Matthew Carr (1)

Between 1609 and 1614, on royal orders, almost all of the formerly Muslim population of Spain, known as the moriscos, was expelled from the country. The deportation involved several hundred thousand people and, in that sense, dwarfed the much better-known edict to expel Spanish Jews, which was drawn up in 1492. The expulsion of the moriscos is referred to in general English-language surveys of early modern Spain and there is an extensive Spanish literature on the subject, but the full story has not been told in English for many years. The journalist Matthew Carr’s well-researched account of the official end of 900 years of Muslim presence in Spain is carefully written and thoroughly documented.

Carr gives a brief account of the initial Muslim conquest of most of Spain after 711, and events between the Christian conquest of the bulk of the Iberian peninsula, which had taken place by the 13th century, and the capture in 1492, by the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, Ferdinand and Isabella, of the last Muslim state in Spain, the emirate of Granada. Carr is rightly sceptical of modern imaginations about supposedly peaceful relations of co-existence (convivencia) between Muslims and their Christian and Jewish neighbours between 711 and the fall of the caliphate of Córdoba in 1031. He points to constant tensions, often leading to violence, between the three religious communities, whether they were under Muslim or Christian rule, though he focuses mainly on what happened to the Muslim population in Christian-ruled Spain after 1492.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

John Edwards is a historian of Spain at Oxford University. His books include Ferdinand and Isabella (Longman, 2005) and Mary I: the Daughter of Time (Allen Lane, 2016).… (mer)