by Matthew Carr
Núñez Muley’s categorical insistence that “the Arabic language has no direct relationship whatsoever to the Muslim faith” was based on less solid foundations, but his criticism of the proposal to ban it was no less vigorous. He reminded Deza that Archbishop Talavera had once incorporated Arabic into his church services and pointed out that there were Christians in Jerusalem who spoke Arabic and wore North African dress, yet who remained good Christians. He also stressed the practical importance of Arabic in the daily lives of Granadan Moriscos, from their land titles, tax records, and accounts to the lists of colors used by dyers in their workshops. Not only would the kingdom be “made blind” by such a ban, he argued, but most Moriscos “could not learn Castilian if you gave them twenty years, let alone the three stipulated by the aforementioned decree.”
Núñez Muley’s patient reasoning is often fused with exasperation. He attacked the notion that the pragmatic was intended to promote assimilation and pointed out that even when the Moriscos had complied with Christian demands in the past, they remained subject to discrimination and abuse:For the past 35 to 40 years, the men here have worn Castilian-style clothing and footwear with the hope that His Majesty might show them the mercy of granting them certain liberties, relieving them of their tax burden, or giving them permission to carry arms. Well, we have seen nothing like this. With each day that passes we are in worse shape and more mistreated in all respects and by all manners, as much by the secular as by the ecclesiastical arms of justice, a fact that is well known and not in need of further elaboration.3
The equality that Núñez Muley wanted for Moriscos was not intended to be universal. One of the pragmatic’s provisions banned Moriscos from keeping Negro slaves, and stipulated that freed slaves, known as gacis, had to leave Granada. This demand had nothing to do with servile emancipation. Christians also kept slaves, but Morisco slaves were regarded as potential Muslims and rebels. Núñez Muley criticized this prohibition, asking “Don’t these blacks deserve their wretched state? Must everyone be seen as equals? Let them bring the water pitcher on their backs. Or carry burdens, or handle the plow.”
These were among the few arguments that Deza would have agreed with as the elderly Morisco painstakingly picked apart the logic of the pragmatic and pointed out its impracticalities and absurdities. How could Moriscos leave their doors open and prevent their homes from being robbed? How would women afford Castilian clothing if they could not sell what they already wore? How would the Moriscos be able to know their “lineages” if they were forced to use Christian names? What would happen to those who were unable to learn Castilian?
The desperation of Morisco Granada is evident in Núñez Muley’s insistence that the pragmatic would lead to the “destruction of the kingdom and its natives.” In conclusion, he invited the president to imagine how Christians might react if Christians were ordered to dress like Moriscos, to speak Arabic instead of Castilian, to play no other music except the zambra, to cover the faces of their women and conduct their daily business in Arabic instead of Castilian. “Could the Christians comply given the diverse manners of all the Christians in this kingdom?” Núñez Muley answers the question himself, telling Deza “They would not comply, but rather they would die and suffer under burdens and punishments.”
These were compelling and skillful arguments, but they were not likely to influence a man like Deza, as Núñez Muley undoubtedly already realized. In response to his offer to increase the tax payment, or farda, that the Moriscos paid for the upkeep of Granada’s coastal defenses, Deza replied that the king “wanted more faith than farda, and placed more value on saving a single soul than on all the revenue the Morisco Newly Converted could give him.” This statement summed up the essential difference between the Spain of Charles I and that of his son. Though Deza was prepared to make a few politic gestures to smooth the progress of the pragmatic, including the highly dubious promise that the Crown would pay for the education of Morisco children, he remained otherwise inflexible.
Deza chose the symbolic date of January 1, 1567, the anniversary of the formal surrender of Granada to Isabella and Ferdinand, to publicize the king’s orders. Across the kingdom, the pragmatic was promulgated by town criers, accompanied by drums, horns, and trumpets. Even though its provisions were not due to take effect for another year, the ornate bathhouse near the Alhambra was demolished shortly afterward in a demonstration of intent, and priests began to compile lists of Morisco children in their parishes to be sent to Christian schools. These lists prompted rumors among the Moriscos that their children were to be taken away from Granada to Castile, which reinforced the anger and despair of the population. With the road to negotiation definitively closed, some Moriscos contemplated the approaching deadline with resignation. Others were already preparing for armed resistance.
Even before the proclamation of the pragmatic, Morisco leaders and the more circumspect Christian officials had warned Philip and his advisers of its potential to produce a violent backlash. In the year that followed, a militant core of Moriscos began to make active preparations for rebellion. These leaders were a disparate group that included former members of the Nasrid elite, disgruntled Moriscos who had worked in the Christian administration, and bandits. Support for rebellion was by no means universal, however. Some Moriscos argued that the king of Spain was too powerful, others that the negative consequences of armed resistance were likely to prove worse than the pragmatic itself. But the militants countered these arguments by pointing out that the deployment of large numbers of Spanish troops in Flanders and Italy had weakened Spain’s internal defenses and insisting that any resistance was preferable to the future that was about to be imposed upon them.
