So, not all the Moriscos were expelled, although the exodus was as comprehensive as any seventeenth-century government could hope to achieve. The Morisco bandits and highwaymen continued to plague Spain, and they occasionally reappeared in the records of the Inquisition. The last trial of Moriscos took place in Cartagena in 1769, where a group was discovered inside a secret mosque.47 For many Spaniards, as much in the nineteenth century as in the seventeenth, the expulsion of the Moriscos seemed necessary or inevitable, a view that also persisted into the second half of the twentieth century. Claudio Sanchez-Albornóz, at the end of his Spain: A Historical Enigma, projected a future in which the Moriscos had not been expelled.
One does not need extensive imagination to calculate the problems that a “Moorish” Valencia, after three hundred years almost superior to the Christian population of the country and a mass of Moriscos not very inferior to the Christians of Aragon, would have caused for Spain in [the] turmoil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … The nation avoided grave dangers … that the Morisco majorities would have posed for our historical life and would continue to pose today [1962] for our future.48
Here is the old language of demographic challenge, as voiced by Cervantes’s dog, Archbishop Ribera, and many others at the time of the expulsion. But Sanchez-Albornóz wrote from a perspective not of a distant threat from 300 years in the past, but of a more recent danger. The fear of the Islamic threat remained a strong connection between the past into the present. All the old terrors could be reinvigorated. Thus, military disaster in Morocco in 1922, when a Spanish general lost 12,000 men—killed and mutilated by Berber tribesmen at the battle of Anual—unlocked a torrent of fear and hatred. So too did the rebel General Francisco Franco when he brought the Army of Africa with its “Moorish” contingents to Spain in 1936. He provided the legitimate Republican government with a potent rallying point. Franco had brought the “Moors” back to Spain and, with them, barbarism. Thus, although 900 years of Islam ended with the expulsion of the Moriscos, their spectral presence remained from that point forward into the twentieth century.
HATRED AND FEAR WERE EVER PRESENT IN IBERIAN AS IN ALL SOCIETIES. But in Spain they focused over several centuries on the division between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Nor was this a theoretical abstraction as it was in the rest of Christian Europe. Christianity and Islam were interwoven in the landscape. The two faiths lived side by side, not in amity but in a kind of equilibrium. That changed over less than a century, as the balance was altered, as Judaism and Islam were officially abolished, and a new unitary Christian culture was created. In later centuries this would be described as social engineering, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was articulated within a religious argument. Jews, conversos, Muslims, and Moriscos were enemies of Christ, and gradually the Moriscos came to be seen as the most directly threatening. Soon they began to attract the kind of visceral insult that for centuries had been directed at the Jews. This abuse, which developed from the 1570s, had a single end in view: to categorize them all as crypto-Muslims. They were the perpetual enemy within. They were the rampant “weeds” that were choking the state. Thus, the street language of loathing and disgust percolated upward into learned treatises written by scholars and clerics.
These educated men often wrote in the vernacular, Castilian, which made what they published directly accessible to a wide audience within the Spanish lands. But it also allowed them a wider public still. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Castilian was the language of the greatest power in Europe. Books published in Spanish could be read by the educated in much of Europe. Thus polemic written in Spain, whether in Castilian or Latin, had a resonance and influence far beyond the Pyrenees. By this time we should cease seeing Spain as an isolated southern outcrop of Europe but, rather, in terms of ideas and attitudes, as a nodal point. Spain disseminated ideologies that purported to have a universal application but that were often rooted in the particular preoccupations of Iberia. Foreign travelers rightly recognized the Iberian peninsula as somewhere distinct, for reasons that they often ascribed to its “Moorish” and Jewish antecedents. Often, ironically, the literary stereotypes that they applied to Spaniards were those that Old Christians had fixed on the Moriscos. Long after the last “Moors” and Jews had gone, these images and tropes persisted. The Spanish state appeared to some a miracle, a model and ordered Christian state, a pattern for utopia. For others it was just the opposite, a dystopia. Whether the expulsions of the Jews and Moriscos were utopian or dystopian depended upon your inclination or perspective.
