by Henry Kamen
Freedom in Spain was a positive side of the picture. The negative side was the unquestionably parochial state of peninsular elite culture, a situation that had little to do with the Inquisition. As we have commented, thousands of Spaniards traveled throughout the Western world. Despite these extensive imperial contacts, Spain was and remained on the fringe of the major currents in West European philosophy, science and creative art. In the great age of empire, Philip II drew for technological expertise on Italians, Belgians and Germans rather than Spaniards.184 Spaniards did not export what expertise they may have had, but instead called on outsiders to contribute theirs. In the same way they exported little in the way of books, but imported them. “The Iberian peninsula was not well placed to contribute to the book market, and books published in Spain made little impact on the wider European market.”185 Spanish printing, in the new age of book production, was probably the worst in Western Europe.186 The Castilian elite, with a few prominent exceptions, was criticized at the time by Italian and German diplomats for its lack of cultural sophistication.187 Saavedra y Fajardo commented that northern Europeans “traverse the world and learn languages, arts and sciences; Spaniards remain in tight seclusion in their country.”188 The Inquisition had no responsibility for the situation, but many observers felt—and with good reason—that it incarnated in some sense the backward aspects of peninsular society. This, as we shall see, contributed powerfully to mold the enduring image of the Holy Office.
Spaniards began to expand their vision in the eighteenth century, when a new French dynasty helped to change perspectives. For the first time, thanks to French sponsorship, Spaniards explored the scientific wonders of the New World. A French-directed expedition in 1735, with the participation of two young naval cadets, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, turned into the first major contribution of the Spanish empire to the observational science of the Enlightenment.189 By this time the Inquisition was almost an irrelevance. From the 1680s there were signs of active contact with European ideas. By the 1750s several Spaniards, albeit hesitantly,190 were abreast of new trends in medical science and philosophy. They were exceptional: for the most part, the Spanish elite was cut off from cultural contact by an unreformed educational system, and by lack of familiarity with any of the languages in which the new thinking was being published. It is significant that we know of no substantial literary correspondence between Spanish and European intellectuals before the late eighteenth century, when the literary contacts of the Valencian scholar Mayans i Ciscar (who looked to Italy rather than northern Europe for his inspiration) began to take shape. There was therefore a serious intellectual divide between the south and the north. “If a nobleman wishes to educate his sons,” a prominent minister in Madrid reported in 1713, “he has to send them to colleges in Bologna, Rome, France and other places.”191 Spain consequently never featured as a desirable component of the Grand Tour: its universities were (explained one pained English visitor in 1664) “just where our universities were 100 years ago.”192 There was no apparent reason for going there; like the rest of southern Europe, it remained on the outer confines of the European experience. “No country is less known to the rest of Europe,” Dr. Johnson concluded in 1761.193
7
THE END OF MORISCO SPAIN
We were taken to the Inquisition where, for no more than following the truth, we were deprived of life, property and children.
—A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MORISCO EXILE IN TUNIS
In the eleventh century, the tide began to turn against Islam. The pope in 1095 summoned all Christian princes to come together in a great crusade against the infidel.1 Already, in northern Spain, Christian princes from France and Burgundy were helping the kings of Castile and Aragon against the Muslims, and in 1085 Toledo was captured. Finally, in 1212 a combined Christian force put together by Castile met the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa and shattered their control in the peninsula. By the mid-thirteenth century the Muslims retained power only in the kingdom of Granada. Two centuries of formal peace ensued. With the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella to the throne in 1474, belligerent ardor was redirected into a new war of conquest. Of the two realms of Spain, Aragon had been the one with an imperial history, but Castile with its superior resources in men and money rapidly took over the leadership.
