A household’s religious identity was determined by the husband’s faith in expulsion law.

Evidence

The proclamation in question had opened by dealing with another difficult borderline category: mixed marriages in which an Old Christian man had married a Morisco woman. (The opposite case, that of a Morisco man married to an Old Christian woman, would be covered by the 1609 edict and other parallel enactments under its clauses 11 and 12 whereby Moriscos who had lived among Christians and could be certified so to have done, might be exempt from expulsion.) An Old Christian man’s household would by definition be Christian, so his wife would not be expelled, whereas a Morisco man’s whole household would be suspected of Islamic heresy. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1523

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly did certification of ‘living among Christians’ function — who testified, and could a Morisco man marry an Old Christian woman to dodge expulsion, turning marriage into legal strategy?