However, images and language never remain static. At some point after the expulsion of the Moriscos from Granada in the 1570s and the re-population of the empty towns and villages with Old Christians from the north, fiestas of Moros y Cristianos (“Moors” and Christians) began to appear in these communities. Gradually, also, as the “Moor” became a distant and near-mythical figure, the menacing Turk became the dominant and threatening image of the infidel.49 Sometimes they figured together in the fiesta. In 1533 the Toledo celebrations of the landing of Charles V at Barcelona had centered on a pageant around “a very high tower [made of wood and plaster] filled with ‘Moors’ completely dressed in the ‘Moorish’ style and inside the Grand Turk defending the castle.” Moors and the Grand Turk were roundly defeated and paraded in chains through the town, carrying their banners. This pageant had a clear and direct message of immediate import, but the ceremonial of Christian triumph over Islam survived after its central purpose had been forgotten. To this day, the town of Baza celebrates the Cascamorras on September 6 every year. Men stained brown from head to foot roam the town, while people hit them, shouting that they have come to steal the image of the Virgin. The origin of this ritual is shrouded in mystery; some have suggested (a little improbably) that it recalls the harsh intolerance of the Almohades in the thirteenth century. Even the name—Cascamorras—is obscure. However, Baza was a great victory for the Catholic Kings in the war for Granada, and Cascamorras can easily be read as “smashing the Moors” (cascar los moros).
There are similar celebrations all over what was once Al-Andulus. Although the scripts for these increasingly elaborate events date from the nineteenth century, the “Moros” and “Cristianos” appeared in festivals long before then. At Alcoy in Valencia, St. George’s Day in 1668 was marked with processions through the streets, with some men dressed up as “Christian ‘Moors’ ” and others as “Christian Christians,” in costumes of the previous century. In the stylized battle that concluded the celebration, it was no surprise that the Christians once more proved invincible. The purpose of these ceremonials was not so much to show the superiority of Christianity to Islam, but to
present a scene of ideal unity and an image of the greatness of the city: the “Moors” were no longer presented as frightening or ridiculous figures … The “Moors” in the fiestas are not savage warriors but noble gentlemen: their costumes are almost always more spectacular than those of the Christians, and they appear majestic.50
Over time, these celebrations became increasingly complex and spectacular, with defined roles assigned to particular districts, churches, or brotherhoods. But in the villages and small towns of the Alpujarras, they retained their original form and purpose for much longer. In Valor, where one of the leaders of the second war of the Alpujarras was born, the emphasis was on Christian benevolence. The “Moorish” king offered his sword to the Christian king and knelt at his feet. The Christian replied:
Moors, among Christians clemency
Lives in our hearts, it fills our soul;
Although you are conquered, I set you free
Take your sword and arise.51
There had been no scene of honor and clemency in Valor in 1568. It was a bloody battle for a starving town, where 200 Moriscos died in a fight against trained and hardened infantry. When they abandoned the town to the Spaniards, they hanged their Christian hostages from the church tower. But even in Valor, the mythma
king of Moros y Cristianos successfully obscured the historical fact, as it did throughout Spain. This celebration of unity eventually lost its original purpose and became a folkloric memory during the eighteenth century, a little more than a century after the departure of the last “Moors.” During the nineteenth century the events became formalized, and by the beginning of this century these local events had been transmuted into a mass international tourist attraction.
