• 1 This research has been supported by the project Privilegio, trabajo y conflictividad. La sociedad (...)

11492 is traditionally considered as the beginning of the Early Modern Era because of the Discovery of the American continent. As for Spain, the kingdom from where the three caravels left, this year also marked the end of the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, led by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinando and Isabella, and the expulsion of the Jewish people. America, Reconquista and expulsion caused an unprecedented migration flow. Specifically, the last two were at the origin of the outpouring of waves of Muslim and Jewish Spanish refugees in the Mediterranean area.1

• 2 On the unsolvable numerical controversy, see the still valid Julio Caro Baroja, Los Judíos en la E (...)

2The Jews did not stand a chance. The ones who did not want to leave Sefarad – as they themselves used to call the Iberian Peninsula – had to convert to Christianity. Reliable research quantifies the departure of (at least) 50 thousand Jews from the territories under the Trastamara crown, but other scholars estimate up to 400 thousand.2 Muslims – known as Mudéjares – were instead given a longer margin of time before being forced into baptism.

• 3 Cf. Isabelle Poutrin, Convertir les musulmans, Espagne, 1491-1609, Paris, Puf, 2012; Rafael Beníte (...)
• 4 On the revolt, see Antonio Domínguez Ortíz, Bernard Vincent, Historia de los moriscos. Vida y trag (...)
• 5 In sunnitism, to which the Moriscos are credited, known as niyya. Cf. Luis F. Bernabé Pons, “Taqiy (...)

4The reality was quite different and, in spite of continuous attempts of evangelization and repression, thousands of Moriscos kept practicing Islam, especially in the areas of Granada and Valencia. In order to uproot the secta mahometana (Mohammedan sect), Spanish authorities opted for a hard-line stance. This meant a fierce cultural attack towards everything that, lato sensu, connected the Moriscos with their past: language, customs, traditions, food, conventions. Unsurmountable doubts were built up on the Moriscos: courtiers, counsellors, theologians and observers held inexhaustible debates about them.3 After their insurrection during the Alpujarras war (1568-1571), they were subsequently defeated and deported from the Granada mountains and sent towards different Spanish regions:4 their detractors questioned their faith in Christ and their loyalty towards the Crown on the strength of a strategy of dissimulation used to hide their apostasy,5 forewarning their betrayal.

• 6 Henry Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque, Paris, SEVPEN, 1959; Manuel Lomas Cortés, El proc (...)

5The choice in favor of expulsión general or destierro was executed from 1609 by staggered measures until 1614.6 At that time, it was the largest and fastest deportation organized by a sovereign state in history. More than 300 thousand people were gathered and escorted by the military to the Mediterranean ports of the Iberian Peninsula. They were then shipped to Northern Africa on galleys provided by the Monarquía. Those who could pay for their own crossing hired private ships to move to other Maghreb ports, to France, to the ancient Italian States or to the Ottoman Empire (above all, to Istanbul).

• 7 Míkel de Epalza, Los moriscos antes y después de la expulsión, Madrid, Mapfre, 1992.

6The Moriscos’ history in Spain lasted around a century. From 1609, a new era, which can be known as the history of the Moriscos’ diaspora in the Euro-Mediterranean area, started. After the expulsion, around six thousand refugees arrived on the Italian shores. From this moment, a silent episode of social history that repositioned Italy on a global dimension happened. It was underestimated, and historiography usually mentions it only en passant because the Morisco presence in the Peninsula was considered a transient situation.7

• 8 Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati. I moriscos e l’Italia, Firenze, Firenze University Press, 2017. I have to (...)

7In a recent publication, I retraced this event through the documentation produced by diplomats, ecclesiasts, counsellors, sovereigns, magistrates, which allowed to approach the voices of the protagonists.8 Therefore, Morisco history in Italy becomes the history of more actors (the refugees, on one side, and the Italian populations, on the other side) who scrutinize and confront each other for the first time. It was a relationship between strangers that slowly began to form even before they actually met. Even though the refugees often had to decide urgently and were subordinated to the pronouncement of the sovereign state that should have hosted them, the Moriscos always inquired about the chosen destination according to the recommendations heard before their departure, during travel, or thanks to the correspondence held with those who had left before them.

