A label of ambassadors accidentally conceded near-sovereign status to the Moriscos

Evidence

The preamble in the normal way was given over to justification of the enactment. Every effort had already been made to convert the Moriscos (and this is the term actually employed here), but “their stubbornness has only increased” and they were “heretics, apostates, traitors guilty of l`esemajest´e both human and divine,” and because they had sought by their “ambassadors” (“por medios de sus Ambaxadores,” a term that seems unwittingly to concede to the Moriscos near-sovereign status) to secure “the harm and the upset of our realms,” out of obligation to his good and faithful subjects because “the peril is evident,” the king announced, “I have resolved that all the Moriscos of this kingdom should be expelled and sent to Barbary.” — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1431

Categorization

• SEED: The slip in bureaucratic language revealing an unwanted political status echoes the moral-panic and class-signaling analysis in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: language that betrays what the regime refuses to acknowledge.
• DEEPTHINKING: The involuntary concession in official rhetoric that the Moriscos were negotiating parties with sovereign standing undermines the entire legal framing of them as mere internal subjects.