Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Aguilar’s deputy, the Count of Ureña, was wounded in the battle but managed to escape with his surviving troops to inform the stunned court of the death of one of Spain’s most celebrated soldiers and the near annihilation of the expedition. Ferdinand now prepared to conduct a war of extermination in the Sierra Bermeja, but the rebels themselves were so unnerved by the scale of their own victory that they sued for peace. Once again, the king showed magnanimity and allowed them to choose between exile and baptism, declaring that “If your horse trips up, you don’t seize your sword and kill him, first you give him a slap on his haunches and place a hood over his head; my view and that of the Queen is that these Moors be baptized. And if they don’t become Christians, their children and grandchildren will.”1

  In fact the alternative of baptism or exile was not always the clear-cut choice that it appeared to be. Few Muslims were able to pay the fee of ten gold doblas that Ferdinand exacted in exchange for providing transportation to North Africa, and the imposition of such conditions suggests that the Catholic Monarchs still preferred even unreliable or insincere converts to a depopulated kingdom. In July 1501, the Catholic Monarchs returned to the Alhambra, where Cisneros developed a fever and became seriously ill, to the point where the king and queen feared for their lives. Ironically, his life was saved thanks to the intervention of a Muslim noblewoman, who brought an eighty-year-old female Moorish herbalist to see him. Against the wishes of his Christian doctors, Cisneros was treated with “ointments and herbs” and made a rapid recovery. He went on to become Inquisitor General and wage war against the infidel beyond the borders of Spain. In 1506 he helped organize a military expedition to Oran in North Africa, and three years later personally led a second assault on the city, returning to the University of Alcalá de Henares, which he had founded, like a Roman caesar, accompanied by a procession of Moorish prisoners and camels laden with war booty. He died in 1517 as regent of Castile, bringing to an end an extraordinary career that had taken him from his rustic hermitage near Toledo to the summit of political power.

  By the end of 1501, virtually the entire Muslim population of Granada had become nuevamente convertidos, “newly converted,” or nuevos cristianos de moros , literally “New Christians from Moors.” In two decades, Granada had undergone the trauma of war and conquest, followed by a bloody rebellion and the mass conversion of its population to Christianity. In the early years of the new century, an anonymous Castilian Muslim author, known to history only as the Mancebo (Young Man) of Arévalo, visited Granada, where he was introduced to a converted Muslim noble named Yuce Venegas.

  The Young Man stayed with Venegas and his daughter on their rich estates on the outskirts of Granada. On the third day of his visit, he was invited by his host to tour his extensive orchards, where Venegas began to talk movingly of the “things of Granada.” The story that he told was one of great personal loss, in which three of his sons had been killed “defending their religion,” followed by the deaths of his wife and three daughters, leaving only a single daughter “as consolation.” All this was only one episode in the collective tragedy that Venegas described to his guest:

  In my opinion nobody ever wept over such a misfortune as that of the sons of Granada. Do not doubt what I say, because I am one myself, and an eyewitness, for with my own eyes I saw all the noble ladies, widows and married, subjected to mockery, and I saw more than three hundred maidens sold at public auction; I will tell you no more, it is more than I can bear.... Son, I do not weep for the past, for to it there is no return. But I weep for what you will see in your own lifetime, and what you can expect in this land, in this Peninsula of Spain. May it please God, because of the nobility of our beloved Koran, that what I have to say be proved unfounded, and that it does not turn out as I see it, but even so our religion will suffer. What will people say? Where has our prayer gone to? What has happened to the religion of our forefathers? . . . If after such a short space of time it appears that we are having to struggle to survive, what will people do when the end of the season is upon us? If parents now make little of the religion, how are their great-great-grandchildren to exalt it? If the King of the Conquest does not keep his word, what are we to expect from his successors?2