• 9 Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op.cit., p. 50-59.

8As for Italy, agents, consuls and ambassadors, coming from different princedoms and residing in Madrid, described the deportation recounting vices, virtues and sufferings of the expelled population. Receiving their messages, the princes would have selected and elaborated all the news according to the Moriscos’ needs, concerns and sensitivities: the exiles were looking for safe places to arrive at and surveyed all possibilities, all the cross-border openings, the allowed passages; on the other side, sovereigns had to weigh the advantages of their reputation for being hard workers against the danger of themselves being viewed as bad Christians. Together with the very few literary productions on their count, letters and relationships were decisive in the arbitrary process of the building of this minority that, until then, in Italy was not juridically identified and culturally contextualized: Moriscos’ identity profiles were crafted by those princes who preferred to take into consideration only the positive aspects of their public image in order to achieve their settlement projects.9

• 10 Ibid., p. 277-279.

9The welcoming or cross-bordering closure policies of each sovereign state can be understood by reading this documentation, but they can also be explained by identifying the equilibrium held by each princedom between loyalty and hostility towards the Spanish Crown or the French one. There were those who denied access to the refugees, such as the Republic of Genoa, a Spanish ally in a subordinate position; or those who allowed it, such as the Duchy of Mantua and the Republic of Venice which were pro-France; or also those who were two-faced, like the Grand-Duchy of Tuscany with the Medici family related to both the Spanish and the French monarchies, officially declaring a policy of refusal towards refugees but, at the same time, acting as a welcoming state.10

• 11 Ibid.

10Moriscos entered Italy by crossing the Alps or docking on the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic ports on board galleys. Their presence opened a series of geopolitical, social and religious questions. Scattered all over the Italian territories, their land allocations did not actually cause much problem. Besides some isolated cases, the locals ignored or overlooked the hearsay and rumour on the suspect Crypto-Muslim religion of the refugees, so that their integration in the urban and rural Italian framework did not determine any shared psychosis. Over roughly a generation, in spite of all the prohibitions and difficulties imposed upon them by some Italian states, challenging the bad reputation that preceded them, Moriscos dissolved silently into the native population. This way, they lost the ethnic markers that would have allowed legal and administrative identification to be transmitted a social stigma.11

• 12 Bruno Pomara, “Storie di moriscos nella Roma del Seicento”, Rivista Storica Italiana, CXXVII, 2015 (...)
• 13 Manuel Lomas Cortés, “Roma, i moriscos e la loro espulsione”, Quaderni Storici, 144, 2013, p. 707.
• 14 “¿’Cristianos malos’? Los moriscos valencianos y su presencia en Italia”, in Borja Franco Llopis, (...)

11Each sovereign state approached differently the Morisco issue, maybe because it reacted to the migration phenomena in an autonomous way or perhaps because the refugees arriving in Italy had different geographical and socio-economic backgrounds: a wealthy, christianized, Spanish speaking, Castilian merchant was not comparable to a poor Valencian peasant who usually spoke only Arabic and presumably was still faithful to Islam. Hence, we can easily understand why Castilian Moriscos had the opportunity to decide freely to set up in Rome, the capital city of Christianity,12 overcoming the initial refusal of the Pope who even authorized shooting cannons against Moriscos’ docked flotilla in the Papal port.13 In contrast to all that, some Valencian Moriscos ended their lives in Sicily or in Sardinia, both under Spanish dominion in which the expulsion decrees were still effective.14 They were people who had resisted banishment and endured in the mountains around Valencia and Alicante: a government ultimatum forced them unconditionally to surrender, otherwise they would have been killed or sold as slaves. This is the reason why troops from the Spanish kingdoms of Italy could bring back this human loot, increased by women and children who would have been exploited by the same soldiers in moments of military anarchy.

• 16 Susanne Lachenicht, “Refugees and refugee protection in the Early Modern Period”, Journal of Refug (...)

