7 - Those Who Stayed

Summary

During the last few years, which have marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spanish territory, it is understandable that almost all the attention has been drawn to the act of expulsion itself, leaving to one side other aspects of it. However, we ought not to forget that there were at least three groups of Moriscos affected by the expulsion, not just the group that was expelled. There were also those who were never expelled and who, for different reasons, remained in their towns and cities, as well as those who returned after being expelled, some of them several times. Although in terms of numbers there were fewer people in these two groups than in the group of those expelled, they nonetheless represented several thousand Moriscos who, one way or another, managed to stay in Spain. The fact that they existed obliges us to look more critically at the official number of Moriscos that were in Spain at the time of the expulsions. Do the expelled Moriscos, between 275,000 and 300,000 (a global number accepted by many), represent 100 per cent of the Spanish Moriscos living in Spain in 1609? And, if not, how many were there? If they amounted to half a million, a figure suggested by many, then 40 per cent of them managed to avoid the expulsion, and this is not a small number.