Ottomans relocated expelled Moriscos to reinforce Sunni presence on the Safavid frontier

Evidence

One can see that there might well be a good reason for the Ottomans to wish to strengthen the reliably Sunni element in southeastern Turkey, where the politically dubious Alavi Shiis were numerous (and perhaps there was also the thought that Arabic-speaking Muslim cultivators from some low-lying areas of intensive agriculture such as the huerta of Valencia might rapidly adapt to the life of a partly Arabic-speaking rich agricultural zone such as the neighborhood of the coastal plain of Adana and Tarsus). Those considerations would not have applied in the case of Kars, of course. High in the mountains, that city had only fallen under Ottoman rule in 1580. Its extreme climate would have made life very hard for the newcomers. Presumably it was thought that as Sunnis and as safely subservient clients of the Ottoman regime, the Moriscos might help to stabilize the difficult Safavid frontier. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1643

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how empires relocate loyal populations to religiously mixed frontiers — parallels Soviet nationality policy and other coerced-migration scholarship.