Expulsion figures record only those officially counted as leaving

Evidence

For the Moriscos, the same historian, writing in 1989 (Elliott 1989, 225) but relying principally on Lapeyre (1959), adopts a figure of 275,000 for those who were finally expelled. This was the number of those officially known to have left the country at the end. Clearly this number is lower than the total population earlier in the sixteenth century, in the period when it was still policy to retain the converts rather than to get rid of them. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 92