Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A genetic history study of Spain by Gonzalo Oteo-Garcia et al. in Genome Biology eloquently confirms the story of the great seventeenth-century ethnic cleansing of the remaining crypto-Muslims of Spain.
As Mar Jonsson writes in his 2007 “The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614: the destruction of an Islamic Periphery,” (Journal of Global History), “The Moriscos were nominally Christian after enforced conversions at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but they mainly clung to their Islamic ancestral faith, and they were expelled from Spain in 1609–14. This was a huge operation, as 300,000 Moriscos were expelled, most of them in the space of a few months.”
The Spanish population in 1600 is estimated by historians at around 8.2 million, so this ethnic cleansing removed some 3.6% of the population. That would be as though over 12 million people were kicked out of the United States today.
In comparison, the combined population of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is roughly 15.1 million so if the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really could succeed in ethnically cleansing 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza, that would be 14.5% of the people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. So what the current Israeli cabinet has in mind is 400% worse than what Spanish King Philip III and Pope Paul V carried out in the early seventeenth century.
Oteo-Garcia and his colleagues looked at the genetic make-up of Spain based on a small number of surviving remains in each of four eras: 3 persons, from late antiquity (200 CE to 700 CE), 5 from the medieval Muslim era of Andalus (Muslim-ruled southern Spain), 2 from the late medieval Christian period, and 2 from the Renaissance Christian era after 1600.
They found, interestingly enough, that in the centuries before the Muslim influx of the early 700s, there was already Arab and Berber immigration into Spain. The pagan woman they examined from the fourth century had a higher degree of North African heritage than is common in Spain today. So the coming of the Arab and Berber Muslims under Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711 was not a new phenomenon — populations had been circulating from North Africa up into Iberia for centuries. She also had East Asian ancestry, likely from bands of Sarmatians or Alans that made their way west. Nationalism likes to imagine “pure” bloodlines, but of course that is Nazi science, and in reality people got all mixed up.
From the 700s until 1492 there were Muslim states in southern Spain. Lots of local Spanish people converted to Islam and intermarried with immigrant Berbers and Arabs. So the genetic record reflects a higher North African heritage in these centuries as far north as Valencia.
This strong North African heritage is visible in the late medieval individuals from the 1400s and 1500s, even though the northern Catholics conquered the last remaining Muslim kingdom, of Granada, in 1492 and began expulsions and forced conversions. Both Muslims and Jews suffered, and many Jews fled to Istanbul, where a small community of Ladinos subsists to this day.
Yes, the Muslims saved a lot of the Spanish Jews persecuted by the Catholics. In fact, one of the charges made by the Catholics against Muslims was that they had tolerated Jews on Spanish soil.
But you can’t see the effects of the 1492 Reconquista or Christian conquest of al-Andalus in the genetic record.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims chose to remain under Catholic rule. Some were mudejars, observant Muslims under Christian rule. The Kingdom of Valencia had a substantial minority of persons of Muslim heritage in the 1500s, and made some of the first legal accommodations for Muslims living under Christian rule in modern history. Most Christian powers of that time simply disallowed Jews and Muslims from living on their soil.
But over time the Muslims were forced to at least pretend to convert to Christianity, becoming Moriscos. Crypto-Muslims were widespread. Muslims can pray the five daily prayers at home where no one can see them, and some other rituals, like fasting Ramadan, could probably be practiced surreptitiously.
Oteo-Garcia’s team found, “The two late medieval samples (GOG56 and GOG57) from the fourteenth–fifteenth century CE were recovered from a Christian cemetery belonging to the parish of San Lorenzo in the city of Valencia. However, these two individuals still group within the medieval “Berberized” PCA cluster (Fig. 2A) two centuries after the Christian conquest of the city. The levels of North African-related ancestry are still comparable to those observed in the Islamic period”
So the Arab and Berber heritage remained strongly represented in that era.
The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. Juan Cole, © 2017.
But then, beginning in 1609, Philip III had the Moriscos expelled en masse, some 300,000 of them. Most of them went to North Africa.
In the mid-1990s I attended a concert in Tunis where Andalusian music was performed — the tradition is still remembered and cultivated there, where Spanish Muslims ended up settling as refugees.
By the time Oteo-Garcia et al. come to the “post-medieval period,” they find an individual with almost no Berber or Arab haplotypes (gene sequences). It is just one person, so they can’t be sure the sample is representative. But among modern people in Valencia, there is a similar relative lack of Arab and Berber heritage.
So the genetic analysis may be bearing witness to the Great Ethnic Cleansing of people of Muslim heritage in the early 1600s.
Oteo-Garcia and his colleagues conclude, however, that the Arab and Berber heritage is much higher in Latin American than in contemporary Valencia, which shows that a lot of Moriscos must have exited to the New World (even though that was supposedly against the law at the time). They write, “One final point, highlighted by the survival of North African-related ancestry in substantial proportions until the seventeenth century, is the widespread presence of such ancestry in present-day South Americans ”
Karoline Cook points to the way Moriscos were perceived by Spaniards in the New World as having useful artisanal skills, such that they sought to bring them over. Some were brought as slaves and never sent back.
Ironically, the emigration from Ottoman lands and then the modern Middle East to Latin America meant that some countries there have substantial Muslim populations today. Argentina has between half a million and 900,000, and interacting with them made the late Pope Francis an ambassador of good Catholic-Muslim relations. Similar numbers live in Brazil. There are even larger numbers of Christian Arabs in those lands, of course.
So there you have it. The very preliminary spadework, based on just a few individuals, helps fill out the history of Christian-Muslim relations in Iberian and the Iberian colonies. The Arab and Berber migration to Iberia did not begin with the Muslims. And the North African heritage remained strong after the Reconquista. It was the Great Expulsion of the 1500s that changed everything, at least in Valencia. I’ll bet you a study of some more southern provinces would show more continuity even so. I saw one early study that found that 10% of the contemporary Spanish genetic heritage is Arab and Berber, across the board.
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