Forced residential integration aimed to break communal silence enabling Inquisition surveillance

Evidence

The earliest example of the Inquisition concerning itself directly with the converts from Islam in Old Castile, noted by Tapia (1991, 224), is in an Inquisitorial inspection of 1523 that took place in Segovia. Assimilation was to be achieved in Segovia by moving the newly converted out of the districts that had, toward the end of the Middle Ages (in the early 1480s) been designated as morer´ıas, and forcing them to live only in houses where they would have as their next-door neighbors reliable Old Christians. Neither Old Christian nor ex-Muslim New Christian inhabitants liked the sound of this. Social engineering of this kind is rarely popular. It was probably doubly unwelcome among the ex-Muslims because only a generation or so earlier, in Segovia, when they had been obliged to move into the morer´ıa, they had lost money on the consequent enforced property transactions. Now, fifty years later, the Inquisition was in favor of shifting them out of their safe retreat—and without compensation. For Inquisitors and other Christian officials, it was virtually impossible to get information on what was going on inside the old closely knit communities such as this morer´ıa; there was a protective barrier of silence. The authorities wanted to force the converts out into the open. If the newly converted were made to live unsegregated lives, the Inquisition could hope that their Old Christian neighbors would be willing to give evidence against the incomers (Cardaillac 1979, 21–31). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter-theme of silence as a protective barrier in communities; also to the broader pattern in The Soundscape work about silence as social defense.
• SEED: Could become an essay on how states deliberately break up ethnic enclaves to convert community privacy into surveillance access — the Segovia resettlement as early ‘broken windows’ social engineering.