by Matthew Carr
As in 1500–1501, the subjugation of the Alpujarras was accompanied by a new outbreak of rebellion near Ronda in the autumn, when Christian soldiers went on a drunken rampage at the Morisco town of Ubrique. Once again, the infuriated Moriscos rose up in revolt and took refuge in the same mountains of the Sierra Bermeja where Alonso de Aguilar’s ill-fated expedition had been decimated seventy years before. In November the Duke of Arcos led a new Christian expedition into the Sierra Bermeja that passed through the same plateau where their predecessors had been annihilated, still littered with the bones of soldiers and horses, saddles, rusted weapons, and armor. Arcos’s expedition did not meet the same fate and quickly brought the rebels to heel. In a time-honored counterinsurgency tactic that stretched back to ancient Rome, the Christian armies constructed a chain of forts across the Alpujarras to watch over the Morisco population. And even before Requesens and Arcos had completed their mopping-up operations, Philip had decided that more long-term measures were required to ensure that the Moriscos of Granada would never again pose a threat to the state.
Long before the outbreak of rebellion, the more hard-line anti-Morisco elements within Christian Granada had called for the expulsion of the Morisco population from the kingdom, citing security considerations as well as the interests of the faith. In June 1569, this objective had been partially realized with the removal of the Morisco population from the Albaicín. In February 1570, Philip instructed Deza to begin secret preparations to deport the entire Morisco population of Granada to Castile. Under Deza’s diligent supervision, Granada was divided into seven administrative zones, whose officials were ordered to compile lists of the Moriscos in their areas and arrange food and shelter during their transportation. Extra Christian troops and militiamen from Andalusia were used to escort the Moriscos to their embarkation points in Granada and then to Castile.
It was not until October that Philip made his intentions public and ordered all Moriscos in the kingdom to be “gathered up with their children and women and taken to other parts and places of these our kingdoms” in order to ensure “the complete security, pacification and quiet” of Granada. These orders were not greeted with universal approval in Christian Granada. Don John protested the king’s decision, arguing that deportation would divert his troops from their operations against the remaining rebels. Churches, convents, and monasteries petitioned Philip to allow Morisco workers to remain on their estates. Moriscos also wrote to the king and pointed out that they had remained loyal to the Crown throughout the rebellion. Few of these appeals received a positive response. On All Saints Day, November 1, Christian soldiers and militiamen began rounding up Moriscos in Granada and assembling them in churches. At Alhendín in the vega, heralds and trumpeters announced the arrival of cavalry and infantrymen from Córdoba to effect the roundup. At the town of Baza, the royal commissioner, Alonso de Carvajal, told the Moriscos that Philip intended to take them for their own safety to Castile, where the harvest had been abundant and they would be able to “eat and sustain themselves in great comfort” until it was safe to return to their homes.
This lie achieved its objective, and the Moriscos assembled without protest, but the roundup was not always so peaceful. At Torox, near Málaga, Moriscos broke away from their Christian guards and ambushed the soldiers sent out to pursue them, before returning to burn their own village. At Bolodui in the Almanzora River valley, Christian soldiers killed two hundred Moriscos who resisted their removal. Many Moriscos fled into the mountains, but most were too shattered and demoralized for flight or resistance, as the deportations unfolded with a methodical efficiency that had been mostly absent from the war itself. In the midst of heavy rain and the first winter snows, the Moriscos were marched to their embarkation points in Granada, in what Don John described to Royal Secretary Ruy Gómez as “the saddest sight in the world, for at the moment of departure there was so much rain, wind and snow that the poor folk clung together lamenting. One cannot deny that the spectacle of the depopulation of a kingdom is the most pitiful thing that anyone can imagine.”9
Ginés Pérez de Hita later described the Morisca women “weeping, looking at their homes, embracing and kissing their walls many times, remembering their glorious past, their present exile, the evil future that awaited them” in an exodus that he compared to the fall of Troy.10 But the motives behind these deportations had more modern parallels. The relocation of the Moriscos was partly a counterinsurgency measure that was intended to drain the civilian “sea” that had sustained the rebellion—while simultaneously removing the strategic threat to Spain’s southern coast. But these deportations were also a form of social engineering that was intended to further the goal of assimilation. By placing small numbers of Moriscos in Christian parishes throughout Castile, Spain’s rulers hoped to break down the bonds of communal solidarity, which had supposedly prevented the Moriscos from integrating into Christian society, and “dissolve” them into the Christian majority.
