by Matthew Carr
With the defeat of the Granada rebels, these fears were concentrated primarily on the three kingdoms belonging to the Crown of Aragon, which between them had the largest Morisco population in Spain as a result of the Granada expulsions. In 1570 the Venetian ambassador wrote of the “great fear among Old Christians” in Valencia that the Muslim population might “rise up and do as those of Granada had done.” These fears were exacerbated by a stream of reports of incipient Morisco conspiracies and attempts to solicit assistance from Constantinople and North Africa, which also percolated through Catalonia and Aragon proper.
The majority of these reports emanated from the Inquisition, which increasingly functioned as an internal security apparatus in addition to its traditional role as the enforcer of religious orthodoxy. In Aragon, inquisitors regularly reported secret contacts between Moriscos and French Protestants in the Pyrenean kingdom of Béarn. The evidence to support these allegations was often flimsy and based on what contemporary security agencies would call “chatter.” In 1575, for example, the Inquisition of Aragon informed the Suprema of an incident in the Aragonese town of Pina de Ebro the previous year, in which two Morisco tailors had been overheard discussing the imminent prospect of a Turkish-Protestant invasion of Spain. According to the inquisitors, the two tailors had been “laughing and showing great contentment” at the prospect of slaughtering the Christian population.2
Some alleged conspiracies were based on unsubstantiated rumors that bordered on the fantastic. In January 1577, Aragonese inquisitors reported that four hundred Turks had infiltrated Aragon and Valencia in preparation for a Morisco rebellion. That same year, the Inquisition of Aragon claimed that a Morisco exile named Josu Duarte had slipped into Spain bearing a message from the Turkish sultan, written “in golden letters,” promising naval support in the event of a Morisco uprising. Neither Duarte nor the letters were ever discovered, nor was there any attempt at rebellion, but these reports were never officially refuted and reinforced an official image of Moriscos that was already taken for granted.
Other alleged plots were equally nebulous. In 1582 the Aragon Inquisition claimed that an exiled Valencian Morisco named Alejando Castellano had returned to his native land after two decades in Turkey in order to confirm certain religious prophecies that predicted a new Turkish conquest of Spain. According to the Inquisition, these prophecies claimed that Valencian Moriscos would participate in this Islamic reconquest, under the leadership of a giant local youth with “six fingers on each hand.” Once again, neither Castellano nor the six-fingered youth were ever found, and there was no Turkish invasion. In other cases, inquisitors conflated disloyalty with seditious intent. In 1578 the Aragon Inquisition cited rumors that Aragonese Moriscos were organizing bullfights to celebrate the defeat of Sebastian’s forces at Alcazarquivir as evidence of disloyalty and potential treason.
Reports like these were often used by Aragonese inquisitors to persuade the hesitant Philip to impose his authority—and their own—on the Moriscos and their insubordinate Christian lords. Rumors of seditious conspiracies and imminent rebellion were intended to instill anxiety, and they often succeeded, regardless of the quality of the evidence to support them. In January 1575, a French Huguenot named François Nelias was charged with heresy and tortured in the Inquisition dungeons in Zaragoza, where he eventually claimed to have witnessed Aragonese Moriscos and the son of the governor of Béarn plotting an uprising.
There is no way of knowing whether Nelias was telling the truth or telling his interrogators what they wanted to hear in order to save himself from further torment. Other plots were based on testimonies from spies and informers, who had a personal interest in keeping themselves employed. In 1582 a group of Moriscos was arrested and tortured by the Valencia Inqusition on charges of sedition following denunciations by a Morisco informant named Gil Pérez, who was subsequently indicted for perjury and blackmail. Equally phantasmal rumors of Morisco plots and rebellions spread periodically through the south of Spain. In Seville in 1580, the authorities carried out a series of arrests following reports that the Moriscos were about to rise up throughout Andalusia, with assistance from the Ottomans and North Africa. Similar episodes subsequently occurred in Jaén and Málaga, and again in Seville in 1596, where the authorities imposed a curfew on the city’s Morisco districts following the English assault on Cádiz, fearing that the Moriscos might rise up with English help. In another incident in the same period, the Count of Sástago informed the government that Moriscos in Aragon had mined the town of Calatayud with barrels of gunpowder with the intention of blowing it up, though no such preparations were ever uncovered.