Urban Moriscos were generally more reluctant to commit themselves to rebellion, particularly in towns and cities where they lived alongside Christians, and the rebels tended to find a more sympathetic audience in rural Granada, particularly in the mountain villages of the Alpujarras. Some of these Moriscos took inspiration from the religious prophecies, or jofores, proliferating in Granada during this period, which predicted the imminent collapse of Christian Spain and the return of Islamic rule under a Turkish king. One of these texts discovered by the Inquisition predicted that the archangels Gabriel and Michael would soon come with a cloud of birds to announce the coming of a new Moorish king. Another predicted that a copper bridge would miraculously form across the straits of Gibraltar and allow a Muslim army to enter Spain.4
The rebels also began to solicit help from abroad. In April 1568, a letter from a Morisco rebel named Muhammad bin Daud was discovered by the Granadan authorities and sent to the Spanish court. The letter was addressed to Ochiali, the beylerbey of Algiers, requesting assistance for an uprising and listing in detail the various abuses that the Moriscos had suffered in Granada, from Inquisitorial persecution and the prohibitions of the pragmatic to their forced incorporation into Christianity and their subjugation to Jews—a reference to the perceived prevalence of Conversos in the Church hierarchy. Much of the letter consisted of a bitter denunciation of the Christian faith that had been imposed on the Moriscos:When the bell tolls, we must gather to adore the image foul;
In the church the preacher rises, harsh-voiced as a screaming owl.
He the wine and pork invoketh, and the Mass is wrought with wine;
Falsely humble, he proclaimeth that this is the Law divine.5
The rebels also sent various representatives to Constantinople and North Africa to seek support for the rebellion, but the response from the Sublime Porte was cautious and lukewarm. Suleiman’s successor, Selim II, did not rate the possibilities of a successful revolt very highly and pan-Islamic solidarity was initially limited to the provision of weapons and supplies and promises of soldiers via the sultan’s North African vassals. Throughout 1567, rebel leaders scoured Granada, disguised as beggars and Christian pilgrims, quietly collecting names of willing fighting men and compiling intelligence information on the kingdom’s defenses. While Moris
co armorers secretly manufactured and stockpiled weapons, rebel leaders bought muskets and ammunition from the corsairs. By the end of the year, the rebels believed that they had recruited a fighting force of some eight thousand volunteers across the kingdom.
In January 1568, the pragmatic formally came into effect. Though the Inquisition reported that most of the Morisco population appeared to be complying with its provisions, Granada continued to seethe with rumors of rebellion. There were continued reports of murders and robberies on the roads by monfíes and raids by corsairs. This atmosphere of expectation and dread was heightened by reports of omens and portents, from mutated animal births to the appearance of comets, unknown stars, and clouds of strange birds. The rebels had intended to launch their insurrection on Maundy Thursday, but the date was postponed after rumors that the authorities had gotten wind of their intentions. On a rainy night on April 16, the nervousness in the Granadan capital was such that the glowing torches carried by Christian night watchmen above the Albaicín were mistaken for a signal of revolt. In the midst of a dense downpour, Christian women and children were herded into churches for protection, while hundreds of armed men, including monks, advanced up toward the Albaicín with the intention of massacring the Morisco population, before they were persuaded by Mondéjar and Deza that the signal was a false alarm.
Though the rebels continued with their preparations, they still had some difficulty in persuading the population that they had any chance of success. In September, according to the Granadan historian Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, one of the rebel leaders, a Morisco named Fernando de Valor, known as el Zaguer, from his Arabic name Aben Xahuar “the younger,” met a group of his co-religionists in a house in the Albaicín, where he reminded them of the abuses that had been heaped upon them over the years and listed the disastrous consequences of the pragmatic. In the speech attributed to him by Mendoza, el Zaguer reminded the assembled Moriscos of the bleak choices that confronted them:Among the Christians we are treated as Moors and despised as Moors, whilst our own Moorish breathren treat us not as Moors but as renegades to the Christians, and neither help nor trust us. We are excluded from all that makes life good and we are not even allowed to defend ourselves. They forbid us to speak our own language but we do not understand their Castilian. In what language are we to exchange thoughts, ask for things, give things? Without language, men cannot treat with other human beings. Not even animals are forbidden to understand human voices. Who is in the position to say that the man who speaks Castilian cannot hold the law of the Prophet or that the men who speak Arabic cannot hold to the law of Jesus?6
At el Zaguer’s instigation, the rebels set out to find a king to lead the rebellion. By the end of the year, they settled on his nephew, a disaffected Morisco landowner’s son and former member of the Granada muncipal council also named Fernando de Valor from el Zaguer’s hometown, whose father had been prosecuted by the Inquisition. This Valor was connected by birth to the Umayyad founders of the original Córdoban Caliphate, and he was then under house arrest for drawing his dagger at a council meeting. He nevertheless accepted the invitation to become king of Granada and reverted to his Muslim name, Aben Humeya, in a conscious invocation of the most glorious period of al-Andalus. In December 1568, nearly a year after the pragmatic had taken effect, Aben Humeya was secretly crowned in a small town near Granada, draped in purple and surrounded by four standards, in accordance with the old customs of the Umayyads. That month the Moriscos finally launched their insurrection.
