by Matthew Carr
If this exotic attire enhanced the sexual allure of Moorish women to Christian men, the imagined wealth of these accoutrements also aroused Christian greed in peacetime and especially in war, when their clothes and jewelry were often taken as war booty. At the same time, Spanish churchmen disapproved of such frivolity in women and were appalled by the fact that many Moorish women also adorned their bodies, whether it was their plaited hairstyles or the intricate henna tattoos with which they stained their legs, hands, and feet. Such customs reflected an attitude to the body that was very different from the ascetic ideal of contemptus mundi, or “contempt for the world,” that was valorized by the Church, and it sometimes generated a tormented mixture of attraction and revulsion that was not that different from Spanish attitudes to the “naked” Indians of the New World.
One cultural practice regarded with particular horror by the Church was the Muslim fondness for public bathing. In the Middle Ages, the Muslim hammam or public bathhouse had become a feature of many Spanish towns, and Christian rulers had allowed Jews and Christians to visit bathhouses on different days. From the fifteenth century onward, public bathing was suppressed throughout Spain and Europe. This transformation was partly due to the belief that bathing opened the pores of the skin and weakened the body’s defenses against plague, but it also reflected a widespread association between bathhouses and prostitution and immorality.7 In fifteenth-century Spain, bathhouses were often regarded as meeting places for illicit sexual relationships, even though separate days were assigned for each sex.
Some Christians saw the Muslim fondness for bathing as an expression of Moorish sensuality and licentiousness—a perception that undoubtedly explains the seventeenth-century ecclesiastical historian Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza’s indignant denunciation of Granadan Muslims who bathed “even in December.” Bathing was also regarded as an effeminate—and possibly homosexual—activity by some Christians, such as the fifteenth-century chronicler Fernando de Pulgar, who attributed the Muslim defeat at Alhama during the War of Granada to their bathhouses, which had caused “a certain softness in their bodies.”8 Christian aversion to public bathing was also based on its perceived association with Islamic religious ritual. Some Spanish Muslims not only washed their hands before prayer, but performed the full body ablution known as the guadoc, which involved the cleansing of what the Church discreetly called the “shameful parts.”
For much of the fifteenth century, these marks of cultural and religious difference were not a priority for Spain’s rulers. Such differences might be disliked or disapproved of, but the ecclesiastical and secular authorities were generally prepared to tolerate them—on condition that Muslim customs did not permeate Christian society unduly. Despite sporadic bouts of repression, there was no systematic attempt to impose Christian norms on the Muslim population. Though some Muslims were obliged to convert during the 1391–1412 upheavals, they never did so in sufficient numbers to warrant the status of an existential threat and a potential source of corruption inside Christian society. Spanish Muslims might constitute weak and largely defenseless minorities within Spain itself, but unlike the Jews, they were connected by culture and religion to Muslim states with real political and military power, which could in theory be used against Christians. In addition, the Muslims of Aragon and Valencia had powerful protectors among the local nobility who were more concerned with profiting from them than they were in converting them to Christianity.
For the most part, therefore, Spain’s rulers were more concerned with maintaining the distance between Muslims and Christians through segregation rather than persecution during the fifteenth century. The 1412 segregationist Catalina laws were aimed at Muslims as well as Jews, as was Isabella’s 1480 edict ordering both minorities to live in segregated areas in order to prevent the “great damage and unpleasantness” caused by the “continued conversation and common life of Jews and Moors with Christians” in Castile. But even as Ferdinand and Isabella made war on Granada, the Muslim population in the rest of Spain was protected by medieval Mudejar agreements signed with their Christian predecessors. How valid were these arrangements in a united Christian Spain that was no longer prepared to allow its Jewish population to exist?
