Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  In these circumstances, it is not surprising that Philip appears to have been reluctant to implement his ministers’ proposals and temporized by establishing yet another commission to debate the evangelization of the Moriscos instead. Nevertheless, the Lisbon proposals marked a new threshold: for the first time expulsion had been recommended at the highest levels of state “when possible,” and its practical details had been considered. It would take nearly thirty years before these proposals were finally implemented, as Spain’s rulers inched toward a solution that often seemed as complex and fraught with difficulty as the problem it was intended to solve.

  Few individuals were more influential in bringing about that final outcome than Juan de Ribera, the archbishop of Valencia. One of the dominant clergymen of his era, Ribera was born in Seville around 1532 into a rich landowning Andalusian family and began his church career at the age of twelve, when he started studying canon law and theology at the University of Salamanca. Following his graduation in 1557, Ribera entered the priesthood and was appointed bishop of Badajoz in 1562. He performed his duties with such distinction that Philip appointed him archbishop of Valencia in 1568, with the honorific title Patriarch of Antioch, when he was only thirty-six years old. Ribera’s rapid ascent was due to his personal piety and energetic promotion of the Council of Trent’s reformist agenda. Solitary, ascetic, and uncompromisingly devoted to the broader interests of the Catholic faith, his stubborn commitment to reform was not initially well received by the ecclesiastical establishment in his new archdiocese, but Ribera eventually overcame such opposition and spent the rest of his life in Valencia.

  The relationship between the patriarch and his Morisco flock had a less happy outcome. In fulfillment of the Tridentine mandate to close the gap between the clergy and the populace, Ribera spent an average of three months every year traveling through Valencia with his retinue of servants and advisers and personally preached and administered the sacraments in the “Morisco places” in his archdiocese. Ribera was initially optimistic that the Moriscos could be won over to Christianity and made some innovative attempts to realize this objective, allocating special funds for the construction and refurbishment of Morisco churches, raising the salaries of priests in Morisco parishes in order to prevent them from battening on their congregants, and collaborating with the Jesuits in a new program of missionary work among the Moriscos.

  These initiatives were too piecemeal to redress the decades of neglect that had preceded Ribera’s arrival. In 1577, the Jesuits called a halt to their campaign and declared that their efforts to convert the Moriscos had failed to produce any positive results. Ribera had already begun to conclude that such attempts were doomed and was increasingly critical of the Moriscos themselves, who he believed had deceived him by pretending to ask for religious instruction when they had no real interest in receiving it. His changing attitude was summed up in a sermon on the parable of the sower, which he delivered to a largely Morisco congregation at Játiva that year, in which he informed his congregants “If the seed does not bear fruit . . . it is not the fault of the seed or sower, but the ground.”6

  As the spiritual head of a kingdom with the largest Muslim population in Spain, the archbishop of Valencia was a key figure in the Lisbon debates in 1582. In a letter to Philip that year, Ribera made his bitterness and disappointment clear and proposed a phased removal of all Moriscos from Spain as one of various possible options. Though he insisted that “I by the grace of God am not so devoid of mercy that this step will not touch my soul, I hold many of these people to be my parishioners,” he nevertheless argued that it might be preferable “to let them go to limbo than to allow the name of God to be blasphemed by so many heretics.”7

  Having floated this possibility, Ribera appeared to draw back from it and recommended that “the present plan” of providing the Moriscos with religious instruction was the most suitable course of action. His commitment to this objective is open to question. A portrait of Ribera in 1607 shows a whitebearded, saintly figure with penetrating dark eyes, but the gentle demeanor belied a religious fanaticism and aristocratic contempt toward a Morisco population that he regarded not merely as heretics, blasphemers, and deceivers, but as primitive and vicious children with “obdurate souls.” Even to administer the sacraments to Moriscos, he once wrote, was “like scattering precious seeds among rocks, giving sacred objects to dogs, or casting pearls before swine.”8

  It may seem surprising that this clergyman who regarded the Moriscos as temperamentally incapable of Christianity made more effort to provide them with religious instruction than any of his predecessors. Even as Ribera lobbied for expulsion, he continued to pursue the path of evangelization. To attract better-qualified priests to Morisco Valencia, he established rotating posts in Morisco parishes and offered promotion to more lucrative parishes in return for positive results. In 1599 he commissioned the publication of a Catechism for the Instruction of Newly Converted Moors, a step that some proponents of assimilation had advocated for years.

  Why did Ribera invest so much time and energy in an enterprise that he regarded as doomed to failure? A clue to the archbishop’s motivations is contained in a pastoral letter written that same year in which he urged priests working in Morisco areas to continue to “engage a people to whom we are abhorrent” but nevertheless assured them that any failure to achieve results would be positive for Spain “because His Majesty . . . will have to cleanse her of infidels.”9 This was not the most inspirational message to launch a campaign of evangelization. Such statements suggest that Ribera was less interested in proselytizing the Moriscos than he was in demonstrating to the king that such efforts were futile. At the same time, he himself was required to fulfill the Church’s own obligations to provide baptized Christians with religious instruction. If these attempts failed, as Ribera clearly believed they would, then the responsibility for such failure would lie with the Moriscos themselves and would therefore make it possible for more radical measures to be undertaken against them.