Not all plots were due to official paranoia. There was credible evidence of contacts between Aragonese Moriscos and the rulers of Béarn, even if these contacts do not appear to have produced any tangible results. Valencian Moriscos did make occasional attempts to solicit arms and military assistance from the Turkish sultan for an uprising, but once again there is no evidence that such support was given. In the last decades of the century, the Ottomans were too embroiled in conflicts further east in Anatolia, Persia, and the Crimea to devote much attention to Spain or the Mediterranean.3 Nevertheless, Spanish officials were often prone to the most alarmist and unsubstantiated scenarios regarding Turkish intentions. In the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of La Goleta, the Council of State received a panicky letter from an official in Valencia, which warned that the Ottomans were poised to launch an invasion from North Africa and bring about “the destruction of Spain from the same place where the Africans had done so” eight centuries before, with the help of the Morisco “enemies in our own houses.”4
No evidence was offered to support these claims, but in any event the invasion did not materialize. Modern governments with far greater resources have often formulated policies on the basis of equally improbable threats and snippets of pseudo-intelligence, so we should not be surprised by the lack of skeptism shown toward these reports. Not all Spanish officials were prepared to take them at face value, however. In December 1576, the vice chancellor of Aragon, Bernardo de Bolea, dismissed the possibility of a Morisco rebellion in the kingdom, claiming that the Moriscos were outnumbered, lacking in fortified castles, and certain to be “discovered, broken up, and slaughtered” if they attempted to rebel.5 At a meeting of the Council of State in March 1577, an Inquisition report of an imminent Morisco uprising in Valencia with Turkish support was dismissed by the assembled counselors, including the Duke of Alva, the hammer of the Flanders rebels, on the grounds that they lacked weapons, resources, and secure ports for the Turkish fleet. The viceroy of Valencia, Vespasiano Gonzaga was equally skeptical of these reports, which he described in a letter later that year as a “very suspicious curiosity,” adding, “Either I am deceiving myself or all this is a lie.”6
These more sober and dispassionate assessments failed to dispel official suspicions of the Moriscos. Despite the Spanish-Ottoman cease-fire in the Mediterranean, Muslim corsairs continued to attack Spanish ships and coastal towns, and their crews sometimes included Morisco exiles, such as Said Ben Faraj al-Dughali, a Granadan émigré who fled to Morocco shortly before the War of the Alpujarras. Initially enlisted in the service of the Moroccan sultan, al-Dughali was given the task of recruiting the elite Andalusian militia that fought in the battle of Alcazarquivir, before subsequently taking up corsairing. From his base at Tetuán, he participated in numerous raids on Spanish ships and his former homeland, including the massive corsair assault on the Canary Islands in 1571, in which Lanzarote was occupied for two months.
Moriscos also continued to provide the corsairs with assistance from within Spain. In October 1583, fifteen Valencian Moriscos were drawn and quartered for helping Algerian corsairs attack the coastal town of Chilches. In another raid, on the Valencian town of Callosa, two thousand corsairs besieged the local Christians in a defensive castle and sacked the town before leaving with the entire Morisco population on board their ships. Though contact between Mor
iscos and their co-religionists in Barbary was strictly forbidden on pain of death, Moriscos from North Africa continued to sail across the Mediterranean by night to visit their relatives and sometimes kidnap Christians to sell as slaves on their return. These mysterious comings and goings heightened the prevailing sense of insecurity in Valencia, where rumors of Turkish spies and the unexplained appearance of sinister foreigners were often embellished with lurid folktales of Morisco bogeymen who reportedly tempted Christian children with sweets in order to spirit them away to Barbary.
