Propaganda has become such a part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life that we sometimes forget that it is not a modern invention at all, but can be traced back many centuries, even to a time when public opinion barely existed as a notion, when governments did not have to face daily on the television or the radio probing journalists, their critics and their political opponents. The very modern concept of ‘burying bad news’ is not so modern as we might like to think, and even spin doctors spinning the news in artfully favourable ways have their counterparts in early modern Europe.

The expulsion of the moriscos from Spain from 1609 to 1614 is an excellent event from which to examine all of these issues, since official propaganda, burying bad news, and spin-doctoring were all to be found there to varying degrees and with varying degrees of success. The expulsion itself brought forth a multitude of propaganda works, favourable to the government position and in many cases instigated, aided and abetted by members of the government. When things did not go as well as expected and the expulsion, which was meant to last for a few months, a year at most, dragged on year after year with no end in sight, attempts were made to gloss over the (many) failures and emphasize the (few) successes. The day that the expulsion was announced to the world as official government policy was itself a prime example of using the occasion to bury bad news, since the expulsion of the moriscos of Valencia was made public on the very same day, 9 April 1609, that the government of Philip III and the Duke of Lerma signed a humiliating twelve-year peace treaty with the Dutch rebels. The admission of failure in a war that had lasted for some forty years between the best and most experienced army in Europe and an assortment of rebels was intended to be a mere footnote to the grandiose announcement that the long-expected expulsion of the moriscos was about to begin. In the words of John Elliott: