Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  All this raised questions that are relevant not only to the sixteenth century. How can a dominant majority absorb into itself a minority group that it regards as inferior, despicable, and dangerous? Is it possible to despise the religious beliefs and cultural practices of a particular group without also hating the people who subscribe to them? If one group attempts to eliminate the beliefs and practices of another by force, how can the former ever be certain that this imposed transformation has become sincere and permanent?

  Ordered by Philip to undertake a program of evangelization in 1588, the ecclesiastical writer Alfonso Chacón warned the king to take care “that Spain does not breed such monsters that will one day eat her flesh” and claimed that Moriscos who appeared to be good Christians were only putting on a façade of Christianity in order “to show what they are not and at the same time conceal what they are.”29 Though Chacón recommended that every effort should be made to integrate the Moriscos into Christian society, he also proposed on another occasion that they be made to wear special marks on their clothing so that their origins would always be recognizable. For Chacón, the integration of the Morisco “monsters” was dependent on keeping them at arm’s length—a proposal that amounted to continued segregation and exclusion of a different kind.

  This contradictory proposal demonstrated once again the recurring tension at the heart of Spain’s concept of assimilation, between the determination to eliminate the Moriscos by absorbing them into itself, and a residual suspicion and loathing that lent itself more naturally toward their exclusion and marginalization. All this placed the Moriscos in a difficult and precarious situation. As the living representatives of a despised Islamic past, they no longer had a collective future within Spain unless they ceased to exist as a separate group. They were punished and repressed if they failed to conform to the obligations of their imposed faith. At the same time, they were held in fear and contempt by a church and state whose leaders continued to regard even the most ostensibly Christianized Moriscos as inauthentic Catholics and yet refused to allow the more recalcitrant Moriscos to leave the country.

  In the last decade of the sixteenth century, there was an audacious attempt to create a new space for the Moriscos within Spain, which began in 1588 when construction workers discovered a mysterious box while demolishing a former mosque tower on the site of the Granada Cathedral. In addition to a parchment written in Arabic, Castilian, and Latin, the box contained a fragment of the handkerchief into which the Virgin Mary allegedly had wept during the Crucifixion, as well as a bone of the Christian martyr Saint Stephen.

  The discovery of a Christian religious text written in Arabic dating back to the arrival of Christianity in Iberia was a remarkable discovery, which seemed to suggest that the Granadan Church was much older than its official establishment in 1492. Clerics in Granada were overjoyed, and the jubilation and excitement in the kingdom was confirmed by the discovery of a series of texts engraved in Latin, Castilian, and Arabic on lead plaques on the hill of Sacromonte (Sacred Mountain) in Granada between 1595 and 1599. Some of these “Lead Books” (libros plúmbeos, or plomos) appeared to have been written by the martyred patron saint of Granada, Saint Cecilio, and his brother Tesifon; others consisted of reported dialogues between the Virgin Mary and the Apostles, including Saint Peter, with titles such as Book of the Maxims of Saint Mary and The Essence of the Gospel.

  The discovery of these texts caused a sensation in Spain, whose repercussions were felt throughout Protestant and Catholic Europe. Not only did the plomos identify the patron saint of Granada and his brother as Arabs, who appeared to have brought Christianity to Spain before it had reached France and England, but they portrayed Islam and Christianity not as antithetical opposites, but as complementary faiths with overlapping beliefs and doctrines in common. Although they appeared to be Christian texts, the plomos contained numerous favorable references to Islamic and Arabic culture, such as the following exchange between Saint Peter and the Virgin Mary:He said, “Tell us about the excellence of the Arabs, who are to be those who aid religion at the end of days, and tell us about their reward, and of the superiority of their language over all other languages, O Our Lady.”

  She said, “The Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days. The superiority of their tongue over all other languages is as the superiority of the sun over the stars of heaven. Allah has chosen them for this purpose and has strengthened them with his victory. The excellence of those who believe is great in the sight of Allah, and their reward is copious.”30

  After more than a century in which successive Spanish rulers had attempted to eradicate Islam from the Iberian peninsula, Spanish Christians were now confronted with a bewildering affirmation of the cultural and religious “excellence” of the Arabs from the Virgin Mary herself. Not surprisingly, the authenticity of these discoveries was immediately called into question. While the archbishop of Granada, Pedro Vaca de Castro y Quiñones, commissioned various translators to examine and reexamine them, and concluded that they were genuine, a number of theologians and linguists declared them to be forgeries.

