same, except that death was commuted to service for life in the galleys. If found elsewhere away from their domiciles men were punished with a hundred lashes and four years of galleys, women with four years of servitude. As soon

as any one was absent from his home for a day, his family, or the inmates of his house, were required under penalties to report him, when he was to be tracked by the Santa Hermandad; any one harboring him was to be punished, any one finding such a fugitive was to take him to the nearest magistrate and receive a reward of eight ducats. Where there were numbers of them they were not to live in a Moreria apart but in houses scattered among Old Christians; the children, as far as possible, were to be brought up in Christian families, and the magistrates were to see that they were taught to read and write and the elements of Christian faith. Arms were rigorously prohibited, save a pointless knife, under penalty, for a first offence, of confiscation, for a second, of six years of galleys, for a third, of galleys for life. The pragmatics of 1566 was declared to be fully in force, and the provisions respecting the use of Arabic were especially severe; any one speaking or writing it, even in his own house, incurred for a first offence thirty days' prison in chains, for a second, double, for a third, men a hundred lashes and four years of galleys, women and youths under seventeen, four years of servitude.'

If anything could obviate the dangers always apprehended from the Moriscos, such a system would effect it, but it was not calculated to merge them with the population or diminish their abhorrence of Christianity. The

Nueva Recop. Lib. VIII. Tit. ii. ley 22.

impossible rigor of the clauses respecting Arabic, applied to those ignorant of any other tongue, shocked even the town-council of Cordova, which, as we have seen, was not favorably disposed to the exiles. November 28th it appointed a committee to represent to the alcalde mayor that God alone was able to render them capable of speaking a language which they did not know, especially as they were harassed by the alguaziles constantly arresting and punishing them, wherefore they asked him to suspend action till the king could be consulted and schools be organized, at the expense of the Moriscos, to instruct them, to all of which the alcalde replied that he had no choice but to obey the royal pragmatica and inflict the punishment on all brought before him.'

Spanish legislation was apt to defeat itself by its exuberance and violence and its execution to be thwarted by the neglect or cupidity of the officials. In 1576 and 1583 it was felt necessary to repeat the prohibition of absence from domicile without a licence, and, in 1581, to reiterate the provisions as to keeping lists of Moriscos. Even the ferocious penalties for returning to Granada were powerless to prevent them from attempting it successfully, especially as no judge or alcalde was found willing to sentence them to death. The law thus was a

dead letter and it was resolved to commute the punishment to the galleys. Philip proposed, in 1582, to have them all seized simultaneously; the Council of Poblaciones represented that there were not officials enough to accomplish this, to which the king replied that he wanted men for his galleys and that it must be done without

1 Janer, p. 256.

delay; he gave minute instructions how it was to be accomplished by surprise in a single day; all the men between 17 and 55, fit for the oar, were to be sent to the galleys, the rest and the women and children to be taken to the places allotted to them; there was to be no hearing allowed and no trials. He was more lenient, in 1585, on learning that three thousand of the exiles had succeeded in getting into Valencia, for he ordered the Viceroy Aytona to hang six of them as a warning and then issue a proclamation that the rest would be treated in the same way if within two months they did not return to their allotted places of residence. Many of those deported claimed that they were not subject to the conditions of the law of 1572, asserting themselves to be Old Christians because their ancestors had been baptized prior to the general coerced conversion; they sometimes made good these claims before the courts, but, in 1585, Philip ordered all these matters referred to the Consejo de Poblaciones and directed that, notwithstanding favorable sentence obtained in the courts, they should be subject to the prescriptions of the law as to residence and deprivation of arms. To the same council were referred the petitions of those who asked for grants of Morisco slaves or that wandering Moriscos might be assigned to them as slaves, from which it would appear that many of them were reduced to servitude. The Inquisition

1 Janer, pp. 246, 252, 273.-Danvila, pp. 200, 202, 204.-Mr. Martin A. S. Hume (Spain, its Greatness and Decay, p. 154) computes at thirteen thousand the Moriscos who were sent to the galleys or the mines or were hanged as the result of the rebellion.

2 Danvila, pp. 205, 206.

Nueva Recop. Lib. VIII. Tit. ii. ley 23.-Distribucion de los Memoriales (Morel-Fatio, pp. 213, 214).

also found in the exiles, both free and enslaved, a field for active operations. A considerable portion of the Morisco trials for years, in the tribunals of Castile, were of those brought from Granada, and it was decided that they were liable to prosecution for Moorish rites which they had performed during the rebellion. A somewhat unusual case was that of Diego de Ortega, a youth of twenty, who, in 1581, denounced himself to the Inquisition of Toledo. He said that, as a boy in the sierra, he had practised Moorish ceremonies and that for some years after coming to Toledo he had entertained doubts as to the truth of Christianity. There was no other testimony, and he was sentenced merely to reconciliation privately in the audience chamber, to which the Suprema mercifully added "without confiscation." Yet in spite of these limitations and disadvantages the indomitable industry and thrift of the strangers, thus violently scattered among a hostile population, soon created for them a prosperous career which excited the jealousy of their neighbors. Only ten years after the exile an official report says that their numbers are increasing because none go to war or into religion and they are so industrious that, after coming to Castile ten years ago without owning a handsbreadth of land, they are all well-off and many are rich, so that if it continues in the same proportion in twenty years the natives will be their servants. It was evident that trampling on them was of no avail and Spain could never be satisfied short of extermination or expulsion.

2

1 MSS. of Library of University of Halle, Yc. 20, Tom. I.-Archivo de Simancas, Inquisicion, Libro 939, fol. 108.

2 Janer, p. 272.

CHAPTER IX.

DANGERS FROM ABROAD.

It is not to be supposed that the Moriscos, thus subjected to hopeless oppression, failed to seek relief from their powerful co-religionists in foreign lands. For more than five centuries the cross and the crescent had waged internecine war throughout the length and breadth of the Mediterranean basin and Turk and Algerine might be expected to sympathize with the miseries of their brethren and be eager to use them as a means of disabling the power which, in the sixteenth century, was foremost among the enemies of Islam. It was a real peril, ever present to the minds of Spanish statesmen, and the means adopted to avert it, by increasing the disabilities piled upon the Moriscos, only augmented it by stimulating disaffection, rendering more earnest the appeals for assistance and strengthening the temptation of the enemy to strike at so vital and unguarded a spot. The Mudéjares had been loyal subjects, but fanaticism, by insisting on their Christianization, had converted them into the most dangerous of internal enemies. Even as early as 1512 Peter Martyr, in describing the disturbed condition of Granada, says that if some daring pirate leader would march into the interior the population would join him and, as the king is occupied with the conquest of Navarre, all would go to ruin.1 While the

1 Pet. Mart. Angler. Epist. 499.