Project

A Mediterranean Network: Spanish Moriscos in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond, 1570s-1620s

Program

ACLS Fellowship Program

Department

History and Religious Studies

Named Award

ACLS/NEH International and Area Studies Fellow named award

Abstract

In the early 1570s, Moriscos (Spanish Muslims Christianized by the Spanish Crown) began their exodus from Spain and dispersion across Europe, Asia, and North Africa, which was to stop only in the 1610s following their final expulsion. This project reconstructs the Mediterranean network that Moriscos established, with a particular emphasis on the community (about which little is known) that settled in the Ottoman Empire—the imperial arch-rival of the Spanish Habsburgs. Through a variety of previously unexplored Ottoman archival and narrative sources as well as European accounts, this project investigates Ottoman-Morisco relations in the context of cross-cultural contact, inter-imperial rivalry, and confessional polarization in the early modern Mediterranean.