Muslims and Jewish Converts in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Between 1609 and 1614, some 300,000 individuals of Muslim descent were ordered to leave the Iberian Peninsula.¹ Historians who have studied these measures remarked that they were issued against persons who were at least nominally Christian. They explained that, from as early as 1500, Muslims living on Spanish soil were encouraged or even forced to convert, first by mass conversions and then by decrees that in 1502 and 1526 gave them the choice between conversion and exile. Consequently, in the early seventeenth century, when these individuals were ordered into exile, all of them were, by definition, Christians. The question of