The war against Granada, which excited the imagination of Christian Europe, took on the status of a European crusade, blessed by the papacy and with funds and volunteers from all over the continent. Campaigns began in 1482 and still retained much of the old medieval spirit: the deeds of Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cadiz, seemed to recall those of the famed warrior the Cid. But the age of chivalry was passing. The brutal enslavement of the entire population (fifteen thousand people) of Málaga after its capture in 1487 gave proof of the savagery of the Christians.2 Military idealism in that period continued to be fed by chivalric novels, notably the Amadis de Gaula (1508), but beneath the superficial gloss of gallantry there burned an ideological intolerance typified by the conquests in Africa of Cardinal Cisneros, who helped to finance the capture of Mers-el-Kebir in 1505 and Oran in 1509 (the latter an event marred by mass slaughter of the defenseless civil population).3
Ten years of war ended with the capitulation of Granada in 1492. The end of the kingdom of al-Andalus meant that the Muslims (known among Spaniards as “Moors”) ceased to exist as a nation, and became no more than a minority within a Christian country. As subjects of a Christian king they were now, like the Muslims who had for centuries lived under Christian rule, known as “Mudéjares.” The terms of the capitulation of Granada were generous to the vanquished and reflected medieval traditions of coexistence. The Mudéjares were guaranteed their customs, property, laws and religion. They kept their own officials, to be supervised, however, by Castilian governors. Those wishing to emigrate were allowed to so.
The reality of the settlement was somewhat different from these terms. Many of the elite found life under Christian rule intolerable and passed over into North Africa. Reorganization of the territory was entrusted to Iñigo López de Mendoza, second count of Tendilla and later first marquis of Mondéjar. Hernando de Talavera was appointed first archbishop, and encouraged conversions by means of charitable persuasion, respect for Mudéjar culture and the use of Arabic during religious services. Progress was slow, and in 1499 Cisneros asked Ferdinand and Isabella, who were then in Granada, for permission to pursue a more vigorous policy.
There appear to have been no compulsory conversions. But the policy of mass baptisms provoked a brief revolt in December 1499 in the Albaicín, the Muslim quarter of Granada. The rising was pacified only through the good offices of Tendilla and Talavera. There were further scattered revolts in other parts of the south, through most of 1500 and into the early weeks of 1501. They presented the government with a serious policy problem. Some, including Tendilla and Cisneros, favored harsh measures. Cisneros’s view was that by rebellion the Mudéjares had forfeited all rights granted by the terms of capitulation and they should be offered a clear choice between baptism or expulsion. His personal preference was “that they be converted and enslaved, for as slaves they will be better Christians and the land will be pacified for ever.”4 Ferdinand, by contrast, favored moderation. “If your horse trips up,” he told his councilors, “you don’t seize your sword to kill him, instead you give him a smack on his flanks. So my view and that of the queen is that these Moors be baptized. And if they don’t become Christians, their children and grandchildren will.”5 It was an important indication of the widely different policy that the monarchs would adopt towards the Muslims in Castile and in Aragon. In Granada and Castile, as Ferdinand saw it, circumstances made obligatory conversion inevitable. In Aragon, there was as yet no need for that approach.
Over the next few months the Mudéjares of Granada were systematically baptized; a few were allowed to emigrate. By 1501 it was officially assumed that the kingdom had become one of Christian Muslims—the Moriscos. They were granted lega
l equality with Christians, but were forbidden to carry arms and were subjected to pressure to abandon their culture. A huge bonfire of Arabic books, ordered by a royal decree of October 1501,6 was held in Granada. It was the end of the capitulations and of Muslim al-Andalus. “If the king of the conquest does not keep faith,” lamented a contemporary Arab leader and scholar, Yuce Venegas, at that time resident on his estates near Granada, “what can we expect from his successors?”7
With Granada apparently converted, Isabella was not inclined to tolerate Muslims elsewhere in her realms. On 12 February 1502 all Mudéjares in Castile were offered the choice between baptism and exile. Virtually all of them, subjects of the crown since the Middle Ages, chose baptism, since emigration was rendered almost impossible by stringent conditions. With their conversion Islam vanished from Castilian territory, and continued to be tolerated only in the crown of Aragon. The different policy adopted in the two realms demonstrated that unity of religion was not an immediate priority of the crown.8 By repeating a step that had already been taken against the Jews, Isabella abolished plurality of faiths in her dominions of Castile but also created within the body of Christian society the wholly new problem of the Moriscos.
