And he is not alone. The theme of things not being what they seem becomes common in Spanish artistic expression during the seventeenth century, and is, perhaps, its most lasting legacy. Playwright Calderón de la Barca explored it in his Life is a Dream, whose most famous lines read:
What is life? It is an illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
Whose greatest value is only small:
All of life is a dream.
And dreams are only dreams.
Priscillian, Ibn Arabi and St Teresa would all have agreed. Those words could almost read as an interpretation of Don Quixote itself, and also of the greatest painting to emerge from seventeenth-century Spain, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, painted in 1656.
Few other paintings in Western art have been the subject of so much analysis. Myriad interpretations abound, even some which insist astrological constellations are hidden within the image. But that the painting is saying something is clear as, just with Cervantes, it states quite boldly that appearances are other than they seem. Is it a group portrait of the five-year-old Infanta Margarita and her ladies-in-waiting? Is it a self-portrait by Velázquez? Is it actually a scene showing Velázquez painting a portrait of King Philip IV and his queen, whose reflections are visible in a mirror? And the shadowy figure at the back, holding a curtain as though to beckon us through to another realm – what’s his significance?
With such a complex painting there is a sense that it expresses the difficult nature of reality itself, a place where solid definitions dissolve. Such a realm is in keeping with the tone set by Cervantes and others: it is Spain itself, the accidental world empire already crumbling, held together more by faith and self-belief than real power. And it is also a representation of our world, the everyday world, a thing which has less solidity than we believe, which is, in fact, an illusion. We must see it as such, become aware of its fragility and inherent madness so that, perhaps, like the mystics of the previous century, we may break through and perceive something other, something beyond.
Decadent Spain, crumbling Spain, the Spain that is losing her empire and her position of power and authority to the new vigorous power that is France in the seventeenth century, is no longer dazzled by the gold and silver from the New World because this is running out. And so, ever more cut off from the rest of the world, fearful and paranoid, it must look deeper within itself. And there, in the darkness, it finds light – the light of Don Quixote and of Las Meninas, two of the greatest works of art in the world.
What these works are hinting at is the existence of another perspective: the mirror to see ourselves, an open doorway to pass through. For centuries Spain has been locked in its dualistic struggle, between two faces of its patron, Santiago, between the Slayer and the Seeker, the Inquisitor and the Converso, the Moor and the Christian, the black and the white. Yet there is a third face to Santiago, his original one, one which many have lost sight of: Santiago the Apostle, the disciple of Christ, the figure who has been as close as is possible to the Divine. Cervantes and Velázquez remind their compatriots that there is another dimension to their national story, that while the Manichaean fight continues and will continue, one can step out of it and see the whole, a whole made up of these two battling parts, neither of them right or wrong, but caught in eternal struggle, each trying to annihilate the other while not understanding that to do so would be to annihilate themselves. This is the mirror with the two royal faces in Las Meninas, king and queen as physical embodiment of their realm. And through self-awareness, by recognising this dual nature, a way out opens up, the queen’s chamberlain holding open the curtain at the back for the couple to step through the scene in front of them and out into a lighter world. That is the eternal challenge that Spain must face, a truth reflected in her greatest painting.
It is said that after Velázquez died, Philip IV himself painted the red cross of the Order of Santiago which adorns the chest of Velázquez’s self-portrait, for the painter had still not been awarded this highest of honours when the painting itself was executed. It is an interesting theory, and places the figure of Santiago, the three-faced saint, at the very heart of the image. Did the king himself realise the symbolism of his action?
MOORS OUT
Al-Andalus came to an end with the fall of Granada in 1492, but Moorish Spain itself continued to exist for almost another century in the form of Muslims who remained in the Peninsula, people referred to as ‘Moriscos’. Like the conversos, they had been forced to convert to Catholicism. But as with many Jews, they continued to practise their religion in secret. Yet with the desire to create Spain in one singular Catholic image, it was only a matter of time before this remnant of a more plural past would be eradicated.
By the sixteenth century the Morisco community was made up mostly of farmers and artisans, people of low social class, but vital for the economy. With the loss of political power, most of the wealthier and more learned Muslims had gone into exile, including jurists and Islamic scholars. The rump of Moorish Spain they left behind was culturally a far cry from its illustrious predecessors, but was proudly aware of its heritage and resentful of Christian authorities who had broken the generous terms given at the fall of Granada and instead imposed harsh restrictions on their Muslim subjects. Forced conversions were combined with a banning of the use of Arabic and the wearing of Moorish-style clothes: not only the Moriscos’ religion, but their entire culture, was under attack.
Although scattered widely across Spain, the bulk of Moriscos lived in Valencia and Aragon, and in and around their former stronghold, Granada. Here, settled in remote villages of the Sierra Nevada, they tried to continue their lives as before. Yet a bloody revolt in the early 1500s, in which both sides carried out acts of unprecedented brutality against each other, set the tone for what was to come: Christian authority was re-established, but Morisco resentment continued to seethe.
