Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  However, the grotesque tales and accusations that quickly developed around Simon of Trent soon followed a pattern that was later recognizable in Spain.5 The same elements, such as crucifixion, circumcision, and bleeding, repeatedly appeared in the cases made against Jews. Simon of Trent became a popular subject for gory woodcuts, as did the imaginary infant of La Guardia, later named Crístobal, a “Christ child.”6 After the events at La Guardia, social panic over the conversos became general, and as Yosef Yerushalmi has observed, “the traditional mistrust of the Jew as an outsider now gave way to an even more alarming fear of the converso as an insider.”7 Many in Spain believed that the “taint” of Jewish birth could never be eradicated. Stories like this suggested the strength of the popular mood. Increasingly the name now widely used for converts was marrano, meaning “pig,” playing contemptuously with the Jewish prohibition against eating pork. The word for Jewish women who converted, marrana, came to mean a whore or slut.8

  The fires that consumed the Jews and conversos in La Guardia were barely cold before the terms were agreed for the surrender of Granada in January 1492, and it was in this climate of fear that two months later the decrees of expulsion were issued. Although Jews and Muslims were linked in Christian attitudes, in popular understanding they were not considered identical. The position that Jews occupied in relation to Christians was anomalous, for Jesus Christ himself was a Jew, “born of the house of David,” but had also been killed by the Jews. The threat that Jews were thought to pose to Christians was subtle and insidious rather than bellicose. Muslims, by contrast, were the exterior enemy, unparalleled in their capacity for war and savage cruelty. But, like certain wild animals, they could be tamed. There were “Moors of peace,” the industrious, peaceful agriculturists and craftsmen of both Castile and Aragon. The people of Granada were undoubtedly “wild Moors,” who had just fought a ten-year war against the best soldiers that Christian Spain could marshal. But it was widely believed in 1492 that conversion could accomplish this transformation, and once Christian they would leave their old ways behind. This, of course had also been the theory applied to the Jews.

  Ferdinand and Isabella certainly held that the Muslims could be converted into sober and useful citizens. The clear expectation in 1492 was that the Muslims would be willing to become Christian. The unusual generosity to the Muslim population in the capitulation was dictated by a desire to bring the long war to an end. The terms had followed the old medieval pattern of agreements made by the rulers of Castile with their new subjects, plus a number of remarkable concessions, such as the right to retain arms. But it was written within an entirely new context. There were two clauses relating to the issue of conversion. The first concerned Christians who had converted to Islam. Their motives were not to be questioned. Nor would a female convert to Islam who had married a “Moor” be forced to become Christian “against her will.” The same would apply to the children of a Christian mother and a Muslim father. The second stated that no “Moors,” man or woman, would be forced to become Christian against their will. These clauses expressed a Muslim fear of forced conversions, beginning with the most vulnerable and marginal categories. The confident expectation among Spaniards was that there would be many who would come willingly to the welcoming arms of Christ. Islam was not expected to last for long in Granada. The sixth clause of the capitulation had been unambiguous:

  Their highnesses and their successors will ever afterwards allow King Abi Abdilehi [Boabdil] and his [officials], military leaders, and good men and all the common people, great and small, to live in their own religion [su ley], and not permit their mosques to be taken from them, nor their minarets nor their muezzins, nor will they interfere with the pious foundations or endowments which they have for such purposes, nor will they disturb the uses and customs which they observe.9