By the end of November, the first phase of the deportation was complete, and the towns, villages, and neighborhoods of Granada had been mostly emptied of their Morisco populations. On November 30, Don John left Granada to take up a new appointment and win new glory as commander of the Holy League fleet that was being assembled to repel the Ottoman invasion of Cyprus, even as the transportation of the Moriscos to their allotted destinations continued to unfold. Royal commissioners, corregidores (chief magistrates), and municipal officials from across the country kept Philip and his ministers informed of their progress, in hundreds of letters that can still be found in the Spanish state archives at Simancas. These faded documents provide bleak glimpses of a sixteenth-century bureaucratic machinery that was barely able to cope with the tide of crushed and broken humanity that it was asked to accommodate and transport.
Many of the Morisco deportees were sick, starving, and traumatized by two years of savage conflict. Widows and war orphans, old and sick people barely able to walk, and very young children all formed part of a grim exodus that was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century forced relocation of the Cherokee Indians known as the Trail of Tears. About 21,000 Moriscos were taken to the staging post of Albacete, 6,000 of whom arrived on the same day. Another 12,000 were marched to Córdoba. In December, the mayor of the town of Molina de Mosquera wrote to Philip that 10,500 Moriscos were awaiting transportation to Seville, including “Men and women and children . . . naked and without any protection and all with extreme need for coats and sustenance.” The mayor reported that some of these Moriscos had been attacked and stripped of their clothing by their Christian escorts and asked that these soldiers be forced to give back what they had stolen.11
In Seville, the processing of the Moriscos was supervised by the Count of Priego, who informed Philip in November that 4,300 deportees had arrived on twenty-four ships from Almería, many of whom were “so shattered and poor and robbed and ill that there was great compassion.”12 In another letter that same month, Priego described his difficulties in finding accommodation for the Moriscos in a city that was already “very much in need of bread.”
From their staging posts, the Moriscos were marched inland to towns and villages throughout Castile in cuadrillas, or columns, of 1,500, accompanied by Christian soldiers. Some columns were accompanied by carts carrying the exiles’ possessions, which also transported young children and those who were too old or sick to walk. But there were not enough carts to go around, so that even the least physically able Moriscos were obliged to walk an average of twelve miles a day in exceptionally cold and inclement weather. Many Moriscos died of hunger, illness, or exposure as they trekked across the mountains and plains of Castile; they were buried in shallow graves by the roadsides. Others remained subject to the predatory attentions of their escorts. Though Philip ordered his officials to ensure that families were kept together, relatives, siblings, and children often became separated during the journey, in many cases because they were kidnapped.
The mortality rate among the Mori
scos was intensified by an epidemic of typhus that frequently made them an object of fear and hostility in the Christians populations they passed through. At Mérida, in Extremadura, one official told Philip that more than half of the three hundred Moriscos who had arrived in the city had died, and he complained that the local Christian population “do not apply themselves to provide charity. They especially flee from them because this land of Estremadura is full of illness and they understand that evil has come from them.”13 The Spanish medical writer Luis de Toro blamed the deportees for spreading a contagion that was “especially virulent among the Saracens, due to the intense colds and other penuries of war that they had to endure.”14
Similar reports were sent from Ávila and Valladolid, where the local corregidor reported that a thousand Moriscos arrived in three different batches, of whom “many have died and are dying away each day.” Not all Christians feared and despised these deportees. Antonio de Salazar, a member of the Valladolid city council, was so moved by the sight of a Morisco named Juan Rodríguez and his wife, María, who arrived “so ill that it filled us with pity,” that he gave them food and clothing and put them up in his own house until they had recovered. 15
At least fifty thousand Moriscos were deported during the winter of 1570–1571, and the overall figure may have reached as high as eighty thousand, including the earlier deportation from the Albaicín and other ad hoc expulsions carried out by Christian commanders before and after the November deportations. Some 20 percent of the Moriscos deported from Granada that winter either died, escaped, or were sold as slaves. Some made their way back to Granada, others became bandits or managed to pasar allende “to go to the other side”—go to North Africa.
