Morisco knights in renaissance Spain is a groundbreaking study of class, psychology, and cultural transformation in early modern Spain. Through a rich analysis of military orders, poetry, literature, family libraries, and other archival sources, this book reveals how Renaissance, chivalric, and court cultures served as powerful vehicles for social mobility. At the heart of the study is the elite Morisco Granada Venegas family. Descendants of the Sultans of Nasrid Granada, their Muslim lineage was impossible to conceal. To survive limpieza de sangre laws (blood-purity laws) and avoid King Philip III's Morisco expulsions of 1609-14, they engaged in complex and intense self-fashioning. In each chapter, they reached for honors higher than those they already held, ultimately succeeding in becoming titled nobility. Because of the family's success, their strategies offer rare insight into what "nobility" meant in early modern Spain and how it was constructed. Ultimately, they became Mediterranean elites when they transitioned to life in Genoa in the modern period.

Morisco knights in renaissance Spain is the first English-language monograph tracing the transformations and strategies of the Granada Venegas family.