Morisco

Moriscos (Spanish: [moˈɾiskos], Catalan: [muˈɾiskus]; Portuguese: mouriscos [moˈɾiʃkuʃ]; Spanish for "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.[1]

The Iberian Union mistrusted Moriscos and feared that they would prompt new invasions from the Ottoman Empire after the Fall of Constantinople.[2] 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 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%.[3][4] The large majority of those permanently expelled settled on the western fringe of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Morocco. The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving relatively light sentences.[5]

In Spanish, morisco was also used in official colonial-era documentation in Spanish America to denote mixed-race castas: the children of relations between Spanish men and women of mixed African-European ancestry.

  1. ^ Anwar G. Chejne (1983). Islam and the West: The Moriscos. SUNY Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0791498873.
  2. ^ "What Don Quixote has to say to Spain about today's immigrant crisis". theconversation. 26 August 2015.
  3. ^ Dadson, Trevor J. (2018). Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain: Old Christians and Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. ISBN 978-1855662735 – via Google Books.
  4. ^ Trevor J. Dadson: The Assimilation of Spain's Moriscos: Fiction or Reality? Archived 2013-06-12 at the Wayback Machine. Journal of Levantine Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, Winter 2011, pp. 11–30
  5. ^ 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.

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