Empathy for the Persecuted or Polemical Posturing? The 1609 Spanish Expulsion of the Moriscos as Seen in English and Netherlandic Pamphlets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In April, 1609, King Philip III of Spain needed to reinforce his image as defender of the faith as he signed a peace treaty with the Dutch Protestant heretics. He therefore ordered at the same time that the Moriscos—Muslims who some decades earlier had been compelled to convert to Catholicism—be expelled from Valencia. A few of these Moriscos made their way to Holland, where they seem to have been welcomed, thereby contributing to the reputation of the Dutch that they would tolerate any religious position. Even so, very few publications have survived on the subject of the Morisco expulsion, whereas treatises on the Twelve Years’ Truce poured off Dutch and English presses. While few, the English and Dutch language pamphlets on the expulsion decree reveal something about what English and Dutch audiences were told on the subject. How then was the Morisco expulsion explained to, and regarded by, Catholic and Protestant Europeans outside of Spain? While two of the surviving newssheets were accurate translations of Spanish decrees, a third work printed in the Spanish Netherlands defended the expulsion by linking Morisco plots with demonic witchcraft. On the other hand, a few Protestant and Mennonite writers in the Dutch Republic expressed some sympathy for the plight of the Moriscos and conversos as fellow victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Even so, the propaganda over the Treaty of Antwerp of 1609 clearly overshadowed the few works condemning the Morisco expulsion, rewarding Philip III’s decision to release them at the same time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".