Spanish elites never seriously considered restoring Muslim acceptance as a policy option

Evidence

To the modern mind, the obvious conclusion to draw at this point would be to acknowledge the failure of the ill-conceived policy of forcible conversion and simply to accept Muslims as fellow subjects. That would not have been a leap into the unknown, it would simply have been a return to the familiar medieval model of Mudejarism, to a regime under which Muslim subjects were accepted as subjects of a Christian monarch. Yet that course of action does not seem to have been considered in council at all. The alternatives that were considered were either intensifying the program of evangelization so as to make conversion to Christianity a reality (i.e., just trying harder); or ending the perceived anomaly created by the existence of thousands of false Christians within Spanish society by getting rid of them (in which case, how?). On the whole, the advocates of persisting with the process of conversion were to be found among the clergy, while those who called for radical surgery and amputation of the offending member were those preoccupied by military and strategic considerations. But as we have seen, there were many cross-currents. The resentment felt by poor and landless Christians obliged to compete economically with hard-working Muslim neighbors at the bottom of the social scale might lead them to want to get rid of their rivals, whereas some members of the Christian aristocracy might fear that the departure of their Morisco cultivators would spell ruin for the rural economy, and so they wanted to keep them. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1352

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the class-divergent attitudes toward Moriscos that mainstream Spanish policy debates consistently excluded — same dynamic as economic competition driving poor Christians to want expulsion while aristocrats valued their labor.
• SEED: An essay angle: how a policy option that seems obvious in retrospect — return to the pre-existing Mudejar model — was never even tabled, showing how framing forecloses alternatives.