“Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 is a work of maturity, distilling all the knowledge L. P. Harvey has absorbed (and also contributed to) over a period of nearly fifty years. A work of definitive scholarship like this one will not be bettered for at least another generation.” — Consuelo López Morillas, Indiana University.

On December 18, 1499, Muslims in Granada revolted against the Christian city government’s attempts to suppress their rights to live and worship as followers of Islam. Although the Granada riot was a local phenomenon that was soon contained, subsequent widespread rebellion provided the Christian city governments in Granada and throughout Spain with an excuse—or justification, as its leaders saw things—to embark on the systematic elimination of the Islamic presence from Spain, as well as from the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, over the next hundred years.

Picking up at the end of his earlier classic study, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500—which described the courageous efforts of the followers of Islam to preserve their secular, as well as sacred, culture in late medieval Spain—L. P. Harvey chronicles here the struggles of the Moriscos. These unwilling converts to Christianity lived clandestinely in the sixteenth century as Muslims, communicating in Aljamiado—Spanish written in Arabic characters. More broadly, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 tells the story of an early modern nation struggling to deal with a determined faction of non-Christians at a time when the forces of the Counter Reformation—themselves threatened by Ottoman political and military expansion— were endeavoring to impose absolute religious uniformity.

Retold in all its complexity and poignancy, this tale of religions intolerance, political maneuvering, and ethnic cleansing resonates with many modern concerns. Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 will be compulsory reading for student and specialist alike.
ISBN: 0226319636
Publisher: CHICAGO