  These questions were also being asked in the Muslim world outside Spain. In 1501 the Catholic Monarchs became so concerned at reports that the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt had begun to persecute and harass Coptic Christians and Christian pilgrims, in retaliation for the conversions in Granada, that they dispatched Peter Martyr of Anghieri as a special envoy to Egypt in order to deny reports of Spanish cruelty and betrayal. In an account of his journey, which was steeped in contempt for the Muslims he encountered in Egypt, whom he described as “a barbarous and savage race of men . . . devoid of any virtues,” the faithful Italian scholar informed his sovereigns that the Sultan initially refused to receive him because of “the Jewish and Moorish heretics expelled from your kingdoms, of whom many have found refuge in these regions.” 3 The “mendacious and fraudulent accusations” spread by these exiles, Martyr claimed, had convinced the Sultan that his sovereigns were “violent and perjuring tyrants.” Eventually he was granted an audience with the Mameluke ruler, in which he claimed that the Granada conversions had not been achieved by coercion, arguing that Ferdinand and Isabella had acted magnanimously by sparing the lives of rebels who had carried out “massacres” against Spanish soldiers. Martyr insisted that the Christianized Muslims of Granada were not oppressed victims but “cowards” who had abandoned their faith, while the Jews were dismissed as a “morbid, pestilential and contagious herd.”

  These arguments appeared to convince the Sultan, who acceded to Martyr’s requests to grant access to Christian temples in the Holy Land and to end the harassment of Christian pilgrims. In the same period, an anonymous Muslim from Granada contradicted Martyr’s version of events in an unusual appeal to the Ottoman sultan Bayazid in the form of a classical Arabic qasida poem, which insisted that it was “the fear of death and of being burned that made us convert” and condemned the violation of the Capitulations as “an infamous and shameful act, prohibited in every region” that was “particularly shameful in a king.”4 The Granadan Muslim asked the sultan to intercede with the pope in order to seek redress for this “betrayal,” but there is no evidence that this unlikely course of action was taken. Nor is it known whether Bayazid agreed to ask the Catholic Monarchs to allow the Muslims of Granada to emigrate to North Africa “without power, but with religion.”

  Within Spain itself, few Christians questioned the methods with which the miraculous conversion of more than two hundred thousand infidels had been achieved. The Catholic Monarchs regarded the conversions as one of their greatest achievements, and a bas relief of the baptisms in Granada was later carved in the altar in the royal chapel containing their mausoleum, alongside Boabdil’s surrender. The transformation of Granada was similarly acclaimed by the Church hierarchy. Only Talavera expressed doubts that these converts would remain constant in their faith unless they were provided with religious instruction, and established a small school in the Albaicín for Morisco boys to ensure that at least some of the new converts received a Christian education.

  Granada’s first archbishop was not able to take these initiatives further. In 1501 he fell foul of the corrupt Córdoban inquisitor Diego Rodríguez Lucero, known as el tenebroso, “the bringer of darkness,” who accused Talavera of allowing “secret synagogues.” Though he was eventually acquitted of all these charges, he died shortly afterward. Some historians have seen Talavera as a more benevolent alternative to the fanaticism of Cisneros, whose methods might have produced a more positive outcome had they been pursued more diligently.5 But the divergence between the two men was not as wide as it sometimes appeared. If Cisneros was more impatient and ruthless, he may well have been more realistic than Talavera in his recognition that the Muslims of Granada would never convert to Christianity in significant numbers without coercion. But ultimately the objectives
of both clerics converged. In an undated letter written to his converts in the Albaicín, Talavera gave a detailed list of instructions on the behavior expected of Christians, which informed them:

  That your way of life may not be a source of scandal to those who are Christians by birth, and lest they think you still bear the sect of Mohammed in your hearts, it is needful that you should conform in all things and for all things to the good and honorable way of life of good and honorable Christian men and women in your dress, the style of your shoes, the custom of shaving, in eating and keeping table and preparing meat the way it is commonly prepared, and especially and more than especially in your speech, forgetting as far as you can the Arabic tongue, and making yourselves forget it, and never letting it be spoken in your homes.6

