Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Even before the proclamation of Charles’s edict, many Muslims had begun to leave Valencia for North Africa. Others began to prepare for armed resistance. As in Granada, the more recalcitrant Valencian Muslims withdrew into the more inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Others sealed themselves up in their towns and villages in expressions of defiance that were often short-lived. In the village of María, would-be rebels convinced themselves that a mythical Moorish warrior named Altafimi would come on a green horse to save them and promptly surrendered when he failed to appear. In other places, resistance was more tenacious. At the town of Benaguacil, ten miles inland from Valencia, the local Muslims expelled the Christians from the city in January and sealed themselves off behind their fortified walls, declaring their intention to “save their law.”8

  A Christian army was sent to the town from the capital with instructions from Charles to persuade the population to surrender in the first instance. When the leaders of the Benaguacil “parliament” insisted on safe passage for North Africa, this request was refused, and a siege began, which ended two months later with an artillery bombardment of the town walls. Following their surrender, some of the town’s residents claimed that they had been forced to rebel against their will by their religious leaders. Whether or not these claims were an attempt to evade punishment, the rebels were treated leniently, but such magnanimity was not always present elsewhere. The main stronghold of the rebellion was the Sierra de Espadán mountains in the north of Valencia, where thousands of Muslims had taken refuge with their families rather than accept their conversion. In this rugged and inhospitable landscape, the rebels dug trenches and built makeshift huts and shelters, stockpiling boulders and millstones with protruding logs to roll down on potential attackers. Supplied with food from sympathetic local villages, these rebels elected their own king, whom they named al-Mansur, the Victorious, after one of the most famous rulers of Muslim Córdoba.

  Many of the rebels were vassals of the Duke of Segorbe, one of the most powerful Christian lords in Valencia, who was ordered by Germaine de Foix to lead an expedition against them in the spring of 1526. To the disgust of the authorities and the Valencian populace, Segorbe’s forces were repulsed with heavy losses, prompting dark rumors that the duke was more concerned with preserving his economic assets than he was with asserting the king’s authority. In July 1526, Muslim raiders from the Espadán attacked the Christian village of Chilches and ransacked the local church, reportedly making off with communion wafers. The reasons for this sacrilegious provocation are unclear, though the attackers may have been retaliating for the assaults on their own mosques during the Germanías revolt. In any case, a wave of vengeful indignation spread across Christian Valencia, as church doors were shut and altars draped with black cloth in mourning at this blasphemous outrage.

  The subjugation of the rebellion now acquired the character of a crusade, as the papal legate in Valencia granted indulgences to all those who fought against the infidels. A new seigneurial army of three thousand was rapidly mobilized, supported by four thousand German mercenaries who were in transit through Barcelona. These soldiers advanced on the Espadán with much pomp and spectacle “as if fiery ovens had been lit in their hearts,” according to the Valencian historian Gaspar Escolano, bearing the city of Valencia’s official standard and accompanied by its praetorian guard, the Centenar, in their white silk shirts emblazoned with the cross of Saint George.9 On September 19, these forces attacked the rebel encampment. Armed with stones, slingshots, and crossbows, the Muslims killed seventy-two Christians, but they paid a terrible price for their defiance, as five thousand prisoners were slaughtered or enslaved by Charles’s German mercenaries.

  This massacre ended the resistance in Valencia. Though some Muslims escaped to North Africa, the majority joined the ranks of the Newly Converted from Moors. As in Granada, mass baptisms were accompanied by the consecration of mosques into churches and public burnings of the Koran and other Arabic manuscripts. The same pattern unfolded in the kingdom of Aragon and in Catalonia. By the end of 1526, the would-be World Emperor had managed to pull off the seemingly impossible task of eradicating the last outpost of Islam from Spain, while simultaneously retaining the labor force on whom the prosperity of his Aragonese kingdoms depended.