14Taking into account how broad this definition is, and despite the resistance of some scholars, I believe that the use of this term can quite rightly be extended to describe the condition of those who, in centuries past, experienced similar situations. Furthermore, if the word “refugee” would be considered anachronistic, we should stop using and abusing some new categories with much less legitimacy. On a strictly semantic note, in fact, when we talk about refugees (from the Latin verb refugere), we are referring to those who are escaping from one place and are seeking shelter in another. Moreover, in the 17^th century, the English used the word refugees to identify the Huguenots, while in France the term “réfugiés” was used from the 15^th century.16

• 17 As early as the 70’s a pioneer Richard Marienstras claimed the necessity to eradicate a victimisin (...)
• 18 Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
• 19 Cit. in Abdeljelil Temimi, “Le passage des morisques à Marseille, Livourne et Istanbul d’après de (...)
• 20 Vatican Secret Archive [VSA], Segreteria di Stato, Firenze, vol. 15A, 324v. Florence, 14^th Februar (...)
• 21 Privilegi che SAS concede a diverse nazioni abitanti in Livorno del dì 10 giugno 1593, article 1. (...)
• 22 VSA, Segreteria di Stato, Avvisi, vol. 7, 129r. Rome, 15^th May 1613.

15As historians, we cannot approach refugees only as victims with whom to be commiserated, even though, as human beings, we could empathize with the sufferings of those who personally endured these third-party decisions.17 They must be studied, instead, as historical subjects with an active leading role in their destiny.18 First of all, there was a margin of negotiation between the refugees and the sovereign states who were inclined, when not actually very interested, in welcoming the escaping people. The Grand Duke of Tuscany wanted them to settle in his territories and some of them accepted only to go to Livorno if they would be “willingly accepted”,19 while “low profile families” agreed to “work in the fields”.20 After all, the Livornine, a set of laws promulgated between 1591 and 1593 to attract foreign settlement in the city of Livorno in order to strengthen its free port and the maritime commerce of the Grand-Duchy, restated that the life and business of the newcomers would be defended and never hindered or “molested”.21 Following the Tuscan example, the Duke of Savoy wanted to boost the maritime commerce of his princedom, decreeing the opening of the free port of Villefranche-sur-Mer (1612-13). For this reason, he looked for around a thousand Moriscos; according to some news circulating in the pontifical environment, around seven hundred others may have been recruited by the same prince during the Monferrato war (1612-1617).22

• 23 Susanne Lachenicht, “Refugees and refugee protection”, art. cit., p. 265-279.

16Arguing about those who were seeking asylum’s experiences, we can also scrutinize the attitudes of those who welcomed them. Susanne Lachenicht highlighted five reasons behind the protection of the refugees in the Early Modern era: Christian charity, economic interest, internal and external colonization, military interests, confessionalization.23 Analysing the Italian Morisco experience, in fact, all these causes resurface and they inextricably juxtapose and intersect with other factors.

• 24 Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, Roma, leg. 996, unnumbered. Rome, 8^th May 1611.
• 25 Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Provintia Romana, Epistulae Generalium, vol. 16 I, 48v-49r. Roma (...)
• 26 Quoted in Giuseppe Piras, La Congregazione e il Collegio di Propaganda fide di J. B. Vives, G. Leo (...)

17Even though the authorities of the Pontifical States, according to Pope Paul V’s will, forbade Moriscos to dock in their ports and decided to monitor their shores carefully, they were unable to stop clandestine arrivals demonstrating how difficult it is to contain migration. In Antonio Zapata’s opinion, a well-known Madrilenian cardinal, Morisco people persisted in doing that because they were convinced that, after all, “they will not be sent away because the Holy Mother Church does not make any distinction among its children”.24 For this same reason, the Jesuit Martin de Funes gathered around fifty Moriscos ready to board at the Provençal port of La Ciotat and guided them towards the Eternal city.25 Funes was stopped by his superiors in Colle Val d’Elsa, in Tuscany, but the refugees decided to keep walking:26 Rome was no longer so far away.