  So gratified was the Granadan Church at its newfound importance that educated Granadan Moriscos were astonished to find themselves favored rather than persecuted because of their knowledge of Arabic, as Archbishop de Castro set out to resolve any doubts about their origins. One of those consulted was Ahmad bin Qasim al-Hajari, a Granadan Morisco who later became a translator and diplomat for the Moroccan sultan. In 1595 al-Hajari was summoned by a local priest to the archbishop’s presence to help translate these texts. He later recalled, “I said to myself, ‘How shall I save myself, as the Christians kill and burn everyone on whom they find an Arabic book or of whom they know that he reads Arabic.’”31

  In the first flush of jubilation that followed the Sacromonte discoveries, the Granadan Church was more concerned with confirming its new lineage and deciphering the secrets of the plomos than it was with extirpating Islam, and al-Hajari’s contributions were welcomed. Outside Granada, theologians and linguists were more skeptical of the authenticity of these manuscripts and claimed that they had been faked. Some scholars argued that Arabic could not have been spoken in the Holy Land in the period described; others pointed out stylistic inconsistencies and anachronisms in the Latin and Castilian texts. It was not until 1682 that the controversy was finally resolved and the plomos were officially declared to be forgeries, but their authorship and purpose have never been confirmed. Most scholars believe that the authors were Moriscos, and suspicions have generally focused on Miguel de Luna and Alonso del Castillo, the former Granadan medical students who had become Philip’s official Arabic translators. The former was the “translator” and most probably the author of a forged history of the fall of Visigothic Spain, True History of Don Rodrigo, written in the same period, which depicted the Muslim conquest as a liberation from the corrupt and tyrannical Visigothic court. Castillo was an enigmatic and ambiguous figure, who had played a leading role in the deception and “black ops” that helped bring the Granada rebellion to an end.32

  Both men were among those called upon by Archbishop de Castro to translate some of the manuscripts in Granada, including the virtually indecipherable text known as the Mute book. The archbishop trusted both translators and defended them against allegations of fabrication, but their involvement in the hoax has never been definitively confirmed or disproved. Were the plomos intended to save Morisco Spain from extinction and effectively reshape the future by changing the past? Were they intended to pave the way for a reconciliation between Islam and Catholicism in Iberia by making each faith appear more acceptable to the other? If so, such aspirations were naive as well as poignant. By this time, religious hostility toward Islam itself was only one component in a contradictory dynamic that has often been repeated in other historical contexts. On the one hand, a dominant Christian majority sought to absorb the Moriscos into Christian society in order to eliminate a minority that it regarded as alien, inferior,
and dangerous. Yet even as Christian Spain demanded that the Moriscos become invisible, its own prejudices and suspicions acted as a barrier to such a transformation and its more bigoted sectors refused to accept that assimilation was possible—or desirable.

  16

  Toward Expulsion

  Even before the Moriscos had begun their reluctant metamorphosis into Christians, the more hard-line Spanish churchmen and inquisitors had argued that Spain would never be fully secure—or fully pure—as long as Muslims remained on Spanish soil. For the best part of the sixteenth century, Spain’s rulers had tried to reconcile the pursuit of religious unity with economic necessity by keeping the Moriscos in Spain—on condition that they become “good and faithful Christians.” In the aftermath of Granada, however, Spanish officials were increasingly pessimistic that this objective could ever be achieved. In 1571 the Inquisition of Valencia conceded the Moriscos an edict of grace on the grounds that they were “delinquent through ignorance and lack of instruction rather than malice.” Ten years later, Valencian inquisitors declared “in our experience with the Moors, even if they are well instructed in Christian doctrine they remain Moors.” This disenchantment was reinforced by continued reports of Morisco defiance and duplicity. In Aragon in 1573, the new priest in the perennially troublesome Morisco village of Gea de Albarracín informed the authorities that the local population had dug a secret tunnel to hide from the Inquisition and maintained a Koranic study school with forty female pupils.

  In June 1581, Luisa Caminera de Arcos, a Morisca from the Aragonese town of Teruel, walked into the local Inquisition headquarters and denounced various members of her family and her neighbors as secret Mohammedans. These revelations were particularly disturbing to local inquisitors. Some of these Teruel “New Christian” families could trace their incorporation into Christianity back to the early fifteenth century. Their religious convictions were taken for granted to the point that many of them had been allowed to participate in religious confraternities and had even entered the priesthood. Yet here was testimony that appeared to confirm the darkest suspicions of a parallel Morisco world that was inside Christian society but not part of it.

  Similar reports from other parts of Spain were brought to the attention of Philip and his ministers. In the town of Hornachos in Extremadura, ecclesiastical and secular officials described a militant “Morisco republic,” whose inhabitants murdered and robbed Christian travelers, maintained regular contacts with Turks and Muslims in North Africa, and generally spurned any attempts to Christianize them. One frustrated local monk complained that these Moriscos regarded “the sermon as a humiliation, the confession as a rack, and communion as a gallows” and that “taking them to church was like taking them to the galleys.”1

  From the point of view of the authorities, some of the most dispiriting reports concerned the Granadan Moriscos in Castile. Their removal had partly been intended to facilitate their assimilation—and to exert more control over them—by isolating them in smaller numbers among Christians. On October 28, 1589, however, nearly two decades after the Granada deportations, the Bishop of Badajoz informed the king that the Granadinos in his bishopric were failing to fulfill these aspirations. Although these Moriscos went to mass and confession, the bishop reported, they did not willingly perform “exterior works” of faith, such as asking for masses to be celebrated for the dead, buying papal bulls, or observing Christian feast days.