  The expectation was that many of the “warlike Moors” would prefer to emigrate to North Africa under the favorable conditions laid out in the surrender, or would at any rate leave the city. Ferdinand’s secretary Hernando de Zafra wrote in December 1492 that “the Abencerrajes [considered an especially bellicose clan] have taken their womenfolk up to the Alpujarras. After selling off all their property, they are preparing to leave by the end of March. As far as I can see most people are packing up to leave at the same time.” By the summer he predicted that only farmworkers and craftsmen would be left. They did not leave because they had been badly treated—as he said, “No people have ever been treated better.”10 A generation later, in 1526, a commentator remarked that all the “noble people” of the Muslim community had gone and all those left were “low and common folk.”11 Within a few years of the conquest Granada had ceased to be a predominantly Muslim city.12 It was officially divided, like many of the cities of Castile, into Christian and Mudejar quarters. The area called the Albaicin became a purely Muslim quarter, while the lower parts of the city were designated for Christians, both migrants from the north and Muslim converts. The separation was extended by regulations designed to keep Christians and Muslims within the bounds of their own communities, not an easy task in a city such as Granada.

  By 1499, almost 40,000 “Old Christian” colonists had entered the Kingdom of Granada, many with families. By 1530, the number had reached 100,0.13 It was hoped that these pioneers would provide a Christian example for the Muslims. First the Muslim community in the city of Granada would convert, and then the common folk of the countryside would follow their lead. Progress was expected to be rapid. Three years was set as a limit in the terms of surrender as a tax amnesty for Muslims, and after that point taxes would be reimposed. The new taxes on Muslims were set at a substantially higher level than for their Christian fellow citizens, so there was a strong financial incentive to convert. Three years was also the time during which Muslims could emigrate without payment. The assumption by Zafra was that those who did not wish to live under Christian rule would have left before the 1495 deadline and that those who remained would be ripe for conversion.

  The confidence of the Catholic Kings in their mission was unbounded. They envisaged reconquering the ancient Visigothic lands in North Africa and recapturing Jerusalem. The Genoese Christopher Columbus presented his commission to sail west to discover the Indies as part of the divine mission that Ferdinand and Isabella were predestined to accomplish. Columbus saw how first they had conquered Granada. Then they had expelled the Jews. Finally, Columbus claimed, he would bring back such riches “in such quantities that within three years the Sovereigns will prepare for and undertake the conquest of the Holy Land. I have already petitioned Your Highnesses to see that all the profits of this, my enterprise, should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem.”14

  A more reliable source of profit came from the gold of Africa which flowed from the Canary Islands—those, so the Castilian histories claimed, had formerly belonged to the unlucky Visigothic king Roderick. In 1458 the Castilian kings had assumed the title of “king of the Great Canary with all its islands.” The conquest of the islands had been waged intermittently in 1402, but in 1483 a large Castilian fleet had sailed to the islands and completed the occupation of Gran Canaria on behalf of the crown. Some of the aboriginal inhabitants (guanches) of the other large island, Tenerife, resisted fiercely. In May 1494 the guanches had attacked and killed 2,000 Spanish soldiers as they ascended the steep slopes of Teide, the volcano dominating the island. They severely wounded the Spanish commander, Alonso Fernandez de Lugo. More Spanish soldiers were landed on the island and they began systematically to kill or enslave the inhabitants. Many guanches had already been converted to Christianity, and the Catholic Kings sent an official in 1498 to look after the interests of all the Canarians, regardless of their faith. It was recognized that the simple people of the Canaries were ripe for conversion, and many became “good Christians” and, it was argued, should consequently be treated well.

  However, a boundary had been crossed in 1494. In the act of resisting the occupation of Tenerife, and by killing Chr
istians, the guanches had shown their savage nature, had become recalcitrant, and were thus subject to forcible measures. The conquest and conversion of the Canary Islands and the conquest and conversion of Granada should not be considered in isolation from each other. The Jews were never considered savages. Their conversion fell within a set of established categories and was presaged in holy writ. The manner of it was laid down: conversion should be “willing,” and based upon consent. Moreover, once converted, former Jews should be thought of as other Christians. The Muslims represented a different problem. Few Muslims had converted in the past, and when offered the opportunity in earlier conquests by Castile, many had chosen to leave for a country under Islamic rule. However, the peaceful and industrious Mudéjares who had lived in Christian lands for generations showed that it was possible for “Moors” to live quietly under Christian rule. In some areas they had increasingly accommodated to the dominant culture, so that in places like Avila in Castile and in much of Aragon, they no longer used Arabic.

