An Urban Minority: The Moriscos of Seville

Abstract

Spain in the sixteenth century was far from presenting the racial and spiritual homogeneity that the Spanish monarchs from Ferdinand and Isabella had sought to attain. That uniformity was the common aspiration of Spanish society during this period cannot be denied, but this was an ideal that bore little relation to reality. Regardless of the efforts put forth by the forces of racial and religious purity, there existed in Spain throughout the sixteenth century both social dissidents and unassimilated classes whose survival was considered an affront to the Spanish government, church and people. The largest of these non-conformist groups was the Moriscos (converted Moslems), who were scattered about the country in their own communities, each with its distinctive features and problems. In Valencia and Aragon, for example, the Moriscos were a rural people gaining their subsistence from the land; in Castile, on the other hand, they were concentrated in the towns, where they lived a ghetto-like existence on the fringes of society. Large numbers of these urban Moriscos lived in Andalusia and especially in Seville, a town that became as a result of its monopoly of the Indies trade, the most famous and important city in Spain at that time. The size and cosmopolitan atmosphere of this ‘new Babylonia’, as it was called by the literary figures of the period, naturally attracted all kinds of dissident elements; it was, in the words of Cervantes, ‘the asylum of the poor and the refuge of the outcast’.