• 27 Archivio Congregazione della Dottrina della Fede [ACDF], Decreta 1612, c. 249. Roma, 7^th June 1612
• 28 Ibid.
• 29 ACDF, Decreta 1612, c. 178. Roma, 26^th Abril 1612.
• 30 Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op. cit., p. 76-77.

18As for the rest of Italy, where the Pope was just a spiritual guide, the Holy See abstained from criticizing decisions to open the frontiers. For those who docked in their territories, a two-month period was given to leave towards the princedoms in the northern Italy.27 Despite bans and restrictions, the fact is that disembarkations also took place in the Papal States and, in order to assist the castaways, their governors set up makeshift camps, collected alms “in food aid mode” (“in subventionem victus”), administered the sacraments to all those identified,28 registered refugees before scattering them in “cities and lands”.29 Their movements were subject to the visits of local health care officials: after their approval, the refugees received a sort of passport (the fedi di Sanità) that allowed them to move from one state to another with a certain freedom.30

• 31 Archivio di Stato di Firenze [ASFi], Mediceo del Principato, Genova, fz. 2850, unnumbered. Genova, (...)

19Some very enterprising princes of the centre-north of Italy convinced themselves to recruit refugees with the aim of starting projects for peopling and colonizing swampy areas with a low demographic density, or that were hard to farm within their own territories. Since the Moriscos had a reputation as excellent farmers and experts in some refined irrigation techniques, Italian princes made no secret of betting on them: they were hoping – as told by Jacopo Malaspina, Marquis of Fosdinovo, a little enclave found between the Republic of Genoa and the Grand-Duchy of Tuscany – that they “could be more useful than his own vassals”.31

• 32 A dramatic testimony of that natural disaster was given by the secretary of the Duke of Mantua to (...)
• 33 Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op. cit., passim.

20These profiles were ideal after the emergency into which centre-north Italy fell due to the winter flood of 1609, which killed many people especially in the Mantua countryside.32 A real “refugee rush” started among princes who glimpsed a beneficial outcome for their States. For this reason, they wanted to be kept informed of the conditions of refugees who were seeking shelter. In those weeks, the Moriscos were even flattered by consular agents sent to the Italian and French ports for this specific purpose, and they were also escorted to the chosen destination.33

• 34 Archivio di Stato di Mantova [ASMn], Archivio Gonzaga [AG], Lettere originali dei Gonzaga, b. 2165 (...)
• 35 The Mantuan case has been retraced in Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op. cit., p. 81-92.
• 36 ASMn, AG, Minute della Cancelleria, b. 2273, unnumbered. Mantua, 18^th June 1610. The Duke to Friar (...)

21In order to attract the refugees and gain their trust, princes had to offer convenient conditions for relocation and settlement. For instance, the Duke of Mantua arranged for “a favourable price for food”,34 he made it so that the local communities would host them until they got to the final destination (the city gates), where he set up a first reception hospital.35. He also assured that he would treat the refugees “the same way I do my old subjects”.36

• 37 Istruzione per la venuta de’ Mori: ASFi, MP, fz. 3503, unnumbered. See its analysis in Cesare Sant (...)

22In Tuscany, the Grand Duke Cosimo II devised a project to repopulate the Maremma area and make it fertile again. This ambitious plan had already been attempted in the past and now it aimed at transferring around three thousand Moriscos to the rural area near Siena and Grosseto. In this precise circumstance, the Grand Duke promulgated the Instruction for the coming of the Moors.37 They indicated the specific sections of the coasts and suitable ports for docking; very skilled sailors were made available to help with the docking in makeshift coves; interpreters, guides and soldiers were hired with the “strict order of protecting them [the Moriscos] from each and every insult”. The need to protect the migrants was highlighted in the hope that “more people could come faster to Grosseto”; the guards must keep the judges of the Holy Office away, as the refugees were granted a certain immunity from inquisitorial investigations. The clergy was to take charge of collecting alms and their spiritual care, as well as finding some neighbours who supported and helped them until they “would be settled down to start working and be able to buy their daily bread”. Civil authorities were to give all equipment so that they could immediately start with agricultural work and artisan activities. The housing issue was to be solved by opening up uninhabited houses, thanks to a “leading” person in each place, even though some lawful owner might be opposed to that.