Things came to a head in the late 1560s. By now Spain had changed, becoming ever less tolerant of religious minorities. Previously, Church and State authorities had been more concerned with Jewish conversos. Morisco farmers and craftsmen had been of little concern. But now they, too, became a cause for alarm, not least because they were being perceived as a potential ‘fifth column’1 for the Ottoman Turks, an ever-threatening Muslim presence in the Mediterranean. New rules in 1568 reinforcing previous but only partially imposed measures against Morisco traditions provoked a second rebellion.
This new civil war was a bloody and drawn-out affair. Don Juan of Austria, Philip II’s half-brother, led the Christian troops at one stage, sacrificing many of his own men in the conquest of Morisco villages and towns high in the Alpujarra mountains south of Granada. Women and children not sold into slavery were frequently slaughtered, while any male over the age of twelve was killed without mercy. Meanwhile, the Moriscos themselves carried out their own acts of brutality: during the siege of Galera, they captured a knight from the Order of Santiago; seeing the distinctive cross on his garments, they tore him apart limb from limb.
Despite holding out for over two years and making good use of the mountainous terrain, the Moriscos were eventually defeated, their cause undermined by divisions on their own side. The Christian authorities, for their part, were determined not to allow a similar revolt to take place again, and expelled all survivors to other parts of Spain, leaving the Alpujarra empty while they searched for Christian families to repopulate it from the north.
The end of the second rebellion, and the defeat of the Turkish navy by the Spanish at the Battle of Lepanto in 1572, only brought temporary respite, however. The Moriscos may have been removed from their southern mountain stronghold, but still numbered in their hundreds of thousands and were particularly concentrated now close to the eastern coast, within easy reach of Muslim naval forces, either Barbary pirates or Ottoman ships. And what had become increasingly clear to the Inquisition authorities was that the Moriscos were particularly stubborn in clinging to Islam. Bereft of their religious leaders, and now
barely capable of speaking Arabic, they had developed their own patois and a written ‘language’, Aljamiado – Castilian Spanish written with Arabic letters.
Nonetheless, a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation came from within the Morisco community itself when two men from Granada carried out one of the most daring religious forgeries in history with the ‘Sacromonte texts’. ‘Miraculously’ discovered between 1595 and 1599 in the Sacromonte area of the city, they purported to be ancient writings from the time of Nero comprising a ‘Fifth Gospel’ revealed to Mary in Arabic to be divulged specifically to the Spanish people. The city authorities were unable to decipher the texts, which were discovered next to the burnt remains of what was assumed to be the body of a first-century Granadan Christian martyr. So they gave them to a couple of Moriscos to translate. These men, Miguel de Luna and Alonso de Castillo, had been instrumental in the discovery of the writings to begin with, and unbeknownst to the authorities, were their actual authors. The two then ‘interpreted’ the ancient message from Mary. It was an attempt to syncretise Christianity and Islam, and to engineer a more tolerant climate for the Morisco community. According to the ‘gospel’, Arabic was the ancient language of Spain, and of the first peoples in Granada, who had been Christians. The cult of the Virgin and worship of relics was praised, but aspects of Christianity unacceptable to Muslims, such as the Trinity and Jesus as the son of God, were rejected.
Many in Spain were excited by the discoveries, including Philip II himself, but from the very start there were doubters. It took the Vatican until 1682 to declare them forgeries, but by then they had become an irrelevance, for in 1609 the inevitable decision was taken: the Moriscos would be expelled from Spain en masse.
In France, Cardinal Richelieu commented that the expulsion of the Moriscos constituted ‘the most barbarous act in the annals of mankind’. Yet he might well have celebrated it as it served seriously to weaken the economic power of his southern neighbour and rival. A Peninsula denuded of its Morisco population constituted a far less vibrant country (which, in time, would be conquered by French troops). That Spain carried out such an act of self-harm, however, fits with the pattern of self-inflicted damage brought on as one ‘Spain’ tries to dominate and eradicate the other. A precedent had been set in 1492 with the expulsion of the Jews. Then, just as in the early 1600s, there were warnings of serious consequences – including economic ones – for the country as a whole by the forceful removal of an entire (and in the case of the Jews, very wealthy) section of society. But then the Americas had been discovered and the gold and silver had begun to flow. This hadn’t prevented multiple bankruptcies, but the arrival of wealth from the New World had an intoxicating effect: if Spain could do it once, she could do it again.