  These instructions were almost certainly issued after Cisneros’s interventions, and Talavera may have intended them to protect his Muslim flock from the attention of the Inquisition. But Cisneros could easily have delivered the same advice himself. In October 1501, the Catholic Monarchs ordered the destruction of all Islamic books and manuscripts in a former emirate on pain of death or confiscation of property. This decision has often been attributed to Cisneros, and he would certainly have approved it, but unlike Talavera, the archbishop of Toledo does not appear to have been in Granada when thousands of Korans and other “books of the Mahometan impiety” were burned in a public bonfire in the city. Many of these books were beautifully ornate Arabic manuscripts, which some of the Muslim spectators begged to be spared from the flames. But only a few medical and philosophical tracts were saved and eventually found their way into the library of Cisneros’s university at Alcalá. As an act of cultural barbarism, the bonfire at Granada ranks with the burning of the Mayan codices in 1562 ordered by the bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa Calderón. In both cases, the collaboration of a conquered people in the destruction of its cultural heritage was a symbolic act of submission that was intended to pave the way for their acceptance of the culture and religion of their conquerors.

  Both episodes combined religious intolerance with a concept of statecraft that was widely understood and accepted at the time. In The Prince, Machiavelli argued that conquered states were easier to hold when their subjugated populations adopted the “language, customs and laws” of the conqueror. This principle was practiced by imperial Spain in all its conquered territories, and Granada was no exception. And having transformed some three hundred thousand Muslims into “New Christians” virtually overnight, Ferdinand and Isabella were now forced to extend the same dismal process to the rest of Spain.

  6

  Faith Triumphant

  In imposing Catholicism on the Muslims of Granada, the Catholic Monarchs faced a dilemma like the one that had preoccupied their predecessors following the creation of the Jewish “New Christians” in 1391–1412. It was one thing to “convert” one section of the population, but how long could these Muslims remain Christians if they continued to mingle with their former co-religionists? At first Ferdinand and Isabella attempted to solve the problem by banning any contact between the new converts in Granada and the Muslims outside the kingdom, but this quarantine was impossible to enforce. The result was an anomalous situation that the Flemish diplomat Antoine Lalaing, the Count of Hoogstraten, depicted in his account of the visit of Philip the Fair, Isabella and Ferdinand’s Hapsburg son-in-law, to Spain in 1501.

  In May the Burgundian archduke arrived in Toledo to meet his in-laws, where Lalaing relates that he repeatedly expressed his amazement at the “multitude of white Moors who lived in the Spains” and asked why their presence was tolerated. Informed of the annual tributes that the Muslims paid to the Crown, Philip warned that “some day they could do more harm to the kingdom than their tribute was worth, as they had done in previous times.” According to Lalaing, “The Archduke repeated these words so often that they reached the ears of the Queen,” who, “knowing that what he said was true” and to please her future son-in-law, promised that all the Moors in her kingdoms would be converted to Christianity by the end of the year.1

  These criticisms would not have pleased Isabella, whose loathing of the Moors was not mitigated by her husband’s pragmatism. But it is likely that she had already resolved on the course of action that led her to sign a pragmática (royal decree) in July that year, which ordered all Muslims in the Kingdom of Castile and León to receive baptism or leave the country. The pragmatic was not publicized until February of the following year, and it constituted an even more explicit rejection of the medieval past than the recent events in Granada. There the Catholic Monarchs had used the charge of sedition as a pretext for mass conversion, but such accusations could hardly be leveled at the moros de paz (Moors of peace) of Castile, who had behaved as loyal subjects of the Crown ever since the failed rebellions of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, Isabella declared her responsibility to “help conserve the holy work” begun in Granada and her determination to remove “any cause or possibility by which the newly converted could be subverted or separated from our faith.”

