by Henry Kamen
Only the year after this, however, we find the Cortes of Valencia stating that the tribunal was disregarding such injunctions. It was after great difficulty that finally in 1571 the Inquisition showed itself open to compromise. The resulting accord was embodied in a decree of October 1571 by which, in return for an annual payment of 2,500 ducats to the Inquisition, the tribunal agreed not to confiscate or sequestrate the property of Moriscos on trial for heresy. Monetary fines could be levied, but with a limit of 10 ducats only. The agreement benefited all sides: the Inquisition, since it brought in a regular annual revenue; the Moriscos, since it protected property for members of their families; and the lords of the Moriscos, since it preserved lands they had leased to their Morisco dependents.
The religious problem, and the activities of the Inquisition, aggravated the position of the Moriscos and provoked many of the conflicts of this period. Spanish publicists later claimed that these events led logically to the decision to expel the Moriscos. In reality, expulsion was never inevitable. There was little difference between the tensions of the time and the equally tense coexistence of the Middle Ages. Islamic civilization was able to cope with the pressures placed on it. Christian society, for its part, regularly turned a blind eye to the Islamic activities of the Moriscos.
Though Moriscos still retained many of their old social customs, and fought to preserve their own religion, they gradually came to realize that some compromises would have to be made. Forced to conform to Christianity, they sought advice from their leaders. In about 1504 a mufti living in Oran (north Africa) issued a fatwa, or opinion, on the situation of Muslims living in Spain. He ruled that in times of persecution Muslims could conform to virtually all outward rules of Christianity without defecting from their beliefs.23 This ruling, which permitted taqiyya (dispensation from religious obligations when under persecution), circulated in text among the Moriscos in the 1560s. The practice made it possible for Moriscos to cling on to their religion.24 It also enabled them to live in their own country, Spain, on terms that they could in some measure decide for themselves. But it did not close their minds to Christianity. On the contrary, many accepted that they could be partially Christian and share in both religions, a state of mind to be found at the same period in southeast Europe, where many Muslims rejected orthodoxy in favor of a more open, syncretic approach.25 The Mediterranean, we have already seen (chapter 1), had no sharp ideological divide: Christians and Muslims (not to mention several minority faiths) lived and traded together, even in times of armed conflict.26
In many parts of the peninsula, consequently, there continued to be a practical coexistence between Old Christians and New Christians of Muslim origin. The town of Arcos de Medinaceli, on the estates of the duke of Medinaceli near the frontier of Castile with Aragon, was in the 1550s nine-tenths Morisco in population. The Moriscos played their due part in the financial and political administration of the town, sharing municipal posts equally with Old Christians.27 When Moriscos were buried, Old Christians attended the funeral. It was a poor community, which may explain the absence of anything beyond the formal signs of Christianity in the religion of the Moriscos. But there was clear evidence that many of them, even though formally Catholic, also had special rites—in their fasts, their burials, their ablutions—that differentiated them from other Christians. None of this altered the tranquility in which the communities in Arcos lived during the two generations before the revolt in Granada.
It was not a unique situation. Reading the times through the perspective of inquisitorial documents, one can be misled into imagining a permanent state of confrontation. Though there were important and periodic conflicts, what also seems striking is the absence of confrontation in many parts of Spain through much of the sixteenth century.28 It was in this period too that the Christians could afford still to entertain a romanticized vision of their links with Moriscos, with the appearance in 1565 of the romance Abencerraje y Jarifa, a story of love between Christian and Muslim. Some Moriscos also took a universal view of religious truth. The Inquisition of Toledo tried one for saying “that every one should be allowed to practice his own religion,” another for maintaining “that the Jew and the Muslim could each be saved in his own law.”29
There was a notable increase in tension between the communities by the end of the sixteenth century, though to present an image of oppression by Christians based on sexual hatred goes beyond the general run of the available evidence.30 The ability of the communities to coexist was recognized and welcomed by many, but did not alter the fact that as a whole the Moriscos refused assimilation.31 That—as social experts can recognize easily in the light of attempts today to integrate minorities of a different religion—was central. Apart from culture, dress and communal autonomy, the principal problem remained that of conversion, for Moriscos overwhelmingly rejected the type of Christianity offered to them.
