Slavery and exile awaited the survivors of the rebellion. They were not
very many. The late wars, it was said, had carried off more than twenty
thousand Moors, and perhaps fifty thousand remained in the district on
that famous Day of All Saints, 1570, when the honour of the apostles and
martyrs of Christendom was celebrated by the virtual martyrdom of the
poor remnant of the Moors. Those taken in open revolt were enslaved, the
rest were marched away into banishment under escort of troops, while the
passes of the hills were securely guarded. Many hapless exiles died by
the way, from want, fatigue, and exposure; others reached Africa, where
they might beg a daily pittance, but could find no soil to till; or
France, where they received a cool welcome, though Henry IV. had found
them useful instruments for his intrigues in Spain. The deportation was
not finished till 1610, when half a million of Moriscos were exiled and
ruined. It is stated that no less than three million of Moors were
banished between the fall of Granada and the first decade of the 17th
century. The Arab chronicler mournfully records the _coup-de-grâce_;
"The Almighty was not pleased to grant them victory, so they were
overcome and slain on all sides, till at last they were driven forth
from the land of Andalusia, the which calamity came to pass in our own
days, in the year of the Flight, 1017. Verily to God belong lands and
dominions, and He giveth them to whom He doth will."
The misguided Spaniards knew not what they were doing. The exile of the
Moors delighted them; nothing more picturesque and romantic had occurred
for some time. Lope de Vega sang about the _sentencia justa_ by which
Philip III., _despreciando sus barbaros tesoros_, banished to Africa
_las ultimas reliquias de los Moros_; Velazquez painted it in a memorial
picture; even the mild and tolerant Cervantes forced himself to justify
it. They did not understand that they had killed their golden goose. For
centuries Spain had been the centre of civilization, the seat of arts
and sciences, of learning, and every form of refined enlightenment. No
other country in Europe had so far approached the cultivated dominion of
the Moors. The brief brilliancy of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of the
empire of Charles V., could found no such enduring preëminence. The
Moors were banished; for a while Christian Spain shone, like the moon,
with a borrowed light; then came the eclipse, and in that darkness Spain
has grovelled ever since. The true memorial of the Moors is seen in
desolate tracts of utter barrenness, where once the Moslem grew
luxuriant vines and olives and yellow ears of corn; in a stupid,
ignorant population where once wit and learning flourished; in the
general stagnation and degradation of a people which has hopelessly
fallen in the scale of the nations, and has deserved its humiliation.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
A.D.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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