Moriskolar (Zorla Hristiyanlaştırılan Müslümanlar)’ın Sürgünün Dönemin İspanyol Kamuoyundaki Yankıları (1609-1614)
The Echoes of the Expulsion of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity) in the Contemporary Spanish Public Opinion (1609-1614)

Summary/Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the expulsion of the Moriscos en bloc in Spain in 1609, who had been forcibly converted after the fall of Granada in 1492, on Spanish public opinion. For this purpose, the emergence and development of the idea of expulsion of the Moriscos in the Spanish public opinion, the debates, the political and economic context in which the decision was taken, and the efforts made to justify this decision based on the Spanish sources. The analyses carried out reveal that Spanish public opinion, especially from the 1580s onwards, from governors to counsellors and from court members to clergy, lobbied hard for the expulsion of the Moriscos producing masses of memoranda, reviews and letters. There were also some extremely brutal ideas and proposals, such as sinking their ships during their exile, killing them en bloc, or sending them to work in mining the quarries. Although there were rare cases where expulsion was opposed on humanitarian grounds, those who opposed it were usually aristocrats with economic concerns. There were those who opposed expulsion by insisting that the policy of assimilation should continue. The decision to expel Moriscos en bloc was announced on 9 April 1609, due to public pressure caused by the truce that had to be signed with the Dutch rebels. After the decision, a series of accusations were made in public, especially by Miguel de Cervantes, and an attempt was made to defend the justification for the decision.

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