  The heritage of Muslim culture, which had produced the Alhambra and the Great Mosque of Cordoba, was not ignored by Christians, and that respectful attitude determined the initial policy and practice of conversion. Yet Christians still perceived “Moors” as possessing wild and savage qualities as well. This ambiguity existed in the Christian medieval polemics and in the histories of the Reconquest, and sometimes governed the experience of contemporaries as well. The Muslims of Granada, like the guanches, were held to be of an indeterminate and uncertain character. If the “Moors” were savages, then their conversion would be less hedged about with restrictions than that of the Jews. The strategy of conversion would shift in a different direction.

  IT IS POSSIBLE TO LOOK AT THE LAST HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY from many distinct perspectives. The artistic and cultural Renaissance, the spread of printing, the loss of Constantinople, the European discovery of the Americas, and Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India have all been taken as touchstones of the age. The previous century has been characterized as “calamitous,” partly due to the consequences of the Black Death, which killed perhaps one-third of the population living between Iceland and India.15 A large set of connections—social, political, religious, economic—have been linked to that one event. Philip Ziegler, in his study of the Black Death, refers to the twentieth-century analogy made between the aftermaths of the Black Death and the First World War. The comparison, he suggests, was that both made “the greatest single contribution to the disintegration of an age.”16 The fifteenth century in Spain saw both disintegration and reintegration, but upon different foundations from those that had prevailed before. Moreover, rather than one single monumental cause, events were increasingly perceived as possessing a multiplicity of origins. Everything was in flux and subject to change. Laws were written and never enforced, or enforced for only brief periods. Dynasties changed, with kings, bastards, pretenders all vying for power. I am also thinking here of France and England, powerful, rich, and hitherto stable states. But in a culture dominated by its inner frontiers and boundaries like the Iberian peninsula, we should expect few certainties or set patterns during the fifteenth century and beyond.

  Formerly settled social categories in Spain were becoming fissile, and this is evident in the language of the time. “Christian” divided into “Old Christian” and “New Christian.” Jews bifurcated into “Jews” and what Christians more and more referred to insultingly as marranos, or as crypto-Jews. Muslims were called “Moors,” Moros, which could sometimes be admiring, but more often contained a sense of contempt, or they were called Mudéjares, which was a category of subjugation. Then they were transmogrified through conversion to Christianity into Moriscos, “little Moors,” a contemptuous and derogatory term, if sometimes tinged with a sense of pity.17 But sometimes not: the “true” author of Don Quixote, Cid Hamet Benengeli, whom we met in chapter 1, was a cultivated and learned figure. We should be as uneasy using the insulting word Morisco, for the same reason that marrano is not a word to be uttered lightly.18 It was resented and never used by these “New Christians” themselves. It was freshly minted to convey a new attitude toward a subject people who had been stripped of their old religion by decree and given a perfunctory baptism. When the “Morisco” Nuñez de Muley wrote to protest about their treatment in Granada, he called them the naturales, the people of the land.

  But changes in language mark a change of status. First in Granada and Castile, later in Aragon and Valencia, Mudéjares became Moriscos by royal decree. Gone was the wild, savage, but noble “Moors” of the border ballads; now over the space of a century they became a people who “have only the outward appearance of a man, for the rest of you are beast.” Moriscos were the antithesis of all that was good, worshiping Mohammed, who was “the word of the devil,” instead of Jesus Christ, who was “the word of God.”19 Here we can see change in process. The traditional diatribe against the Muslim, built up over many centuries, coalesced with a new style of abuse. This did not just happen as some kind of linguistic evolution: it was rooted in a specific sequence of events. This outcome was not by design. It was an unforeseen but not a random consequence.

