Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Despite the weaponry they received from North Africa, the Moriscos were always poorly armed compared with their enemies. They were also outnumbered by an array of Christian forces that included professional soliders, private feudal armies, and militia levies raised by town councils across Granada and Andalusia. Some Christians were motivated by revenge, such as the nobleman Hernando de Quesada, who founded a private army known as the Gentlemen of the Cross when his father was killed by Moriscos in the early stages of the rebellion. But many Christian soldiers were attracted to the war by the prospect of pillage, and in the absence of opportunities for plunder, their morale quickly plummeted. In the summer of 1569, the Marquis of Los Vélez and his army were stranded without food on the Granadan coast because corrupt Christian officials and quartermasters were siphoning off the supplies that they should have received. Reduced to catching fish to feed themselves, the marquis’s soldiers melted away, leaving him with less than a thousand fighting men.

  Diego Hurtado de Mendoza blamed such corruption and maladministration on the “men in power who were only too happy to let the disorders grow in order that the crisis might get worse.” But these were the men whom Philip appeared to be listening to. The following month, the king recalled Mondéjar to Madrid, thus removing the most effective Christian commander from the conflict. Throughout the second half of 1569, Don John’s army remained inexplicably passive in the Granadan capital, while the rebellion began to settle down into a bloody stalemate. In general, the more mountainous areas of the Alpujarras were controlled by the rebels, while the plains and river valleys below were crisscrossed by Christian cavalrymen with lances, breastplates, and plumed helmets, and by rows of harquebusiers and pikemen, accompanied by baggage trains laden with goods looted from Morisco homes and processions of bound slaves and herds of stolen sheep and cattle.

  In June that year, a detachment of soldiers from the Naples tercio (legion) arrived in Granada, under the command of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Luis de Requesens. Based mostly outside Spain, the veteran Spanish soldiers who filled the companies of tercios were probably the toughest and most efficient fighting men in the world at the time, and they soon demonstrated their prowess with an assault on the Morisco fortress of Frigiliana in the bleak highlands of the Sierra of Bentomiz. In the desperate battle that followed, Morisco men and women rolled boulders and millstones with protruding timbers down on the soldiers, before the fort was successfully stormed and the customary bloody retribution enacted on the survivors.

  That summer, in the midst of this carnage and devastation, in an effort to raise the morale of his troops, Aben Humeya staged a series of games and festivities in Purchena, Almería, the seat of Boabdil before the fall of Granada and one of the few towns controlled by the rebels. These festivities are described in extravagant detail by Pérez de Hita with a delicacy and lyricism that contrasts strikingly with the hallucinatory violence that he depicts elsewhere. In his imaginative recounting, Purchena becomes a microcosm of al-Andalus, as the whole town is draped in silks and pennants, and Aben Humeya and his subjects gather in the main square to witness Turkish and Morisco captains participate in chivalrous sporting events. There are weight-lifting competitions and wrestling matches and prizes for the men who dance the most gallant zambras and singing contests for women. In one of these competitions, a “beautiful Mora” steps up to sing before the Morisco king, dressed entirely in black in mourning for her father and four brothers who have been killed during the war.

  Beating a plate as a tambourine, the Mora sings a song in Arabic in a “soft, delicate and mournful voice” which immediately reduces her audience to awed silence. In it she predicts that the rebellion will fail and that its leaders will all die, including Aben Humeya himself before concluding:The Christian bands are powerful.

  They will return covered in glory,

  Laden with spoils.

  And I am crying at my great misfortune

  And the tomb that awaits me now.8

  On completing her song, “the beautiful and grief-stricken Mora” gives a last desolate sigh and falls down dead before her astounded listeners. Even allowing for Pérez de Hita’s considerable poetic license, the episode captures something of the tragic impact of this savage conflict on a Morisco society whose members were often regarded by Christian Spain as barbarian heretics and subhuman monsters. And the trajectory that his fictional “Mora” depicted was broadly faithful to the actual course of events, as the Hapsburg state finally began to mobilize its formidable resources against the rebels.