• 38 Guillaume Calafat, Sonia Goldblum, « Diaspora(s) : liens, historicité, échelles », Tracés. Revue d (...)

24These networks were not only circumscribed within the Morisco world; on the contrary, they gave rise to new links with other minority (or majority) groups and opened up unprecedented religious, political and, above all, commercial, vicinal and friendly horizons. According to an updated historiographical interpretation, groups in the diaspora could extend, renounce, cancel or even forget their internal ties and, subsequently, reactivate them (or not); however, the reasons underlying the tensions between the remote connections established, and possible breakages must also be investigated.38

• 39 For an overview and a reflection on the sources for the study of the Moriscos diaspora in Italy, s (...)

25The Moriscos’ diasporic networks can be studied through different sources: the documents of the French consuls in Tunis describe the credit system and the commercial alliances developed by this city, especially going back and forth from Leghorn and Marseille; the registries of the Roman parishes tell us how newcomer families were stabilized with the help of godparents and best men chosen according to endogamic and exogamic criteria; the chancellor’s reports drawn up by those who intercepted the correspondence among the Moriscos scattered in Spain, France, Sicily and North Africa reveal the international plots, insinuating surprising conspiracies and behind-the-scenes activities; inquisitorial and criminal interrogatories bring out connections and factional enmities among different subjects, otherwise difficult to identify.39

• 40 So that we can talk about diaspora, William Safran (“Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homel (...)
• 41 Nathan Wachtel, La foi du souvenir. Labyrinthes marranes, Paris, Le Seuil, 2001.
• 42 Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, “Les diasporas, dispersion spatiale, expérience sociale”, Autrepart, 2002 (...)

26I should recall the origin of the word diaspora: from the ancient Greek dia and sperein, that means “through the dispersion”. The recognized features of the diaspora are two: (1) the eradication from the original homeland, caused by a forced ejection; (2) the physical dispersal of the ethnic minority to remote places.40 So, through the dispersion (or, in spite of the dispersion), often the group’s members preserve something alive among them, for example the nostalgia and melancholy towards their abandoned homeland. Distance and loss of contact notwithstanding, frequently (but not always) the group’s members feel interdependent and maintain mutual trust in commercial trade relations. The exclusive exchange of data allowed a kind of socio-cultural integrity of the group,41 although – it is worth pointing out – the diaspora is a dizzying perpetual movement42 of situations and experiences that forges people with characteristics in perennial definition.

• 43 Roger Brubaker, “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28, 2006, n° 1, p. 1-19.

30There can be no doubt that the Moriscos can be considered a diaspora: it was a widespread, transnational dispersion within the entire Mediterranean basin that included all the above listed features. Postulated this way, the notion of diaspora overcomes its socio-anthropological crisis because it is not limited to sheer substantialistic terms and it is not circumscribed to a defined group contest.43 If anything, it contributes itself to criticize the concept of “purity”: not only the Nation-state one, but even the notion of identity that is an entity, which is always the same and seems stamped inside any individual or society. Ultimately, both concepts are laid bare by a penetrating (and itself iridescent) otherness, called diaspora.

• 44 Cited in Nadia Castronuovo, Natalia Ginzburg. Jewishness as Moral Identity, Leicester, Troubador, (...)

31The other side of the coin within the diasporic issues is the crux of the identity. In recent years, it had been called into question by cultural anthropology and sociology, and not without reason. Identity is a cultural construction that leads us to the social labels of them and us. These characters are created ad hoc and attributed to oneself or to the others by those performing institutional roles or by the minority groups who, as a reaction to the threat of discriminatory laws, develop “defensive antibodies”. The Italian chemist Primo Levi, deported to Auschwitz in 1943 as Jew and partisan, after surviving the concentration camp uttered in an interview: “If lagers and racial laws had not existed, I probably would not have been Jewish anymore, except for the surname: instead, this double experience, the racial laws and the lager, printed me like we print a sheet of metal”. In another record he added: “The conscience of feeling Jewish was imposed on me”.44

• 45 Archivo Histórico Nacional [AHN], Inquisición, Cerdeña, libro 783, 110r-11v.
• 46 On Catalina Barón, see Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op. cit., p. 137-147 and passim. In the Catholic (...)

