Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  The Moriscos also faced attacks from bandits, particularly in Catalonia, which experienced an epidemic of banditry between 1609 and 1615. In one incident in the summer of 1612, a party of two hundred Moriscos traveling from Lérida to Barcelona were ambushed by a large group of bandits that included armed horsemen and stripped of all their money and possessions. Even when the Moriscos reached the French border, their safety was not guaranteed. At another point that summer, fourteen thousand Moriscos were turned back from the border village of Canfranc in the Aragonese Pyrenees and forced to walk all the way back down to Los Alfaques on the coast. Many died of illness or exhaustion and arrived at the port in such bad shape that the authorities feared an outbreak of plague on the ships that were waiting to transport them. After so many years of conspiring with the Aragonese Moriscos, the Béarnese governor, the Duke de la Force, was less than hospitable to the exiles who now appeared on his borders. In June, nearly five thousand Moriscos found themselves stranded without food along the border when the duke refused to allow them to enter France and threatened to massacre them if they attempted to cross the border. The following month, the Moriscos were allowed to enter the country in separate batches, and de la Force subsequently allowed them to cross the border in exchange for fees of ten to twelve reales each.

  The expulsion orders in Aragon and Catalonia expressly stipulated that Moriscos could only sail to North Africa if they left their children behind, but many Moriscos sailed with their children on private ships to France and then persuaded their captains to take them to Muslim lands. Some chose to settle in France, where they received a mixed reception. The French authorities were not enthusiastic at the prospect of a transient population of impoverished Moriscos, but Henry IV eventually allowed Moriscos to remain permanently in the country on condition that they converted to Catholicism and settled south of the Dordogne. Moriscos who were unwilling to accept these conditions were permitted to travel to other destinations from French ports. As in Spain, royal decrees were not a guarantee of safety, and Moriscos traveling through French territory or on French ships were robbed and extorted so often that the Ottoman sultan Ahmad I asked the French authorities to take more energetic measures to protect them. In 1612, the Moroccan sultan Mulay Zidan sent a delegation to France to seek restitution for Moriscos who had been robbed in France, whose members included the Granadan Morisco Ahmad bin Qasim al-Hajari, the translator of the Sacromonte plomos. In his account of his travels, al-Hajari describes how he presented a sealed letter from the sultan to the courts of the ifranj (French), which stipulated that “whatever is found of what had been stolen from the Andalusians should be returned to me” and which listed “twenty-one sea commanders, each of whom had robbed the Andalusians who had rented their ships” in the town of Olonne.15

  The Tagarinos who reached North Africa generally found a better reception than their Valencian counterparts. Travelers making their way across the lawless tribal hinterlands were still subject to the depredations of the Alarbes, but the Ottoman sultan also instructed his North African vassals to look after the exiles who were dumped on their shores, and the burgeoning “Andalusian” communities of Algiers, Tetuán, Fez, and other cities make it clear that that many Moriscos did find sanctuary. The Moriscos were especially well received in Tunis, whose ruler, Uthman Dey, made special provision for them, on the sultan’s orders. But these Spanish-speaking Moriscos were not always accepted by local Muslims, and in some cases, Moriscos were obliged to prove that they were not Christians by showing that they had been circumcised or agreeing to circumcision. Not all Moriscos were willing to do this. In Tetuán, a group of Moriscos was reported to have remained so committed to Christianity that they refused to enter a mosque and were stoned to death.

  It is difficult, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, to imagine how daunting these journeys must have been to those involved. Many Moriscos had never left their homes and villages, let alone the country, and were no more familiar with North Africa than they were with the towns and cities of Christian Europe that they passed through. Peasants and craftsmen, notaries and merchants, silk weavers and gardeners, the richest and the poorest, even the Morisco tailor who attended the ladies of the court, all participated in an exodus of which only a few firsthand accounts have survived.

  One anonymous aljamiado manuscript offered “information for the road” to Moriscos looking to cross France and Italy and make their way onward to Muslim lands. In addition to details of accommodation and food and transportation costs for each phase of the journey, prospective exiles were also given various strategems to enable them to conceal their Muslim identity from potentially hostile Christians, such as pretending to be debtors fleeing their creditors or posing as Christian pilgrims visiting churches and Christian holy places. This pretense was to be maintained all the way to cosmopolitan Venice, where the boundaries between the Islamic and Christian worlds began to dissolve and travelers could openly seek assistance:Go out into the plaza to buy whatever thing you need. There, those that you see with white headgear are Turks, those with yellow headgear are Jews, merchants from the Grand Turk, and from those you should ask whatever it is you wish, for they will lead you aright to it. Tell them that you have brothers in Salonica and that you wish to go there; you will pay one ducat per head and for the passage you will also give for water and firewood. Purchase provision for fifteen days, buy stew and rice and vinegar and olives or other white beans and fresh bread for eight days and cake at ten pounds per man.16

