by Matthew Carr
We do not know if these representations succeeded, but Philip’s anxiety was another indication that the Crown’s version of the expulsion was not always shared by its target audience. This discrepancy partly accounts for the strange sense of anticlimax that was already becoming evident even before the expulsion was officially terminated. As early as 1611, the archbishop of Granada suggested the introduction of an annual public holiday to commemorate the expulsion, and this possibility was mooted by Philip and his ministers on various occasions, yet no such holiday was ever inaugurated. There is no record of why the Crown chose not to do this, but the most plausible explanation is that Spain’s rulers privately recognized that it would not be popular and that many of their subjects had little reason to celebrate the expulsion.
On the contrary, in many parts of Spain, the departure of the Moriscos had left gaping holes in the local economy that would take a long time to repair. In Ciudad Real, the capital of La Mancha, the population fell from twelve thousand to less than one thousand in the aftermath of the expulsion. In Seville, the Morisco exodus deprived the port of much of its labor force of carriers and dockworkers. Across the country, churches, convents, monasteries, and secular landowners had lost the silkworkers, agricultural laborers, and horticulturists on whom their income depended, and town councils had lost a vital source of taxation. In Valladolid, the local cathedral chapter appealed to Philip to make up the contributions that the former Morisco barrio of Santa María had once made to its revenues. Similar appeals emanated from other parts of Spain for many years afterward.
The economic impact was particularly severe in Valencia, which lost an astonishing 30 percent of its population. Writing in 1611, the historian Gaspar Escolano described how the Morisco exodus had transformed “the most florid kingdom in Spain into a dry and desolate wasteland.”7 Many Morisco settlements remained abandoned and their lands untended for years, plunging their lords into poverty and ruin. Nor were the barons the only ones to suffer. The Inquisition lost the income it had once obtained through fines and confiscated Morisco property. The Church lost tithes from Morisco parishes, and the Crown itself was deprived of taxes.
This picture of devastation was not universal or permanent, however. Valencia did not experience the general economic collapse that Juan de Ribera had once feared. Some “Morisco” crops, such as sugar and rice, fell into permanent decline, but others, such as wine, wheat, and silk, recovered and even underwent a resurgence.8 Some lords were able to renegotiate more favorable tenancy agreements with the Christian settlers who took the place of their departed Morisco vassals, so that a report to Lerma observed that “many lords have suffered . . . others have gained.” A number of lords used bankruptcy as an opportunity to evade their creditors or obtain lower interest rates on their debt repayments. Others profited from the sale of Morisco land and property, including Lerma and his family, according to a malicious satirical verse circulating at the court, which askedOne hundred thousand Moriscos left,
These houses that remained,
To whom were they distributed? 9
These allegations were probably well founded. In May 1610, the English ambassador, Lord Cottingham, reported that Philip had distributed some of the proceeds raised from the sale of Morisco property to Lerma and his relatives, and the duke also had a network of agents in Valencia who bought land and property on his behalf. Other barons also profited from such transactions or received new titles and grants of land to compensate them for their losses. The Duke of Gandía, who had previously feared for the destruction of his household, was so well rewarded for his loyalty that he was eventually able to restore the Borgia family seat to its former greatness.
Not everyone benefitted from the Crown’s largesse in the post-expulsion settlement. In 1614 a royal commissioner was sent to Valencia to address the complicated economic issues pertaining to the expulsion, particularly the conflicting demands of the censalistas, whose loans had helped finance the Valencian landowning aristocracy for so many years, and who now complained that their debtors were using the Morisco expulsion as a pretext to evade their obligations. After two years of tortuous negotiations, these disputes were resolved at the expense of the urban-based creditors, who were obliged to accept a lower interest rate in exchange for repayment, while the landowners who owed them money retained their estates and the possibility of economic recovery. Nevertheless, many of these estates remained stagnant and unproductive for years. Despite the optimistic predictions that Christian settlers would quickly replace the Moriscos, Christians were often reluctant to work in the arid interior where many Morisco settlements had been located, and many were unwilling to accept the high rents and onerous conditions that the Valencian barons attempted to impose on their new vassals.
