A Compact History of Spanish Islam

Less than eighty years after the death of Mohammed in 632, Islam had become the dominant force in the Near East and North Africa and was poised to invade Spain.

In the years immediately following the Prophet's death, when Islam was governed by the first caliphate (the Rashidun) the muslims established an empire, bursting out of the Arabian peninsula and expanding east to the Iranian highlands and west along the north-African littoral.

The second caliphate, the Ummayad, arose from the bloody strife which culminated in the assassination of the fourth Rashidun caliph, Ali in 661.

Despite the ensuing civil war, the boundaries continued to move forward. By 710 the Ummayads had extended the frontiers of Islam as far as the Punjab, and the following year, 711, saw the start of the Ummayads' lightning conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

Although in the Near East the Ummayads were comprehensively defeated by the Abbasids in 750, a prince of the Ummayads, 'Abd al-Rahman, survived the ensuing slaughter and established a revived Ummayad caliphate at Córdoba in 756.

The Ummayad Caliphate of al-Andalus persisted until the capture of Granada on January 2nd 1492, which ended seven and a half centuries of muslim occupation of Spain.

Muslim communities continued to subsist here and elsewhere in Spain for over a century after the capture of Granada. They remained the objects of suspicion even if they converted to Christianity. In Alcalá de Xivert the Moriscos, catholic converts from Islam, were banned from approaching the coast at Alcossebre, ostensibly to prevent them signaling to Barbary pirates who raided these waters during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Finally, in 1609 the Moriscos were expelled from the Kingdom of Valencia by Philip III. The illustration above depicts what appears to be an orderly dispersal from the port of Vinaròs of the Moriscos of Alcalá de Xivert and others. In truth their expulsion from this and other ports along the coast including Valencia, was the start of a disquieting journey into the unknown which ended with life-long exile in North Africa.

Vicente Carducho's drawing, La Expulsión de los Moriscos captures better the sense of desolation that hundreds of thousands of Moriscos must have felt on leaving Spain.

Almost exactly nine hundred years after Tariq ibn Ziyad landed on Gibraltar (Jabal al Tariq) the last remnants of Islam were bundled up and thrown out of Spain. In the near future I want to write something about the Moriscos of Alcalá.