The Expulsion of Jews from Spain was an early measure by Isabella and Ferdinand after the Reconquest, compelling approximately 200,000 Jews to leave within four months. They had to sell their land and other assets at very low prices and could not take gold or silver out of the country. The episode illustrates the costs of Spain’s emerging absolutist order: the monarchy’s consolidation coincided with the forced removal of a large population and the insecurity of their property.

Background and royal consolidation

When the crowns of Castile and Aragon merged, Spain was among Europe’s most economically successful regions. The union grew into a multicontinental empire under Charles, the son of Joanna and Philip of the House of Habsburg: crowned Charles I of Castile and Aragon in 1516, he later inherited the Netherlands and Franche-Comté and, in 1519, the Habsburg territories in Germany, becoming Emperor Charles V. He continued the project of strengthening the absolutist state begun by Isabella and Ferdinand.

The expulsion belonged to the monarchy’s first actions after the Reconquest. The book places it within a political transformation that would have economic consequences: after Spain’s absolutist system solidified, the country entered relative decline and, after 1600, absolute economic decline. The account does not reduce that longer trajectory to the expulsion alone; rather, it presents the treatment of Jewish property as one early example of the insecurity that accompanied the new order.

The expulsion and confiscation

The decree gave Spain’s approximately 200,000 Jews four months to leave. Departure was not a voluntary relocation on ordinary terms: they were required to sell their land and assets at very low prices and prohibited from taking gold or silver with them. The combination of a short deadline, compelled sales, and restrictions on carrying wealth made the loss both immediate and material.

The account emphasizes the unequal terms under which the community departed. Property could be sold, but only at very low prices; precious metals could not be removed from the country. It identifies the expulsion as a human tragedy, while showing how royal authority could determine who remained within the kingdom and what wealth those forced out were allowed to retain.

A recurring pattern of insecure property

The book connects the expulsion to a later parallel under Habsburg rule. Between 1609 and 1614, Philip III expelled the Moriscos, descendants of citizens of the former Arab states in southern Spain. Like the Jews, they could take only what they could carry and were forbidden to remove gold, silver, or other precious metals. The recurrence suggests that the earlier expulsion was not an isolated instance of property insecurity under the monarchy.

Other examples extend the pattern beyond expulsions. Philip II, who succeeded Charles V in 1556, defaulted on his debts in 1557 and again in 1560, ruining the Fugger and Welser banking families. Genoese banking families subsequently took their place and were themselves ruined by repeated royal defaults in 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652, 1660, and 1662. Set beside these defaults and the later expulsion of the Moriscos, the expulsion of the Jews forms part of the book’s wider account of how absolutist power weakened confidence in property and claims against the state.