Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Cock also visited the Morisco settlement of Muel near Zaragoza, a town renowned for its ceramics industry in the Islamic period and whose products remained popular in the Aragonese capital. Cock’s touristic descriptions of the smelting processes used by Morisco potters were interspersed with observations of the local “Moors,” who refused to eat pork or drink wine and afterward broke the clay plates and cups in which these substances had been served to their Christian guests. The local church, he noted, was mostly closed and rarely attended except “on Sundays and festivals when they are obliged by force to hear mass.” According to Cock, there were only three Old Christians in the town, one of whom was the priest. The rest of Muel’s inhabitants, he commented sarcastically, “would rather go on a pilgrimage to Mecca than to Santiago.”1

  Cock’s depiction of the Moriscos of Muel echoed the official consensus of the Moriscos as an alien and unassimilated subculture that remained dangerously separate from Christian society. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, however, evidence of such separation was not always so obvious. Ostensible expressions of Islamic worship had long since vanished, and many of the traditional markers of Muslim cultural identity had become blurred or eroded. In rural Valencia and Granada, Arabic was still spoken. Even in the Castilian heartlands of Ávila, Valladolid, or Segovia, the strains of algarabía, spoken mostly by the deported Granadan Moriscos, might still have grated on Christian ears, but most Moriscos now spoke Spanish or Catalan among themselves or knew enough to speak it in Christian company.

  Moriscos were often associated with particular grammatical variants of Spanish and “Morisco” pronunciation of certain sounds, such as the fusing of the two syllables in ie so that words like viejo, “old,” became vejo. The stereotype of the Morisco comically grappling with the “language of empire” was a frequent source of amusement in sixteenth-century Spain, but it was an image that did not always correspond with reality, according to the philologist Bernardo de Aldrete, who noted that the children and grandchildren of Granadan Moriscos in Castile “speak Castilian so well, as well as the best . . . even if some hardened others have not given up their Arabic. The same is true in Aragon; those who do not know particular speakers cannot tell them from the natives.”2

  The vexed issue of clothing was no longer what it had once been, either. In parts of rural Spain, it was still possible to find Morisco peasants in turbans and rope-soled alpargatas and Morisca women in their white almalafas. But most urban Moriscos now dressed like Christians, and even in Valencia, Morisco men—and increasingly women—were also likely to wear Christian dress, so that a casual glance at a Spanish street in the late sixteenth century would not necessarily have revealed any obvious difference between them. In 1594 Papal Nuncio Camilo Borghese was struck by the differences between Italian women and Spanish women in Madrid who “wear a veil across their faces like nuns, with their heads completely covered by the mantilla, which they wear across their faces in such a way that they can hardly be seen.”3

  Moriscos were still associated in the public mind with certain trades and occupations; many worked as shopkeepers, street vendors, gardeners, and the ubiquitous fritter sellers, or buñoleros, who were found in many Spanish towns and cities. But Moriscos could also be found working as notaries, tax officials, and in other “offices of the Republic” in which they were indistinguishable from Old Christians. They were also recognizable by where they lived. Even when they worked among Christians in towns and cities, they generally went home at the end of the day to Morisco neighborhoods, such as Triana in Seville, San Bernardo in Teruel, or El Azoque in Zaragoza. Elsewhere, in the desolate steppes of lower Aragon or the wild mountainous regions between Valencia and Catalonia known as the Maestrazgo, the thatched roofs and clay houses of Morisco villages and settlements distinguished them from the brick-and-tile Old Christian houses on the coastal plains.

  Few Christians penetrated these communities to the point where they would actually witness Islamic religious worship, though the more experienced observer might have detected continued adherence to the “sect of Muhammad” in the sight of Morisco men and women wearing their best clothes on Fridays, in the absence of smoke emanating from Morisco chimneys during Ramadan, and in the bored or sullen faces of Morisco congregants during mass. In the post-Granada era, however, Spanish officials often did not need to see external signs of Morisco difference in order to imagine the most hostile intentions beneath the surface. Their suspicions were often dependent not so much on what the Moriscos did or did not do, but on the prism of assumptions and prejudices through which Christians viewed them. And it is to this image of the Morisco that we must now turn, in order to understand the unenviable position in which Spain’s former Muslims found themselves in the last decades of the century.