  By this time, Ribera was working in tandem with the Dominican monk Jaime Bleda, who served as his adviser on Morisco Valencia. A former Inquisition official, Bleda’s initial encounter with Morisco Valencia took place in 1585, when Ribera gave him the rectorship of the Morisco parish of Corbera. Before officially taking up his new post, Bleda made an unannounced visit to the local parish church where the incumbent priest was already giving mass. Disguised as an ordinary member of the congregation, he arrived in the middle of Communion and observed the Moriscos openly mocking the Eucharist. Bleda later recalled that he was so “astonished and inconsolable on seeing my Redeemer degraded by so many notoriously heretical acts” that he left the church, making the sign of the cross, and “without talking to anyone, got on my horse and returned to Valencia. I threw myself at the feet of the holy archbishop, begging him tearfully to grant me permission to renounce the rectorship.”10

  The patriarch refused this request, and Bleda’s fruitless tenure at Corbera forged an obsessive loathing of a Morisco population he regarded as “flesheating wolves and rabid dogs” whose members were “born with the lie in their mouths.” Even more than Ribera, Bleda’s hatred of the Moriscos was entirely unconstrained by any considerations of mercy or humanity. Despite his fervent support of expulsion, Bleda was always attracted by more extreme possibilities and once expressed the hope that Moriscos might become infected with plague en route to Barbary and kill more “Saracens” after their arrival. Few men were more energetic in their advocacy of expulsion than this fanatical monk, whose writings and lobbying efforts place Bleda in the most extremist wing of the Morisco debate.

  Bleda and Ribera would have to wait a long time to see their proposals realized, as the court and government grappled with a solution that often seemed to raise as many problems as it was intended to solve. Some officials predicted that expulsion would increase the ranks of Spain’s enemies and that the Moriscos might prove to be more dangerous outside the country than they we
re inside it. Others warned of the disastrous economic consequences of expulsion. There was also the question of whether expulsion could be carried out “in good conscience” in the religious rather than the moral sense of the term. Could a Christian state expel baptized Christians to Muslim lands where they could “become Moors” again? Was it right to punish children for the sins of their parents and send them to Barbary to become infidels? These issues were endlessly discussed during the Morisco debate.

  Some proponents of expulsion, including Ribera himself, argued that the Moriscos were Christians on the surface but Moors underneath, so that Spain would not be breaching its religious obligations by sending them to Barbary. But these arguments failed to dispel the doubts over whether Spain had really done all it could to provide the Moriscos with religious instruction. Philip II was an admirer of the Italian humanist writer Giovanni Botero, who argued that Christian princes were obliged to convert both Calvinists and Muslims to Catholicism. Only when such attempts failed, Botero advised, could such groups be “dispersed and transplanted to other countries” or even massacred.11

  A number of clerics attempted to apply these criteria to the Moriscos. In May 1595, Doctor Joseph Estevan, the bishop of Orihuela, advised the king to make a new attempt to convert the Moriscos, through a combination of religious instruction, rigid segegration, and a new legislative assault on their “barbarous customs.” If these policies failed, the king would then be free to employ more “rigorous measures,” for “just as Sara ordered the slave girl Hagar from her house, lands, and inheritances . . . kings must do the same against the Hagarene children of the slave girl who disturb and mock our religion.”12

  These arguments failed to elicit a firm decision from the king. Nor were the churchmen and officials consulted by Philip able to resolve the thorny issue of the Morisco chidren. While it was generally agreed in principle that children who had not reached the “age of reason” of ten to twelve years should be kept behind and brought up as Catholics, others questioned whether such children might have absorbed their parents’ customs and beliefs to the point where it was too late to transform them into Christians.

  These issues of legitimacy are crucial to understanding the long gap between the Council of State’s recommendation of expulsion in 1582 and its final implementation nearly three decades later. The theological objections to expulsion also had political ramifications beyond Spain’s borders, which the celebrated arbitrista (social analyst) and lawyer Martín González de Cellorigo Oquendo brought to the king’s attention in a memorandum “on the murders, offenses, and irreverances committed by the Moriscos against the Christian religion.” Though Cellorigo noted that “Some say Your Majesty should order them all burned” for these offenses, he rejected this option as “not worthy of the mercy of Your Majesty” and called for a new attempt to convert the Moriscos, which combined Inquisitorial coercion and evangelization. If Catholic Spain could not convert its own naturales (native-born inhabitants), Cellorigo argued, then Protestant rulers might use this failure to dispute Spanish claims to represent a “truth so pure and perfect” and undermine the king’s prestige in Europe. 13

  All these arguments were undoubtedly considered by a ruler known for his caution and indecision. Though Philip did not explicitly rule out expulsion, he did nothing to bring it any closer but continued to convene panels of experts and ecclesiastical delegations to debate the conversion of the Moriscos. As late as 1596, Philip authorized a comprehensive program of religious instruction in Valencia, using Arabic-speaking missionaries and friars with experience in the Indies who would preach to the Moriscos without “violence or rough methods.”