  It was in many ways a less than signal triumph, in which conversions enacted in the midst of a seditious revolt had been granted official approval through questionable theology and outright opportunism. This outcome was not regarded with universal favor within Christian society. Bray de Reminjo, a Muslim alfaqui from the Aragonese village of Cadrete, near Zaragoza, later described the reaction of a Christian friend, a Carmelite friar named Fray Esteban Martel, to the news “that we had been sentenced to become Christians by force.” Summoned to his friend’s house from his mosque in Cadrete, Reminjo was served a lunch of pomegranates, Valencian conserve, and roast meat. “After we had eaten,” the alfaqui later recalled, “we entered the study of his father’s house, and with tears in his eyes he said to me: ‘Bray, Sir, what do you think of all this upheaval, and of the un-Christian way in which you are being used? For my part, I say, and it grieves my heart and soul to do so, that they have done you a great wrong.’” According to Reminjo:This friend was so moved by compassion for us that he never ceased to argue before prelates and councils against all those who had given their consent to any such thing and to inveigh against them. Together with many others he issued a summons to protest and to argue strenuously against His Majesty and his ministers. He would have done so to some effect if he had not died within two months. He charged me to pray for him if he should die, for when I visited him he was sick, and I wept when he died, for he was a loyal friend.10

  The touching tribute of this former alfaqui to a Christian friar he called “a great friend of the Moors of this kingdom” is another reminder of the more positive relationships between Christians and Muslims that had once been possible under the old order. Other Christians were less well-disposed toward the New Converts and regarded their continued presence in Valencia on the basis of insincere conversions as dangerous and prejudicial to Christian society. Some Christians criticized the moratorium granted to the Valencian Muslim delegation at Madrid, though the details of these agreements were never made public, and blamed Charles’s Flemish and Italian advisers for accepting it. According to one Christian legend, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Aragonese town of Taubet began sweating in protest at the “false baptisms” in Valencia, creating enough drops to fill a glass. But if some Spaniards were not pleased with these arrangements, Spain’s rulers could nevertheless take some satisfaction from the fact that Islam had ostensibly been removed from the surface of Spanish society. For the first time since the fall of the Visigoths, the call to prayer had fallen silent across Spain, and it would not be heard again for some time.

  Part II

  One Flock, One Shepherd

  We are forced to worship with them in their Christian rites unclean To adore their painted idols, mockery of the Great Unseen. No one dares to make remonstrance, no one dares to speak a word: Who can tell the anguish wrote upon us, the Faithful of the Lord?

  —Muhammad bin Daud, Morisco ballad, 1568

  8

  A “House Full of Snakes and Scorpions”

  Assimilation is a concept that can embrace a wide range of methods and meanings. It can refer to a two-way relationship in which the integration of ethnic or racial minorities is negotiated, rather than imposed, on the basis of mutual equality and respect for difference. But it can also describe a top-down process, in which a dominant majority demands the complete eradication of the cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics of minorities that it regards as inherently inferior and whose separate existence is regarded as incompatible with its own. In sixteenth-century Spain, assimilation belonged firmly to the second category. To Christian society, the conversion of its Jewish and Muslim minorities required not merely the complete abandonment of their religious beliefs
and forms of worship, but the disappearance of everything that distinguished them from Christians.

  As far as these ultimate objectives were concerned, Spain’s rulers were more or less unanimous, but there was nevertheless a wide spectrum of moderate and extremist opinion on how best to pursue them, which ranged from persuasion, evangelization, and positive inducements to coercion and persecution. Neither Charles nor his advisers had any illusions about the commitment of the Moriscos to their new faith, but they nevertheless saw the removal of the outward trappings of Islam as an essential first step to the permanent transformation of Spain’s former Muslims into “good and faithful Christians.” In the immediate aftermath of the tumultuous events in Valencia, both the ecclesiastical and secular authorities were inclined toward a more gradualist model of assimilation. This attitude was enshrined in the 1526 agreements negotiated between Charles and the Muslim delegations at Madrid and Granada, which spared the Moriscos the “full rigor” of the Inquisition on condition that they voluntarily complied with their new religious obligations.