  13

  Defeat and Punishment

  The Granada revolt coincided with a series of challenges and crises throughout the Hapsburg empire, from rebellions in Flanders and the Americas to looming conflict with France, which Cabrera de Córdoba attributed to the “barbarians, malcontents, scandalous villains, sacrilegious apostates, who with the blood that Spain gave them, like bastards and traitors, turned their weapons against their mother, causing her to spill much blood in order to undo their violence and punish their disobedience.”1 By the autumn of 1569, a great deal of blood had already been spilled in Granada. Even at its peak, the Morisco rebellion was essentially a violent response to Christian oppression that lacked a unified long-term objective. Some rebels merely hoped to pressure Philip into rescinding the pragmatic; others wanted to establish an autonomous Islamic enclave in Granada and launch a Muslim Reconquista. In the absence of significant Turkish intervention or the participation of their co-religionists elsewhere in Spain or even within urban Granada, this autonomy was always fragile. As long as they remained isolated in a small geographical area, the Moriscos were vulnerable to a concerted Christian counteroffensive, and the rebellion was further weakened by the same internal rivalries that had once undermined Nasrid resistance to the Christian invasion of Granada.

  Aben Humeya’s own objectives were never entirely clear even to his followers. At times he appeared willing to negotiate peace terms with the Christians; on other occasions he executed his subordinates when they attempted to do the same. As the rebellion wore on, the Morisco king’s arbitrary and tyrannical behavior and his erratic conduct of the war began to alienate his subordinates. In the autumn of 1569, these tensions came to a head when Aben Humeya offended one of his associates named Diego Alguacil, by taking his wife-to-be as his own mistress. Alguacil took revenge by plotting with some of Aben Humeya’s discontented Morisco and Turkish commanders to have him killed. On the night of October 20, the conspirators strangled him to death in his “palace” at the village of Laujar de Andarax.2 The title of “king of Andalusia and Granada” now passed to one of the plotters, a cousin of Aben Humeya’s named Abdullah Aben Aboo, another Morisco of Umayyad lineage, who had reportedly lost his testicles when he was strung up from a tree by Christian soldiers in the early period of the war.

  Aben Aboo celebrated his coronation by taking the offensive and laying siege to the strategic Alpujarran town of Órgiva, whose Christian garrison was notorious for its depredations of the surrounding Morisco villages. The rebels successfully encircled the town and were digging trenches with a view to starving out its inhabitants when they learned that a column of Christian soldiers was sent out from Granada to relieve the siege, under the command of the Duke of Sesa.

  Without alerting the besieged population, Aben Aboo peeled off the bulk of his forces and ambushed the relief column in an audacious maneuver that the veteran soldier Diego Hurtado de Mendoza called “extraordinarily skilful tactics of a kind that are seldom seen.” In a fierce night battle, the duke and his men were driven back to the capital, and the garrison at Órgiva eventually had to be evacuated. This was the only occasion on which the Moriscos managed to retake a town from Christian hands, but they were soon forced to abandon it once again as the fighting reached a new pitch of intensity. On October 19, Philip announced that the war would now be fought with fuego y sangre (fire and blood), or war without quarter. To motivate the Christian armies, Philip also gave his sold
iers campo franco—a free hand to loot and enslave at will, even absolving them from the customary quinto, or fifth of their spoils that was paid to the Crown.

  Though Philip declared that Morisco children under the age of ten would not be enslaved but would be handed over to Christian families in order to ensure that they received a Catholic education, this limit was rarely observed, as the Christian soldiery took advantage of the opportunities for profit that the war provided, whether it was slaves, stolen sheep and cattle, almonds, raisins and other fruits, or clothes and jewelry stripped from Morisca women they had killed. Thousands of women and children were sold to the slave merchants who accompanied their expeditions or taken to the teeming slave markets of Spanish ports and cities. On December 26, Philip decided to move the Council of Castile to Córdoba to “give warmth and provide as close an aid as possible in the troubles of Granada.”3 For the rest of the war, rebel successes would be few and far between.