The central government eventually imposed resettlement charters in an attempt to satisfy both the lords and their vassals, but the pace of resettlement remained slow and uneven. In 1638, 205 out of 453 Morisco villages in Valencia remained empty and some of the more remote Morisco places were never resettled. The expulsion left a similar legacy of stagnation and decay in Aragon, which lost some 15 percent of its population. With the exodus of the Moriscos from the banks of the Ebro River, one of the most fertile regions in Spain went into decline. As in Valencia, many Aragonese lords were ruined or impoverished by the loss of their vassals. Some were able to recover and found Christians to take the place of the departed Moriscos, but these new settlers often struggled to reclaim lands that had become overgrown and neglected since the Morisco exodus. Many fell into debt or gave up the attempt, so that many parts of the kingdom remained unproductive and underpopulated for many years.
The writers who celebrated the expulsion were not oblivious to these negative repercussions, but they tended either to dismiss them as temporary setbacks or minimize their importance compared with the creation of a Spain that was now united in “one Catholic faith, Apostolic, Roman,” as Marcos de Guadalajara put it. Some writers even presented Spain’s supposed willingness to undergo material privation as a testament to its spiritual grandeur. To Blas Verdú, it was “better to have a Spain weakened and discomforted, but cleansed and purged,” while Juan de Salazar praised Philip for “conserving the purity and faith of his kingdoms” and purging Spain of an “incorrigible and vile horde” regardless of the cost to his own revenues.
Some writers claimed that Spanish society had become safer and more law-abiding through the removal of a criminal Morisco subculture. This was largely fantasy and propaganda. Long after the expulsion, Valencia continued to demonstrate its startling proclivity for robbery, homicide, and mafialike vendettas. In 1689, the viceroy reported to the king that the kingdom was plagued by “bands of thieves, highwaymen, murderers, and criminals of every kind, who spare neither the life nor the purse of the traveler, nor the horse which the peasant uses to plough.”10 Nor was there any evidence to suggest that the crime rate in other parts of the country went down after the departure of the Moriscos. In Seville a pullulating criminal underworld of con men, contract killers, and thieves continued to torment the authorities throughout the century. In Madrid, an official report in 1639 observed that “not a day passes but people are found killed or wounded by brigands or soldiers, houses burgled, girls assaulted and robbed.”
In 1613 Marcos de Guadalajara painted an idyllic picture of a postexpulsion Spain in which “Merchandise flows freely by land and sea . . . we are free on our coasts and shores from African robberies and insults: the deaths that used to take place every hour no longer occur.”11 This, too, was wishful thinking. Throughout the expulsion, both Muslim and Christian corsairs continued to attack Spanish coastal towns and shipping, and these raids appear to have increased exponentially in its aftermath, according to the English ambassador, Lord Cottingham, who informed the Privy Council in 1616 that “The strength and weakness of the Barbary pirates is now grown to that height, both in the ocean and the Mediterranean sea, as I have never known anything to have wrought a greater sa
dness and distraction in this Court.”12
As Medina Sidonia and others had feared, the corsairs included large numbers of Moriscos. In 1617, the distinguished English courtier Lord George Carew informed his friend Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador at the Mughal court, of a wave of “Turkish” piracy all over the Mediterranean, especially in Spain itself, where “they spoyle the maritime villages and take many prisoners, which is principallye affected by the banished Moores that once inhabited the eastern coast of Spayne.”13 Carew noted that “these piratts now are become good mariners” and worried that they “will visite ere itt be long christian coasts upon the ocean.” The increase in piracy cannot solely be attributed to the expulsion, but there is no doubt that expelled Moriscos took to corsairing, either to make a living or take revenge on their former tormentors. In June 1618, a fleet of 6,500 corsairs from Algiers that included 250 Moriscos, launched a huge slave-hunting raid on Lanzarote. The best-known Morisco corsairs came from the militant Morisco community of Hornachos, which established itself in the run-down Moroccan port of Salé (Rabat) on the estuary of the River Bouregred. Together with an assortment of Christian renegados from various countries, the Hornacheros converted the port into an autonomous corsair republic, with a fleet of forty ships, its own grand admiral, and a ruling council, or divan, that coordinated their operations and shared out their spoils.
