Moriscos and the Early Modern Mediterranean | Mayte Green-Mercado

Ottoman History Podcast

E525 | In 1609, King Phillip III of Spain signed an edict to expel a community known as the Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula. The Moriscos were Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity during the 16th century, after Christian kingdoms displaced the last remaining Muslim rulers in Iberia. The persecution and erasure of the Moriscos following the Reconquista are well documented in the historiography, where alongside Iberian Jews, they appear as victims of the fall of Islamic al-Andalus. But in this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, we’ll explore what these events looked like through the eyes of the Moriscos themselves and study their roles as political actors in the momentous political shifts of the 16th century. In this conversation with Mayte Green-Mercado about her book Visions of Deliverance, we discuss the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts, known as jofores; and how these texts were catalysts for morisco political mobilization against the Spanish crown. We chart the formal and informal networks of communication between Moriscos, the Ottoman Empire, and the broader Mediterranean world. And we reflect on the challenges and benefits of using biased sources like the records of the Inquisition alongside other material. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/04/moriscos.html Mayte Green-Mercado is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University—Newark, and the director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies minor in the department of History. At Rutgers she teaches courses on Islamic civilization, medieval and early modern Mediterranean and Iberian history, as well as migration and displacement. She has published articles on early modern apocalypticism, the conversion of Iberian Muslims, as well as race and ethnicity in early modern Spain. Her first book, Visions of Deliverance. Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cornell, 2019) examined the political culture of Moriscos—Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism beginning in 1501—through their deployment of End Time prophecies. The book won the Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the Best First Book in Mediterranean Studies from The Mediterranean Seminar. Her current book project, tentatively titled Mediterranean Displacements. Morisco Migrations in the Sixteenth Century traces the history of migrations and displacement of Moriscos around the Mediterranean basin in the pre-expulsion priod, from their forced conversion to Catholicism until their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609. She is founder and co-director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project at Rutgers-Newark. Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories. CREDITS Episode No. 525 Release Date: 11 April 2022 Recording Location: Newark, NJ / Charlottesville, VA Sound production by Chris Gratien and Brittany White Music: Aitua; A.A. Aalto Bibliography and images courtesy of Mayte Green-Mercado available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/04/moriscos.html