  We can locate a starting point for this new idiom of disparagement in Granada during the late summer of 1499. In July the Catholic Kings were in Granada for the first time since the spring of 1492. After seven years they had expected to see a people won for Christ, as the reports of Archbishop Talavera and Hernando de Zafra had led them to believe. Yet the city was much as they had left it, still looking to all appearances more a Muslim than a Christian city.20 In the new Christian quarters new churches were strongly in evidence, as were a gratifying number of processions, saints’ days commemorations, and the sound of church bells (which the Granadine Muslims referred to contemptuously as “cowbells”). However, the mosques were still thronged by the faithful on Fridays.

  Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to advance the pace of conversion, perhaps to the level achieved among the mainland Jews and the guanches of the Canaries. Outside the Kingdom of Granada better progress was being made. At the town of Caspe in Aragon the Mudéjares had converted to Christianity en masse, led by the most prominent members of their community. During the five months of their stay in the Alhambra, the Catholic Kings became convinced that conversion was not being pursued with sufficient energy in the capital; and if Granada lagged, then the conversion of the kingdom at large would be much more difficult. Before they left in November they had instructed the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (who had succeeded Talavera as Isabella’s confessor), to summon his team of able preachers and catechizers to Granada and so speed the process.

  Jiménez de Cisneros had already argued at court for a more aggressive policy toward the Muslims in Granada. In particular, he was completely opposed to the clause of the 1492 capitulation that allowed former Christians and their children to remain, if they chose, with Islam. Once installed in the “Moorish” quarter of Granada, he began immediately to make lists of these individuals, termed elches, who were summoned to his presence. There he harangued them, and in the words of one of the court historians,

  with kind words he persuaded them to return to our holy Catholic faith, because, as he said, it could not without the gravest sin be permitted for people to belong to the religion of the Moors if their forebears had been Christian … Those converted in this way were given assistance by him, and he bestowed gratifications upon them: those who refused, he had put in prison, and kept locked up until they were converted … When he heard that many Muslim leaders were attacking his methods as being contrary to the agreements … [he] imprisoned the dissidents in chains, and though it ran counter to his temperament, he allowed them to be dealt with by methods that were not correct.21

  This was a euphemism for strict imprisonment and torture. In this Jiménez de Cisneros was merely taking the same path as the Inquisition, which in Valencia was beginning, illegally, to take jurisdiction over Muslims as well as Christians.22
Moreover, in anticipation of the increase of converts in Granada in 1499, the jurisdiction of the Inquisition in Cordoba was extended to take in the Kingdom of Granada. Eventually Archbishop Talavera himself was to be called before it on the grounds of seeking to convert Spain to Judaism by witchcraft.23

  When one of Jiménez de Cisneros’s officials went up into the Moorish quarter on December 18, 1499, to summon other elches, the people of the quarter killed him, closed the gates, and took up arms in defense of their rights. “They began to call upon Mohammed, clamouring for liberty, and saying that they would burn the treaty of surrender; they took to the streets, blocked and fortified the gates to the Albaicin against the Christians of the city. They began to fight with them and all through the night the tumult grew.”24 There was a near panic among them that all Muslims would be converted by force. Even the well-liked Archbishop Talavera was stoned and not allowed to enter. When the count of Tendilla, the captain general of the kingdom, followed the archbishop, he was heard more respectfully. He told them that the pursuit of the elches would end, there would be no more forced conversions, and in a symbolic gesture, he brought down his wife and young child from the Alhambra to the Albaicin and entrusted them to the care and hospitality of the Muslim inhabitants. The rising in the city lasted some ten days, but further outbreaks of violence were forestalled. Yet nothing could be done to prevent news of the events in the capital reaching the staunchly Muslim villages of the Alpujarras. These had become a last redoubt for those who could not or would not leave their country, but did not want to live too close to Christians. Many of them had participated in the defense of Granada and were familiar with every contour and crevice of the land, invaluable knowledge in the guerrilla war that soon engulfed most of the kingdom.