For more than half a century the “Salee Rovers,” as they were known in England, continued to operate in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and their ships were found as far afield as the English Channel, Iceland, and Newfoundland. Their notoriety was even enshrined in Robinson Crusoe, when Defoe’s protagonist is captured by a “Turkish rover of Sallee” during a trading expedition to Africa and subsequently enslaved, before his escape with the help of a local “Maresco” paves the way for his subsequent adventures.
All these factors cast a shadow over the king’s achievement that could not be entirely dispelled by propaganda. Lerma’s own position was not greatly enhanced by his role in the expulsion. In March 1618, he was made a cardinal by Pope Paul V, in what his enemies believed was a maneuver to escape execution for his corrupt financial practices. In October of that year, these allegations of corruption finally obliged Philip to banish his mentor from court, in a palace coup that was engineered by Lerma’s own son. The duke left Philip’s office in tears and retired to his estates, where he remained a pariah from the circles of power until his death in 1625.
Philip himself did not long outlive the political fall of his favorite. In February 1621, the Little Saint became ill with scarlet fever. His frail health had been undermined by years of gluttony, and despite three bleedings by his doctors and the restorative presence of the remains of Saint Isidore in his chamber, he never recovered. Facing death, Philip was stricken by remorse at his failings as a ruler and terrified at the prospect of a long period in purgatory. There was certainly much to regret. Having secured a much-needed period of peace for his war-weary subjects, he and Lerma had failed to take advantage of it. For years, his more astute advisers had urged the monarchy to take action on the social and economic problems facing the country, from Spain’s chaotic finances and oppressive taxation to a skewed social hierarchy that was top-heavy with aristocrats, bureaucrats, and clergymen but lacked farmers to work the land. In 1619 the Council of Castile published a report originally commissioned by Lerma himself, which identified the depopulation of the countryside as one of the most serious problems facing the country and recommended the planned resettlement of skilled cultivators in Spain’s deserted regions.
This was precisely the activity at which the Moriscos had excelled, but they were now gone, sacrificial victims in a vainglorious fantasy of religious purification that the king and his favorite believed would restore Spain’s greatness and bring honor and prestige to the monarchy. On March 31, 1621, Philip died, just short of his forty-fourth birthday, and the throne was inherited by his son Philip IV (1621–1665). And within a few years, the giddy expectations of national regeneration that had once surrounded the expulsion would be swiftly forgotten, as Spain continued to experience an inexorable decline that was in many ways as spectacular as its rise to power.
Even before Philip’s death, the fragile peace that had made the expulsion possible had begun to unravel. In 1618 an anti-Catholic rebellion in Bohemia triggered the Thirty Years War and sucked Spain into another maelstrom of savage religious conflict. In 1621, in one of his last acts as king, Philip refused to renew the truce with the Dutch United Provinces and ushered in a new phase in the longest of all Spain’s wars. By 1625 Spanish armies were once again engaged in multiple conflicts, with a staggering three hundred thousand soldiers deployed abroad and another half million men mobilized in the militia. Despite the prodigious efforts of Philip IV’s able chief minister and Lerma’s successor as válido, the Count of Olivares, Spain was barely able to find the money and manpower to sustain this vast military enterprise.
