uproot the wheat with them, and the command to preach to all nations in Matthew 28:19-20. Some argued that the Moriscos had not been properly instructed and that the Church bore responsibility for their failure to become sincere Christians. Pedro de Valencia, a humanist and royal chronicler, wrote a treatise in 1606 arguing against expulsion and recommending integration through intermarriage and dispersal.

The use of the Arabic language in Christian instruction was also debated. Talavera and some later bishops had favoured the preparation of catechisms and devotional works in Arabic, while others regarded Arabic as inseparable from Islam. The Bible was not translated into Arabic for the Moriscos, and the prohibition of vernacular Bible translations by the Spanish Inquisition, confirmed in the Index of 1559, applied to Spanish and Arabic alike. The site's page on Bible scholarship in Spain describes the wider context of Bible study and its restrictions in sixteenth-century Spain, including the Complutensian Polyglot sponsored by Cisneros.

XV. Cervantes and the Ricote Episode

The expulsion is reflected in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, described on the site's page on the Golden Age of Spain. In the second part of Don Quixote, published in 1615, Cervantes includes the episode of Ricote, a Morisco shopkeeper from Sancho Panza's village who has been expelled and returns in disguise to recover buried treasure. Ricote speaks of the expulsion as a just punishment imposed by the king, but he also describes the grief of the exiles, who weep for Spain as their homeland, and his daughter Ana Félix is presented as a sincere Christian. The episode has been read in many ways, as support for the royal policy, as a subtle criticism of it, or as an expression of the ambiguities of Spanish attitudes towards the Moriscos.

XVI. Historical Assessment

The Morisco question has been studied extensively since the nineteenth century, when Spanish historians such as Pascual Boronat defended the expulsion as necessary for the religious unity of Spain, and others such as Henry Charles Lea condemned it as an act of intolerance. Modern research, especially the work of Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Mercedes García-Arenal, Louis Cardaillac, L. P. Harvey and Trevor Dadson, has examined the history of the Moriscos from many perspectives, including their own writings, the records of the Inquisition, and local studies of their communities.

Recent scholarship has emphasised the diversity of the Morisco population. The Moriscos of Granada and Valencia, who spoke Arabic and retained much of their Islamic culture, differed considerably from those of Castile and Aragon, many of whom spoke only Spanish and were partly integrated into Christian society. Dadson's research on the village of Villarrubia de los Ojos in La Mancha showed that some communities were sufficiently integrated that their Christian neighbours and officials protected them from expulsion, and that many expelled Moriscos returned. This research has qualified the older picture of a uniformly unassimilated minority.

The Morisco expulsion is often compared with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and both are seen as expressions of a policy aimed at religious uniformity in Spain. However, the Moriscos were baptised Christians at the time of their expulsion, whereas the Jews in 1492 were given the option of baptism. The expulsion of 1609 was therefore an expulsion of Christians who were suspected of insincerity, and as such it raised distinctive questions about the nature of conversion and religious identity.

The memory of the Moriscos has also been renewed in modern Spain and North Africa. In 2009, the four hundredth anniversary of the decree of expulsion, conferences, exhibitions and publications in Spain, Morocco and Tunisia examined the history of the Moriscos and their descendants. Families in Tunisia and Morocco who trace their descent from the exiles have preserved surnames, recipes, music and architectural forms of Andalusian origin. In Spain the Moriscos have been increasingly recognised as part of the national history rather than as a foreign element, and their writings have been edited and studied by Spanish scholars. These developments reflect a broader interest in the plural religious heritage of the Iberian peninsula, which is also a theme of the site's pages on the Jewish communities of medieval Spain.

For summaries of the events, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the Moriscos, the Rebellion of the Alpujarras and the expulsion of the Moriscos.

XVII. Chronology

In January 1492 Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1499 Cisneros began forced conversions in Granada, and in 1499–1501 the first Alpujarras revolt took place. In 1502 the Muslims of Castile were required to convert or leave, and in 1504 the mufti of Oran issued his opinion. In 1525–26 the Muslims of the crown of Aragon were required to convert. In 1526 the Moriscos of Granada obtained a forty-year suspension of measures. On 1 January 1567 the Pragmatic was promulgated. On 24 December 1568 the revolt of the Alpujarras began. In April 1569 Don John of Austria took command, and in October Aben Humeya was murdered.

In February 1570 Galera fell. On 28 October 1570 the deportation of the Granadan Moriscos was ordered. In March 1571 Aben Aboo was killed. Between 1588 and 1599 the lead books of Sacromonte were discovered. On 9 April 1609 the expulsion was decided, and on 22 September 1609 the decree for Valencia was published. In October and November 1609 the revolts of the Vall de Laguar and the Sierra de Cortes took place. In 1610 the Moriscos of Andalusia, Castile, Aragon and Catalonia were expelled. In 1613–14 the Moriscos of the Ricote valley were expelled, and in 1614 the expulsion was declared complete.

XVIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.