  The exact conditions of this grace period were never entirely clear to the parties involved and were subject to conflicting interpretations on both sides. In a letter to the Valencia Inquisition in 1528, Inquisitor General Alfonso de Manrique denied that a moratorium had been placed on the Inquisition’s activities and condemned “badly informed persons” for spreading rumors that the Moriscos had been given “license to live like Moors for forty years.”1 In practice, Manrique and his successors generally accepted a policy of leniency, but the Inquisitor General was correct that the grace period was not intended as a reversion to the Mudejar status quo.

  These agreements were seen very differently by the Moriscos themselves, many of whom interpreted the absence of repression as a permanent dispensation rather than a temporary concession. Others may never have heard of the grace period or the negotiations that prompted it, but continued to “live as Moors” after their conversion because they had not wanted to become Christians in the first place. Many Valencian Moriscos were encouraged to “become Moors” again by their Christian lords and assumed that they would be protected by them. Over the next four decades, the incompatibility of these expectations would become increasingly apparent. Compared with the dramatic events that had brought the Moriscos into Christianity, it was a period of relative calm and inaction, but the absence of overt confrontation was to prove deceptive.

  To some extent, the grace period was a recognition of the inadequacies of the initial conversion process. In a letter to the pope in December 1526, Charles admitted that the conversion of Valencia’s Muslims “was not completely voluntary and since then, they have not been indoctrinated, instructed and taught in Our Holy Catholic Faith.” The emperor’s suggestion that subsequent evangelization might compensate for the inadequacies of the Valencia conversions contained a strong element of wishful thinking, but such aspirations were nevertheless taken seriously at the upper levels of church and state. In theory, all Spain’s former Muslims were now subject to the attentions of the Inquisition, yet even the Inquisition Suprema (Supreme Council) recognized that it was unreasonable and even counterproductive to punish Moriscos for failing to meet their religious obligations when many of them had no idea what their new faith required of them.

  Many Moriscos lacked even the most elementary knowledge of Catholicism ; they could not recite its basic prayers; they did not understand the sacraments and rituals; they were unfamiliar with its religious calendar. Often they had no one to teach or instruct them. In Granada, the new ecclesiastical bureaucracy had established a parish infrastructure even in the remoter regions of the kingdom by the time Charles came to the throne, but its effectiveness was limited by a poorly motivated lower clergy that was more concerned with fleecing its Morisco parishioners than ensuring their spiritual salvation.

  The situation was not much better in Valencia and Aragon. In the more remote lugares de moriscos (Morisco places) Moriscos often went for months without ever seeing a priest or a representative of the Church after their initial baptisms. In 1532 Pope Clement VII instructed Cardinal Manrique to establish a parish infrastructure for the Valencian Moriscos. Yet two more years passed before Manrique dispatched an ecclesiastical commission to Valencia to begin this process. Their recommendations eventually led to the establishment of 120 new parishes throughout the kingdom, but these new parishes were starved of funds and often existed in name only. They were generally expected to finance themselves from local rents and church tithes, but because most Morisco parishes were poor, they were rarely able to generate enough income to maintain a permanent resident priest or cover the costs of converting mosques into churches and refurbishing them.

  As in Granada, many of these priests attempted to mitigate their own poverty at the expense of their parishioners. Others preferred to avoid Morisco Valencia altogether and left their parishes to their own devices. In 1547, an ecclesiastical commission found that many priests in Morisco Valencia had abandoned their posts and that others had embezzled the funds that were supposed to finance their parishes. The absence of qualified or motivated personnel was such that, in 1542, the Valencian Church was obliged to reinstate a priest named Bartolomé de los Angeles, who had already been punished by the Inquisition for extorting money from his Morisco parishioners. Los Angeles was given personal responsibility for 128 Morisco towns and villages—an absurdly high number even for a more committed cleric, and within two years he was arrested for extortion a second time. Los Angeles was one of the few priests in Valencia who spoke Arabic. The majority of the Valencian clergy spoke no Arabic at all and preached to their apathetic and sometimes hostile Morisco congregations in a language that few of their congregants understood—an experience that was undoubtedly as uninspiring for the priests as it was for their listeners.2