32We can find such confessions among the Moriscos who arrived in Italy. Take the Aragonese native Ginés alias Alí who declared that, as he was expelled as a Moor, he claimed his belonging to Islam both aesthetically (wearing a feather on the head) and ritually (eating meat on Fridays and praying “like Turks”). He wanted to end his days as a Muslim, “even if they [the Inquisitors] wanted to kill me or burn me”;45 there was also someone such as Catalina Baron who, imputed by the Sicilian Inquisition, did not want to convert to Christianism: if she did – she believed – the authorities would have never given her the permission to leave Sicily and re-join her family in Maghreb.46

• 47 . Jean-François Bayart, L’illusion identitaire, Paris, Fayard, 2019.
• 48 Francesco Benigno, Le parole nel tempo. Un lessico per pensare la storia, Roma, Viella, 2013, p. 3 (...)
• 49 Roger Brubaker, Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘identity’”, Theory and Society, 29, 2000, n° 1, p. 36.
• 50 Adriano Prosperi, Identità. L’altra faccia della storia, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2016, p. 9.

33So, it is evident that identity is not just a social, political and cultural construction. It is an illusion.47 For some intellectuals, it is a contradictory and paradoxical solution, because it simplifies the intelligibility of the social cohesion of groups;48 for others, this explanation does not work: scholars of social sciences must abandon the concept of identity, because it may have consequences on analytical interpretations and on political and social levels.49 In Adriano Prosperi’s opinion, identity is “a barrier” among human groups, a monster that ignores “the changing dimension that belongs to history”.50

• 51 Gino Remotti, L’ossessione identitaria, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2010.

34Even though the term “identity” is commonly used in political slang with the subsequent creation of clichés and the reductio ad unum of majority or minority groups, historians – as other scholars – should use this word very cautiously or, even better, avoid it:51 using this concept has the intrinsic risk of considering an individual or a group as an unchanging entity; in other words, identity implicates the depletion of complexity, exclusion, ipseity, cultural homologation, and denies the inevitable continuous transformations caused by internal inputs and external factors.

• 52 Among the books that have been holding a great recent historiographical echo, see: Tamar Herzog, D (...)

35The Morisco phenomenon in Italy could be part of the recent and intense debate on the presence of foreigners in the urban and transnational contexts in the European Early Modern History.52 The foreigner was here intended as extraneus: a person extraneous to the society in which he/she lived, an outcast or a subject who did not want or could not integrate him/herself; even an autochthonous person could be a stranger in his/her own home. In order to overcome this situation of marginality and the surrounding indifference, the stranger must take root, be lucky or have the right intuition to find a favourable environment. In 1529, the famous Valencian Judaeo-Converted intellectual, protagonist of a voluntary and inevitable exile, Juan Luis Vives, stated:

• 54 Unidentified witness in the trial against Tomasa from Benidoleig (kingdom of Valencia). Archivio S (...)

36At the beginning, the relationship between locals and foreigners was influenced by fear and, as a consequence, by the hostile refusal of the other. Then, it was also distinguished by an attitude of curiosity and attraction to novelty, endowed with an exotic charge and culture. The report of a Neapolitan witness during an inquisitorial trial against a Valencian Morisco woman was emblematic: during a “Turkish party” in Naples, Muslims gave a show while they “ate, drank and played instruments” and, for this reason, “all the people in the square ran to watch them”.54

• 55 Irene Fosi, Convertire lo straniero. Forestieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna, Roma, Viella (...)

