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By Root 1288 0

In all some 80,000 were uprooted from their hometowns and villages, and were resettled in communities that had no desire to receive them. A few were left, plus a host of bandits and Moriscos who fled to the mountains rather than submit to Christian justice. But this purgation had been achieved at an enormous cost, for a once prosperous region now became a burden on the Spanish state; Granada was effectively emptied of its former inhabitants. Even when repopulated with Christians from the north, the kingdom never recovered its prosperity.

IN CASTILE, UNDER CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE, THEIR CHILDREN TAKEN from them to live in Old Christian families, the Granadine exiles still excited wild fears among Christians. The former Granadines attracted the special interest of the Inquisition wherever they were settled, and yet despite weekly visits from a priest, many still failed to become “good and sincere Christians.” The people of Granada still perversely followed their old ways, both in religion and in their supposed “wildness.” In 1573, a Morisco from Aranda on the river Duero, deep in the heart of Castile, told his local priests that “the Moriscos who were taken from Granada intend to rise up again and to take to the hills when the time is ripe.”32 The Moriscos of Valencia, Murcia, and Aragon represented an even greater danger, for they could unite with the Ottomans and guide the galleys from Algiers in their attacks on the Spanish coast. In 1580, it was widely rumored that the Moriscos in western Andalucia were in contact with North Africa and were planning a landing of troops from Morocco.33 The danger (built upon rumor and some evidence) seemed pressing and required an immediate solution.

Barely ten years after the depopulation of Granada, Philip II and his advisers met in Lisbon to discuss the Morisco question. In 1580 Philip had gained the throne of Portugal, so that he now ruled all the lands of Iberia. But this achievement seemed threatened by the insoluble problem of the Moriscos. It was accepted that a complete and permanent solution had to be found, for Spain could no longer risk their presence. The king asked for suggestions. One proposal was that the entire Morisco population should be crammed onto old ships that would then be scuttled at sea, drowning all aboard. But the logistical difficulties proved insuperable, and the fleet was needed in Flanders. Over the next two decades other imaginative schemes were suggested as the king extended the inquiry. Another proposal was to work all the males to death in the galleys, to the great benefit of the state. Another, from a priest of Morisco origins, Durrical, proposed a stockbreeder’s solution: the king should command that “no Morisco shall marry a Morisca; but only with Old Christians. The Children will be brought up as Christians, while the adult males would not reproduce and the line would die out.”34

In 1587 the bishop of Segorbe, Martin de Salvatierra, answered Philip’s request for a solution with a program of Swiftean audacity. In Salvatierra’s view it was too dangerous to allow the Moriscos, this “evil and pernicious people,” to go to North Africa, where they would only reinforce Spain’s enemies. The better answer was that all Moriscos, men and boys and all grown women, should be gelded or spayed, and then they could be taken to empty zones of the New World and left there.35 In the following year, Alonso Gutiérrez of Seville proposed a kind of clan system where each Morisco would be branded on the face with a mark, so that they could be identified and then set to work. If the numbers grew too great, some should be selected for castration, “which is what they do in the Indies without any great difficulty.”36 These procrustean solutions had one factor in common: effectively abandoning all hope of conversion and assimilation. While the immediate dangers were political—from the Turks and the Protestants—dealing with the Moriscos was essential because, as had been long suspected, they were by birth pernicious. The bishop of Segorbe bundled Jews and Moriscos together