Morisco

Moriscos (Spanish: [moˈɾiskos], Catalan: [muˈɾiskus]; Portuguese: mouriscos [mo(u)ˈɾiʃkuʃ]; "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.

The Iberian Union mistrusted Moriscos and feared that they would prompt new invasions from the Ottoman Empire after the Fall of Constantinople, 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 the 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%.

The large majority settled on the Northwestern part of Africa. The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most receiving relatively light sentences.

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.

The label morisco for Muslims who converted to Christianity began to appear in texts in the first half of the sixteenth century, though the use of the term at this time was limited. Usage became widespread in Christian sources during the second half of the century, but it was unclear whether Moriscos adopted the term. In their texts, it was more common for them to speak of themselves simply as muslimes (Muslims); in later periods, they may have begun to accept the label. In modern times, the label is in widespread use in Spanish literature and adopted by other languages, including Standard Arabic: الموريسكيون, romanized: al-Mūrīskiyyūn.

The word morisco appears in twelfth-century Castilian texts as an adjective for the noun moro. These two words are comparable to the English adjective "Moorish" and noun "Moor". Mediaeval Castilians used the words in the general senses of "Muslim" or an "Arabic-speaker" as in the case of Muslim converts; the words continued to be used in these older meanings even after the more specific meaning of morisco (which does not have a corresponding noun) became widespread.

According to L. P. Harvey, the two different meanings have resulted in modern scholars misinterpreting historical texts. In the early years, the Christians called them "new Christians," "new converts", or "new Christians, converted from Moors" (nuevos christianos convertidos de moros; to distinguish from those converted from Judaism) to refer to this group.

In 1517, the word morisco became a "category" added to the array of cultural and religious identities that existed at the time, used to identify Muslim converts to Christianity in Granada and Castille. The term was a pejorative adaptation of the adjective morisco ("Moorish"). It soon became the standard term for referring to all former Spain Muslims.