  This image was shaped by a complex overlap of cultural and religious chauvinism, quasi racism, and incipient Spanish nationalism that defies easy categorization. Some historians have argued that modern concepts of racism are anachronistic in the context of sixteenth-century Spain and that religion rather than race was the deciding factor in Christian hostility toward Muslims and Jews. Such criticisms ignore the extent to which modern notions of racism are a continuation of a tradition whose essential contours can be traced back to classical times. Crucial to this tradition is the idea that all members of a particular society or social group share the same inherently hateful, inferior, or contemptible characteristics. Whether these narratives of inferiority are attributed to culture, religion, or biology, they invariably serve to justify domination, exclusion, and even extermination by the group that takes its own superiority for granted.

  In sixteenth-century Spain, religion, culture, and ethnicity were all part of the bitter animosity that was often extended toward the Moriscos. Such hostility was rooted in a theological revulsion toward Islam itself, which was expressed in depictions of Moriscos as “Saracens” and “Hagarenes,” “Hagarene relics,” or “Hagarene beasts”—in reference to Ishmael’s illicit relationship with the slave girl Hagar. Spanish anti-Muslim polemics in the sixteenth century often echoed their medieval predecessors in their dismissal of Islam as a vicious and diabolical sect whose followers were credulous and warlike primitives.

  As was the case elsewhere in Europe, hatred of Islam was also shaped by fear of the Ottoman Empire, whose military and technological prowess made “the Turk” an even more formidable and dangerous geopolitical adversary than “the Saracen.” Throughout the sixteenth-century Hapsburg Empire, anti-Turkish propaganda and popular broadsheets known in Austria as Turkenschriften (Turkish writings) relentlessly portrayed the “terrible Turk” as a cruel, barbaric, and subhuman foe.4 This image of the Ottomans as the “hereditary enemy” of Christianity was powerfully embedded in post-Reconquista Spain. In 1551, Bartolomé de las Casas, the great critic of Spanish colonial violence in the New World, took part in a historic debate at Valladolid with the cleric Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the rights of Indians subjugated by the conquistadors, in which he argued that conquest was a “tyrannical” and “Mohammedan” concept that should not be applied to the Indies, “as if the Indians were African Moors or Turks.”5 In his famous indictment of the behavior of Spanish colonists in the Indies, he condemned the abuses carried out by his countrymen as “worse than those carried out by the Turk to destroy Christendom.”6

  In Las Casas’s eyes, Islam was the violent antithesis of Christianity, against which unrelenting warfare was entirely justified and even obligatory for a Christian state, whereas “innocent” Indians were to be won over by more peaceful means. In the course of the sixteenth century, other narratives were also invoked as a justification for Spanish imperial conquests in Muslim lands. Clerics such as Sepúlveda depicted the inhabitants of pre-Columbian America as barbarians and savages who deserved to be conquered and civilized according to “natural law,” and the same conceptual framework was sometimes applied to Moorish North Africa, whose inhabitants were depicted as a barbaric and primitive “s
warm of peoples” who were unworthy of the lands they possessed. This image of Moorish barbarism was supported by Spanish descriptions of Barbary like Archbishop Diego de Haedo’s Topografia e historia general de Argel (Topography and General History of Algiers, 1612), which may have been partly authored by Christian captives in Algiers. Haedo depicted the Muslims of Algiers as a brutish and primitive population, whose lack of civilization was confirmed by their diet, their sexual practices, the way they brought up their children, their treatment of Christians, and their dealings with each other.