Anti-Morisco paranoia was also affected by the banditry that was endemic in many parts of Spain during Philip’s reign. Banditry was by no means a uniquely Morisco activity. Both Moriscos and Old Christians “took to the mountains” and became bandits and salteadores (highwaymen) in the last decades of the century. Valencia was plagued by mafia-like gangs and armed bands, whose members included Christian “gentleman bandits” and disgruntled friars. Both priests and laymen in Valencia often carried weapons, and in other parts of Spain, members of the Church were similarly involved in various forms of criminality, from running gambling dens to kidnapping and homicide. The prevailing social insecurity was to some extent a consequence of the dire economic circumstances in which much of the Spanish population found itself in the last years of Philip’s reign. Banditry was also given a technological boost with the invention of flintlock muskets and pistols. Whereas matchlock firearms required an attacker to stand in front of his victim and painstakingly light a fuse to fire his weapon, flintlock technology made it possible to stage ambushes without warning.
Moriscos and Old Christian bandits all made use of this innovation, to the point where the Spanish authorities attempted to ban both populations from using these weapons. But the special horror and dread that surrounded Morisco banditry was exacerbated by rumors and stories of cruel and gruesome crimes carried out by Moriscos against Christians, whether it was drinking the blood of their victims or leaving naked and decapitated bodies of Christian travelers lying by the roadsides. In Valencia, according to the Valencian chronicler Escolano, the Morisco bandit Solaya led a band of “killers and lost youths” whose activities were so prolific that it was “not possible to walk through the kingdom without danger of being robbed or killed.” Between 1566 and 1573, parts of Andalusia and Granada were plagued by a band of escaped slaves and former Morisco rebels, led by the bandit El Joraique, known to Christians as “the Dog,” before its leader fled to Barbary.
Castile also experienced a surge in banditry, much of which was attributed to Moriscos deported from Granada. In 1581 a report presented by the Valladolid Chancellery to the Council of State attributed some two hundred homicides in central Castile during the previous four years to Morisco bandits. According to the investigating official and author of the report, Doctor Francisco Hernández de Liébana, these killings were the work of six or seven Morisco bands, whose ranks were drawn mainly from “those who rebelled in Granada.” These bands killed “muleteers, people travelling alone and unarmed” in broad daylight, secure in the knowledge that they would be given shelter by “anyone of their nation.” Liébana’s report placed these activities in the context of a broader threat to Christian society posed by the expelled Granadinos, whose Christianity “cannot be trusted.... They have never shown any sign of it no matter how many different methods have been tried.”7
Some Moriscos undoubtedly saw banditry as an opportunity for revenge against Christian society, though their activities were directed not only against Christians. Moriscos turned to banditry for many different reasons, and they were not necessarily concerned about the ethnic or religious background of their victims, nor were they any more or less brutal than their Christian counterparts. If some Morisco communities sheltered bandits, out of sympathy or fear, Morisco bandits in Valencia also had powerful Christian protectors, so much so that the Valencian viceroy, the Marquis of Aytona, was obliged in June 1586 to issue a decree threatening both Old and New Christians who protected Morisco bandits with equally harsh punishments.
Aytona attempted to eliminate all banditry from the kingdom with a draconian policy of floggings, hangings, and imprisonments, which achieved some temporary success, including the dissolution of Solaya’s band in 1586. Elsewhere in Spain, the authorities hanged Morisco bandits, sentenced them to serve in the galleys or forced labor in the mines, and in some cases negotiated their surrender in exchange for exile to Barbary. But brigandage continued to ebb and flow in accordance with the economic situation, though sometimes it overlapped with more specific political agendas. From 1585 to 1588, rural Aragon became the scene of a vicious ethnic feud between the Morisco vassals of the count of Ribagorza and Christian sheep and cattle herdsmen known as Montañeses, “mountain men,” who brought their animals through these lands to pasture. In 1585, the historic tensions between these two groups burst into violence when a Christian herdsman was murdered by Moriscos from the village of Codo. In retaliation, the victim’s brother and neighbors murdered a group of Morisco peasants from Codo as they were leaving to work in the fields.