  The attempts to provide religious education were equally inadequate. The Manrique Commission had recommended the establishment of a wide network of schools to teach Morisco children. More than a decade later, the only institution providing religious education to Morisco children in Valencia was a private school established on the estates of the Duke of Gandía by the pious Jesuit priest Saint Francisco de Borgia, which had places for twelve Morisco pupils out of a total of eighteen.3 The situation was not much better in Granada. In 1559 the Jesuits established a catechism school in the Albaicín district, where pupils were taught to read and write in Castilian and received religious instruction from a dedicated staff of twelve Jesuit fathers that included a Granadan Muslim convert named Juan de Albotodo. Some five hundred boys lived the demanding ascetic routines of the Albaicín colegio, waking before dawn for mass, followed by prayers, rosary, catechism, and a lunch of a bread roll, but within a few years, most Moriscos had dropped out and the school was receiving most of its intake from Old Christian families.4

  This lack of enthusiasm was not universal. If some Moriscos were not interested in sending their children to Christian schools or receiving religious instruction, others asked for the authorities to provide such schools and send them priests. There is no doubt that many Moriscos had not wanted to become Christians in the first place and resented the faith that had been imposed upon them, but the slow pace of evangelization was not entirely due to Morisco intransigence. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Church hierarchy continually reiterated the need to provide the Moriscos with religious instruction, without providing the human and financial resources that might have given these efforts a chance of success. The Morisco parishes rarely attracted clergymen with the same level of commitment found among some of Spain’s missionaries overseas.

  Not all priests in Morisco parishes were corrupt or poorly motivated “idiots,” as one Spanish clergyman described his colleagues in Valencia, but too many fell short of the standards required or failed to receive the necessary institutional support that might have motivated them. This discrepancy did not go unnoticed. “I do not know why it is that we are so blind . . . that we go off to
convert the infidels of Japan, China, and other remote parts,” wrote one anonymous Christian writer during the 1570s, “rather as if someone had his house full of snakes and scorpions yet took no care to clean it, but went to hunt for lions or ostriches in Africa.”5

  The same writer pointed out that “It is impossible for us to convert the Moriscos without soothing them first and removing the fear, hatred, and enmity that they have toward Christianity.” Other clerics made similar observations, yet no systematic and coherent attempt was made to realize these objectives. Why did these calls go unheeded? Part of the explanation lies in the institutional weaknesses of the Church itself, which was often barely able to meet the pastoral needs of the Old Christian population, particularly in rural Spain. “It would be useful to have devoted and zealous preachers who wander through the archdiocese and win souls; but where shall we find them?” asked the church reformer Juan de Ávila of the archbishop of Granada in 1547.6 This absence was equally notable in Valencia. Even when the Church hierarchy tried to prevent the exploitative treatment of the Moriscos by parish priests and the lower clergy, these initiatives were rarely followed through and often became snagged in a cumbersome ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

  Assimilation was also pursued through other means. Some local authorities tried to promote mixed marriages between Old Christians and Moriscos through tax exemptions or other financial incentives, and such marriages did take place, but their number was not significant enough to break down the ethnic divide between the two communities.7 There were also attempts to force Moriscos to live in Old Christian neighborhoods and vice versa. The re-incorporation of segregated Muslim ghettos into Christian towns was a complex process that involved the re-negotiation of long-standing agreements regarding rents and ownership, and this process was sometimes handled with an arrogant disregard for Muslim sensibilities. In some cases, the Moriscos themselves were required to finance the demolition of their own religious buildings and ghetto walls.8 Nor did the removal of the physical barrier of the ghetto walls necessarily lead to greater integration. Many Moriscos remained reluctant to leave the neighborhoods where they had spent their lives, or they were too poor to afford the higher rents elsewhere, while Christians were not keen to live in areas that were generally regarded as “the vilest in the city.”