  The bishop also claimed that the Granadinos were failing to mix with Christians and continuing to “speak their algaravía and live together and they only marry those of their nation, except for a few, and at their weddings they celebrate and sing in Arabic.” Whereas in Granada the clergy had understood Arabic and had been able to keep an eye on the Moriscos, the bishop reported, Arabic was not spoken or understood by the Christian population in Extremadura, so that “it is believed and suspected that the Moriscos perform their ceremonies and with even greater freedom than in the Kingdom of Granada,” especially since many of them had breached their control orders and “gone from some parts to others without passports or any knowledge of their whereabouts.”2

  Other Castilian officials accused the Granadan deportees of corrupting the “Old New Christians” who had lived in Castile before their arrival and encouraging them to return to Islam. In Ávila, inquisitor Juan Carillo described the “Mudejar Moriscos” who had lived in the city for centuries as “not only not Christians but enemies of Christianity.” In Toledo, Inquisitorial officials routinely expressed anxiety at the presence of an unassimilated Morisco population in the “heart of Spain” whose numbers were growing inexorably to the point where Moriscos would soon outnumber Christians. In September 1588, a Sevillian official named Alonso Gutiérrez informed the king and his ministers:We must take all Moriscos to be declared enemies, both Mudejars and those from the Kingdom of Granada dispersed in other provinces, cities, and towns of the Crown of Castile, and regard them all as Moorish as those in Africa and if they perform some act of Christianity, it is through coercion and obligation. We see that as rich as they are, they do not want to marry Old Christians and that in their food and drink they behave like those who live by the same law in Africa. We see and have seen the intention they had in the rebellion in the Kingdom of Granada and by a more circuitous route, in Seville and what is generally shown by those of the Crown of Aragon. We must see that when any of them are left to their own devices how little that our religion prevails among them, also taking into consideration that as these people are not leaving, their numbers are multiplying enormously, unlike Old Christians who ordinarily go to Italy, Flanders, the Indies.3

  This was the consensus at the highest levels of the Spanish state in the last decades of the century. But if the Moriscos could not be incorporated into Christian society, then what could be done with them? It was a question that was to torment Spanish officialdom for the best part of three decades.

  In December 1581, Philip convened a special ad hoc commission, or junta, to debate the conversion of the Valencian Moriscos in Lisbon, where the Castilian court had temporarily relocated in the wake of Spain’s annexation of Portugal. After considering previous state papers on the Morisco problem, the three-member commission concluded that the conversion of the Moriscos was “not morally impossible” and attributed the failure to realize this objective thus far to the inadequate provision of religious instruction. Though the junta agreed that the “infidels and sinners” of Valencia were “more stubborn than the Moors of Barbary,” it nevertheless proposed that the Moriscos could still be won over to Christianity through a concerted missionary effort comparable to “what is seen in the Indies and other parts.”4

  Over the coming months, this optimistic prognosis was challenged by a number of officials and statesmen. In April 1582, Inquisitor General Jiménez de Reinoso presented the Inquisition Supreme Council with a dramatic assessment of the Morisco security threat, which claimed that a potential Morisco army of two hundred thousand soldiers was waiting to assist the Turkish sultan in a new “conquest of Spain” and speculated whether “throwing out and expelling all the Moriscos from Spain and especially those of the Kingdom of Valencia” might be the only viable solution. Though Reinoso recognized that expulsion would have a negative impact on the kingdom’s public and private revenues, he argued that such losses would only be temporary and would be counterbalanced by the “universal security and calm of these kingdoms” that would accrue from “cleansing and purging not just heresies but the people who have perpetuated and are perpetuating them.”5

  Despite his alarming depiction of the Morisco threat, Reinoso dismissed the possibility that the Valencian Moriscos would rebel, arguing that they were cowed and defenseless. Interestingly, the Inquisitor General’s proposal to remove the Moriscos from Spain was not shared by the Inquisition of Valencia itself, which agreed “to expel all of them from Valencia and settle them in Old Castile, but not to send them to the Levant or Barbary, because after all they are Spaniards li
ke ourselves.” In June, Philip convened an enlarged version of the Lisbon Junta, whose deliberations were considered in detail by the Council of State between September 19 and 21. In its summary and recommendations (consulta) made to the king, the council proposed that “when possible” the Moriscos “should be removed and expelled from the kingdoms of Spain” and transported to Barbary, with the exception of baptized Morisco children, who would remain in Spain to receive a Christian education. The counselors proposed that ships be brought to Majorca to expedite this task, which would begin with the Moriscos from Valencia and be followed afterward by the removal of the Moriscos from Castile and Aragon.

  These were not abstract statements of principle. The extant documentation suggests that Philip’s ministers seriously considered the possibility of implementing these proposals the following year. It is not clear whether Philip gave his approval, but in any case, the international situation was not favorable to a logistical enterprise on this scale. Hardly had the Turkish-Spanish truce been concluded when the Spanish navy was required to fend off two military assaults on the Azores Islands by the challenger to the Portuguese throne, Dom Antonio, who was receiving support from France and England. In Flanders, the brilliant Spanish military commander Alexander Farnesse was massing troops for a major offensive, which finally unfolded in 1583.