Moriscos in Early Modern France

FAIN: FT-58939-11

Gillian Lee Weiss
Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH 44106-1712)

This project on incompletely converted Muslim exiles from Spain (Moriscos) who entered, fled and settled in seventeenth-century France will form one of four chapters in a book that examines French domestic encounters with individuals of Muslim heritage during the early modern period. Based on administrative correspondence, fiscal accounts and baptismal records, the chapter on Moriscos will explore how a principle of providing sanctuary to persecuted outsiders ceded to popular antagonism before giving way to economic pragmatism. Other chapters on ambassadors from the Ottoman Empire and Morocco, converts from Islam (renegades), and slaves from throughout the Mediterranean will also highlight the tension between ideologies and policies of either inclusion or exclusion. Together they will show how inside the kingdom and during an earlier era than previously understood, Muslims became a measure of French belonging and a means to French power.