  Other sixteenth-century Spaniards echoed Haedo’s depictions of the Moors of North Africa as greedy, superstitious, dissolute, and sadistic, and these negative characteristics were often attached to the “Moors” within Spain’s borders. In the Spanish imagination, the Moriscos not only shared the same barbaric characteristics as their North African contemporaries, which placed them on a level lower than a Castilian society that believed itself to be the height of civilization, but they were a constant reminder of an Islamic past that was regarded with shame, contempt, and disgust. At a time when some Spanish intellectuals were beginning to imagine a common national identity based on the concept of Hispanidad (Spanishness), with its roots in the Latin and Visigothic past, the “Oriental” and “African” vestiges of Morisco culture were particularly anomalous and unwelcome.

  This antipathy was to some extent a consequence of Spain’s new power and status in Christian Europe and the paradoxical attitude toward it outside Spain. On the one hand, Spanish culture was widely admired, particularly in Italy. At the same time, Spanish—and Hapsburg—power was feared, in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. Even though Philip II presented himself as the “hammer of heretics” and the militant defender of Catholic religious orthodoxy, many leading European Christians continued to regard Spain as a suspect country that had been fatally corrupted by the long centuries of Islamic domination. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Dutch theologian and church reformer Erasmus refused an invitation to visit Spain, where his writings were extremely popular, telling Thomas More, “Non placet Hispania” (“I don’t like Spain”) on the grounds that Spanish society was infested with Jews and heretics and these perceptions were echoed by other leading Christians. In Table Talk (1566), Martin Luther described Spain as a country of “faithless Jews and baptized Moors,” while the bitterly anti-Spanish Pope Paul IV referred to Spaniards in 1555 as the heretical “spawn of Jews and Moors.”

  In the course of Philip’s wars with Protestant Europe, the depiction of Spain as a polluted and defiled country was routinely integrated into Protestant anti-Spanish propaganda, which attributed Spain’s supposedly anomalous proclivity for violence and conquest to its Moorish heritage. A French pamphlet in the 1590s described Philip II himself as “half-Moor, half-Jew, half-Saracen.” William of Orange’s widely distributed anti-Spanish Apologie (1580) attributed the Duke of Alba’s bloody repression in Flanders to the fact that “the greatest part of the Spaniards, and especially those that count themselves noblemen, are of the blood of the Moors and Jews.” In Briefe Discourse of the Spanish State (1590), the Dutch writer Edward Daunce similarly attributed Spanish “tyranny” in the Indies to the fact that Spaniards had “mingled with the Mores cruell and full of treacherie,” while the Catholic poet Alessandro Tassoni denounced Spanish domination of his native Italy in a pamphlet entitled Le Filipiche (1612) which described Spain as “the Moorish barbarian, equally great by land and sea.” Even William Shakespeare gave “the Moor” Othello “a sword of Spain” with which to kill himself. These depictions were deeply wounding and humiliating to a country that aspired to be “universal, Catholic, and perfect” and undoubtedly reinforced the determination of Spain’s rulers to extirpate these alien influences from Spanish society and make itself “pure” in the eyes of the outside world.

  Religious chauvinism and cultural prejudice fueled Christian hostility toward the Moriscos, which was expressed in various ways: in discriminatory legislation and limpieza statutes; in the refusal of some priests to offer communion to their Morisco congregants; in forcing Morisco galley rowers to cover their heads when mass was celebrated on board; in the taunts of “Moorish dogs” and “Moorish bitches” directed at Moriscos by the Old Christian populace; in physical attacks on condemned Moriscos who attempted to “die as Moors” at Inquisitorial autos-da-fé; and in official documents that variously referred to the Moriscos as a “pestilence,” a “plague,” a “fever,” a “pestilential horde,” or “beasts” or “vipers” within the “bosom of Spain.”

