Spain expelled roughly 300,000 Muslims nine centuries after their 711 arrival.

Evidence

The first Muslims had arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in 711; the mass expulsion of all Muslims was decreed and carried out in the period 1609–14, nine centuries later. In this great final displacement of population some 300,000 people were forced to leave their homes and were deported from Spain: some of them went out by road over the Pyrenees, but most left by sea. The diaspora left them scattered from the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco in the west to Ottoman Turkey in the east (and possibly beyond). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 42

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s core numbers and geographic scope in one compact statement.
• CANDY: The nine-centuries span between arrival and expulsion is a striking elevator fact.