Spain’s Muslim minority declined through Christian demographic growth, not Muslim overbreeding

Evidence

In general, we are speaking of a relatively small and powerless minority. In this, the final century of the existence of Spanish Islam, then, a key factor was not the absolute population of Muslims, nor yet the rate of increase of the Muslims, although this was a theme that preoccupied many Christian commentators of the period who often spoke of the propensity of the Moriscos to breed rapidly. The Christian communities, on the other hand, with their numerous priests, monks, and nuns, not to mention all the soldiers absent overseas, were held to reproduce themselves more slowly. (Such calculations made by Christians rarely took into account the way that persecution and clandestine emigration must have acted as a countervailing brake on population increase among the Moriscos.) The key demographic trend in the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, far outweighing all these others, was that surge in the Old Christian population to which Elliott refers in the passage cited above. It was population growth in Castile, above all, sustained until the plague that struck Castile in 1599–1600 (Elliott 1989, 225), that really served to keep Spain’s Muslims demographically marginalized. They may have bred like flies, as some observers alleged, in some villages, but at the national level the significant trend was the growth of the predominantly Christian population of the center and the north (the source of the manpower for Spain’s imperial expansion), and it is to that undoubted factor (the reasons for which cannot be discussed here) that we should ascribe the long-term demographic eclipse of Spain’s Muslims. The final expulsion was a cruel coup de grˆace to a community long in decline, not a measure of self-defense taken by Christian folk in any real danger of being demographically overwhelmed and outbred. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 98

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the broader theme of expulsion driven by majority demographic expansion rather than fear of minority takeover — resonates with other cases of scapegoating minorities amid larger structural shifts.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what explains the surge in Old Christian population in 16th-century Castile (the ‘reasons which cannot be discussed here’)?