This vendetta quickly escalated, as bands of Montañeses and local Christian bandits led by a mysterious individual named Lupercio Latrás unleashed a reign of terror against the “Moorish dogs” on the Count of Ribagorza’s estates. A onetime Spanish naval officer and a former spy at the English court, Latrás was a murky and enigmatic figure, whose war against the Morisco infidels coincided with an ongoing jurisdictional dispute between the Crown of Castile and the Aragonese courts regarding ownership rights over Ribagorza’s Morisco vassals. Whether Latrás was secretly working as an agent of the Crown or acting on his own account, neither the royal authorities nor the Christian seigneurs were able to protect the Moriscos from the violence that now engulfed the region. On Easter Sunday, 1588, Latrás and his Montañeses burned the Morisco village of Codo to the ground after its inhabitants had fled. This was followed by an even bloodier assault on the mixed Christian-Morisco village of Pina, where Latrás’s men murdered hundreds of Moriscos in the main square or threw them from the tower of the local monastery.
This was the most serious outbreak of ethnic violence since Granada, and there was a prospect of worse to come as Latrás exhorted his followers to “destroy all the Moriscos in the area.” Faced with the prospect of a civil warcum -crusade spreading throughout the region, the Aragonese authorities finally sent troops to restore order, arresting and executing both Morisco and Christian ringleaders involved in the violence. Latrás escaped punishment, however, and went on to perform another espionage assignment at the English court before being quietly murdered on returning to Spain in 1590. The unrest in Ribagorza preceded a major confrontation between the Castilian monarchy and the restive Aragonese, which began in 1590 when Philip’s disgraced royal secretary, Antonio Pérez, fled murder charges by seeking sanctuary in Aragon. The Inquisition’s attempts to arrest him provoked anti-Castilian riots in Zaragoza, and in September 1591, Philip was obliged to send eighteen thousand troops into the kingdom to restore the Crown’s authority. Moriscos had played no part in the alteraciones (disturbances) of Aragon, despite official fears that they might be used by their Christian overlords to resist the Castilian incursion, but they nevertheless felt its repercussions, when the Crown finally authorized the Inquisition to carry out the disarmament of the Morisco population, which the Holy Office had urged for more than a decade.
These periodic disarmaments were among various attempts by Spain’s rulers to neutralize the perceived Morisco security threat. In October 1575, a royal decree prohibited Valencian Moriscos from approaching the coastline without an official permit. In 1581, in response to the “many murders, robberies and lootings” attributed to Morisco bandits, the Granadinos of Castile were ordered to carry identification papers at all times to prove their place of residence. The Moriscos of Castile were also banned from carrying weapons, except for knives with rounded points. In Granada, any Morisco caught carrying weapons could be hange
d. In Valencia in August 1586, Moriscos were prohibited from changing their place of residence. In 1588, Philip instructed the authorities in Aragon to increase their vigilance along the French frontier in order to prevent contacts between Aragonese Moriscos and French Huguenots.
There were also sporadic attempts to ban Moriscos from certain professions that were deemed to pose a security risk, such as the manufacture of saltpeter and gunpowder. The Morisco muleteers, or arrieros, who dominated the Spanish transportation industry, came under particular suspicion. Morisco muleteers were often accused of smuggling weapons, gunpowder, and forbidden manuscripts in their baggage trains, and official searches occasionally did discover these banned items. But it was impossible to exclude Moriscos from a profession that Christians were generally averse to doing themselves, nor was it feasible to seal Moriscos in their different regions.
As much as the authorities tried to police the Moriscos, sixteenth-century Spain simply lacked the resources to allay its own fears. How could the authorities be certain that Morisco blacksmiths or metalworkers were not manufacturing weapons or musket balls to replace those that had been confiscated? How could they distinguish the horse smugglers who regularly crossed the Pyrenees from foreign spies or Moriscos seeking assistance for a putative revolt? How could Valencian Christians ever be sure that Morisco fishing boats did not liaise with corsair ships out of sight of land? In 1582, the Council of State drew up a detailed list of proposals to reduce the possibility of a Morisco uprising in Valencia and instructed the viceroy to ensure that all town councils were well supplied with gunpowder, muskets, and musket balls and to establish a Christian militia that would engage in regular shooting practice and shooting competitions between different towns as a show of strength visà-vis the Morisco population. Yet it was not until 1597 that these proposals finally resulted in the establishment of the Valencian militia known as the Efectiva.