In 1513 archbishop Talavera of Granada, who had encouraged his Moriscos to sing Arabic hymns at mass, complained to the crown about cultural pressure put upon them. Francisco Núñez Muley, a Morisco leader who in his youth was page to Talavera, recalled how the archbishop went through the mountains of Granada to preach and say mass. Since there was no organ for music he made the natives play the zambra (a traditional dance), and during mass always said the greeting “The Lord be with you” in Arabic. “I remember this,” Núñez reminisced, “as if it were yesterday.”32 Many Christian nobles understood the need for some cultural tolerance. In 1514 the count of Tendilla criticized Ferdinand’s attempt to make Moriscos abandon their clothing: “What clothing did we use to wear in Spain, how did we wear our hair, what sort of food did we eat, if not in the Morisco style?”33
But the early missionary efforts were fruitless. When he went to Granada in 1526, Charles V was informed that “the Moriscos are truly Muslims: it is twenty-seven years since their conversion and there are not twenty-seven or even seven of them who are Christians.” In Granada and Valencia they held fast to their religion, observing prayers, fasts and ablutions, and were strengthened in their faith by their clergy, the alfaquis. Had religious practice alone been at issue, social tension might not have been so high. But in the everyday contact with Old Christians there was periodic irritation and conflict over dress, speech, customs and, above all, food. Moriscos slaughtered their animal meat ritually, did not touch pork (the meat most commonly eaten in Spain) or wine, and cooked only with olive oil, whereas Christians cooked with butter or lard. They tended also to live apart in separate communities, which could lead to antagonism: for example, in Aragon there was friction between highland Christians (the montañeses) and Moriscos living in the plains. Even in Castile, where the older Morisco communities were more assimilated, there were cases such as Hornachos (Extremadura), a flourishing and almost entirely Morisco town of five thousand people which at the expulsion in 1610 emigrated in its entirety to Morocco. Though religious zeal was weaker in Castile and in those parts of Aragon where coexistence with Christians had diluted traditional practices, Islam endured because of community solidarity. In general, Moriscos were strongly repelled by the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and felt extreme repugnance at the sacraments of baptism (families would wash the chrism off on returning home, and hold a Muslim ceremony), penitence and the Eucharist (Morisco irreverence at mass was proverbial).34
There were many attempts to catechize them.35 From 1526, missionaries were sent out in Valencia and Granada. In the 1540s a Franciscan, Fray Bartolomé de los Angeles, carried out missions in Valencia; in the 1560s further campaigns were conducted there by Jesuits and other clergy. In 1566 the archbishop of Valencia, Martín de Ayala, published his manual Christian Doctrine in Arab and Castilian. Ayala also tried, with little success, to find clergy who knew, or could learn, Arabic. Juan de Ribera, archbishop of Valencia from 1568, initiated a financial scheme to increase the stipends of priests and make work among the Moriscos more congenial to the clergy. He also helped to found a seminary and a coll
ege for Morisco boys and girls. For the forty-three years that he held this see, Ribera made every effort to travel round his bishopric and attend to the needs of the Moriscos.36
Considerable opposition to the missionary program in the crown of Aragon came from the seigneurs, who had opposed the forced conversions of 1526 and at every stage fought the activities of the Inquisition. In 1561 in Valencia the inquisitor Miranda named members of the rich Morisco family of Abenamir as familiars of the Inquisition, but the duke of Segorbe, their overlord, ordered them to give up the appointment since his protection was sufficient for them. In 1566 the Inquisition of Aragon complained that “the seigneurs daily persecute the comisarios and familiars that the Holy Office has in their lands, expelling them and telling them that in their territory they want no Inquisition.”37 It was in the nobles’ interest to keep Morisco dependents under their control, since they were a substantial source of revenue. In various meetings of the Cortes they pressed continually for Moriscos to be free from inquisitorial confiscations, a concession eventually granted in the 1571 agreement.
