One Morisco town was expelled from Spain as an undefeated armed column
When Spain expelled its converted Muslims, the Moriscos, between 1609 and 1614, most left as refugees. The townsfolk of Hornachos, openly Muslim and famously defiant, were allowed to march out fully armed, went to Morocco, and set up a corsair republic at Salé. Their story shows how varied Morisco lives had been.
The crisis began with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, in 1492. A treaty promised its 250,000 to 300,000 Muslims freedom of worship, but Cardinal Cisneros's conversion campaign provoked revolts, and afterwards the population was offered baptism, bondage or exile, which in practice was often blocked. Soon every Granadan Muslim was nominally Christian. Castilian texts had long used morisco simply to mean Moorish; from 1517 it became a label, somewhat pejorative, for these converts.
Many kept their language, names, food, dress and sometimes their faith in secret. Philip II's decree of 1 January 1567 banned those customs, sparking the revolt of 1568 to 1571, after which 80,000 to 90,000 Granadans were dispersed across Castile. Conditions elsewhere differed sharply. In Valencia, nobles let their Moriscos live almost openly as Muslims and Arabic survived until the expulsion. Aragon's Moriscos, a fifth of the population, spoke Romance but worshipped fairly freely; in Catalonia they were under 2 percent, and in Castile many were sincere Christians barely distinguishable from their neighbours.
Fear that the Moriscos might aid an Ottoman invasion drove the expulsions, harshest in Valencia. Official records suggest about 275,000 were deported, mostly to Morocco and the Ottoman west, but totals are disputed because Moriscos avoided registration. Historian Trevor Dadson estimates about 500,000 lived in Spain beforehand, implying some 40 percent escaped expulsion and another 20 percent later returned. The last mass trial for secret Islamic practice took place in Granada in 1727.
The Canary Islands were a separate case. Their Moriscos were North Africans seized in raids, not descendants of Iberian Muslims; by insisting on their Christianity they avoided expulsion and came to make up half of Lanzarote's inhabitants. In colonial Spanish America the same word took yet another meaning, naming a mixed-race caste in marriage registers and casta paintings.
Source: Morisco