From about 1511, various decrees attempted to make the new converts modify their cultural identity and abandon Muslim practices. These measures culminated in an assembly convoked by the authorities in Granada in 1526. At the meeting all the distinctive characteristics of Morisco civilization—the use of Arabic, their clothes, their jewelry, the ritual slaughter of animals, circumcision9—came under attack. A decree was passed encouraging intermarriage between Old Christians and Moriscos. It was also decided to transfer the local tribunal of the Inquisition from Jaén to Granada.
In the crown of Aragon there was no comparable pressure on the Mudéjares. The principal reason for this was the great power of the landed nobility and the authority of the Cortes. On the estates of the nobles the poorer Mudéjares formed a plentiful, cheap and productive source of labor, from which the expression arose “Mientras más Moros más ganancia” (More Muslims, more profit). Whether to placate his nobility or in pursuit of a moderate policy, Ferdinand repeatedly warned the inquisitors of Aragon not to persecute the Mudéjar population or resort to forced conversions. The Mudéjares therefore continued to lead an independent existence until the revolt of the Comuneros in 1520.
At the same time that the Comunidades of 1520 broke out in Castile, Valencia experienced disturbances of its own. Here the rebels, grouped into Germanías, or brotherhoods, organized an urban revolution directed against the local aristocracy. Valencia had the largest Muslim population of any part of Spain. The Mudéjares were almost exclusively a rural community and were subjected to the big landowners of the realm. The Germanía leaders saw that the simplest way to destroy the power of the nobles in the countryside would be to free their vassals, and this they did by baptizing them. The years 1520–22 in Valencia thus witnessed the forcible baptism of thousands of Muslims. The defeat of the rebels by royal troops should in theory have allowed the Mudéjares to revert to Islam, since forced baptisms were universally regarded as invalid. But the authorities were not so eager to lose their new converts. The Inquisition in particular was concerned to hold the Mudéjares to the letter of their baptism. To the argument that the conversions had taken place under compulsion, the standard answer was once again given that to choose baptism as an alternative to death meant the exercise of free choice, which rendered the sacrament of baptism valid.10 The Inquisition was therefore ordered to proceed on the assumption that all properly administered baptisms were valid.
It now seemed incongruous to tolerate Muslims elsewhere in the crown of Aragon. In November 1525 Charles V issued a decree ordering the conversion of all Mudéjares in Valencia by the end of the year, and of those elsewhere by the end of January 1526. From 1526 the Muslim religion no longer existed in Spain officially: all Mudéjares were now Moriscos. Writing to the pope in December that year, Charles V admitted that “the conversion was not wholly voluntary among many of them, and since then they have not been instructed in our holy faith.” Considerable efforts were subsequently made to evangelize the new “converts” in the regions of greatest concentration. Among the clergy leading the campaign was the distinguished humanist Antonio de Guevara, who labored in Valencia and Granada.11
The situation of the Moriscos varied across the peninsula according to density of population. The highest concentration was in the kingdom of Granada, where Moriscos in the 1560s were some 54 percent of the population; in areas such as the Alpujarra mountains they constituted the totality. In Valencia they formed a third of the population in the late sixteenth century, in Aragon about a fifth. In Catalonia Moriscos were a tiny group, and in Castile they were proportionately even less, perhaps a total of some twenty thousand in 1502,12 scattered throughout the country in small urban morerías and living at peace with their Christian neighbors.
