Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  As baptized Christians, the Moriscos were theoretically liable to the same legal and tax status as Old Christians, but such equality was repeatedly contradicted by discriminatory laws and a range of tithes and taxes that applied only to Spain’s former Muslims. Moriscos were often obliged to make special contributions to the upkeep of roads and bridges. In Granada, they paid the tax known as the farda for the upkeep of the kingdom’s coastal defenses. Even after their conversions, they remained barred from certain professions, such as midwifery, medicine, or pharmacology, which were reserved only for Christians. In Valencia, they were not allowed to change residence, on pain of fines or flogging. In Granada, Moriscos could not carry weapons, except for daggers with rounded points, so that they were not able to defend themselves.

  Official discrimination was often accompanied by popular prejudice and hostility. In 1537 a wealthy Granadan Christian named Catalina Hernández bequeathed a large donation in her will for the establishment of a female orphanage in the city, on condition that Morisca orphans were excluded from it. The Christian wife of a Morisco once complained to the Inquisition that “Old Christians don’t want me or my daughter because I have the daughter of a New Christian.” In his anti-Islamic polemic the Antialcorán (Anti-Koran, 1532), the ecclesiastical writer Bernardo Pérez de Chinchon addressed the Moriscos in the following terms:You are for the most part people who do not know how to read or write nor do you know anything of God nor of heaven nor of the earth, but you go around the countryside like beasts in the manner of the Arabs of Barbary who are a barbarous people without law nor king nor peace without fixed dwelling, here one place, tomorrow somewhere else: treacherous and thieving people, prone to the vice of sodomy like all the Moors of Africa.9

  If these attitudes cast doubt on the willingness of Christian society to accept the Moriscos, there was also growing evidence to suggest that many of Spain’s former Muslims were no more enamored of the identities that had been foisted on them. From various parts of Spain, inquisitors and clergymen reported that Moriscos were not attending mass or going to confession; they were not baptizing their children or observing Christian fasts and feast days. When they went to church, they were often disrespectful and irreverent, entering without making the sign of the cross or exhibiting an “honest posture of the body” during prayer. Church officials were particularly scandalized by the behavior of some Morisco congregations during Holy Communion. The concept of transubstantiation and the transformation of wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ was one of the aspects of Catholicism that had always drawn the ire of Muslim religious scholars, and many Moriscos turned their faces away when the Eucharist was raised, pinched their children to make them cry so as to disrupt the solemnity of the sacrament, or threw breadcrumbs—and in one incident, a soiled cloth—at the altar.

  Bad behavior in church was not restricted to the Moriscos. In some parts of rural Spain, Christian peasants took their animals to church with them and spent mass talking, playing dice, and even dancing to the sound of the church organ. But irreverence among Moriscos was always subject to more sinister interpretations than ignorance or rustic backwardness. In 1530 the archbishop of Granada, Gaspar de Avalos, sent a special envoy to report on the status of the Granadan Moriscos to Empress Isabella, who was acting as regent during one of Charles’s absences in North Africa. Avalos provided his envoy with an extensive list of offenses to demonstrate to the queen that “these New Christians are worse in their faith than when they were Moors.” Not only were they continuing to observe the Ramadan fast and giving Muslim names to their children, but they refused to go to confession or attend mass without compulsion, and they were generally disrespectful when they did go “unless there is an Old Christian present whom they fear.”10

  The archbishop urged Isabella to take more vigorous action against a Morisco “nation” that he insisted should be “governed more through fear and not from love.” The empress responded with another tranche of prohibitions banning Moorish clothing, songs, and dances, but these do not appear to have been enforced or obeyed. Avalos’s own attempts to ban the almalafa and Moorish dancing from the town of Guéjar provoked a riot, and he was eventually forced to back down when Captain-General Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, the son of the count of Tendilla who first occupied the post, intervened on the Moriscos’ behalf. The archbishop was also obliged by the captain-general to abandon an attempt to force Moriscos to go to mass by stationing constables on the roads to burn the saddlebags of any Morisco who traveled on Sundays.