However, Moros y Cristianos and the language of the Reconquest also appeared in the Spanish colonial territories of the Americas and the Far East.52 There they did not lose their original roots of conflict. The fiestas spread rapidly through Mexico and Guatemala, where no “Moors” had ever been seen. But the indigenous inhabitants took to them. They identified with the Moros, and carried traditional Aztec festivals and mock battles into the fiestas. While the Spanish colonists saw in the fiestas a message of pacification and Christian forgiveness, the local people found in Moros y Cristianos a means of preserving memories of Aztec power and even hopes of an eventual expulsion of the Spaniards.53 Nor were the language and attitudes of the Reconquest restricted to the Atlantic dimension. Later in the sixteenth century, far to the east in the Philippines, the Spaniards found powerful and combative Muslim communities in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. Instinctively, they called them Moros. They termed the many groups they managed to convert to Christianity collectively Indios, after the pacified peoples of the Americas. It was the intransigents who were generically called Moros. The Muslims of the southern Philippines were never successfully controlled by the Spaniards nor, indeed, by any subsequent government. Thus, the association of “Islam” with wildness persisted as Spaniards took their culture into the wider world.
In this way Spain carried its long conflict with “Islam” beyond the peninsula. I have suggested that the how and why of words and concepts becoming fixed to Aztecs or Malay tribesmen were circumstantial. But the inner intimations of danger and savagery were disseminated with the words themselves. All Spaniards knew what a Moro could and would do. This attitude persisted even in more tranquil contexts. In the Renaissance courts of Europe, there was a frenetic and uncontrolled dance that came to be called the Moresque, or “Moorish” dance. A German poet visiting Nuremberg in 1491 saw a display where the participants moved in a circle, throwing out their arms and legs in jerky spasms, their necks stretched back and wild grimaces on their faces. Sometimes they were called “Madmen” or “Savages,” but most often they were known as “Moors.” You can still see them, for there is a fine set of small gilded wooden figures, the Moriskentänzer, by Erasmus Grasser, in the Stadt-museum of Munich. These little Moors have dark faces, sinewy legs and arms, strong hands, unsmiling faces. They convey an air of power, mystery, and menace.54
Part Three
CHAPTER SEVEN
To the Holy Land
THE IBERIAN PENINSULA HAS LOOMED LARGE IN THIS BOOK, BUT there is no simple and neutral way to refer to it. Each of its names—Iberia, Hispania, Al-Andalus, Spain—proclaims a different heritage, a particular view of its history and origin, although it notionally describes the same territory. For a long time those who wrote about “Spain” did so mainly from Christian sources, and those who chronicled “Al-Andalus” worked principally from Muslim materials. Thus the history of the same past, in the same landscape, had a double aspect. It included both what was written about and what was ignored, what was visible on the surface and what Meron Benvenisti calls “buried history.”1 Buried history is not some archaeological material that can be excavated, but rather a terrain full of ghosts and memories. All three areas that I consider in this book have buried histories.
Spain was the first. Another was that broad wedge-shaped peninsula with the Adriatic to its west and the Black Sea to the east, stretching up to the great Hungarian plain. The Turks called it balkan, “the mountain,” and that name—the Balkans—has stuck. Here, like the holy sites of Spain, buried saints suffused the land with a kind of holiness.2 A third lay to the east, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean. It extended from the desert edge of Sinai to the foothills of the Anatolian plateau. It had various names, but in many European languages it was (and is) the Levant, from the Italian and Spanish term for the point where the sun rises in the east (levante). In Arabic it was called Al-Mashreq, also meaning the land where the sun rises. But the archetype for this idea of holy ground was that part of the Levant where Jesus Christ had been born, lived, and died.3
Muslims were enjoined to make the journey to Mecca at least once in their lives. But pilgrimage to Palestine, the Holy Land, was not mandatory for Christians. Nonetheless a pilgrimage still conferred a great spiritual benefit. The pilgrim’s journey involved physical sacrifice and hardship, which was meritorious in its own right. Furthermore, to pray with a pure heart where Christ himself had once stood was an act of great symbolic significance. One knight, leaving his goods to the Abbey of Cluny as he left for the Holy Land, wrote: “I have decided to go to Jerusalem, where God became man, where He spoke with men, and to adore Him where He walked.”4 Pilgrimage could also be imposed as penance for a serious crime such as murder, and these pilgrims sometimes carried a heavy iron chain about their waists to signify the reason for their journey. It was widely believed that when the sinner prayed in Jerusalem, God himself would shatter the iron links to make clear his absolution.