  Philip’s urgency was partly driven by anxiety at the gloomy international situation during the winter of 1569–1570. In the Netherlands, there were rumors of an imminent rebel invasion under the exiled William of Orange. From England, the Dutch privateers known as the Sea Beggars were attacking Spanish shipping. In Constantinople, Spanish spies reported that the Ottomans were refitting their fleet. In January 1570, the Ottomans’ Algerian vassal Ochiali led an army unopposed into Tunis and ended thirty-five years of Spanish control of the city. Throughout the winter, the Spanish government lived in expectation of a Turkish-Muslim attack on Spain to aid the Moriscos. In fact, Selim II was preparing to conquer the Venetian colony of Cyprus and rebuffed a Morisco delegation to Constantinople that winter which tried to persuade him to launch an invasion of Spain.

  The prospect of Turkish intervention was taken so seriously that Philip himself warned the papal nuncio in October 1569 that a Turkish-Morisco alliance might lead to the defeat of Spain. In March of the following year, Philip instructed the clergy throughout Spain to fast and pray that “the Turkish navy, the common enemy of Christianity” did not attack Spanish possessions in North Africa or “help and encourage the Morisco rebels in the kingdom of Granada.”

  By this time, reports of the rebellion had begun to spread beyond Spain, despite Philip’s attempts to keep it secret. In June 1570, the Spanish ambassador to England, Guerau de Spes informed Philip that an unknown English spy in his court had recently pleased Elizabeth’s Privy Council with the news that the Granadan rebellion was going “very badly for the Christians.”4 De Spes also claimed that the English queen was planning to channel weapons and supplies to the Moriscos through the king of Fez. On October 2, 1569, Francés de Álava wrote to Philip from France that Spain was rumored to have suffered heavy losses in the rebellion and it was widely believed that “the Moors have reached the gates of Granada and were carrying away animals, grain, flour and people from the vega.”5

  As Philip had feared, Spain’s difficulties in suppressing a rebellion in its own territory were also having an inspirational effect on rebels outside its borders. “It is an example to us, in that the Moors are able to resist for so long even though they are people of no more substance than a flock of sheep,” wrote the Dutch prince William of Orange to one of his associates on learning of Philip’s relocation to Córdoba. “What then might the people of the Low Countries be able to do? . . . We shall see what will happen if the Moriscos can hold out until the Turks can send them some aid.”6

  Philip and his ministers were painfully conscious of imperial Spain’s inability to suppress a rebellion on its soil. On December 23, 1569, bolstered by a shipment of munitions from Italian armaments factories, Don John’s forces finally marched out of Granada to begin the pacification of the Alpujarras. The long-awaited Christian offensive began ingloriously, with the conquest of the town of Guéjar Sierra, which the rebels abandoned without a struggle, taking their women and children with them into the Sierra Nevada. While Christian militias pursued the population into the highlands where they had taken refuge, the bulk of Don John’s force pressed on toward the fortified rebel stronghold of Galera in the Granadan altiplano. Situated at the base of a large rock shaped like a seagoing galley, which gave the town its name, Galera was already under siege by the reconstituted army of the Marquis of Los Vélez. In February 1570, Don John’s army joined the siege, and Galera now became the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, as a Morisco population supported by Turkish and Berber volunteers attempted to hold off some eighteen thousand well-armed Christian soldiers equipped with field guns.

  Despite successive assaults and artillery barrages, the besieging armies were unable to break through or scale the town’s thick mud walls and were driven back repeatedly by a stubborn Morisco defense in which women and young children joined, hurling stones down on their attackers. These female defenders included a woman named Zarcamodonia, described by Pérez de Hita as “large in body, with strong legs and arms, that obtained a great force” who fought with a sword and armor and was said to have killed eighteen soldiers by her own hand. The siege was finally brought to an end when Christian sappers used mines to blow holes in the town’s seemingly impregnable defensive walls. Even then, Don John’s soldiers were obliged to fight their way through the barricaded streets and take the town house by house as the Moriscos defended their homes with desperate ferocity. Women fought alongside their men, including the formidable Zarcamodonia, whom the Christians finally picked out and shot because of her inspirational effect on the other defenders. Another Morisca fought in the streets with a sword in one hand and her two young brothers under her other arm before all three were killed.

