Historians can overweigh archival silence on policy intentions

Evidence

It is not that Meyerson is unaware of the larger context, of the evidence concerning what happened in Portugal in 1497, for example, or in the lands of the Crown of Castile in 1500–2, but he gives less weight to these manifestations of Ferdinand’s intentions than to the absence of discussion of the theme of conversion in the Aragonese primary sources. … My own view is that although the various Spanish realms were administered separately, Ferdinand can hardly have kept his mind divided into compartments so hermetically sealed that he could not relate events in Lisbon and in Granada—and Cairo and Istanbul—to what went on in Valencia and Saragossa. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 412

Categorization

• DEFINE: Harvey articulates a methodological principle: absence of discussion in primary sources does not outweigh evidence of intentions from other realms.