Jerusalem was a magnet for Muslims as well as Christians and Jews. It was the third holiest site of Islam, after Mecca and Medina; for Muslims it was Al-Quds, the holy place.5 Devout Jews often came to the city in the month of Tishri, and stayed to celebrate the feast of the Tabernacles.6 Christian pilgrimage had begun under the emperor Constantine and continued under his successors. Great efforts had been made to recover the Christian past of the Holy Land. Lost or half-forgotten biblical sites were located and restored, and lavish churches were erected to enshrine the key places in the life of Jesus Christ. The vast Holy Sepulchre complex was first built between 326 and 336, over the tomb in which Christ had briefly lain. Constantine’s redoubtable mother, Helena, commissioned the building of churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. She was also responsible for rediscovering the three long-lost crosses upon which Jesus of Nazareth and the two thieves had been crucified, relics that had disappeared centuries before. The cross on which Christ had died was identified by the simple expedient of lowering a mortally ill woman onto each of the three wooden shafts in turn, and witnessing her miraculous recovery the instant she was placed upon the true cross.
Not only Jerusalem, but Bethlehem, Nazareth, and many other places named in the Old and New Testaments received a steady stream of pilgrims from the fourth century onward. St. Jerome (342–420), living in the Holy Land, observed that the places where a diligent Christian should pray in Jerusalem had become so numerous that it was impossible to visit them all in a single day.7 Ardent pilgrims soon discovered a multitude of additional holy sites, some of dubious authenticity. One of Jerome’s community told him how she had visited the houses where Cornelius and Philip had once lived in Caesarea, as well as the grave of four unspecified holy virgins. In Bethlehem, she had visited not just the Church of the Nativity, but also what was by tradition the tomb of Rachel. At Hebron she was taken to see some remarkable relics: she entered the authentic hut of Sarah, wife of Abraham, where the swaddling clothes of Isaac had been preserved, and outside the hovel, she saw the remains of the patriarch’s oak, gnarled with age but still in vigorous leaf.8
The Persians’ invasion and occupation of Palestine in the early seventh century, the wars of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius against them, and the Muslim occupation that followed sometimes severely impeded the flow of pilgrims, especially those from the West. But the flow never ceased entirely, and the emperor Charlemagne (who legend held had himself made the pilgrimage) later purchased a hostel in Jerusalem, which welcomed any Western Christians, as well as building a church and a library for their use. In 810 he also sent money to be used for
the repair of the main holy sites in the city.9 However, the bulk of pilgrims were not Western Christians, but devout men and women from Egypt and other lands by then under Muslim rule, as well as those from the Byzantine domains. The long journey from western Europe restricted pilgrimage to those who could afford the time and considerable expense.10 Nonetheless pilgrimages from the West had increased steadily. There were six substantial groups from the German-speaking lands in the ninth century, eleven in the tenth, and thirty-nine in the eleventh.11 But by the mid–ninth century the journey had become much more dangerous.
ISLAM MAY HAVE TRIUMPHED IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY BUT POLITICAL and military control over the Muslim lands eventually fragmented. A strategist looking at a map of the Mediterranean would see Africa joined to the Levant and Anatolia by only a narrow bridge of land fringed by desert, across the Sinai peninsula and north along the coastal strip of Palestine.12 The same coup d’oeil would register that the various terrains of North Africa—part coastal littoral, part high mountain ranges, part desert—were distinct from the Muslim lands to the north of the land bridge. Above all, Egypt, at the junction of Africa and the Levant, was a historic entity in its own right. The land of Egypt, like Jerusalem, featured in the Qur’an, and so existed within the Islamic ethos from the outset. The economy of Egypt, based on the Nile, had no equal, and Islam in Egypt had inherited a long tradition of culture, government, and power. With the building of Cairo in the last quarter of the tenth century and the opening of the Al-Azhar mosque and university in 988, Egypt also became an intellectual center of the Muslim world.13
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 21