The Moriscos Are Expelled From Spain

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

Muslim life in Spain ends with the expulsion of the Moriscos, the Spanish Muslims baptized under compulsion after Granada's fall in 1492 and known afterward by that name. Despite the forced baptisms, Moriscos continued practicing Islam covertly for over a century, keeping the faith alive as a hidden rather than a public tradition across generations who had never known Muslim rule.

That hidden persistence ended between 1609 and 1614, when the Spanish crown carried out a systematic expulsion, forcing roughly 350,000 Moriscos into exile, most of them to North Africa. The expulsion proceeded region by region across those five years rather than in a single decree carried out at once, and it targeted a population whose ancestors had already been Christian in name for more than a century, removing them from Spain regardless.

What this changed for Islam's spread was decisive and final for Iberia itself: it ended Muslim presence in Spain as a living population, closing out a story that had run from the eighth century conquest through the long Reconquista and the forced conversions that followed 1492. Islam's history on the peninsula, from arrival through establishment, suppression and covert survival, comes to its end here, with a living community physically removed from the land rather than merely converted or suppressed in place.