Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  This official approval paved the way for a spate of blood-purity statutes enacted in universities, cathedrals, and military orders. It was a period in which ordinary Christians could boast, like Sancho Panza, that their blood was “free of any admixture of Jew or Moor,” while nobles came to dread the appearance of their names in the “Green Books,” which purported to reveal members of the Castilian nobility who carried the “stain” of Jewish or Moorish blood in their ancestry. Philip’s commitment to religious purity was such that he refused to allow French or Morisco workers to participate in his pet project, the Escorial palace-monastery, despite the renowned prowess of the latter as craftsmen and builders. This somber “eighth wonder of the world” was intended as a monument to the Hapsburg monarchy, but it also symbolized the image of Spain that Philip wished to project to the world: an austere and indestructible fortress of the pure faith. It was an image that did not always reflect the reality of Spanish society, and nowhere was this discrepancy more glaring than in the case of Spain’s former Muslims.

  In the decade that followed Philip’s coronation, Spanish foreign policy was dominated by the savage confrontation between the Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean, and from the mid sixteenth century onward, it was a confrontation that appeared to be turning decisively in favor of Constantinople. In 1551, a Turkish expeditionary force expelled the Knights of Malta from Tripoli. Four years later, Saleh Reis, the beylerbey (governor-general) of Algiers seized the important Spanish enclave at Bejaïa (Bougie) in Morocco. In 1558 a Turkish fleet ravaged the Balearic Islands, taking four thousand Christians as captives. That same year, Spain launched an assault on the Turkish garrison at Mostaganem from its base in Oran, which ended in a disastrous defeat and the capture of some twelve thousand soldiers. An even worse disaster followed in 1559, when a Spanish-Italian fleet of two hundred ships occupied the strategic island fortress of Jerba in an attempt to neutralize the activities of the corsair admiral Dragut and create a springboard for the reconquest of Tripoli. The following spring, a Turkish fleet under the great Turkish admiral Piyale Pasha trapped the anchored Christian fleet and sank or captured sixty ships. The Jerba expedition was decimated as the Turks retook the island, and Piyale Pasha returned to Constantinople in triumph with thousands of prisoners.

  This chain of defeats effectively left Spain at Suleiman’s mercy. For the next five years, Philip and his court lived in expectation of a full-scale Turkish invasion while Spain frantically sought to rebuild its depleted fleet of galleys with the help of subsidies from the Papacy. In the event, no such assault took place. It was not until 1565 that the Ottomans attempted another major push in the western Mediterranean, when Suleiman launched an expedition against the Knights of Saint John in Malta. By this time, Spain had begun to replace its galleys, and Philip was eventually able to relieve his beleaguered allies after a bloody siege in which the Ottomans suffered huge losses.

  The Ottoman retreat from Malta was a humiliation for the Hapsburgs’ arch-enemy, Suleiman, who died the following year, but the struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean was continued under his less able successor, Selim II. “On land there is peace, and on sea there is perpetual war,” wrote the Valencian chronicler Martín de Viciana in 1564. Turkish power was not the only threat to Spanish interests in the Mediterranean. In the same period, there was an exponential increase in the raids by Barbary corsairs on Spanish ships and coastal towns. These attacks were partly a form of irregular warfare, but they were also driven by a need for manpower. Both Christian and Muslim corsairs needed rowers for their respective fleets, and Christian sailors—including Spaniards—frequently raided the Barbary coast in search of slaves or rowers, while Muslim corsairs carried out similar raids on Christian lands in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. Dragut, Barbarossa’s successor as kapudan pasha, known as the “drawn sword of Islam,” as well as Ochiali, the beylerbey of Algiers, and the two sons of the Barbarossa brothers were among the many Muslim corsairs who plagued Spain’s coasts and navigation in the second half of the sixteenth century.