And so the decision was made: after a hundred years of rebellions, unrest and unsuccessful conversion campaigns, the Moriscos were forced to flee. In 1609 there were some five hundred thousand of them in Spain, around 5 per cent of the population, with around half of their number concentrated around Valencia. Here they formed up to a third of the population, generally settled in the countryside, where they farmed one of the most fertile areas in the country, la huerta, using irrigation systems established centuries before during the Umayyad caliphate. When news of the expulsion was announced, it began in Valencia on 22 September, and by 30 September the first ships were taking Moriscos to North Africa, a final insult being that these Muslim Spaniards had to pay for their own fare to leave their home country. Within mountainous areas a rebellion began, but was eventually crushed, and by the end of the year over one hundred thousand people had been forced into exile, only allowed to take with them what they could carry. Dwellings passed to the crown and anyone caught burning them down was executed.
It took three years for the expulsion to be effected throughout Spain, and the result for the State was the loss of up to half the country’s revenues in taxes. But by 1614, nine hundred years after the Moorish invasion of 711, the last remnants of Moorish Spain had gone.
Or had they? Recent historical research suggests that not a few Moriscos managed to avoid the expulsion, while many who did sail away eventually found their way back and reassimilated. Spanish-speaking and Spanish-born, they had little in common with the North African communities among whom they were supposed to start a new life. And after a nine-hundred-year presence in Spain, they were ethnically closer to their Christian persecutors than their co-religionists on the other side of the Mediterranean. Just as with the expulsion of the Jews, the language used to describe events hides an important fact. These were not acts of Spaniards expelling non-Spaniards or foreigners who they happened to find in their midst: these were mass expulsions by Spaniards of other Spaniards. By 1609 there was barely even a linguistic barrier between Moriscos and Christians. This makes the argument that many secretly returned more compelling: as Spaniards it would have been easy for them to pass unnoticed back into the land which had rejected them.
Whatever the truth about the numbers who returned, however – and this is still debated – the fact remains that the Valencian economy in particular collapsed with the removal of the Moriscos, the very men and women who farmed the land and kept the local economy afloat. And the move came as the flow of precious metals from the Americas was diminishing. Spain could ill afford such a blow, and the consequences were to be felt over the coming years and centuries as the country slid into decadence and decline. The Moors had brought greatness to Spain. Now, with their final removal, came disaster.
1 The term was coined during the early months of the Spanish Civil War by a Francoist general referring to secret supporters inside besieged, Republican-held Madrid.
GOLDEN YEARS
The seventeenth century is known in Spain as the Siglo de Oro, the ‘Golden Century’, not for the gold from the Americas, which had run out years before, nor for any major success internationally, but for the writings and paintings produced in the country at the time. This is the period of Cervantes and Velázquez, of Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega, architects of modern Spanish culture. Yet, in a trend which appears to be repeated time and again in world history, this artistic rise runs in parallel with political decline. Spain at the start of the 1600s is damaged yet still powerful. By the end of the century, however, her collapse is complete.
Yet things might have gone differently. Decline was not inevitable, and Spain came close to taking an alternative path, but old patterns of behaviour came into play, reinforcing the country’s downward spiral.
Much of the reign of Philip III (1598–1621) coincided with a period of peace with France, England and the Dutch. Problems with the Turks rumbled on in the Mediterranean, but the absence of wars on multiple fronts couldn’t have come at a better time for Spain, whose wealth had evaporated over much of the previous half-century. Rather than serving as a period of healing and new growth, however, the early seventeenth century witnessed further decline. The disastrous decision to expel the Moriscos was the brainchild of Philip III’s chief minister, the Duke of Lerma. Yet if Lerma’s wisdom at expelling a highly productive section of the population was questionable, he inflicted further damage through his own corrupt practices. Unlike his father, Philip III was happy to take a back seat when it came to affairs of state, with the result that for a while Lerma tried to run the country as his personal fiefdom. In a move which today’s corrupt Spanish political class could only envy and admire, he managed to move the capital from Madrid to Valladolid having previously bought up large amounts of real estate in the city for next to nothing which he then sold on at a vastly inflated price. The move lasted for six years, before the court was bribed by Madrileños to return to its former home.
Corruption at the very top of public life is a refrain running through Spanish history, and it has a long pedigree, but the Duke of Lerma set a precedent which his successors emulate to this day.
Philip III died, it is said, because a heating stove had been placed too close to him against the cold March winds,
making him sweat. Strict court protocol meant that only one person could mention this to the monarch, but by the time that official was found and brought into the royal presence, Philip was already drenched in his own perspiration. That night he caught a fever and died.
The tale might easily act as a metaphor for Spain at the period, so rigid in its own grandeur that it marches relentlessly towards doom.
But another Philip – IV – brought in changes and placed a man in charge who came close to reversing the country’s slide. This was the Count–Duke of Olivares. Olivares had a vision for Spain to become a truly unified country, rather than the collection of kingdoms and principalities which it still was, albeit all under the same king. In a secret memo of 1624 called el Gran Memorial he wrote: ‘The most important business facing the monarchy is to reduce the kingdoms which make up Spain to the laws and ways of Castile, without any difference among them. If your majesty achieves this, he will be the most powerful prince in the world.’
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