Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  In Zaragoza, the Young Man describes a clandestine meeting of “honored Muslims,” who give him alms to help him undertake the hajj to Mecca. After evening prayer, some of these scholars comment on “how much our religion had fallen into neglect” and ask him to write a tafsira (commentary) on the Koran. The Young Man accepts the commission, closing his account of the meeting with the following invocation:Let no man lose his faith, for Allah created us out of even less, and we are His. Let us hope for his divine mercy, which is even greater than all created things put together, for if, as a result of our sins, we are suffering now, a time will come when, out of his ineffable love, He will grant us the favor of burying the state of the unbelievers, and of restoring the throne of Islam, to the benefit of the Muslims of this peninsula. So let us not cease to call on Him, for he has promised to us more than He has yet given, mighty and powerful as He is.10

  This vocation “to serve Allah and to be of service to every Muslim” was a dangerous calling, since Muslims who actively proselytized Islam could always expect harsher treatment from the Inquisition than those arrested for everyday transgressions. History does not record his fate, but the Young Man’s fervent hope in a resurgent Islam was undoubtedly shared by many Moriscos. Some regarded their oppression in Spain as a test of their faith; others, just as Christians had once done before them, interpreted the triumph of their enemies as a punishment for their immorality and lack of faith. There were also those who took consolation from aljamiado prophetic texts known as jofores, which predicted that Spain’s Muslims would have to endure suffering before they were finally liberated. Some of these prophecies predicted that Turkish or North African armies would invade Spain during propitious years in the astrological calendar, and there were Moriscos who saw confirmation of these predictions in the Turkish military and naval successes during the first half of the century. Others echoed the millenarian predictions found in Christian prophetic texts of the period and foretold that a new Islamic conquest of Spain would be followed by the universal triumph of Islam.

  It is impossible to know how many Moriscos lived these “parallel lives” in the aftermath of their conversions, but not all Spain’s former Muslims were engaging in taqqiya or dreaming of their imminent liberation. There were genuine Muslim converts to Christianity, such as Juan Andrés, a former Valencian alfaqui who converted in 1487 and became a priest, and the Granadan Jesuit Juan Albotodo. There were former members of the Nasrid aristocracy in Granada, such as the Venegas and Zegrí families, who achieved high positions in the Christian administration after the conquest. Some of these nobles acted as intermediaries between Christian and Morisco Granada, such as Francisco Núñez Muley, a former page to Archbishop Talavera, who loyally served the Christian administration yet retained the honorific title Muley (a respectful term generally given to members of the nobility, from the Arabic word maula) as an indication of his continued high status in the Morisco community.

  There were also Granadan Moriscos who rose from relatively humble beginnings to prestigious positions in Christian society, such as Miguel de Luna and Alonso del Castillo, both of whom graduated in medicine from the newly created University of Granada. The son of Morisco converts to Christianity, del Castillo became an Arabic translator, working first for the Granada city council and then the Inquisition. He went on to become the official translator for Philip II and was given the task, together with Miguel de Luna, of cataloguing the collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial palace. Elsewhere in Spain there were Moriscos such as the Zauzala family from Pina del Ebro, in Aragon, whose members served in the local Christian administration over successive generations and accumulated substantial holdings of land and cattle. Such was the wealth of the Zauzalas that when one member of the family was sentenced to death for murder and robbery in 1532, his family offered to feed the entire town “with all it could eat for a year” in exchange for an acquittal from the local seigneur—an offer that was nevertheless turned down.11

  In the city of Ávila, in Castile, there were wealthy Moriscos who enjoyed voting rights on the municipal council and served in the local militia. Further down the social scale, in the Jiloca Valley in lower Aragon, Morisco peasants regularly brought their children to be baptized in church and even called for priests to administer extreme unction to their dying relatives. In Granada in 1550, Christians and Moriscos both turned out to mourn the death of a local saint known as John of God, the founder of a public hospital for the poor, whose patients and volunteer staff included both Old Christians and Moriscos, and one local observer described how “all who came, even the Moriscos, cried and spoke of his great charity.”12 At Málaga, Moriscos danced a zambra to celebrate Charles’s sacking of Tunis—with authorization from the local authorities.

  In May 1539, Charles’s beloved wife, Isabella, died of fever during childbirth, and her putrefying corpse was taken to Granada to be buried in the royal chapel. This was the same queen who had issued a series of repressive anti-Morisco edicts nearly a decade before. But when her cortege arrived in the city, thousands of Moriscos joined the grieving crowds, including three thousand Morisca women, who waved their white almalafas above their heads alongside the colored pennants of the Christian craft guilds and “shrieked and tore at their hair and ripped their cloaks,” according to one astonished Christian observer. We cannot know how many of these Moriscas were secretly practicing Muslims, but their Islamic cultural identity clearly did not conflict with their political loyalty to a Christian sovereign.