There were conflicts between nobles and the Inquisition. In 1541 a prominent Valencian grandee, the Admiral of Aragon, Sancho de Moncada, was reprimanded by the Inquisition for building a mosque for his Moriscos and telling them “that they should pretend to be Christians externally but remain Muslims internally.” In 1569 he was placed under house arrest for three years for persistently protecting his Muslim vassals against the Holy Office.38 In 1571 the Grand Master of the Order of Montesa appeared in an auto de fe for protecting his Moriscos. In 1582 in Aragon when the lord of Ariza, Jaime Palafox, heard that the Inquisition had arrested three of his vassals, he and his men burst into the house of a familiar and beat and stabbed him to death. The courts sent him “for life” to the North African fortress of Oran.39
Even had the nobles been more cooperative, it is unlikely that the Moriscos would have responded favorably to Christian overtures. Supported by the taqiyya, they defiantly maintained and proclaimed their separateness. Maria la Monja of Arcos in 1524 said “that not for all the world would she cease saying that she had been a Muslim, so great a source of pride was it for her.”40 The authorities, as the Granada regulations of December 1526 showed, were convinced that all Morisco customs were obstacles to the acceptance of Christianity. In 1538 a Morisco of Toledo was arrested by the Inquisition and accused of “playing music at night, dancing the zambra and eating couscous,” implying that these activities were heretical. In 1544 the synod of the bishopric of Guadix held that “it is suspicious to take baths, especially on Thursday and Friday night”! Even the Morisco manner of sitting—never on seats but always on the ground—could be viewed as evidence of a preference for Islam.
In several parts of Spain the Inquisition prosecuted Morisco religion when the occasion arose. In Daimiel (Ciudad Real), where the community had duly converted in 1502, a generation of tranquility was interrupted by an important series of arrests and prosecutions around 1540.41 The most intense period of religious pressure did not come until after the provincial Church councils of 1565. Attempts to Christianize Spaniards, the clergy felt, made no sense if not applied also to the Moriscos. In Granada the Church council demanded that radical measures be adopted. Philip II’s chief minister, Cardinal Espinosa, agreed. In Valencia, however, the archbishop, Martín de Ayala, wrote to Philip II in 1567 protesting vigorously against the senseless persecution of Moriscos by the Inquisition:
I cannot fail to advise Your Majesty of the danger in this realm, because the inquisitors have recently punished, with confiscation of goods, some of the newly converted. I was there in the auto in order to please the Holy Office, but it pained me deeply that they punished persons who were not in any way guilty, and their guilt is no worse than that of all the others in this kingdom. I feel that it would be beneficial and very necessary for Your Majesty to order the inquisitors to suspend action against the said newly converted.42
Tensions and conflicts were at their most intense in the most Islamic of the Morisco territories, Granada. When all the repressive legislation was repeated in a pragmatic of January 1567 in Granada, the community leader Francisco Núñez Muley drew up a memorial protesting against the injustices done to his people:
Every day we are mistreated in every way, by both secular officials and clergy, all of which is so obvious that it needs no proof. . . . How can people be deprived of their natural tongue, in which they were born and raised? The Egyptians, Syrians, Maltese and other Christian people speak, read and write in Arabic, and are still Christians as we are.
Two generations of tension exploded finally into the revolt that began on Christmas Eve of 1568 in Granada and spread to the Alpujarras. It was a savage war, with atrocities on both sides, and military repression was brutal. Thousands of Moriscos died. Over eighty thousand were forcibly expelled from the kingdom and made to settle in Castile. The end of the rebellion did little to solve the problem. The Granadans brought into Castilian communities an Islamic presence they had not hitherto known. Where Castile had had about twenty thousand Mudéjares, by the end of the century the numbers had swelled to over one hundred thousand, mostly Arabic in tongue and Muslim in culture. Moreover, the military threat was now obvious. Some four thousand Turks and Berbers had come into Spain to fight alongside the insurgents in the Alpujarras. Morisco banditry in the south reached its peak in the 1560s. There were millenarian hopes of liberation from oppression. Inevitably, seeing the obduracy of the Moriscos, the authorities reverted to a repressive policy.