The survivors faced a difficult future in a Castilian society that tended to regard the expelled Granadinos with fear and suspicion. All the provisions of the Granada pragmatic were imposed upon them. Arabic was strictly forbidden, either in public or in the home, and they were subject to special requirements to attend mass and observe Christian feast days. They were forbidden to gather in groups or travel to Granada or Valencia and were obliged to carry a special identity card. If they were away from their new homes for longer than a night they had to inform the local justices. One magistrate in Valladolid was still not satisfied by these restrictions and proposed branding the Moriscos on the face with the names of their allotted residence, a practice that was sometimes carried out with slaves, so that they could be immediately identified if they strayed.
This proposal was not implemented, and many of the other restrictions on the Moriscos proved impossible to enforce. Nevertheless, the Granadinos were often subject to the claustrophobic vigilance of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, especially in the early period after their arrival. In Granada itself, the deportations dealt a final blow to the rebellion. In February 1571, the French ambassador, Fourquevaux, wrote that the survivors were “leaving the mountains and coming to sell themselves to the Christians as slaves, in order to eat.” In March of that year, a monfí—turned—bounty hunter named Gonzalo el Xenix made a secret agreement with Deza to deliver up Aben Aboo dead or alive. When Aben Aboo discovered these intentions, a violent struggle took place in an Alpujarran cave, before el Xenix broke the Morisco king’s skull with a rock. His corpse was brought back to Granada on a mule, where it was decapitated in Deza’s presence. The head of the “king of the Andalusians” was impaled on a pole outside the city gate, facing out toward the Alpujarras, where it remained for more than a year as a warning to rebels.
Thus ended the last great war between Muslims and Christians on Spanish soil. Deza exulted in his victory and boasted that he had “disciplined Granada with blood.” He was rewarded for this service with the post of captain-general of Granada, in a final triumph over his rival Mondéjar. Deza went on to become a judge at the Valladolid Chancellery before Pope Gregory XIII appointed him a cardinal, at Philip’s request. The scourge of Morisco Granada moved to Rome and died a wealthy man. Don John became the great hero of Spain and the savior of Christendom, leading the Holy League in the crushing victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571, which ended the Turkish advance into the Mediterranean. Farax Aben Farax, the ferocious dyer-turned-bandit, was never found. According to one possibly apocryphal story, one of his comrades attempted to beat his brains out with a rock in order to claim the reward on his head. Farax survived, hideously disfigured, and lived out his life as a beggar, unrecognized and reviled wherever he went.
The soldier-historian Mármol Carvajal hailed the victorious conclusion to a “war for religion and for the faith,” which completed the efforts begun by the Catholic Monarchs to prize Granada from the “subjection of the Devil.” But the rebellion had left a smoking hole in Granadan society. War, slavery, and deportation had reduced its population by as much as 160,000. Hundreds of churches had been burned or otherwise destroyed, many villages and neighborhoods had been abandoned, and the economic life of the kingdom disrupted or paralyzed. The silk industry never recovered from the loss of the Morisco silkworm breeders and spinners. And despite a concerted attempt to repopulate the abandoned Morisco villages and farms with Christian settlers, much of the Alpujarras remained underpopulated well into the next century. Years later, church authorities in Granada and Almería were still writing to the government complaining of their poverty, caused by the lack of workers on their estates, and appealing for financial assistance.