  There were other indications from other parts of Spain that Moriscos were able to make a similar distinction. It is tempting to wonder what might have happened had the authorities allowed the more discontented Moriscos to leave the country in the first place, as they had done with the Jews, and pursued a more benign program of evangelization. Would the remainder have constituted a permament ethnic and cultural minority within a Christian state? Or would their religious loyalties—and their culture and traditions—eventually have withered away, as they were already beginning to do in some parts of the country?

  These questions are purely speculative, but they are worth asking, if only to remind ourselves that there were other possible courses of action available to Spain’s rulers than the ones that were actually taken. There was, of course, another alternative, which may seem obvious to a modern world that has become accustomed to the concept of a secular and religiously neutral state based on freedom of conscience as a right of all its citizens. Religious tolerance was not an unknown concept in the sixteenth century. In the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim religious congregations were organized into administrative units known as millets, whose members were allowed religious autonomy and a certain degree of political, civil, and educational jurisdiction over their own communities in an arrangement that parelleled the Koranic dhimma model. Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian-Georgian ecclesiastical communities within the sprawling multireligious and multicultural Ottoman Empire were all incorporated into the millet system. In the Greek city of Salonika, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Muslim communities all had their own separate representatives to mediate with the central government in Constantinople. Throughout the empire, members of all denominations fought in the sultan’s armies. In 1608 a special envoy of the Austrian Hapsburg monarchy passing through Ottoman-controlled Belgrade found a mixed population of Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Orthodox Christians, and even Franciscan friars who celebrated mass in a local church.

  In India, the Mughal emperor Akbar granted similar autonomy to Hindus and Portuguese Christians. Akbar’s commitment to religious pluralism was such that he allowed Jesuit missionaries into India and even permitted them to educate one of his sons. All this was very different from Europe, whose rulers were reluctant to allow freedom of conscience even to Christians with opposing religious views. Yet even in the midst of the fierce struggle between Protestant and Catholic Europe, there were periods of temporary coexistence. In 1562 Catherine de Medici enacted the Edict of Saint-Germain, which bri
efly ended the persecution of the Huguenots in France, before the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day unleashed the first of the French Wars of Religion. In 1598 these wars were brought to an end by the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes by Henry IV, which granted limited civil rights to Huguenots.

  Similar legislation was passed at various times in the sixteenth century by Catholic and Protestant rulers in Germany, Poland, and Transylvania. In 1571 the Austrian Hapsburgs themselves granted a special dispensation to nobles in Lower Austria to worship as Protestants.

  There was also the extraordinary French preacher and theologian Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563), who famously protested the execution of the Spanish theologian, philosopher, and physician Miguel Servetus in Calvinist Geneva on charges of heresy and blasphemy for denying the concept of the Holy Trinity. Servetus’s execution was largely due to the efforts of John Calvin himself, whom Castellio passionately denounced in his pamphlet De haereticis an sint persecuendi (Whether Heretics Should Be Persecuted, 1554), which condemned all such executions and argued that “to burn a man does not defend a doctrine, but slays a man.”13

  It would take many centuries of bloody religious conflict and political and social evolution before this idea was accepted as a permanent principle in Europe. For most European states in the sixteenth century, religious conformity was an instrumentum regni, an “instrument of ruling” that served to legitimize the authority of rulers over their subjects and the projection of power beyond their borders. This principle was firmly embedded in the House of Hapsburg, with its aspirations toward a universal Catholic monarchy, and it was also an integral component of Spanish imperial ideology, which always presented its external conquests as a religious imperative on behalf of the Catholic faith. This convergence between religion and statecraft is crucial to understanding Spain’s rejection of its own more tolerant traditions and its evolution into the society described by Rodrigo Manrique, the son of the Inquisitor General, in a letter to an exiled friend in 1533 that described his country as “a land of envy, pride, and . . . barbarism” in which “no one can possess a smattering of letters without being suspect of heresy, error, and Judaism.”

  Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Spanish rulers regarded religious dissent as a potential threat to their political authority. To a society that saw Spain’s recent triumphs on the international stage as an indication of divine favor, religious purity was essential to ensure Spain’s continuing power and prestige in the outside world. To achieve this objective, its rulers were prepared to dismantle a model of coexistence that had prevailed for centuries and still remained within the living memory of their subjects. Throughout the sixteenth century, Moriscos and Protestants were often prosecuted by the Inquisition for expressing the scandalous belief that “each could be saved according to their own law.” To the Church and the Crown, such views were heretical and dangerous. With the option of freedom excluded, the authorities were faced with the daunting task not only of enforcing outward religious conformity on a Morisco population that had for the most part come unwillingly to Christianity, but also of ensuring that the Moriscos became fully committed Christians de corazon, “in their hearts.”