  Some corsairs acted as surrogates for the Turkish sultan or local Muslim rulers, to whom they dedicated a percentage of their profits. Others operated on their own behalf from semiautonomous North African ports such as Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers. Some of these ports became flourishing commercial entrepôts, whose economies were based not only on the traffic in slaves and ransomed Christian captives, but also trade and agriculture. The most successful of these ports, and the most notorious from the perspective of Christian Europe, was the corsair regency of Algiers founded by the Barbarossa brothers. By the mid sixteenth century the “scourge of Christendom” had become something of a boomtown, whose cosmopolitan population included Jews, Moriscos, Christian converts to Islam, and foreign adventurers from throughout Europe and even from the Americas.

  In Christian Europe, Algiers was often portrayed as a kind of sixteenth-century “rogue state” whose inhabitants were outlaws and barbarians, sans foi ni loi, “without faith nor law,” but corsairing laid the basis for a flourishing cosmopolitan city that also impressed European visitors. In 1551 the French traveler and royal geographer Nicolas de Nicolay described a thriving city with “many faire and pleasant gardens” where “Turkes, Moores and Jewes in great number with marvellous gaine exercise the Trade of Merchandise.”3 Algiers also housed the notorious slave-pens known as the baños, where Christian captives were kept in grim conditions. Cervantes was one of many Spanish prisoners who passed through these converted bathhouses, whose captive population in the second half of the sixteenth century may have been as high as 25,000. Many of these prisoners, like the author of Don Quixote, languished for years before their ransom could be paid. Others were sold as slaves in North Africa and the Islamic world or converted to Islam to gain their freedom.4

  The activities of the Barbary corsairs would have important consequences for Spain’s former Muslims. After the depletion of Spain’s Mediterranean fleet in the early 1560s, the corsairs became increasingly audacious and often carried out their attacks in broad daylight. Philip himself was made painfully conscious of Spain’s inability to prevent these attacks during a royal visit to Valencia in 1563, where the French ambassador wrote that “All the talk is of tournaments, jousting, balls and other noble pastimes, while the Moors waste no time and even dare to capture vessels within a league of the city, stealing as much as they can carry.”5 Spanish vulnerability was demonstrated on many other occasions, as corsair chiefs sailed in fleets of up to thirty-five vessels that were often equal to anything that Spain could muster against them. In 1556 Dragut attacked the Valencian city of Denia. In 1565, corsairs landed on the Granada coast and marched unopposed to the town of Órgiva in the Alpujarras, returning to their ships with hundreds of captives. The following year, corsairs sacked the Granadan coastal town of Tabernas and seized hundreds of Christian captives.

  Spain made some attempts to improve its coastal defenses, from the creation of permanent garrisons of cavalry to the construction of defensive walls and fortresses known as torres vigias (watchtowers) by Italian military engineers. In 1561 the renowned military architect Giovanni Batista Antonelli was commissioned by Philip to devise a system of fortifications along the Valencian coastline, but no number of watchtowers could ensure complete protection and security. Even after Spain had rebuilt its fleet, the Barbary corsairs remained a constant threat to Christian settlements near the Granadan and Valencian coast, and the sudden appearance of unknown ships off the coast could send the inhabitants fleeing inland or into the local fortress. In the Christian imagination, “Barbary” was synonymous with terrifying disappearances and the horrors of the baños of Algiers.

  Such terrors were not limited to Spain. Muslims near the North African coast also lived in fear of attacks and slave hunts by Christian corsairs. In Valencia and Granada, dread of the corsairs was often directed at the Moriscos, who were suspected of helping them. Such suspicions were not without foundation. During
the corsair raid on Tabernas, hundreds of local Moriscos participated in the sacking of the town and fled afterward to North Africa. Some corsairs included Moriscos in their crews, who used their local knowledge to gain intelligence information and to facilitate raids. In some cases, Morisco fishermen met corsairs at sea and gave them information on the state of Christian defenses. The extent of such collusion was easily exaggerated by rumors and assumptions, as people tended to imagine what they were unable to prove.

