The Reconquista and the Inquisition: The Ethnic Cleansing of Muslim Iberia

The End of Al-Andalus

At its height, Islamic Andalusia was the most culturally advanced society in Europe. Its libraries, universities, hospitals, and multi-faith intellectual culture produced figures including Ibn Rushd, Ibn Tufail, al-Zahrawi, and al-Idrisi. Its Jewish community experienced what historians call a golden age of intellectual flourishing under Islamic protection.

The reconquista (the Christian military campaign to retake the Iberian Peninsula) was completed with the fall of Granada in 1492. What followed was not merely a change of governance. It was a systematic attempt to eliminate Islamic civilisation from the peninsula entirely.

Forced conversion: Muslims were given a choice: convert to Christianity or leave. Those who converted became known as Moriscos. Those who left lost everything, their property, their communities, their accumulated wealth. Estimates suggest that between 300,000 and 500,000 Muslims left Iberia in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Granada.

The Inquisition: The Spanish Inquisition targeted Moriscos specifically, investigating whether their conversions were genuine, torturing those suspected of secretly maintaining Islamic practice, and burning those found guilty of apostasy from their forced Christianity. The mechanisms of the Inquisition (anonymous accusation, torture, public execution) were deployed against people whose only crime was having been Muslim.

The Expulsion of the Moriscos (1609): Even conversion was not enough. Between 1609 and 1614, the Spanish Crown expelled the remaining Morisco population (approximately 300,000 people whose families had been Christian for generations) on the grounds that they could not be trusted. They were loaded onto ships and deposited on the North African coast, many dying during the crossing or in the aftermath.

The ethnic cleansing of Muslim Iberia was total. A civilisation that had existed for 800 years was eliminated.

What Was Lost

The physical destruction was immense. Libraries were burned. Mosques were converted into churches. Arabic manuscripts (centuries of accumulated Islamic scholarship) were destroyed in bonfires ordered by Cardinal Cisneros in Granada in 1499.

What was lost is incalculable. We know what survived. We do not know what did not.

The Historical Memory

The reconquista is celebrated in Spanish national history as a triumph. The Inquisition is acknowledged as an excess but treated as a historical aberration. The Moriscos are rarely discussed.

The Muslim victims of this process: forcibly converted, tortured for maintaining their faith, expelled after generations of Christian identity, killed during the crossing, have no memorial, no official acknowledgement, and no place in the European human rights narrative.