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But changes in language mark a change of status. First in Granada and Castile, later in Aragon and Valencia, Mudéjares became Moriscos by royal decree. Gone was the wild, savage, but noble “Moors” of the border ballads; now over the space of a century they became a people who “have only the outward appearance of a man, for the rest of you are beast.” Moriscos were the antithesis of all that was good, worshiping Mohammed, who was “the word of the devil,” instead of Jesus Christ, who was “the word of God.”19 Here we can see change in process. The traditional diatribe against the Muslim, built up over many centuries, coalesced with a new style of abuse. This did not just happen as some kind of linguistic evolution: it was rooted in a specific sequence of events. This outcome was not by design. It was an unforeseen but not a random consequence.

We can locate a starting point for this new idiom of disparagement in Granada during the late summer of 1499. In July the Catholic Kings were in Granada for the first time since the spring of 1492. After seven years they had expected to see a people won for Christ, as the reports of Archbishop Talavera and Hernando de Zafra had led them to believe. Yet the city was much as they had left it, still looking to all appearances more a Muslim than a Christian city.20 In the new Christian quarters new churches were strongly in evidence, as were a gratifying number of processions, saints’ days commemorations, and the sound of church bells (which the Granadine Muslims referred to contemptuously as “cowbells”). However, the mosques were still thronged by the faithful on Fridays.

Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to advance the pace of conversion, perhaps to the level achieved among the mainland Jews and the guanches of the Canaries. Outside the Kingdom of Granada better progress was being made. At the town of Caspe in Aragon the Mudéjares had converted to Christianity en masse, led by the most prominent members of their community. During the five months of their stay in the Alhambra, the Catholic Kings became convinced that conversion was not being pursued with sufficient energy in the capital; and if Granada lagged, then the conversion of the kingdom at large would be much more difficult. Before they left in November they had instructed the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (who had succeeded Talavera as Isabella’s confessor), to summon his team of able preachers and catechizers to Granada and so speed the process.

Jiménez de Cisneros had already argued at court for a more aggressive policy toward the Muslims in Granada. In particular, he was completely opposed to the clause of the 1492 capitulation that allowed former Christians and their children to remain, if they chose, with Islam. Once installed in the “Moorish” quarter of Granada, he began immediately to make lists of these individuals, termed elches, who were summoned to his presence. There he harangued them, and in the words of one of the court historians,

with kind words he persuaded them to return to our holy Catholic faith, because, as he said, it could not without the gravest sin be permitted for people to belong to the religion of the Moors if their forebears had been Christian … Those converted in this way were given assistance by him, and he bestowed gratifications upon them: those who refused, he had put in prison, and kept locked up until they were converted … When he heard that many Muslim leaders were attacking his methods as being contrary to the agreements … [he] imprisoned the dissidents in chains, and though it ran counter to his temperament, he allowed them to be dealt with by methods that were not correct.21

This was a euphemism for strict imprisonment and torture. In this Jiménez de Cisneros was merely taking the same path as the Inquisition, which in Valencia was beginning, illegally, to take jurisdiction over Muslims as well as Christians.22 Moreover, in anticipation of the increase of converts in Granada in 1499, the jurisdiction of the Inquisition in Cordoba was extended to take in the Kingdom