  Some glimpses of this exodus are contained in the letters written by expelled Moriscos to their former Christian employers or acquaintances in Spain. On November 22, 1610, the Granadan Morisco Pedro Hernández wrote to his former lady, Doña Catalina de Valdés, describing how he and his wife had sailed from Málaga and spent twelve days at sea before their crew robbed them and dumped them on an island off the North African coast wearing nothing but “linen breeches and without cloaks or clothes.” The couple made their way to Tetuán, where Hernández wrote how “God Our Saviour . . . frees us from the Devil and bestows his grace upon us so that we may serve him.”17

  Despite his ordeal, Hernández expressed his desire to return to “the most beautiful nation in the world” and pleaded with Doña Catalina to send him money so that he and his wife could travel to Marseille and escape from the “evil people” among whom they found themselves. Such nostalgia was not unusual. Many Moriscos struggled to adapt to their adopted countries and pined for the friends, neighbors, and landscapes they had left behind. Diego Luis Morlem, a Morisco from La Mancha, traveled overland to France with his wife Elsa, where the two of them joined the large Morisco émigré community at Saint-Jean-de-Luz. On November 10, 1611, he wrote to his former lord in the Campo de Calatrava of a predicament that was undoubtedly shared by many of his exiled compatriots:I wanted to inform Your Grace of the suffering and upheavals that we are going through here. May God receive them for our sins, for we are in such a bad way that not a day or night passes when we do not remember our lands and neighbors, from which they threw us out without us having given any cause or offense. Some of us have agreed that we can prove our Old Christian descent through the male line [and] send this information through representatives to Madrid, for we are resolved a thousand times over to leave these monotonous roads, finding ourselves in a strange land outside our own, we are crying tears of blood for it and intend to go back even if they hang us.18

  Like all stateless people, the Moriscos were powerless and entirely dependent for their survival on the goodwill of the populations they passed through. A letter from Algiers dated July 25, 1611, by the “licenciado [graduate] Molina,” a Granadan Morisco from Trujillo in Extremadura, to a Christian friend named Don Jerónimo de Loaysa, makes this precariousness and vulnerability clear.19 Molina appears to have been a man of some substance in his hometown and remembered fondly his regular visits to Loaysa’s house. He told his friend how he and a group of Moriscos had traveled overland from Trujillo
to the port of Cartagena before sailing to Marseille, where “we were well received, with great promises of protection.” Within a few days of their arrival in May, Henry IV was assassinated by the Catholic fanatic François Ravaillac, and France was plunged into political turmoil. Spanish involvement was immediately suspected, and Molina and his fellow exiles now found themselves accused by the local authorities in Marseille of spying on behalf of Philip III in order to pave the way for the conquest of France. These accusations may well have been a pretext for extortion, as the Moriscos were divested of “a large part” of their savings by their accusers. When the queen regent, Marie de Medici, appointed a judge to redress these losses whom Molina described as “equally hungry for money,” the Morisco traveled with a thousand of his compatriots to the Italian port of Livorno, with where “the same thing happened to us as at Marseille.”

  Like Molina himself, most of these exiles were educated middle-class Moriscos who soon became disillusioned with Italian lords, who “only wanted us to cultivate the fields and other vile professions that most people did not know how to do and had not been taught.” Molina and his companions considered returning to Spain, but changed their minds on hearing reports from other Extremaduran Moriscos on the high incidence of robbery and rape on the ships that took them from Spanish ports. Instead they made their way to Algiers, which was filled with Morisco exiles from all over Spain. Molina told his friend that his Muslim hosts “have not obliged us by any spiritual or corporal act to make us unsay what we have been,” suggesting not only that he himself was a Christian but that even Morisco exiles who were seen as Christians could sometimes be treated with a level of tolerance that was not always present in North Africa—not to mention Spain. Molina was clearly a religious man and appeared to take some consolation from the belief that his fate was divinely ordained and therefore unavoidable:I do not think, Your Grace, that it was the King of Spain who banished us from his land, but divine inspiration; because I have seen prophecies here that are more than two thousand years old, which foretold what has happened to us and what must happen, that God would remove us from that land [of Spain] and place this intention in the heart of the King and his Counsellors and the majority of us would die on sea and land and in the end that is what has happened.

  These “prophecies” belonged to a Christian apocalyptic tradition that continued to fascinate many Spanish Christians in the seventeenth century, the roots of which could be traced back through the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore (c.1145–1202) to the Book of Revelation and the Christian forgeries added to the ancient Sibylline oracles. The essence of this tradition was the belief in the end of history, followed by a cosmic conflagration that would usher in the end of time and the return of the Messiah. Over the centuries, this tradition had acquired new variants, some of which had a specifically Spanish and anti-Islamic dimension. Isidore of Seville had once prophesied the coming of a powerful king who would rule over Spain and drive out the “impurities of the Spaniards” before going on to conquer Jerusalem. The seventh-century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius had been developed among Syrian Christians specifically in response to the Muslim conquests and foretold the coming of an Emperor of the Last Days who would wage victorious war on behalf of Christianity against Islam. Many of these prophecies were incorporated into the pronósticos that circulated through Spain in the sixteenth century. As a Christian—and a victim of the expulsion—Molina appeared to see Philip as the instrument of this tradition.

