A senior Spanish royal official secretly licensed arms sales to rebel Moriscos.

Evidence

A number of years ago, when I came across in a Valencian archive a document about the illegal purchase of arms and weapons written in 1595 in Arabic by a Morisco who was informing his associate that he had obtained an arms permit from Franqueza, I was at first not certain how to interpret what was written. The Morisco had written in Arabic characters ifranqizza, and I puzzled for hours, trying to make sense of this as some garbled Arabic word, before I yielded to the obvious, and saw it as a reference to Lerma’s subordinate. I now have no doubt at all that this notoriously venal government servant was involved in supplying arms to the other side (Harvey 1971, 81–115). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1391

Categorization

• CANDY: A Spanish royal henchman was quietly arming the enemy, rendered transparent only because a Morisco transcribed his name into Arabic letters — a great cocktail-party anecdote.
• SHARE: Since this connects to a specific published article Harvey wrote in 1971, a historian friend would relish the detective story of decoding ifranqizza.