Aragon’s nobles sheltered Moriscos, but royal centralization ultimately crushed that protection

Evidence

Both the strength and the weakness of the Morisco position in Aragon (and in this case, I mean specifically the kingdom, rather than the whole of the territories of the Crown of Aragon) was that their principal protectors were the Aragonese ruling classes (both nobles and the lawyers of the urban patriciate). Aragon was from the latter years of Ferdinand onward in conflict in some way with Castile, Castile’s rulers, and Castile’s ruling institutions. Wrangles and disputes took all sorts of forms and had as their immediate causes issues of the most diverse kinds, but underlying everything was Aragonese resentment at the dominant position of Castile (while Castilians felt exasperation at the uncooperative stubbornness of their weaker neighbors). The strength of the Morisco position in Aragon depended in large measure on the fact that they could rely on the support of the local nobility and the local institutions when the Crown (or that effective servant of the Crown’s centralizing policies, the Inquisition) sought to exercise its power against them. But this very support was ultimately a source of weakness because, when the showdown came between the advocates of local and regional independence on the one side, and royal central power on the other, it was central power that eventually won hands down. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 564

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general pattern in this book about how minority communities depend on patron protection that proves fragile when central power consolidates.