The Morisco expulsion was tied to Spain’s foreign policy needs

Evidence

Thus the most radical of measures were already being debated at this point, some thirty years before the final expulsion. It is to be noted that already in the 1580s the “Morisco Question” was by some perceived as having a solution outside Spain itself. (The international dimensions of the “Morisco Question” are discussed in the following chapter.) What had begun as an entirely internal matter, a domestic issue, now was to be solved in some way overseas. And so the powerful Spanish monarchy found that in order to deal with this “domestic” matter, it needed to involve its experts in foreign as well as home affairs. It cannot be a coincidence that when at last in 1609 the final decision was made to put the Expulsion into effect, it was done on the very day that a twelve-year truce with the Netherlands was signed. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1369

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a ‘domestic’ ethnic-cleansing decision needed a foreign-policy window — the timing of the expulsion synchronized with the Dutch truce as enabling condition.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that solving an internal ‘domestic’ matter required overseas action — and that the final decision came on the exact day of a foreign truce — quietly reframes expulsion as a state-capacity and diplomatic operation, not merely an ideological one.