  The tolerance shown by the captain-general toward the Granadan Moriscos was even more prevalent among the Christian nobles of Valencia, who continued to encourage their Morisco vassals to “live as Moors” on their estates when churchmen and inquisitors were not present. During his 1544 trial, the disgraced priest Bartolomé de los Angeles described the Moriscos of Valencia as “a disobedient and rebellious people” and claimed that “of forty households . . . only five or six go to mass.”11 Los Angeles blamed this intransigence on their Christian lords, whom he accused of protecting the Moriscos on their estates and impeding the attempts to evangelize them. The Inquisition of Valencia made similar accusations and frequently criticized the seigneurs for impeding the efforts of its officials. One of the most notorious “bad barons” was Sancho de Cardona, the Admiral of Valencia, who was charged by the Inquisition in 1570 with decades of pro-Morisco advocacy.

  At his trial, one witness described how Cardona had told the Moriscos on his estates in 1542 to “fake the outward appearance of Christianity, but remain Moors on the interior” when ordered by a local priest to attend mass. Another claimed that the Moriscos on the admiral’s estates had been allowed to live “as if they were in Fez” and had even been permitted to build a new mosque. Cardona’s protection of his Morisco vassals appears to have been based on something more than economic self-interest. Various witnesses claimed that he rarely went to church or attended confession, and one witness claimed that the admiral once proposed to inform the pope that the Moors of Valencia had been forcibly converted and ask him to allow them to return to their faith.12

  There were also reports of continued adherence to the “sect of Mohammed” in Castile. In 1538 a Morisco named Juan of Burgos was accused by the Toledo Inquisition of “playing and dancing zambras at night and eating couscous” and inviting friends and relatives to his house, where they “sang Moorish songs, speaking in Arabic, they called each other by the names they had when they were Moors, valuing these names more than those they had when they were Christians.”13 In the1540s, the Toledo Inquisition conducted a prolonged investigation in the town of Daimiel, in which a Morisca woman named Mari Gómez confessed under torture to being a “confirmed and persistent Moor.” Inquisitors attempted without success to discover the identity of an anonymous Morisco “prophet” in the town, who reportedly claimed to be able to speak with angels and the dead and proselytized Islam at clandestine meetings. In the same period, the Inquisition investigated reports of Islamic worship in the town of Arévalo, near Segovia, involving a “boy held to be a prophet,” who was never located. In the course of these investigations, a number of Moriscos suspected of giving evidence to the inquisitors were mysteriously murdered.

  The emphasis on persuasion rather than force had always been conditional on the Moriscos’ willingly fulfilling the obligations of their new faith, and incidents like this were cited by hard-liners as proof that sterner methods were required. Repression was never entirely absent during Charles’s reign. Moriscos were routinely fined by priests or secular officials for not attending mass or observing feast days or for calling each other by their Muslim names. They were also increasingly subject to the vigilance of the Inquisition, particularly after the appointment of the ambitious and hard-line Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés in 1546. Devious, paranoid, and determined to nip any expression of Lutheranism in the bud, Valdés presided over a renewed drive against heresy that also affected Spain’s former Muslims.

/>   Few Moriscos were “relaxed to the secular arm” in this period, as inquisitors continued to err on the side of leniency in the punishments imposed upon them and opted for fines, confiscation of goods and property, floggings, and “spiritual penalties” such as obligatory prayers and attendance at confession or special masses. In some cases, the Inquisition waived punishments altogether and pardoned Morisco transgressors. Nevertheless, regional inquisitors were often a law unto themselves, and not all of them were disposed to clemency. In 1535, five Moriscos were burned at the stake in Majorca and another four were convicted and burned in effigy because they could not be found. During the 1540s, 232 Moriscos were paraded in seven autos-da-fé in Zaragoza, including four alfaquis and a former monk who had converted to Islam, who were burned at the stake.