  Not for the first time, this program failed to attract the finance or personnel that might have given it a chance of success. In February 1598, Pedro de Franquesa e Esteve, the secretary of Charles I’s reactivated Morisco Commission in Valencia, reported that many monasteries that had previously promised to send preachers to Morisco parishes were now refusing to do so, on the grounds that these parishes were so poor that their monks and friars would be forced to spend more time trying to feed and support themselves than preaching. 14 Whether Philip sincerely believed that the Moriscos could still be converted, or whether he merely wished to be seen to be fulfilling his obligations as a Christian king, it was a familiar story of worthy intentions followed by institutional inertia, and it did nothing to calm the hard-liners in the Church and government, who were demanding more urgent and radical solutions.

  Whatever the broader social, political, and economic forces behind them, the most atrocious historical events are often decided during measured discussions among men of power in meeting rooms far removed from the human consequences of their actions. The official correspondence, minutes, and internal records on the Morisco question contain numerous examples in which Spain’s highest secular and ecclesiastical authorities calmly and unproblematically contemplated the cruelest and even genocidal solutions to the “problem” that obsessed them.

  In 1584 one of the king’s officials proposed the removal of all the Granadan Moriscos in Castile to a reservation in the isolated flatlands of Sayago near the Duero River, where they would “forget the ferocity and pride that they took from their victories against us.” On May 22, 1590, the Council of State discussed removing Moriscos from all major Castilian cities and placing them in “villages and places of little importance,” where they would provide an annual tribute of rowers to the royal galleys. In February 1599, a Council of State memorandum listed a number of possible options for dealing with the Moriscos: galley service for males aged between fifteen and sixty; dispersing them in small numbers throughout Spain; allowing the Inquisition to act against them “with the full rigor of the law . . . with natural or civil death”; or “perpetual exile,” with the exception of children aged below six or seven years, who would be brought up in Christian seminaries financed through the sale of the property of “dead or banished Moriscos.”15 Other proposals involved sending Moriscos to non-Muslim Africa rather than Barbary, so that Spain could not be accused of allowing them to become infidels; condemning all Morisco men between the ages of fifteen and sixty to the mines and galleys, leaving behind only women, children, and old people; or a general massacre of the entire Morisco population, like the punishment of a thirteenth-century rebellion in Sicily known as the Sicilian Vespers.

  One proposal, which was first made during the 1581–1582 Council of State debates in Lisbon and later resurfaced in other official discussions, was to load the entire Morisco population onto ships without sails that would then be taken out to sea and scuttled, drowning their passengers. In a lengthy memorandum to Philip on July 30, 1597, the bishop of Segorbe, Martín de Salvatierra, suggested transporting the Moriscos to Cape Cod and Newfoundland, where a Christian garrison would watch over them as they died out in the inhospitable climate—an outcome, the bishop suggested, that could be facilitated by “castrating the men and sterilizing the women.”16

  This was not the only time that mass castration was considered. The possibility appears to have been sufficiently well known to appear in the condemnation of the Inqusition by the Exile of Tunis, who wrote that “some of them said that we should all be put to death; others, that we should be castrated; still others, that we should be given a button of fire in that part of our body so that we could not procreate again.”17 It is not known what this “button of fire” consisted of, but there is no evidence that Philip’s officials felt any moral qualms over such methods.

  As is often the case, these fantasies of extermination were facilitated by the distancing language used by these officials, which stripped the Moriscos of their human characteristics and referred to them only as barbarians, swine, heretics, and infidels who had to be “cleansed,” “finished off,” or “uprooted.” Spanish officials often echoed the imagery used by the Church to describe heresy in their depiction of the Moriscos as a diseased organ or limb that had to be amputed to prevent infection spreading through the living
organism of Spanish society.

  Such language enabled the statesmen and clergymen who discussed the Morisco question to contemplate even the most savage possibilities with equanimity. It is true that these genocidal proposals were not implemented, but they lowered the threshold of what was acceptable and made the physical removal of the Moriscos appear to be a more merciful alternative to mass killing, so that by 1597, the new bishop of Segorbe could tell Philip that the options for dealing with the Moriscos “can be reduced to two; namely, instruction or expulsion.”18

  The latter possibility always assumed that the Moriscos remained resolutely and collectively hostile to Christianity—an assumption that was rarely questioned in the Morisco debate. Official documents of the period frequently made the damning indictment “todos son uno” (“they are all one”) to describe the Moriscos, and the Spanish government appears to have taken this depiction for granted. The same picture of Morisco Spain has been repeated by historians who approved of the expulsion, such as the Valencian priest Pascual Boronat y Barrachina. In his copious compilation of documents justifying the expulsion, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión (The Spanish Moriscos and their Expulsion, 1901), Boronat refers repeatedly to the failure of assimilation and insists that the Moriscos were both incapable and unworthy of Christianity, in a bigoted assessment of Morisco Spain that echoes the views of his idol, Juan de Ribera. Even such a sophisticated and humane historian as Fernand Braudel, who did not approve of the expulsion, has written that the Moriscos “remained inassimilable” and “refused to accept western civilisation” at the time of their removal.19