37For the Early Modern confessional states, the key element that caused the discrimination against migrants was not so much their geographical origin as their religious affiliation. The identification of the transients and the foreign allocations decided by the authorities were linked especially to this aspect. After a phase of strict surveillance in the 16^th century, at least in Italy, these controls became less intense in the following century. The inclination to tolerance, shaped during the 17^th century, finally stabilized in the Age of Enlightenment.55 This happened in spite of the Holy See countermeasures which tried to throw the heretics out of the heart of Catholicism (such as the seal In Coena Domini in 1568 or the Romani Pontificis in 1622). These decrees were valid all over the Catholic lands and kingdoms but were disregarded even in the Pontifical States: the law was one thing and its enforcement was another. Moreover, it should be taken into account that the interests of the secular powers were quite distinct from those of the Catholic Church; indeed, they often collided.

• 56 Bruno Pomara, “Fuga de la Suprema. Los moriscos en búsqueda de la benevolencia del Papa”, Sharq al (...)

38Furthermore, we cannot forget the gradual indifference of the population to denounce foreigners: unless a neighbour practised his religion with a particular fervour or a foreigner exhibited such a behaviour to cause public scandal or the same foreigner had problems with a neighbour, the refugees lived a relatively calm everyday life, endangered only by occasional and adverse circumstances. Even in cases of inquisitorial arrests or trials, most of the involved foreigners – Moriscos were not an exception – preferred to abjure heresy and convert themselves, thanks to the rather mild repressive conduct of the Roman tribunals. It is no coincidence, in fact, that a few decades before the expulsion, groups of Moriscos – likely to be investigated by the Spanish Inquisition – travelled secretly to Rome by reason of a benevolent reputation enjoyed by its Holy Office.56

• 57 Cf. Albert A. Sicroff, Les controverses des statuts de “pureté de sang” en Espagne du xv^e au xvi^e (...)

39In Spain, for Moriscos, as well as for Crypto-Jews, a powerful exclusion parameter had been the impure blood: used by confraternities, guilds, universities, religious, military and aristocratic orders, the Blood Purity Statutes (Estatutos de limpieza de sangre) established the exclusion of both Jewish and Muslim descendants.57 In his analysis, Pedro de Valencia, a treatise writer and Philip III’s counsellor, some years before the mass deportation justified the fractious attitude of many Moriscos:

• 59 I tried to show it with the Roman case. See Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op. cit., p. 164-195.

40These powerful instruments of marginalization were not contemplated in Italian territories. For the Moriscos who had recently appeared in the Peninsula, what was important in the urban contexts was to earn their neighbours’ trust, offering some guarantees, respecting local equilibriums and showing their particular dedication to their jobs. In short, in order to integrate themselves and lose the label of “foreigner” as extraneous, they had to “create familiarity”. And so they did.59

• 60 Bruno Pomara, Rifugiati…, op. cit., p. 251-276.

42Especially those strangers who managed to gain citizenship could also be envied by their neighbours since they could benefit from a condition of translocality that, sometimes, converted them to privileged people. Merchants, who were often exonerated from paying taxes and custom duties, are a fitting example. The Morisco merchants, seasonal residents and trading among the ports of Tunis, Palermo, Naples, Leghorn and Marseille, were linking figures able to dissemble repeatedly their religion: they could change their facades and clothes; they could go indiscriminately to Church or to the Mosque according to the country they were at the moment.60

• 61 Fernand Braudel, Civiltà e imperi del Mediterraneo nell’età di Filippo II, Torino, Einaudi, 2010, (...)

43Such mobility could not be cancelled or destroyed; nor could it vanish, since it was useful even for the host society, albeit it was subject to regulation. Therefore, we can appreciate another Morisco characteristic: territorial mobility as a source of economic, social and cultural enrichment that showed how fluid Mediterranean societies are. The different ethnic cultures were not clearly divided in national groups or opposed to one another in a clash of civilizations between Muslims and Christians, as Fernand Braudel had once made us believe.61 Also, in this case, the mobility experiences were as numerous as the number of migrants since each of them reacted according to their personal characters which were, among other things, subject to political, social, environmental and circumstantial variables. Thanks to their porosity and perhaps also for fear of future labelling, at least in the Italian territories, the Morisco refugees dissolved among the local population. Thus, within a little more than a generation of their diaspora, only their faded memory had remained.