  In a phenomenon that is not entirely unlike the security emergencies of our own era, actual incidents of Morisco collusion were often regarded by the authorities as the most visible expression of a wider tendency. In addition to possible links between Moriscos and corsairs, Spanish officials were increasingly concerned by a potential convergence of interests between the Moriscos of Aragon and French Protestantism. With the emergence of the French principality of Béarn as a Huguenot enclave from the 1550s onward, the Inquisition of Aragon often suspected Aragonese Moriscos of plotting rebellion with Béarnese assistance. Moriscos and Huguenots shared a common experience of Catholic persecution, and Moriscos periodically sought refuge in Béarn, while Béarnese rulers also flirted with the possibility of an alliance with Aragonese Moriscos that might help them recover Navarre from Castile.

  In the summer of 1559, a sensational incident took place in the Morisco village of Plasencia del Monte, near Huesca, Aragon, when three Inquisition familiars were found cut to pieces at the bottom of a well and a local priest who served as an Inquisition official was found nearby with his throat cut. These officials had been on their way to arrest a Morisco alfaqui named Juan Zambarel, who was eventually caught and tortured to death. But thirteen other Moriscos who allegedly carried out the murders escaped across the Pyrenees to Béarn. When the Moriscos were arrested by a group of passing Spanish travelers, the Béarnese authorities secured their release, refused requests to extradite them, and the assassins went free.

  Incidents like these brought the ambivalent religious loyalties of the Moriscos into increasingly glaring focus, as Spanish officials tended to interpret any expression of cultural and religious difference as evidence of disloyalty or seditious intent. Such perceptions gave a renewed urgency to the goal of assimilation. The more Spanish officials regarded the Moriscos as an internal enemy with links to Spain’s foreign enemies, the more inclined they were to regard their continued separation from Christian society as a potential threat to the security of the state. Evidence of such deviance was not lacking. In May 1568, the bishop of Tortosa conducted an extended visitation to Morisco parishes in Aragon and Valencia and was not impressed by what he found. On the estates of the Duke of Segorbe in the Uxó Valley, the local Moriscos openly complained to the bishop that they had been converted to Christianity by force and told him that they wished to make representations to Philip and the pope. “These people have me fed up and exasperated,” the bishop complained. “They have a damnable attitude and make me despair of any good in them.... I have been through these mountains for eight days now and find them more Moorish than ever and very set in their bad ways.”6

  Inquisition officials often expressed similar frustration and claimed that Moriscos were not only failing to assimilate, but were becoming more openly defiant and intransigent. In 1560 the Valencia Inquisition issued a damning relación (report), which claimed that Moriscos throughout the kingdom were continuing to preserve their Islamic customs and traditions and publicly proclaiming the heretical belief that “they can be saved in their damned sect and each one in his own law.” The inquisitors depicted the Moriscos of Valencia in the most alarmist terms, evoking images of lawless Morisco enclaves that lay entirely outside the jurisdiction of church and state in “rugged, mountainous and dangerous lands” that priests and constables were afraid to enter. Not only were these Moriscos resisting the king’s own officials, the inquisitors claimed, but they were also rumored to be planning an uprising with Turkish support .7

  Reports like these reinforced the consensus among Spanish ecclesiastics and statesmen that the Moriscos had been treated too leniently and that more forceful measures were required to transform them into Christians. In 1561 the Inquisition commissioner for Valencia, Gregorio de Miranda, asked Philip to send troops to disarm the entire Morisco population. Despite protests from the Valencian nobility that disarmament would deprive them of the use of Moriscos in their private militias, the king agreed to this request. In February 1563, the Moriscos of Valencia were ordered to hand in their weapons on a town-by-town basis, and the king’s officials confiscated or received some twenty thousand lances, crossbows, swords, harquebuses, and muskets. The following year, the Valencia Inquisition set out to reassert its authority with a stern proclamation that ordered all Morisco adults and children over the age of seven to attend mass regularly and obliged parish priests to test their Morisco parishioners on their knowledge of the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Credo, and other rote passages.

