At the height of the Falklands War, at a moment in which success for either side hung in the balance, the Argentinean Air Force announced that they had brought down two British Harrier jump jets. For several hours panic reigned in London. Being so far away from the action, it was not easy to ascertain the truth, until the daily nine o'clock evening news, when the BBC correspondent Brian Hanrahan reported from the deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, from where the Harrier jet fighters had taken off two hours earlier. Barred from giving away any details of the raid, he made the following statement: ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’ None of the fighters was missing; all had returned.

I mention this because it contains an excellent lesson for any historian. One part of the equation is not enough: ‘I counted them all out’. Both parts are: ‘and I counted them all back.’ For too long only the first part of this now legendary broadcast has been applied to the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, not the second. In his celebrated Géografie de l'Espagne morisque, Henri Lapeyre dedicated many pages to the number of Moriscos who were expelled from their homeland and included detailed lists of those who had been embarked from all the Spanish ports along the Mediterranean, yet he spent very few pages on those who returned. And yet he must have seen the numerous papers and letters kept in Simancas which continuously talked about the return of Moriscos to Spain, a return that for some started immediately after the expulsions began.