The Sultan had already agreed to take some Jews into his empire from Spain in 1470 (although the city’s resident Jewish community had in large part been enslaved or deported at the time of conquest), but now there was mass immigration. When the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I took Granada in al-Andalus, Muslims and Jews were killed or expelled. At the beginning of the sixteenth century many, perhaps 30,000, came directly to Istanbul.4 There were now more than 8,070 Jewish households in what was once Constantine’s capital. It was said that Sultan Bayezid II had recognised the
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Lewis (1985), 122. Restrictions on non-Muslims: İnalcık (1990),