  In December 1564, Philip convened an ecclesiastical convention in Madrid to assess the progress that had been made in evangelizing the Moriscos in Valencia. The convention was presented with a dismal picture of the corruption, neglect, and decay in the parishes established in the lugares de Moriscos (Morisco places) during the 1530s. One Valencian cleric lamented that the Moriscos “have not been taught any Christian doctrine either publicly or privately.” Inquisitors told the convention that many of these parishes were so starved of funds that some mosques had not even been reconsecrated and still retained their trumpets, Korans, and implements of worship, while the newly created churches lacked communion cups and crucifixes.

  These reports were a damning indictment of the Church’s achievements in Valencia, but not for the first or last time, the recognition of such failures rebounded negatively on the Moriscos themselves. In February 1565, the Madrid convention proposed a new crackdown on Moorish dress and customs, together with a systematic attempt to root out “alfaquis, dogmatizers, circumcizers, and others who come from Algeria or elsewhere.” At the same time, the Moriscos were to be treated “with all Christian kindness and charity” and provided with religious instruction by competent priests and rectors who would be specially appointed for this task. Corrupt officials and priests would be punished, and ecclesiastical rents and tithes were to be used for the upkeep of churches and the payment of local priests, while the Moriscos were to be relieved from the range of “tyrannical” taxes that applied only to them since, the convention argued, not unreasonably, it was unfair to expect them to “live as Christians and pay as Moors.”

  This was not the first time such worthy proposals had been made, but as on many other occasions, the ecclesiastical and secular bureaucracy once again devoted more energy and resources to repression than reform, as Moriscos found themselves subjected to increasingly harsh punishments from the Inquisition, from floggings and imprisonment to fines or a fixed period of service as rowers in the Spanish navy. Executions were still comparatively rare in the first decade of Philip’s reign, though “unpaid penance at the king’s oars” often amounted to a death sentence, since conditions were so harsh that many rowers died of exhaustion or committed suicide by throwing themselves overboard or hanging themselves with their own chains.

  The new emphasis on repression served various agendas. Morisco galley slaves provided essential manpower for the Spanish Mediterranean fleet, while fines and confiscations helped pay the salaries and running costs of the Inquisition itself, at a time when the Holy Office was in financial difficulties. The disciplining of the Moriscos was also part of a broader attempt by the Hapsburg monarchy to reassert its political authority, particularly in the restive kingdom of Aragon. From its headquarters in the Aljafería, the former Moorish palace-fortress in Zaragoza, the Aragon Inquisition prosecuted a higher percentage of Moriscos than in any other part of the country, sending so many Moriscos to galley slavery that Philip recommended in 1560 that the same punishment be extended to Moriscos elsewhere in Spain “as
is customary in Saragossa.”8

  The repression in Aragon was partly based on the belief that Aragonese Moriscos were particularly intransigent and seditious, but it was also intended to undermine the Christian “lords of Vassals,” who, according to the Zaragoza Inquisition in 1565, “are so free, since they already oppress the royal and ecclesiastical Judges, they would like to do the same with the inquisitors if they could.” Zaragoza inquisitors frequently claimed that their attempts to exert their authority over the Tagarinos, as the Moriscos of Aragon were known, were being thwarted by Christian lords, and they pestered Philip to enact a disarmament similar to the one carried out in Valencia, but the king was not yet ready to risk destabilizing the kingdom at a time when his Aragonese subjects were even more resentful of Castilian rule than usual. In a letter to the Supreme Council in June 1557, Inquisition officials at Zaragoza made it clear that their hands were tied, and referred to a previous letter from their superiors, which declared “that as these are dangerous times, we should for the present suspend hearings of cases against the Tagarinos.”9

  The Inquisition found similar opposition in Valencia, where its officials complained in 1566 of Christian seigneurs who “daily persecute the commissaries and familiars that the Holy Office has in their lands, expelling them and telling them that in their territory they want no Inquisition.” Such opposition limited the ability of the Crown to impose its will on the Moriscos of Aragon and added to the frustration of Spain’s rulers regarding la cuestión morisca. In the upper echelons of the Spanish government, it was now taken for granted that the Moriscos had failed to willingly integrate into Christian society and that something needed to be done to quicken the pace of assimilation, and with its room for maneuver limited in Aragon, the Crown turned its attention to the troubled kingdom of Granada.