The edict issued at Granada on 31 March 1492 gave the Jews of Castile and Aragon until the end of July to accept baptism or leave, forbidding them to take gold, silver or coined money. Many converted; the rest dispersed to Portugal, Navarre, North Africa, Italy and above all the Ottoman Empire, where Bayezid II received them and where the Jewish population of Istanbul and Salonica grew sharply. A substantial minority returned within a few years and were baptised, which is one reason the figures are so hard to pin down. The scale is genuinely disputed: traditional totals of several hundred thousand rest on chroniclers rather than records, and archival work since the 1980s has produced figures around a tenth of those. What is not disputed is that a Jewish communal presence that had existed in Iberia for over a millennium was ended by state order.
Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Jews who would not convert to Christianity to leave Castile and Aragon within four months
Estimates rest on tax rolls of the aljamas and on the accounts of chroniclers, and differ by more than a factor of two. Ladero Quesada and Henry Kamen argue for roughly 80,000; Haim Beinart and older traditions give 200,000 or more. The number is politically freighted because it bears directly on how many left versus how many converted. About 100,000 sits at the lower-middle of the range.
There was no organised killing. Deaths occurred on the roads and at sea, from shipwreck, disease, robbery and the conditions of a forced departure in high summer, and are described in Jewish and Christian narrative sources; no reliable total exists and no modern scholar has proposed one.
The edict of 31 March 1492 ended the legal residence of Jews as such in the Spanish kingdoms and barred them from removing precious metals or coin, a combination of expulsion and confiscation recorded in the text of the edict itself and in the Crown's implementing orders.
Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Morocco