  Moriscos often pleaded ignorance for their religious transgressions, claiming that they had not known what was required of them, and these appeals were sometimes successful, but even when Inquisitorial edicts of grace were conceded, they were not always respected. In 1546 the pope ordered the Aragon Inquisition not to confiscate Morisco goods or property for a period of ten years, but such confiscations still occurred. The Holy Office depended on fines and confiscations for a large part of its income, to the point where Moriscos often suspected that they were being fined in order to pay the salaries of their persecutors. In Valencia and Aragon, however, the local nobility resented punishments that reduced their Morisco vassals and their descendants to destitution, harming their own economic assets.

  In 1556 this conundrum was temporarily resolved when Inquisitor General Valdés conceded a general amnesty to the Moriscos of Aragon for specific offenses. In exchange for a substantial annual payment, the Inquisition agreed not to confiscate Morisco property, and similar agreements were negotiated in Valencia and Granada. Once again, the Moriscos had escaped persecution by paying what amounted to protection money, but such concessions were deceptive. By the mid sixteenth century, the attitude of Spanish officialdom toward the Moriscos was no longer the same as it had been in the immediate aftermath of their conversions. Whereas inquisitors had once been disposed to accept pleas of ignorance as an excuse for Morisco transgressions, they were increasingly inclined to regard their continued intransigence as an obstinate refusal to take advantage of Christian magnanimity.

  The changing attitudes toward la cuestión morisca (the Morisco question) were also related to the growing ferocity of the struggle between Islam and Christendom in the Mediterranean. Throughout the first half of the century, the Ottoman Turks made steady gains in North Africa, establishing direct or indirect control over a number of cities and territories, which threatened the precarious system of garrison fortresses, or presidios, that Spain had established along the Barbary coast. In 1516 the Greek pirate brothers Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa seized control of Algiers, thus beginning the transformation of the city into an autonomous corsair enclave under Turkish protection that was to survive for another three centuries. Following the death of Aruj in 1518 at the hands of Spanish soldiers during the siege of Tlemcen, Hayreddin Barbarossa was appointed kapudan pasha (high admiral) by the Ottoman sultan. This role enabled Barbarossa to construct a powerful fleet that many Christian rulers could envy, which combined the strategic and religious interests of Constantinople in its conflict with Christian Europe with the pursuit of profit on his own account.

  Many coastal towns and villages in Spain and Italy felt the impact of the self-styled General of the Sea, or the king of evil, as he was known in Spain. In the summer of 1534, Barbarossa’s refitted fleet ravaged Italy’s Adriatic coast, sacking towns and villages and carrying away thousands of Christian slaves. In 1543, Barbarossa and a fleet consisting of some thirty thousand sailors were welcomed into the French port of Toulon, where the Valois king of France sealed a temporary alliance with the Turkish sultan. To the disgust of much of Christian Europe, a joint French-Muslim fleet sacked the Hapsburg vassal state of Nice.

  Turkish ascendancy in the Mediterranean prompted calls from Protestants and Catholics for “peace among Christians and war with the infidel.” Following the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, Martin Luther advocated Turkenkrieg (war against the Turks) against an enemy that he regarded as the incarnation of Satan, while successive popes called upon the Holy Roman Emperor to unite Christendom in an anti-Turkish crusade. Charles tried and failed on various occasions to interest other Christian princes in this enterprise, and he increasingly looked to North Africa as an opportunity to strike a decisive blow against the sultan that would enhance his own prestige and remove the corsair threat to Spain.

