Note 263 — Chapter XL

There is a great discrepancy in the accounts of the number of Moriscos expelled from Spain, 1609-11,—several making it a million, and one reducing it so low as a hundred and sixty thousand. But, whatever may have been the number expelled, all accounts agree as to the disastrous effects produced on a population already decaying by the loss of so many persons, who had long been the most skilful manufacturers and agriculturists in the kingdom; effects to which the many despoblados noted on our recent maps of Spain still bear melancholy testimony. (Clemencin, Notes to Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 54.) In stating six hundred thousand to have been the number driven out, I have taken the reckoning of Circourt, (Tom. III. p. 103,) which seems made with care.

These unhappy persons had among them a good deal of Castilian culture, whose traces still remain in manuscripts, which, like that of the old poem of Joseph, already described, (Period I. chap. 5,) are composed in Spanish, but are written throughout in the Arabic character. Of parts of two such manuscripts I possess copies, through the kindness of Don Pascual de Gayangos. The first is a poem written in 1603, and entitled, “Discourse on the Light, and Descent, and Lineage of our Chief and Blessed Prophet, Mohammed Çalam, composed and compiled by his Servant, who most needs his Pardon, Mohammed Rabadan, a Native of Rueda, on the River Xalon.” It is divided into eight Histories, of which I possess the fourth, entitled, “History of Hexim,” who was one of the ancestors of the Prophet. It contains above two thousand lines in the short, Castilian ballad measure, and is remarkably Arabic and Mohammedan in its general tone, though with occasional allusions to the Greek mythology. It is, too, not without poetical merit, as in the following lines, which open the second canto, and describe the auspicious morning of Hexim’s marriage.

In the preface to the whole poem, the author says Allah alone knows how much labor it has cost him to collect the manuscripts necessary for his task, “scattered,” he adds, “as they were, all over Spain, and lost and hidden through fear of the Inquisition.”

The other work to which I refer is chiefly in prose, and is anonymous. Its author says he was driven from Spain in 1610, and was landed at Tunis with above three thousand of his unhappy countrymen, who, through the long abode of their race in a Christian land and under the fierce persecutions of the Inquisition, had not only so lost a knowledge of the rites and ceremonies of their religion, that it was necessary to indoctrinate them like children, but had so lost all proper knowledge of the Arabic, that it was necessary to do it through the Castilian. The Bashaw of Tunis, therefore, sent for the author, and commanded him to write a book in Castilian, for the instruction of these singular neophytes. He did so, and produced the present work, which he called “Mumin,” or the Believer in Allah; a word which he uses to signify a city populous and fortified, which is attacked by the Vices and defended by the Virtues of the Mohammedan religion, and in which one of the personages relates a history of his own life, adventures, and sufferings; all so given as to instruct, sometimes by direct precept and sometimes by example, the newly arrived Moriscos in their duties and faith. It is, of course, partly allegorical and romantic. Its air is often Arabic, and so is its style occasionally; but some of its scenes are between lovers at grated windows, as if in a Castilian city, and it is interspersed with Castilian poems by Montemayor, Góngora, and the Argensolas, with, perhaps, some by the author himself, who seems to have been a man of cultivation and of a gentle spirit. Of this manuscript I have eighty pages,—about a fifth of the whole.

Further notices on the Morisco-Spanish literature may be found in an account by the Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, of two manuscripts in France, like those just described (Ochoa, Manuscritos Españoles, 1844, pp. 6-21); but a more ample and satisfactory discussion of it occurs in a learned article in the British and Foreign Review, January, 1839.

It should be remembered that Morisco was substituted for Moro, after the overthrow of the Moorish power in Spain, as an expression of the contempt with which the Christian Spaniards have never ceased to pursue their old conquerors and hated enemies, from the time of the fall of Granada to the present day.

Encouraged by the expulsion of the Jews, in 1492, and by that of the Moors, in 1609-11, Don Sancho de Moncada, a professor in the University of Toledo, addressed Philip III., in a discourse published in 1619, urging that monarch to drive out the Gypsies. But he failed. His discourse is in Hidalgo, “Romances de Germania,” (Madrid, 1779, 8vo,) and is translated by Borrow, in his remarkable work on the Gypsies (London, 1841, 8vo, Vol. I. chap. xi.). Salazar de Mendoza, at the end of his “Dignidades de Castilla,” published in 1618, says he had himself prepared a memorial to the same effect, for driving out the Gypsies; and he adds, in a true Castilian spirit, that “it is being over-nice to tolerate such a pernicious and perverse race.”