  Christian supporters of the expulsion also believed that it was divinely ordained, from a more triumphalist perspective. On December 23, 1610, the Council of State considered a memorandum from Jaime Bleda on the “marvels that Our Lord has worked in the expulsion of the Moriscos” from Valencia. 20 Bleda’s memorandum was intended to solicit official funding for his forthcoming chronicle of the expulsion, and he summarized its contents in terms that were clearly intended to please the king and his ministers. He cited various indications that the expulsion had met with divine approval, from the good weather that had made it possible for the king’s ships to remove the Moriscos to the abundant “trees and harvests” that were now sprouting up across the kingdom since their departure. Much of this was a product of Bleda’s imagination, such as his description of the giant “white and resplendent” cross that had appeared above Los Alfaques during the expulsion of the Moriscos from Aragon and remained in the sky throughout their removal. The fanatical Dominican also saw divine intervention in Spain’s conquest of the Moroccan port of Larache that year.

  The serious and respectful consideration that this strange document received from Spain’s senior statesmen was an indication of the overlapping religious expectations and statecraft through which the expulsion was perceived by the Hapsburg Court. Whether Philip and his favorite really believed that Valencia had suddenly become fertile as a result of the departure of the Moriscos, or whether they merely wanted their subjects to believe it, there is no doubt that both men expected the expulsion to meet with God’s approval and hoped that such approval would bring positive benefits for Spain. Without these expectations, it is difficult to make sense of Lerma’s insistence to the Council of State in December 1610 that “the greatest thing that the King of the World has ever done will remain imperfect” if the Moriscos were not expelled “without any exception.”21

  By this time, the majority of the Moriscos had already been removed from the country, and whatever threat they might have posed to Spain’s religious unity or the security of the state had been eliminated. The remainder were either so closely assimilated into Christian society that it was difficult even to identify their Morisco origins in the first place, or else they were so outnumbered by Christians that they had ceased to exist as coherent communities. On the surface, the broader objectives had been achieved, and the expulsion process could at this point have been brought to a halt.

  But the purging of Muslim Spain was not merely intended to eliminate a deviant ethnic minority, nor was it simply a punishment for sedition. To rulers who saw political and military failure as a sign of divine disfavor, the expulsion was a propitiatory offering to the Almighty that was intended to change the course of history and usher in a new and glorious era in Spain’s fortunes—and win prestige for the monarchy that had achieved this purification. Bleda was not alone in seeing the relatively minor conquest of Larache as the first sign that the new era had arrived. For this regeneration to continue, Spain had to be completely cleansed of every single Morisco. Nor were the Moriscos the only source of defilement. In the summer of 1610, the Council of State recommended the expulsion of Spain’s Gypsy population, whom it described as “vagabonds and prejudicial people.” This second purge never took place, as the architects of the expulsion continued their frustrating and ultimately futile attempt to ensure that no Morisco remained in the country.

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  A Perfect Conclusion? 1611–1614

  On March 23, 1611, Cabrera de Córdoba records that Philip attended a special thanksgiving mass in Madrid to commemorate the “happy event of the expulsion of the Moriscos.” The ceremonies were attended by a prestigious gathering of invited foreign and national dignitaries that included the papal nuncio, numerous foreign ambassadors, and leading members of the aristocracy and clergy. Dressed from head to foot in white in a symbolic expression of Spain’s newfound purity, Philip led a solemn procession from the Church of Santa María to the Descalzas Convent, where he thanked the “Virgin of March” for making the expulsion possible. The new archbishop of Granada sent a hyperbolic memorial to mark the occasion, which described the expulsion as one of the Seven Wonders of the World and compared it to the great Christian victories over Islam, such as the medieval battle of Las Navas de Tolosa and the more recent defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto.

  These celebrations took place at a time when the benefits of the expulsion were conspicuously absent in many parts of the country. Throughout Spain, the departure of the Moriscos had left a desolate trail of e
mpty houses, deserted neighborhoods and villages, and falling revenues. In Valencia, despite Bleda’s evocation of a new era of abundance, there were reports of unsown and unharvested crops, and vineyards and orchards whose produce was left to rot because there were not enough hands to pick it. The absence of manpower was so acute that Lerma was considering the possibility of resettling the Valencian countryside with Greek Christians, while Caracena in December 1609 even warned the king that it might be necessary to use Moriscos from Granada to make up the shortfall.1 In other parts of Spain, secular and ecclesiastical landowners complained of a lack of workers, and town councils appealed for financial assistance from the Crown to compensate for what they had lost through the departure of the Moriscos.

  If the “happy event” was not as popular as the celebrations in Madrid suggested, there was also disturbing evidence that the expulsion was not yet complete. In December 1610, in the last months of his life, Juan de Ribera ordered the removal of four thousand Moriscos from Valencia who had managed to remain in the kingdom more than a year after the expulsion had begun. Nearly six months later, viceroy Caracena was still reporting to Philip that many Moriscos “have remained hidden without showing themselves.” Some of them were working on the estates of their Christian lords despite the strict prohibitions against such activity. There were also survivors of the 1609 rebellion in the Muela de Cortes, who continued to live in caves in the surrounding mountains and occasionally attacked outlying Christian settlements.