10 - The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon

Summary

Eran torpes en sus razones, bestiales en su discurso, barbaros en su lenguaje, ridiculos en su traje,… brutos en sus comidas.

Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expulsión justificada de los moriscos (1612) (cited by Caro Baroja, Razas, pueblos y linajes, p. 87n).

Que es harta falta no entenderlo [Arabic] vosotros, y ansi os escribimos de mi letra en algamia.

Valencian Morisco to Aragon (quoted by García Cárcel, Herejía y sociedad, p. 239).

God wished to withdraw us from among those raving dogs, those enemies of truth, who in the blindness of their false sect nail their God to a piece of wood, calling it son, father, and mother, and making a thousand other lies. With their cruel Inquisition, they held us subjected and annihilated through the force of their punishments … A thousand praises to Allah, who has delivered us from among them.

Tunisian refugee, late seventeenth century (quoted in Epalza and Petit, Moriscos andalous en Tunisie, p. 131).

The Morisco minority in the Kingdom of Aragon was the smallest among the three viable centers of Islamic culture in sixteenth-century Spain. At most they comprised only one fifth of the sparse population of the Kingdom of Aragon, compared with almost one third in the Kingdom of Valencia and over half in the Kingdom of Granada until 1570.