Friday, January 2, 2009: 4:10 PM
Midtown Suite (Hilton New York)
My goal in this paper is to broaden the known context for morisco residential architecture in the Albaicín quarter of Granada. I will analyze change in the city by a) presenting the histories of several morisco dwellings not physically conserved but documented in property records, and b) relating these structures to emerging patterns of inhabitation in the post-expulsion city. The documentary basis for my study consists of Legajo 5244 in the Provincial Historical Archive in Granada, and a late-sixteenth century map found in the Municipal Historical Archive.
The former collection dates from the 1560s through the mid-seventeenth century, and consists largely of documents of the sale and transfer of houses, plots, and other properties that formerly belonged to the moriscos. This group of documents illustrates a) the process of consolidation of properties, b) the change in physical condition of these properties, and c) the social positions of both previous morisco owners and new, Old Christian acquirers in the parish of San Salvador, which underwent greater demographic changes than any other Albaicín parish in the late sixteenth century. In 1561, it had between nine hundred and a thousand vecinos; in 1587, only between three and four hundred remained. This dramatic shift was a direct result of the population loss that occurred as a result of the morisco expulsion, and left a depopulated parish with infrastructure in a ruined state. The map, which complements the textual sources, is a detailed visual representation of land use and individual properties at the edge of the Albaicín. Considered in the aggregate, these documents provide firsthand knowledge of some of the larger tendencies of the urban changes in Granada in the period immediately posterior to the 1570 expulsion of the moriscos from the city, while individually they detail smaller-scale interventions in the built environment.
The former collection dates from the 1560s through the mid-seventeenth century, and consists largely of documents of the sale and transfer of houses, plots, and other properties that formerly belonged to the moriscos. This group of documents illustrates a) the process of consolidation of properties, b) the change in physical condition of these properties, and c) the social positions of both previous morisco owners and new, Old Christian acquirers in the parish of San Salvador, which underwent greater demographic changes than any other Albaicín parish in the late sixteenth century. In 1561, it had between nine hundred and a thousand vecinos; in 1587, only between three and four hundred remained. This dramatic shift was a direct result of the population loss that occurred as a result of the morisco expulsion, and left a depopulated parish with infrastructure in a ruined state. The map, which complements the textual sources, is a detailed visual representation of land use and individual properties at the edge of the Albaicín. Considered in the aggregate, these documents provide firsthand knowledge of some of the larger tendencies of the urban changes in Granada in the period immediately posterior to the 1570 expulsion of the moriscos from the city, while individually they detail smaller-scale interventions in the built environment.