There wasn't much to start with, since the moorish conquest didn't displace the people but "incentivized"(ahem...) people to convert.
> How many conversos did the Inquisitors burn at the stake, generations after their ancestors converted, on the strength of rumormongering by jealous neighbors?
It's hard to know, but I've seen stimates around 3k-5k. Germanic wytchhunts probably had a much higher number of victims. The Inquisition was a pretty bureacratic institution, and it had proper trials with defence lawyers, questioning of witnesses, etc... Inquisitor [Alonso de Salazar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_de_Salazar_Fr%C3%ADas) for example, saved probably thousands of people by setting high standards in Inquisition trials.
Yes, it was VERY BAD and TERRIBLE, I'm not condoning it, but it wasn't the worse that humanity has seen. By far.
I brought it up because the centuries-long intellectual blight that resulted from it is a salient example of the corrupt fruits of the poisoned tree of state censorship, a tree whose root in European history is that very Inquisition.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397905 for a slightly longer disquisition on that theme.
Anyone that checks out historical records will also discover that the Moors and Jews represented a significant percentage of the population of Iberia before the expulsions, around half a million people out of a total of less than 9 million.
Furthermore, anyone that checks out historical records will discover that the Jewish ghettos were in fact established by Isabel and Ferdinand, the monarchs who also established the Inquisition and, a few years later, expelled the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and Moors from their lands.
One of the few true statements in your comment is that many empires, not only the Spanish Empire, have been founded on genocide. Among the other abuses of human rights the Spanish Empire also practiced, an abuse which facilitated that genocide, was state censorship.
We should practice neither of these abuses. Do you disagree?
I don't know what the protestant countries had, or how they called it, but they were definitely doing something wrong because the casualties in Spain pale in comparison to those in Germany. It seems that the inquisition saved lifes, after all.
> hundreds of thousands of Moors and Jews fled or were expelled, and that only tens of thousands returned.
What you say is true, but you have to give the numbers: From 200k Jews living there, 100k were expelled and from those 50k returned. The conversion terms offered by the Catholic Kings allowed for quite a comfortable life in the peninsula, and you had to be a really fanatic believer not to take it. It seems, by the way, that you are talking in terms of race and not religion, which I find quite amusing.
> anyone that checks out historical records will discover that the Jewish ghettos were in fact established by Isabel and Ferdinand, the monarchs who also established the Inquisition and, a few years later, expelled the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and Moors from their lands.
No, the Jewish ghettos were stablished by the Jewish population itself. Spinoza (whose parents were expelled) wrote about that; they were building an empire within an empire, which caused social friction and translated into popular killings or pogroms. One of the earliest tasks of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova was the protection of such converts from the mobs. The stablishment of the inquisition attempted to solve the problem institutionally.
> One of the few true statements in your comment is that many empires, not only the Spanish Empire, have been founded on genocide.
I didn't say nor imply that. To say that the Spanish empire is rooted in genocide, at least to the extent of the English and Belgian empire, or nazi Germany is laughable.
You speak with such harshness about the past, but you do it from the eyes of a pathologist, grounded from today's vision (which owes, by the way, a lot to the School of Salamanca and its contributions to natural law and the so called human rights) and so you have no autority, not only to judge it, but to use it as any sort of argument against the current secesionist situation.
Bartolomé de las Casas relates stories of cruelty beyond belief, inhuman monstrosities beyond imagining, atrocities whose publication he delayed for more than thirty years, finally publishing pseudonymously. How many such true accounts have been forgotten because they were denied the Inquisitor's imprimatur? But the Aztecs' human sacrifices to the sun god, used to justify the bringing of "civilization" to the "savages", remain notorious today.