Yet, in the face of these atrocious enactments, we find the Moriscoes occasionally making their escape into the province of Valencia, where numbers of their countrymen were living as serfs on the estates of the great nobles, under whose powerful protection they enjoyed a degree of comfort, if not of independence, unknown to their race in other parts of the country. Some few, also, finding their way to the coast, succeeded in crossing the sea to Barbary. The very severity of the law served in some measure to defeat its execution. Indeed, Philip, in more than one instance in which he deemed that the edicts pressed too heavily on his Moorish vassals, judged it expedient to mitigate the penalty, or even to dispense with it altogether,--an act of leniency which seems to have found little favour with his Castilian subjects.[284]
Yet, strange to say, under this iron system, the spirit of the Moriscoes, which had been crushed by their long sufferings in the war of the rebellion, gradually rose again as they found a shelter in their new homes, and resumed their former habits of quiet industry. Though deprived of their customary amusements, their _fêtes_, their songs, and their dances,--though debarred from the use of the language which they had lisped from the cradle, which embodied their national traditions, and was associated with their fondest recollections,--they were said to be cheerful, and even gay. They lived to a good age, and examples of longevity were found among them, to which it was not easy to find a parallel among the Spaniards. The Moorish stock, like the Jewish, seems to have thriven under persecution.[285]
One would be glad to find any authentic data for an account of the actual population at the time of their expulsion from Granada. But I have met with none. They must have been sorely thinned by the war of the insurrection and the countless woes it brought upon the country. One fact is mentioned by the chroniclers, which shows that the number of the exiles must have been very considerable. The small remnant still left in Granada, with its lovely _vega_ and the valley of Lecrin, alone furnished, we are told, over six thousand.[286] In the places to which they were transported they continued to multiply to such an extent that the Cortes of Castile, in the latter part of the century, petitioned the king not to allow the census to be taken, lest it might disclose to the Moriscoes the alarming secret of their increase of numbers.[287] Such a petition shows, as strongly as language can show, the terror in which the Spaniards still stood of this persecuted race.