  Ostensibly, the Muslims of Castile were presented with the same alternatives offered to the Jews—they could remain in Spain and become Christians, or they could remain Muslims and leave Spain by the end of April. But the conditions offered by the Crown were heavily tilted in favor of the former option. Prospective emigrants were not allowed take gold or silver with them, and various essential goods were similarly embargoed. They were forbidden to travel overland through Aragon, to make sure they wouldn’t settle there; their ports of embarkation were limited to the Atlantic Bay of Biscay, and they were not allowed to go to any Muslim country with which Castile was at war, thus eliminating most of the Muslim world. Last but not least, they were not allowed to take any male children with them under the age of fourteen or girls under the age of twelve, who were to be given to Castilian families to be brought up as Christians.

  These restrictions were hardly likely to facilitate mass emigration, and were probably intended to ensure that Muslims did not leave, thereby enabling Isabella to fulfill her religious obligations while maintaining a valuable labor force and source of revenue. It is not known how many Muslims accepted these conditions, but it is unlikely to have been more than a small proportion. Across Castile, mass conversions were turned into civic celebrations, as mosques were reconsecrated or earmarked for demolition, and entire Muslim families were publicly baptized and took Christian names before joyous Christian crowds. In the ancient city of Ávila, the collective baptism of one of the oldest Mudejar communities in Spain was celebrated with bullfights and festivities.

  On November 26, 1504, Isabella died, exhorting her husband from her deathbed to “wage war unremittingly against the Moors” in North Africa. Two years later, the death of her son-in-law Philip the Fair ushered in a dynastic crisis in Castile, as the throne passed into the hands of his mentally disturbed widow Joanna the Mad, who proved unequal to the task. In the absence of an eligible Castilian contender, Ferdinand briefly became acting king while the inheritance was decided. His death in 1516 was followed by Cisneros’s brief regency until Charles of Ghent, the eldest son of Joanna and Philip came of age. In 1517, the interregnum came to an end when the teenage grandson of the Catholic Monarchs arrived in Spain for the first time to be crowned Charles I of Castile and Aragon, the first of the Spanish Hapsburgs. By that time, a new category had been added to Spain’s bewildering array of cultural and religious identities, as the Muslim converts of Castile and Granada became known as Moriscos—a pejorative adaptation of the adjective morisco (“Moorish”), meaning “little Moor” or “half-Moor,” that would soon became the standard reference to all Spain’s former Muslims.

  With the dynastic transition to the House of Hapsburg, Spain acquired the Burgundian/Hapsburg possessions in the Low Countries and Germany and a new role in the heart of western Europe. In 1519 the new king was elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and became the secular head of Christendom. Two years later, Cort�
�s completed his audacious subjugation of Aztec Mexico that began the transformation of Saint James, the iconic saint of the Reconquista, from Santiago Matamoros (the Moorslayer) into Santiago Mataindios (the Indian slayer) as the conquistadors invoked his name during the conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. The conquest of New Spain provided a springboard for further acquisitions in the Americas that transformed Charles into one of the most powerful rulers in history, and the head of a vast transnational Christian empire spanning three continents. These stupendous powers were not without limitations. Charles’s expensive election campaign to become Holy Roman emperor had placed him heavily in debt to the Flemish and German bankers who had financed his bid, and he continued to be plagued by financial problems throughout his reign. Between 1520 and 1522, civil war returned to Castile in the form of the Comunero rebellion—an upheaval that was partly a protest against what was seen as the imposition of a “foreign” Hapsburg king on Castile. Though Charles eventually emerged victorious from this confrontation, he faced other challenges, both inside and outside Spain. In 1517 Martin Luther pinned his famous theses to the castle church in Wittenburg, which became the ideological basis for the Protestant Reformation and ushered in a new era of religious and political conflict across Europe.

  The advent of Lutheranism coincided with a renewed threat to central Europe from the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, as a Turkish advance along the Danube River conquered the Balkans and Hungary, and culminated in the abortive siege of Vienna in 1529. Further Turkish conquests in Rhodes, North Africa, and Egypt placed Hapsburg Spain at the center of a fierce struggle in the Mediterranean that would dominate much of the coming century.