Thousands of Moriscos managed to evade the deportations and subsequently made their way back to their former towns and villages. Some were caught and expelled again. Others managed to survive by remaining as unobtrusive as possible. Morisco Granada had paid a terrible price for defying the orders of His Most Catholic Majesty. Long after the war was over, it was said, farmers and peasants in the more remote parts of rural Granada reported seeing phantom armies clashing in the sky and hearing the sounds of ghostly combat. For the Granadinos obliged to build new lives from scratch in the Christian heartlands of Castile, that world was now part of their past. And for all Spain’s Morisco populations, the rebellion and its cruel aftermath cast a long shadow that would continue to hover over them until they, too, were forced to leave their homes.
Part III
Catastrophe
Solutions have already been sought for all the injuries you’ve mentioned and roughly outlined: for I’m well aware that those of which you say nothing are graver and more numerous and no proper remedy has yet been found. However, our state is governed by very wise men who realize that Spain is rearing and nurturing all these Morisco vipers in its bosom, and with God’s help they will find a sure, prompt and effective solution to such a dangerous situation.
—Miguel de Cervantes, The Dialogue of the Dogs
14
The Great Fear
It would be an exaggeration to speak of before and after the War of the Alpujarras, but there is no doubt that the rebellion marked a watershed moment in the confrontation between the Hapsburg monarchy and its Morisco subjects. To Moriscos, the Granada pragmatic and its terrible consequences ended any hopes of a de facto return to the Mudejar past. To Christian Spain, the rebellion confirmed the image of the Moriscos as dangerous “household enemies” inside its borders. For years afterward, Granada was cited in official documents as a touchstone of evil Morisco intent and a harbinger of worse things to come. At the same time, the difficulty in suppressing the revolt and the presence of foreign fighters on Spanish soil was a reminder of Spain’s strategic vulnerability. The anxious winter of 1569–1570, when Philip and his ministers had lived in dread of a Turkish invasion in support of the Moriscos, continued to haunt the minds of Spain’s rulers, long after the possibility of such intervention had receded. In 1571 Don John of Austria’s stunning destruction of the Turkish armada at Lepanto reawakened old fantasies of a united Christian crusade against Islam, but once again, Christian unity proved to be ephemeral.
In 1573 Don John added the conquest of Tunis to his list of achievements,
but the following year, a Turkish fleet reconquered the city, together with the key Spanish presidio of La Goleta. In 1578 King Sebastian of Portugal led a Christian coalition against the sultan of Morocco, Abd al-Malik, which was supported by Philip against his better judgment. This ill-conceived adventure met with disaster at the battle of Alcazarquivir, when Sebastian was killed and his expedition routed by a Moroccan army in which “Andalusian militias” made up of Morisco musketeers from Granada played a major role.1
This debacle ushered in a new era of strategic stalemate in the western Mediterranean. In 1581 a Spanish-Turkish truce ended the Mediterranean struggle between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, which had dominated much of the century, as both sides concentrated on more pressing priorities elsewhere. For years afterward, however, Spanish statesmen continued to believe that the Turkish sultan was waiting for the opportunity to strike at Spain once again or seeking an alliance of opportunity with the Hapsburgs’ Protestant enemies, at a time when Spain was constantly engaged in a theater of war that ranged from Flanders and northern France to the Caribbean and the shores of Spain itself.
Spain’s wars with Protestantism reflected a paradoxical combination of power and weakness that would have important implications for the Moriscos. On the one hand, Spain was the dominant European superpower, with an unmatched ability to fight multiple wars on land and sea. At the same time, its coasts and shipping remained vulnerable to Muslim corsairs and also to Dutch and English privateers, who engaged in piracy as a form of unconventional warfare. In April 1587, Francis Drake sank the Spanish fleet in Cádiz harbor in an audacious raid that contributed to Philip’s decision to launch his ill-fated invasion of England the following year. Nine years later, a fleet of English and Dutch ships sailed into Cádiz once again and pillaged and burned the city for two weeks without meeting any resistance or counteroffensive. These attacks humiliated the king and reinforced the siegelike atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Spain during the last decades of the century. English and Scottish merchants and seamen, French immigrant workers, and German visitors to Spain all ended up in Inquisitorial jails and sometimes on bonfires during this period. But in the aftermath of the great rebellion in Granada, official paranoia and suspicion were increasingly directed toward Spain’s former Muslims.