The Granada war created a decisive change in attitudes. The excesses committed on both sides were without equal in the experience of contemporaries. It was the most savage war to be fought in Europe that century. Philip II was staggered by the massacres of priests committed by the rebels. The Moriscos, for their part, had suffered unspeakable atrocities. Apart from the deaths and expulsions, thousands were sold into slavery within Spain. In Córdoba alone, in 1573, there were over fifteen hundred Morisco slaves.43
From that period the attempts at conversion decreased and the repression intensified. Those expelled from Granada to the provinces of Castile took with them their Islamic beliefs and their hatred of Castile. In Arcos de Medinaceli the older community of integrated Moriscos was pressurized by threats from the newcomers to declare themselves openly as Muslims.44 From the 1570s in Aragon and Valencia, Moriscos formed the bulk of Inquisition prosecutions.45 In the tribunal of Granada itself, Moriscos represented 82 percent of those prosecuted between 1560 and 1571.46 In the tribunal of Cuenca, the arrival of the Granadans quintupled the number of Moriscos prosecuted, strengthened the faith of the Castilian Muslims and provoked a wave of persecution by the Holy Office.47 In the tribunal of Saragossa 266 Moriscos had been tried over the years 1540–59; between 1560 and 1614 the total shot up to 2,371, a ninefold increase. In Valencia there were 82 Morisco prosecutions in the earlier period, but 2,465 in the latter—a thirtyfold increase. In the autos de fe in both tribunals in the 1580s, Moriscos constituted up to 90 percent of all accused. The repression in Aragon was singularly harsh. Though the kingdom had only half as many Moriscos as Valencia, it suffered much higher rates of execution and condemnation to the galleys.48
It is true that the repression of the Moriscos was not strictly comparable to the severity meted out to judaizers and Protestants. In Cuenca only 7 Moriscos were executed in person out of 102 cases in the period 1583–1600, and in Granada only 20 were executed out of 917 Moriscos appearing in autos in the years 1550–95.49 This was because the Moriscos were not usually treated as heretics but rather as semi-infidels to whom patience should be shown. However, there is no doubt that the patience of the Christian missionaries had long since run out. Reporting from a visit to the Moriscos of Aragon in 1568, the bishop of Tortosa wrote: “These people have me fed up and exasperated. . . . They have a damnable attitude and make me despair of any good in them. . . . I have been through these mountains for eight days now and find them more
Muslim than ever and very set in their bad ways. I repeat my advice that they should be given a general pardon without insisting on confessions, for there is no other way (unless it be to burn them all).”50 He was, obviously, not recommending the latter option. “All of them live as Muslims, and no one doubts this,” the Inquisition of Aragon had affirmed in 1565.51
Throughout Spain there was ample evidence that most Moriscos were proud of their Islamic religion and fought to preserve their culture. The Morisco María de Lara, prosecuted by the Inquisition of Granada in 1572, admitted: “at home we were Muslims, outside home we were Christians.” She and her family ate their meals virtually in secret within their own houses, so as not to betray the fact that the meat they consumed came from an animal that had been ritually killed. Oppression only strengthened their separateness. “They marry among themselves and do not mix with Old Christians, none of them enters religion nor joins the army nor enters domestic service nor begs alms; they live separately from Old Christians, take part in trade and are rich,” runs a report of 1589 made to Philip II on the Moriscos of Toledo.52 By contrast, for Moriscos the inquisitors were “thieving wolves whose trade is arrogance and greed, sodomy and lust, tyranny, robbery and injustice.” The Inquisition was “a tribunal of the devil, attended by deceit and blindness.”53