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the intentions of Spain’s rulers toward their Muslim subjects were not entirely clear and often appeared contradictory. In 1597, Ferdinand and Isabella obliged Portugal to expel the Muslims together with the Jews, during the prenuptial negotiations with the Portuguese king for their daughter’s hand. But these Muslims had then been allowed to travel through Castile and even settle there. In eradicating the Muslim population of Portugal, the Catholic Monarchs increased the number of infidels in their own realms. Was this apparent paradox due to a cynical attempt to gain short-term economic advantage, in the knowledge that these Muslims would soon face the same choice extended to the Jews? Or did it indicate a long-term commitment to religious tolerance? It was not until the end of the century that the answers to these questions became clearer in Christian Spain’s most recent Muslim acquisition.
4
Broken Promises: Granada 1492–1500
On the surface, the Catholic Monarchs appeared to be fully committed to a permanent Muslim presence in the newly created kingdom of Granada. This commitment was enshrined in the remarkably magnanimous surrender agreements signed by Boabdil in November 1491. Not only were the Muslim population guaranteed their lands, property, and income in perpetuity, but they were allowed to emigrate to North Africa and return to live in Spain afterward if they changed their minds. The agreements also specified that the “judges, mayors and governors” appointed to rule Granada should be “persons who will honor the Moors and treat them kindly.” On the question of religion, the Catholic Monarchs were equally conciliatory, declaring:
Their highnesses and their successors will ever afterwards allow King Abi Adilehi [Boabdil] and his alcaides, judges, muftis, alguaciles, military leaders, and good men, and all the common people, great or small, to live in their own religion, and not permit that their mosques 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.1
These promises were reinforced by the establishment of a joint municipal council in the city of Granada to which the Muslim population was allowed to elect their own representatives. All this appeared to presage a long-term coexistence between Muslim Granada and its new rulers. Whether this new dispensation was really intended to be permanent is open to question. Even in this early period, according to the sixteenth-century Granadan historian Luis de Mármol Carvajal, Ferdinand was urged by leading Spanish prelates to “extirpate the name and sect of Muhammad from the whole of Spain” by ordering Spain’s Muslims to make the same choice offered to the Jews between exile or baptism, beginning in Granada. According to Mármol, Ferdinand rejected these demands on the basis that such a policy would require “returning to the war again” at a time when he was engaged in “other conquests” outside Spain. Instead he opted for a policy of laissez-faire in the hope, as Mármol puts it, that “through domestic communication with Christians, debating and discussing religious matters, [the Muslims] would understand the error they were in and abandoning it, . . . come to a true knowledge of the faith and embrace it, as many other barbarous nations had done in the past.”2
This gradualist approach was dictated primarily by economic and security considerations. After ten years of war, Ferdinand was keen to consolidate Christian control over Granada and turn the Muslim population into a source of revenue. Even though veterans of the Granada war were rewarded with grants of land and Muslim vassals, Christian immigration remained sparse in the immediate aftermath of the conquest, and a policy of moderation was essential to ensure the continued cooperation of the Muslim population with the new dispensation. To this end, the new administration of Granada was stacked with expe
rienced Christian administrators with firsthand knowledge of the new kingdom, such as the royal secretary Hernando de Zafra, who had negotiated the surrender agreements, and Iñigo Hurtado de Mendoza, the count of Tendilla, who was appointed captain-general—a position roughly equivalent to viceroy and governor-general. A scion of the powerful Mendoza clan, one of the great families of the Spanish Renaissance, Tendilla presided over a small garrison based at the Alhambra and maintained amicable relations with the local Muslim elite.
The policy of conciliation was also reflected in the appointment of the saintly Hernando de Talavera, a friar in the Hieronymite monastic order of Saint Jerome and former royal confessor to Isabella, to the key post of first archbishop of Granada. Of Converso origins and already in his sixties at the time he took up this historic new appointment at his own request, Talavera was known for his piety and moderation, writing in a controversial 1480 tract entitled Católica impugnación that “Heresies need to be corrected not only with punishments and lashes, but with Catholic reasoning.”
