In March 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Spain who refused to convert to Christianity. An estimated 100,000–200,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes, communities, and libraries in one of the largest forced migrations of the medieval world. The expulsion dispersed Sephardic Jewish communities across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Italy, and the Low Countries, carrying with them their cultural traditions, languages, and literary heritage.

The expulsion of the Spanish Jews was a catastrophe for one of medieval Europe's most sophisticated literary cultures: Sephardic poets writing in Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) had produced a tradition of lyric verse, philosophical poetry, and biblical commentary of extraordinary richness. In diaspora, Sephardic poets maintained and transformed their literary traditions, preserving medieval Spanish ballads (romances) in Ladino that became primary sources for nineteenth-century Romantic collectors interested in oral poetry. The expulsion also sent converso intellectuals into a precarious position, their hidden identities a constant source of creative obliquity in Spanish Golden Age literature.