War fanned the smoldering fires of sedition throughout the Spanish Hapsburg domains. Between 1640 and 1652, the secessionist revolt in Catalonia known as the Reapers’ War brought French troops into the principality on the side of the rebels and eventually forced Spain to cede a large swathe of territory to its archenemy. Further rebellions in Valencia, Portugal, Naples, and Sicily continued to erode the crumbling edifice of the Spanish Hapsburg empire in Europe and shifted the balance of power inexorably toward France. In 1643 seven thousand of Spain’s finest soldiers were annihilated by a French army at the battle of Rocroi, the most shattering military defeat in Spanish history. Four years later, the Peace of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years War to an end, and Spanish weakness was confirmed by the recognition of the sovereignty of the Dutch United Provinces at the Treaty of Munster—a landmark moment that ended nearly eighty years of war and marked the symbolic end of Spain’s “golden century.”
By the end of the seventeenth century, Spain was teetering on the brink of administrative and financial collapse, and the monarchy was barely able to impose its authority over its own subjects or resist the encroachments of its external enemies. “It would be difficult to describe to its full extent the disorder in the government of Spain,” declared the French envoy, the Marquis de Villars, in 1668, observing that “the power and the policy of the Spaniards’ had been “diminished constantly . . . since the beginning of the century.”14 In 1700 the death of the half-mad and childless King Charles II was followed by the War of the Spanish Succession and the eventual accession of a Bourbon king to the Spanish throne.
Long before the final collapse of the Spanish Hapsburgs, many Spaniards had begun to identify the expulsion as a major contributing factor in Spain’s dizzying decline. “It is a most malign policy of state for princes to withdraw their trust from their subjects,” wrote the chaplain and royal secretary Pedro Fernández de Navarrete in 1626, in a gloomy analysis of Spain’s economic problems entitled Conservación de monarquias (Conservation of Monarchies), which blamed the depopulation of Castile on the “many and numerous expulsions of Moors and Jews, enemies of our Holy Catholic faith.” Though Navarrete condemned both expulsions as a “mistaken policy decision,” his attitude toward the Moriscos was clearly ambivalent. On the one hand, he described the expulsion as “so well executed by our holy king Philip III,” yet he also implied that it had been unnecessary, writing,I shall state only that despite the great importance of a large population to our kingdoms, the Spanish monarchs have always preferred that the mystical body of the monarchy reduce its illustrious numbers than consent to harmful humours that may contaminate good blood . . . for those with different customs and religion are not neighbours, but domestic enemies.... Despite all this, I am persuaded that if we had found a means of granting [the Moriscos] some honour, without marking them with infamy, before their desperation led them to such evil thoughts, they might have entered through honour’s door into the temple of virtue, and into the confederation and allegiance of the Catholic Church, wit
hout our bad opinion of them having incited them to evil.15
Other leading members of the court and government were also beginning to reassess the expulsion as the crisis of manpower in the countryside became more apparent. On September 28, 1622, little more than a year after his father’s death, Philip IV officially recognized the “great harm caused by the expulsion” in Valencia in the form of falling rents and depopulation. In 1633 Philip rejected a proposal from the Council of Castile to expel the Gypsies, on the grounds that this option had already been considered and rejected because of the “depopulation of these kingdoms after the Moriscos left.” So acute was the depopulation crisis perceived to be that Philip’s confessor even suggested inviting the Moriscos back into the country, and Olivares also made the same suggestion regarding the Jews. As late as 1690, the Moroccan ambassador in Madrid claimed to have overheard court officials criticizing the expulsion and Lerma’s role in it. These changing attitudes were reflected in the more sympathetic and even nostalgic cultural depictions of the Moriscos that emerged after the expulsion, from the second part of Don Quixote to Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s powerful play Amar despues de la Muerte (To Love After Death). Based on an episode from Ginés Pérez de Hita’s chronicle of the War of the Alpujarras, Calderón’s tragic tale of love and revenge describes how the Morisco nobleman el Tuzaní infiltrates the Christian camp after the sack of Galera to avenge the death of his lady Maleca at the hands of a Spanish soldier who has killed her to steal her necklace. Featuring real historical figures such as Aben Humeya and Don John of Austria, Calderón depicted the Morisco rebellion as a collective revolt against Christian oppression, and contrasted the nobility of his Morisco protagonists with the squalid looting of the Spanish soldiery.
