Moriscos

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Granada's Muslims first faced forced conversion in 1499, when Cardinal Cisneros's campaign provoked a revolt that ended in 1501 with a stark choice: baptism or expulsion. Most converted. Castile made the same demand of its remaining Muslims by royal edict in 1502, and the Crown of Aragon followed in 1526 under Charles V, creating a population of new Christians, Moriscos, whose outward faith the state accepted and whose inward faith it never fully trusted.

Many Moriscos kept Islamic practice alive in secret: circumcision, ritual slaughter, fasting through Ramadan and prayer, recorded across generations of Inquisition trial records. In 1504 the mufti of Oran issued a fatwa permitting exactly this, outward conformity to Christianity paired with inward preservation of Islam, and Aljamiado literature, Spanish and Aragonese written in Arabic script, carried Qur'anic material and devotional texts under a script the authorities could not easily read. Philip II's 1567 edict banning Arabic, Moorish dress and Arabic manuscripts triggered a second Granada rising, the 1568 to 1571 Rebellion of the Alpujarras, after which most of Granada's Moriscos were dispersed across Castile. Philip III's 1609 edict of expulsion, carried out through 1614, removed the great majority of Spain's remaining Moriscos, most of them resettling in North Africa.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Whether most Moriscos were still meaningfully Muslim by 1609, or had become Christian in fact if not in the state's estimation, is a real disagreement among historians rather than a settled question this atlas can flatten into one answer. L.P. Harvey's standard history reads the record of Inquisition trials, confiscated Aljamiado manuscripts and the Oran fatwa's wide circulation as evidence that clandestine Islamic practice remained genuinely alive across most Morisco communities down to the expulsion, sustained by religious authorities in North Africa and the Ottoman lands who kept advising Moriscos on how to dissimulate.

Other historians, working from regional records in areas such as Castile's La Mancha, have argued that generations of intermarriage, Christian education and simple time had produced communities substantially indistinguishable in practice from their Old Christian neighbors well before 1609, making the expulsion in those places a persecution of people for an ancestry rather than for a living faith. The two readings are not fully reconcilable, and this atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it: how thoroughly assimilation had proceeded appears to have varied considerably by region, and the sweeping 1609 edict drew no such distinction.