The Expulsion of the Moriscos

Between 1018 and 1023 AH (1609-1614 CE) the Spanish crown expelled the Moriscos, the last Muslims of Spain, bringing to a final end the nearly nine centuries of Islam in the Iberian peninsula. The Moriscos were the descendants of the Muslims of al-Andalus who had been forced to accept Christian baptism in the years after the fall of Granada in 897 AH (1492), in violation of the surrender terms. For more than a century they lived as nominal Christians under suspicion and pressure, many of them keeping their Muslim faith and practice in secret, neither fully accepted by the society around them nor able to be openly what they were. In 1609 King Philip III decreed their expulsion, and over the following years some three hundred thousand people, the great majority of the Morisco population, were rounded up and shipped out of the country, most of them from the Mediterranean ports of the east, bound for North Africa. They were Spanish in language and custom, natives of the land their families had lived in for generations, yet they were cast out for their ancestry and their suspected faith; many suffered greatly in the crossing and the resettlement. The expulsion closed the long history of Muslim Spain, and it is remembered with grief in the Arabic sources, including al-Maqqari, and in the accounts of Moriscos who reached the Maghrib. This scene depicts not violence but the departure: a Mediterranean quay of eastern Spain, families gathered with their chests and bundles among the coiled ropes of the dock, ships waiting at anchor with their bows toward the open sea, and the Spanish coastal town behind, the homeland being left for the last time. The framing is sober and grieving, a careful Muslim memory of the final exile of a people from al-Andalus.