Vulnerability to seaborne invasion made Valencia the first expulsion target

Evidence

The decision as to how precisely to begin the implementation of the policy of expulsion was governed by considerations of broad strategy. The Valencian Moriscos were the largest coherent group, the only one in a position to threaten to take over a port or landing zone. They had already been discovered to have been in contact with England and, above all, with Henry IV’s France. And in the early seventeenth century, just as nowadays in the twenty-first, the Valencian coast was wide open to clandestine contacts with the Magrib. (The crossing near the Straits of Gibraltar would be shorter, of course, but effective coastguard surveillance was far easier to maintain.) Militarily, the first priority for Spain in any operation to carry out the Expulsion would be to deprive its enemies of the possibility of establishing a bridgehead to supply a counterattack. Inland Moriscos and others might safely be left to be mopped up later. Valencia was the strategic key. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1426

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Spain’s fear of a Maghreb/English/French landing zone map onto the actual Mediterranean threat picture in 1609, versus the reality of a declining North African Islam the author notes?
• XREF: Clandestine coastal contact across the Straits echoes the coastal-smuggling dynamics in the Drake/Armada maritime material.