12
“A Dirty Little War”
Of all Spain’s civil wars, few have been bloodier and more savage than the Morisco revolt known to history as the War of the Alpujarras. As in 1500–1501, the epicenter of the rebellion was the great natural fortress of the Alpujarras Mountains, but the second war was infinitely more destructive and extensive than its predecessor. In its absence of elementary notions of humanity or morality, its greed, vengeance, and murderous ethnic and religious passions, the rebellion anticipated the European religious wars of the seventeenth century. The cascade of massacres and sieges, ambushes, and mutual atrocities was depicted in grim detail by the Granadan soldier and historian Luis de Mármol Carvajal, whose Historia de la rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del reino de Granada (History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos of the Kingdom of Granada, 1600) contains the most comprehensive—if not the most objective—narrative account of the war. An Arabic speaker and a veteran of Spain’s North African wars, Mármol fought on the Christian side during the rebellion and witnessed many of the events he described. A more critical account of the Christian conduct of the war was contained in Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s La Guerra de Granada (The War in Granada), which circulated for years in manuscript form before its first publication in 1627. The uncle of Granada’s then captain-general the Marquis of Mondéjar, and a former diplomat, soldier, and poet, Mendoza was exiled to his childhood home in the Alhambra in the early stages of the revolt after a violent altercation at Philip’s court.
Though too old to fight himself, he observed firsthand a conflict that he called a “dirty little war” and depicted its follies and disasters in a taut and acid prose that recalled the histories of his great model, Tacitus. The rebellion was also chronicled by the extraordinary Murcian shoemaker, soldier, and poet, Ginés Pérez de Hita, in his fusion of novelistic fiction, balladry, and narrative history, La Guerra de los Moriscos (The War of the Moriscos, 1619). Like Mármol, Pérez de Hita fought with the Christian armies, and like Mendoza, he was strongly critical of the Christian conduct of the war. But unlike his Granadan contemporary, his disgust with the behavior of his own side is strongly infused with pro-Morisco sympathies and a romantic “Maurophiliac” nostalgia for Granada’s Moorish past. More than four centuries later, these three very different histories remain the main source of reference for a vicious war that presented Hapsburg Spain with one of its gravest security crises of the century and ultimately brought about the end of Morisco Granada.
After so many months of rumor and expectation, the rebels finally struck their first blow on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1568, when a detachment of Christian soldiers billeted in the Morisco village of Cádiar were quietly murdered in their beds. This news had not reached the Granadan capital by the following night, by which time thousands of Moriscos were poised to descend on the city from the Alpujarra Mountains and take the Christian population by surprise in the midst of their Christmas celebrations. Had the assault taken place as planned, the poorly defended Granadan capital would probably have been overwhelmed, and the revolt might have had a different outcome, but the plan was called off at the last minute after heavy snows made the roads almost impassable. Instead a hundred or so monfíes led by a dyer and former prisoner of the Inquisition named Farax Aben Farax slipped into Granada in the early hours in the midst of the blizzard and made their way directly to the Albaicín. Playing hornpipes and other musical instruments and proclaiming the name of Muhammad, the monfíes marched through the streets, urging the Morisco inhabitants to come out of their homes and join them. Farax’s men had brought rope ladders with the intention of scaling the walls of the Alhambra, but the residents of the Albaicín were unimpressed by the low rebel turnout and refused to come out and join them. Disgusted and frustrated by the lack of response, the monfíes tried to storm the Morisco colegio established by the Jesuits, but they were unable to break down the doors and withdrew to the Alpujarras as news of their presence reached the Christian authorities in the city.
Over the next few days, the rebellion spread rapidly throughout the towns and villages of the Alpujarras, and the Moriscos proceeded to exact a terrible retribution on the Christian population. Priests, sacristans, monks, and secular officials were stripped naked, led through the streets with their hands tied behind their backs, and used for live target practice with muskets and crossbows. But the cruelest punishments were reserved for members of the clergy. Some priests had crosses carved on their faces before they
were stabbed and hacked to death. Others had gunpowder forced into their ears or mouths that was then set alight, or were boiled alive in vats of oil, or handed over to Morisca women, who stabbed them with knives and needles or stoned them to death.
In some villages, the Moriscos parodied the religious rituals that had been forced upon them, dressing themselves in priestly vestments as they tormented their victims. At Luchar de Andarax, the local priest was tied to a chair in front of the church altar, while his sacristans were ordered to read out the register of Moriscos that had previously been used to check attendance at mass. One by one the former members of his congregation stepped forward and slapped and punched their former tormentor or spat in his face, after which the priest’s eyes and tongue were cut out and he was forced to eat them. At the village of Jarayrata, a sacristan with a reputation for drunkenness who had once fined his Morisco parishioners for not attending mass had his head cut off and placed in a vat of wine. In the Augustine monastery at Guecija, according to Hurtado de Mendoza, Moriscos poured boiling olive oil into the drains of the building where the monks had taken refuge, “helping themselves to the abundance of olive oil which God has made grown in those parts in order to fry and drown his friars.”