There were major differences between the Morisco communities. The Granadans, recently subjugated, included a flourishing upper class, preserved their religion and culture intact and usually spoke Arabic (algarabía, the Christians called it). They were an integral Islamic civilization. The Valencians were largely a rural proletariat, but because they lived quite separately from the Christian population and were so numerous, they managed to preserve most of their customs, religion and language. Elsewhere in Spain, Arabic was almost unknown among the Moriscos. All spoke a form of Castilian. In Aragon, where Mudéjares had lived longest among Christians, the decline of Arabic produced the beginnings, in the sixteenth century, of a Morisco literature written in Spanish. Residual knowledge of Arabic, however, was sufficient to warrant the import of sacred texts from abroad.13 Aragonese Moriscos, for the most part, lived and dressed like their Christian neighbors; they differed only in religion.14
Though deprived of access to Christian society by discrimination, the Moriscos were not uniformly poor. As a separate community, they had an economic life parallel to that of Christians. The majority worked the land. But in Aragon they also herded flocks of sheep and cattle for the market; in Saragossa they were carpenters, metalworkers and cloth workers. They were active in the building industry, and produced swords and arms for sale. Some were traders, investing their profits in the land.15 In towns wholly populated by Moriscos, such as Almonacid de la Sierra (in Aragon), the inhabitants logically produced their own liberal professions: a surgeon, a scrivener, a lawyer, a noble, in addition to lesser callings.16
To maintain their internal integrity, the Muslim leaders strengthened the social role of their community, the aljama. It was an institution that allowed them to preserve their autonomy and culture, but at the same time made it possible to cooperate on good terms with the authorities.17 They spoke among themselves the version of Spanish known as aljamía.18 When written down, in Arabic script, this produced a secret literature that the inquisitors were unable to read and that they normally categorized, when they discovered and confiscated writings, as “Korans.” Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did the Arabist Pascual de Gayangos, resident for nearly half his life in France and England, discover that what appeared to be Arabic was in reality a special variant of Castilian.19
Until the early years of the reign of Philip II the efforts of the Inquisition to keep Moriscos to their nominal Christianity were little more than a gesture. The largest numbers to be prosecuted were in the crown of Aragon, but they were only the tip of the iceberg of unbelief in Morisco Spain. There were two main reasons for the relative absence of prosecutions: the conviction of both Church and state that a proper program of conversion should be undertaken, and the strong opposition of Christian lords to any interference with their rights over their Morisco vassals. In Aragon, for instance, nearly 70 percent of the Moriscos were under noble jurisdiction.20 We may add to these two reasons the fact that Mediterranean society, not only on Spain’s coast but throughout the inland sea as far as Greece, still accepted
the possibility of social coexistence between Christians and Muslims. In some islands near Corfu, there were even cases of upper-class Muslim ladies who converted voluntarily to Christianity.21
In January 1526 the leaders of the Valencian Moriscos succeeded in obtaining from the crown and the inquisitor general Manrique a secret concordia, or agreement, that if they all submitted to baptism they would be free for forty years from any prosecution by the Holy Office, since it would be impossible for them to shed all their customs at once. In 1528 the agreement was made public, and in that same year the Cortes of Aragon, meeting at Monzón, asked Charles to prevent the Inquisition prosecuting Moriscos until they had been instructed in the faith. Their request was timely, for the guarantee was no more lasting than the one granted to the Mudéjares of Granada. The Holy Office interpreted the accord to mean that it could bring to trial those converts who had slipped back into Islamic practices.
In December of 1526, the year when the Inquisition was transferred from Jaén to Granada, regulations were reissued forbidding Granada Moriscos to use the Arabic language, Muslim clothes or Muslim names. Morisco money offered to Charles brought about the suspension of these rules. But the removal of one burden was balanced by the imposition of another in the form of the Inquisition, whose activity the Moriscos continued trying to curtail over the next generation. In Aragon, protests raised against the Inquisition in the Cortes of Monzón of 1533 included claims that the tribunal was seizing land confiscated from its victims, to the detriment of the feudal owners of the land.22 Similar complaints were raised in the Cortes of 1537 and 1542. In 1546 the pope intervened and agreed that for a minimum period of ten years the Inquisition should not confiscate any property from the Moriscos.