  In some cases, the Christian soldiers were obliged to burn families out of their houses as the Moriscos resisted their advance with any weapons that came to hand—swords, knives, iron pokers, and stones. At the end of a ninehour battle, the town was finally taken, and Don John ordered his soldiers to massacre the entire population in punishment for their defiance. About 400 men, women, and children were killed before the Hapsburg prince called a halt to the massacre after his soldiers protested that they were being deprived of their spoils. Some 4,500 survivors were marched off to slavery, as the Christian soldiers scoured the town for money, clothes, and jewelry. When the sack of the town was complete, Don John ordered it razed to the ground and the ruins scattered with salt in the Roman style as a permanent reminder of the price of sedition.

  The fall of Galera signaled the beginning of the end of the rebellion, as three Christian armies converged on the Alpujarras from different directions and swiftly conquered the towns and fortresses that remained under rebel control. In March, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza informed Cardinal Espinosa from his residence at the Alhambra that more than ten thousand “scattered and starved” rebels remained in the field but were no longer capable of mounting offensive operations. In May, the French ambassador, Fourquevaux, observed that the Morisco rebellion “consumes and burns Spain with a slow flame.”7 By this time, however, the rebels were in full retreat, as the Christian armies burned orchards and crops to cut off their supply of food and destroyed mills and millstones to prevent them from grinding flour. Throughout the summer and autumn, Christian soldiers pursued the rebels into their mountain hideouts. Hundreds of Moriscos were killed or hanged in the course of these operations or died of suffocation when soldiers lit fires in the entrances to the caves where they had taken refuge. Thousands were taken to the slave markets of Seville, Lisbon, and other cities, which did very well from the rebellion.

  With the rebel ranks drastically reduced by death and desertion, and the Turkish and Berber volunteers beginning to make their way back to North Africa, some of Aben Aboo’s commanders began to conduct their own unilateral peace negotiations. These divisions were skillfully exploited by the Morisco translator Alonso del Castillo who forged letters and messages from rebels and alfaquis calling on the Moriscos to surrender and stressing the power and magnanimity of the Spanish king. This sixteenth century “bla
ck propaganda” further undermined the Morisco resistance. On May 22, one of Aben Aboo’s most trusted commanders, Hernando el Habbaqui, visited Don John’s encampment to open surrender negotations, offering his sword as a gesture of submission. The Hapsburg prince accepted the offer of surrender, but graciously told him to keep his sword “for the service of His Majesty.”

  By this time, even Don John had begun to conclude that Deza and his cohorts were actively impeding his efforts to achieve a negotiated surrender. In August he asked Philip to remove Deza from Granada by making him a bishop or granting him “some other favour” because “the common opinion is that the president has been the great instrument for the rebellion of these people, and el Habbaqui has told me on various occasions that the greatest difficulty in reducing them was the fear of being tried by the president, and for my part, I have no reason to doubt it.”8 It was an indication of Deza’s status with the king that this request was rejected.

  Aben Aboo’s own attitude toward these peace negotiations is not clear. Some accounts suggest that he was also considering surrender but was encouraged by the arrival of a new contingent of North African volunteers to continue the revolt, but whatever the truth, el Habbaqui was executed on his orders on returning from Don John’s camp. For the rest of the year, Aben Aboo and a few thousand rebels continued to survive in the Alpujarran highlands, as the tercios under the command of Luis de Requesens harried them relentlessly. “I have become ruthless with these people . . . an infinite number have been put to the sword,” wrote Requesens to one of Philip’s secretaries in November. By this time, most of the Turkish and Berber fighters had been allowed to return to Barbary, and organized Morisco resistance had ceased.