  Such language was often found in the seventeenth-century apologetics and anti-Morisco texts written in support of the expulsion, such as the Portuguese Dominican friar Damián Fonseca’s Just Expulsion of the Moriscos of Spain (1611). A former preacher in Valencia, Fonseca wrote how the “treason and bad customs” of the Moriscos were inherited in their “corrupted blood” and their mother’s milk, so that all members of the Morisco “nation” had imbibed “the depraved customs of their ancestors . . . in the belly of their mothers.” Fusing limpieza discourse and religion, Fonseca cited the Book of Ezekiel and compared the Morisco presence inside Spain to a parasitical “vine” that was “in the insides of its mother” and “fed by a poisonous blood.”7 The Aragonese priest Pedro Aznar Cardona also depicted the Moriscos as a source of pollution in his condemnation of Old Christians who married Moriscos and thereby “stained what little clean lineage they possessed.” Like Fonseca, Aznar Cardona lived and preached among the Moriscos and spent several fruitless years preaching in a rural Morisco parish in the Jalón Valley in Aragon before writing the ferociously anti-Morisco tract Expulsión Justificada de los Moriscos (Justified Expulsion of the Moriscos). This experience contributed to Aznar Cardona’s subsequent denunciation of the Moriscos asThe vilest of people, slovenly and enemies of virtue, noble letters, and sciences. In consequence, they were far removed from all urbane, courteous, and polite manners and customs. They brought their children up to run wild like brute beasts, giving them no rational teaching or instruction for salvation, except what was forced upon them, and what they were obliged by their superiors to attend, because they had been baptized. Their sentences were clumsy, their discourse bestial, their language barbarous, their way of dressing ridiculous.... In their meals they were coarse. They always ate on the ground with no table or any other piece of furniture that might smell of other people.... What they ate were vile things . . . vegetables, grains, fruits, honey, and milk; they do not drink wine nor eat meat unless it is slaughtered by them . . . they love charlatanry, stories, dancing, promenading, and other bestial diversions . . . they pursue jobs that require little work, such as weaving, tailoring, shoe-making, carpentry, and the like; they are peddlers of oil, fish, honey, sugar, eggs, and other produce; they are inept at bearing arms and thus are cowardly and effeminate; they travel in groups only; they are sensual and disloyal; they marry young and multiply like weeds overcrowding places and contaminating them.8

  Aznar Cardona’s hysterical loathing of a population he regarded as “savage idiots” sometimes acquires a hallucinatory intensity, as in his depiction of Moriscos as “devouring foxes, serpents, scorpions, toads, spiders, and poisonous lizards from whose cruel venom many became sick and died. They were hawkish highwaymen and birds of prey that lived by giving death. They were wolves among sheep, drones in the beehive, crows among doves, dogs in the church, gypsies among the Israelites, and finally, heretics among Catholics.”9 Other clerics were equally visceral in their rejection of their former parishioners. “They were, like the devil, inimical to the most holy Cross,” recalled Friar Marcos de Guadalajara,10 while the Dominican friar Blas Verdú later recalled the “terrible, mute, and silent arguments that clamor in the blood. After we preached to them, these wretches responded: my father—Moor; I—Moor.”11

  Like the Gypsies, who occupied a similarly precarious and marginalized position in sixteenth-century Spain, Moriscos were often regarded as a malevo
lent subculture whose members were suspected of blasphemous religious practices, crime, and murder. Such bigotry was able to convert even the more positive characteristics imposed upon them into a source of loathing and disgust. To Fonseca, the inferiority of Valencian Moriscos was confirmed by the fact that many of them lived in “rough and mountainous places, where these savages chose to live the better to flee the company of Catholics.”12

  If the Moriscos were loathed because of where they lived or what they ate, they were also despised by their enemies for the same qualities of sobriety and industriousness that made them attractive to Christian employers. In Castile, Christian observers often expressed jealousy and amazement at the rapid economic progress made by some Granadan Moriscos and attributed such advancement to the fact that Moriscos worked harder than Christians and consumed less and therefore enjoyed an unfair advantage. Some anti-Morisco narratives went further and accused Moriscos of deliberately working long hours and living frugally in a collective plot to undermine the Christian economy and take over Spain by stealth.