  By the mid fifteenth century, many Spanish officials were beginning to doubt whether either objective could be achieved. To some extent, the de facto truce between the Moriscos and the Spanish authorities that followed the conversions in Valencia was made possible by Charles’s frequent absences from Spain. But if the emperor was preoccupied with more pressing matters of state, the Moriscos had not been forgotten entirely. In 1555, Charles took the unusual step of abdicating his throne and handing the crown to his son Philip. In his political testament to the new king, Charles instructed Philip to wage unrelenting war against heresy, to support the Inquisition, and to “throw the Moors out of your kingdoms.” Physically ruined by diabetes, gout, insomnia, and his years of campaigning, Charles withdrew from worldly affairs to spend his last days at his monastic retreat in Yuste. In 1558 he died, disillusioned at his failure to unite Christendom. For much of his reign, the confrontation between the Moriscos and the Spanish authorities had been intermittent and relatively low-key. But all this would soon change, when Philip II returned to Spain from Flanders to take up permanent residence in the Hapsburg Spanish kingdoms.

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  Dangerous Times: 1556–1568

  With the coronation of Philip II (1527–1598), Spain entered a turbulent period of history that was to have dramatic consequences for the Moriscos. Unlike his father, Philip was born and brought up in Spain and had already ruled the country as regent on two occasions, and his definitive return in September 1559 signaled a new emphasis by the Hapsburgs on their Spanish possessions. This reorientation coincided with a period of intensifying political and religious crisis in Europe, in which the schism between Protestantism and Catholicism appeared to be permanent and religious fissures were opening up between states and within them. Faced with looming religious conflict and fearful of the potentially seditious impact of Lutheranism inside Spain itself, the Spanish government introduced a range of repressive measures to seal the country off from foreign religious influences, including censorship of foreign books and restrictions on Spanish students studying abroad.

  The same period saw an intensification of Inquisitorial terror. Philip had hardly returned to Spain when he watched the burning of twenty-nine Lutherans in a huge auto-da-fé in Valladolid that followed the discovery of alleged Protestant cells in that city and also in Seville. The “most potente monarch in Christendome” was known to be an enthusiast of such spectacles. A warm and affectionate father, a lover of music, and a connoisseur of Flemish painting, Philip was also a pitiless opponent of heresy who famously informed Pope Pius IV in 1564, “Rather than suffer the slightest thing to prejudice the true religion of God I would lose all my States, I would lose my life a hundred times over if I could, for I am not and will not be a ruler of heretics.”

  Philip’s determination to uphold Catholic religious orthodoxy would lead Spain into a series of debilitating wars against an array of enemies, from Protestant England and Dutch Calvinist rebels to French Huguenots. Where his father had worn himself out on the battlefields of Europe, Philip was a warrior-bureaucrat who fought his wars from behind a desk, but he was no less militant in his defense of Catholicism. Religion was not the only cause of the incessant warfare that marked the reign of the “prudent king,” nor was Spain uniquely responsible for these conflicts, but Spain’s self-appointed role as the blunt instrument of the Counter-Reformation provided a compelling justification for its military campaigns in Europe and beyond.

  These wars also heightened the mood of messianic religious nationalism and xenophobia within Spain’s borders, as its rulers attempted to present Spain as a lone bastion of the pure faith. “Of the whole of today’s world there is no part where our true God is not persecuted and ill-used, save only for this little corner called Spain, where in refuge from the world, He has deigned to seek a welcome for His great mercy’s sake,” wrote Fray Antonio Baltasar Alvarez in 1590.1 The early years of Philip’s reign coincided with the final session of the ecumenical Council of Trent (1545–1563), in which leading Catholic theologians and clergymen from across Europe elaborated a common response to the Protestant challenge. In the course of these complex deliberations, the council issued 156 decrees or “chapters,” which delineated the essential components of Catholic doctrine and ritual, from its sacraments and prayers to its saints, hymns, and feast days. The council’s decrees also included a series of proposals to ensure that these norms were observed, including regular inspections by bishops of their dioceses and closer monitoring by parish priests of the religious observance of their parishioners, such as their attendance at mass, confession, or baptism ceremonies.

  Spanish ecclesiastical delegations played an important role throughout the Council of Trent debates, particularly in the crucial final session in 1562–1563, when the majority of its decrees were
enacted. These churchmen returned to Spain determined to implement the Tridentine (Trent) agenda, which was fully supported by Philip. The intense religious fervor of Counter-Reformation Spain was expressed in many different ways: in the piety and reforming zeal of Saint Theresa, the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, and the mystical visions of El Greco; in the proliferation of new religious orders and flagellant processions; in the holy women known as beatas; and in the towering cathedrals and churches that dominated Spanish towns and cities, with their sumptuous gold retablos (alterpieces) and their lurid paintings of Christ and the saints that fixed the viewer’s attention on blood, wounds, and martyrdom. Philip’s reign also coincided with the high-water mark of Spain’s obsession with purity of blood and purity of faith. As regent in 1546, Philip had opposed the controversial limpieza statute enacted by the archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Siliceo, in his cathedral chapter, which barred entry to prospective applicants with Jewish or Moorish ancestry. Ten years later, however, he ratified it as king. In defending his decision, Philip praised Spain’s reliance on such statutes compared with countries like France, which had failed to ensure that “those of the Generation of Moors and Jews were known and differentiated from the rest of Old Catholic Christians” and had therefore “infected the whole Kingdom with their heresies.”2