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In attempting to suppress this insurrection Spain adopted the cruel methods she had exercised against the Moriscos in the sixteenth century, ignoring the fact that the twentieth century was near its dawn, and that a new standard of humane sympathy and moral obligation had arisen in other nations.
Tidings reaching them of a party of Moriscos who were eager to make their escape from their Spanish masters, and were ready to pay handsomely for a passage to Barbary. "Drub-Devil" and his comrades landed by night near Oliva, embarked two hundred families and much treasure, and lay-to under the island of Formentara.
The Moriscos, as they were called, struggled desperately from 1568 to 1570 to reestablish the independence of Granada. This rebellion was suppressed with great cruelty, and the surviving Moriscos were forced to find new homes in less favored parts of Spain until their final expulsion from the country in 1609.
At that time we were quartered in Seville, to keep guard on the suspected Moriscos." "Ah, the hated infidels!" muttered Calderon, fiercely, through his teeth. "I saw Beatriz, and loved her at first sight. I do not say," added Fonseca, with a blush, "that my suit, at the outset, was that which alone was worthy of her; but her virtue soon won my esteem as well as love.
The dispersal of the Moriscos of Granada, while cruel to them, proved of the greatest benefit to Spain. Wherever they went the effects of their superior skill and industry were soon manifested.
The expulsion of the Moriscos was one of the most prominent causes of her decline, and no indications of a recovery have yet been shown. The expulsion of the Jews and Moriscos was not sufficient to satisfy the intolerant spirit of Spain. Heresy had made its way even into the minds of Spaniards.
The evil grew with the increase of the Turkish power in the Levant, and received a violent impetus upon the fall of Constantinople; while on the west, the gradual expulsion of the Moors from Spain which followed upon the Christian advance filled Africa with disaffected, ruined, and vengeful Moriscos, whose one dominant passion was to wipe out their old scores with the Spaniards.
"Thomas of Erceldoune," passim; Child, vol. i. p. 318; "Border Minstrelsy," vol. iii. p. 170. Malory, vol. iii. p. 339; Braga, vol. ii. p. 238; Liebrecht in a note to Gerv. Tilb., p. 95, quoting Aznar, "Expulsion de los Moriscos."
Does not history apprise us how Spain suffered in her agriculture, and the arts of life declined, when the Moriscos were driven from her soil? how Belgium, the garden of Europe, decayed when Spanish intolerance banished to England the Protestant weavers and spinners, who laid the foundation of English opulence? how France retrograded when superstition exiled from her shores the industrious Huguenots?
The rebellion of the Moriscos, due to the oppressive edicts of Philip II., as stated in the preceding tale, was marked by numerous interesting events. Some of these are worth giving in illustration of the final struggle of the Moors in Spain.
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