  Initially Charles attempted to recruit Barbarossa in this enterprise and offered him political control over the whole of North Africa if he converted to Christianity, but this offer received an unambiguous rejection when the envoy who made it had his head cut off. When Barbarossa expelled the Spanish puppet ruler of Tunis, Muley Hassan, in 1534, Charles led a fleet with twenty-five thousand soldiers to recapture the city the following year. The successful Christian assault was followed by an orgy of destruction, in which libraries and mosques were razed to the ground and tens of thousands of Muslims who had already surrendered were massacred in the streets or captured as slaves. On his return to Italy, Charles was feted like a Roman Caesar in triumphal processions in various cities, including one particularly elaborate welcome at Messina designed by the painter Caravaggio, which included a chariot carrying an altar covered with spoils surrounded by six chained Muslim captives.

  The victory at Tunis may have enhanced Charles’s reputation as a crusading Christian prince, but it did nothing to curb the activities of the Barbary corsairs, who continued to maraud the Spanish coast and threaten Spain’s vital trade links with Sicily. In October 1541, Charles overreached himself when he set out to emulate his success in Tunis with an assault on Barbarossa’s fiefdom at Algiers. This huge expedition was undertaken against the advice of his celebrated Genoese admiral, Gian Andrea Doria, and it ended in disaster when more than a hundred fifty ships were sunk in storms while they waited offshore. Some twelve thousand soldiers were drowned, or killed by the local population, and one Turkish chronicler described how the North African beaches “were littered with the bodies of men and horses.” The death of Barbarossa in 1546 was followed by the rise of a Greek corsair named Turgut, or Dragut, as he was known in Christian Europe, who was appointed kapudan pasha in his stead and quickly proved himself an equally formidable enemy of Hapsburg Spain.

  This escalating struggle in the Mediterranean inevitably had consequences for the Moriscos, as Spain’s rulers continued with an erratic and sometimes barely coherent attempt at assimilation, in which long periods of neglect alternated with amnesties, bribes, edicts of grace, and unpredictable bouts of repression. Not only were Moriscos suspected of providing corsair raiders on the Spanish coast with intelligence information, but there were also reports that Turkish successes had emboldened some Moriscos to believe that their liberation was imminent. And by the middle of the century, Spanish officialdom was beginning to conclude that the majority of Spain’s former Muslims were inside Christian society but had yet to become part of it.

  9

  Parallel Lives

  Even in the absence of systematic persecution, the Moriscos often occupied a precarious and increasingly claustrophobic position in the midst of a Christian society that was determined to eliminate all “memory of the Moors” from Spain in the long term. For those unwilling to submit to the new dispensation, armed resistance was not generally an option. Another alternative was to leave the country, but emigration was strictly forbidden, and Moriscos caught attempting it were subject to harsh punishments, from confiscation of their worldly goods to hanging. Despite these risks, a steady stream of Moriscos did manage to escape to Barbary, with help from either corsairs or from their relatives and friends who had already left. But the majority of Spain’s former Muslims remained in their homes and attempted to adapt themselves to their new identities a
s Christians. Many Moriscos availed themselves of the Koranic injunction known as taqiyya, “precaution,” which permits Muslims faced with persecution to outwardly dissimulate when the wider interests of the faith are at stake.

  In 1504, this principle was explicitly applied to Muslim Spain by Ahmad ibn Bu Jumah, the mufti of Oran, in a fatwa issued in response to requests from Spanish Muslims for religious guidance, which exhorted the Moriscos to “hold fast to their religion, just as somebody might clutch to himself a burning ember.” Bu Jumah was clearly aware of the repression to which the Moriscos were being subjected, and he advised them to remain steadfast in their faith by maintaining a rigid barrier between their external appearance and behavior and their true thoughts and feelings. If they were forced to recite Christian prayers or receive the sacraments, they should inwardly reject them and silently proclaim the name of Muhammad. If they had to eat proscribed foods such as pork, Bu Jumah told them to “eat it, but in your heart reject it.” If they were unable to perform their ritual ablutions, they could still purify themselves before prayer by “wiping their hands clean on a wall” or “plunging into the sea.” If they were unable to perform their daily prayers, Bu Jumah advised them to pray at night instead.1