It was the emphasis on the latter that determined his treatment of the Muslim population of his new archdiocese. Talavera opposed the introduction of Inquisitorial tribunals in Granada, preferring to win the Muslims to Christianity through “the word, the book and the example” rather than fear. From the beginning of his tenure, he set out to put these principles into practice, giving several sermons every week and sometimes in the same day to specially invited Muslim congregations. He established private “houses of doctrine” in the Albaicín quarter of the city, where he preached to individuals and small groups of Muslim alfaquis through an interpreter. These efforts were focused primarily on the Muslim elite, in an attempt to initiate a top-down process of conversion. Talavera also made some potentially controversial innovations in an attempt to make Christianity more appealing to Granada’s Muslims. He allowed Muslims to dance the zambra during the annual Corpus Christi processions and permitted some Arabic words to be used during the liturgy. He also insisted that his priests learn Arabic and commissioned a basic Arabic grammar in Castilian to facilitate the process. Despite his advanced years, he tried to learn the language himself, and was reportedly able to read the Ten Commandments and extracts from the Catechism in Arabic.
These efforts were not intended to broaden the cultural understanding of the clergy or lay the basis for bilingualism. As Pedro de Alcalá, the composer of the Castilian-Arabic grammar, explained, the purpose of his handbook was “to bring these recent converts out of the darkness and many errors induced by that evil, vile and accursed Muhammed.” Although Talavera admired the Muslims for their sobriety, declaring on one occasion that “we should have their morals and they should have our faith,” he was as keen to eradicate the “sect of Muhammad” as any other cleric of his era. For Talavera, Christianizing Granada’s Muslims was synonymous with civilizing them. According to Bermúdez de Pedraza, the archbishop would invite Moorish nobles to supper in order to inculcate in them “the love of Christian customs,” such as sitting on chairs, eating Christian food, and dressing “in the Castilian manner.”3
Despite this paternalism, Talavera appears to have been well liked and respected in Granada. Pedraza describes how a “globe of fire” appeared on Talavera’s head during one of his sermons—a miracle that earned him the respectful title of “the holy alfaqui of the Christians” among the local Muslims. In 1494–1495, an Austrian doctor named Hieronymus Munzer visited the former emirate in the course of a journey through Spain, and his travelogue contains some vivid descriptions of the mixed Christian and Muslim society that was taking shape in the postwar period.4 In some Granadan towns, Munzer found that the Muslim population had been displaced by Christians and their mosques reconsecrated as churches. Other areas, to Munzer’s astonishment and wonder, remained entirely Islamic.
Though Munzer was hostile to the religious practices of the Granadan “Saracens,” he was also fascinated by an Islamic world that seemed to him both alien and exotic, and he appreciated the productivity and agricultural prowess of the Muslim population. Munzer was particularly impressed by the Granadan capital, which he described as “the greatest city in the world.” On his first night in Granada, he observed with amazement how “the din from the mosque towers was unimaginable” during the evening call to prayer. The intrepid Christian tourist ventured into the narrow, cobbled streets of the Albaicín and observed the splendid palatial villas of the Muslim nobility with their sumptuous gardens and cypress trees, the tiny, overcrowded houses where the majority of the population lived, and the former Jewish district that had been demolished on the orders of the Catholic Monarchs after their expulsion.
Though the Christian presence was growing, Granada remained predominantly Muslim, where Munzer counted more than two hundred mosques, including one that “was so crowded that worshippers prayed in the streets.” Munzer also visited the Christian garrison at the Alhambra, where Muslim workers from the Albaicín were carrying out repairs, and where he was entertained by Captain-General Tendilla in the palace grounds, seated on the lawn on a silk cloth in the Moorish style. He also met Talavera, describing him as a “new Saint Jerome” responsible for the “conversion of many Saracens.” These claims were not borne out by Munzer’s own descriptions of the prevalence of Islam. Nor were they reflected in the criticisms from clerics and inquisitors outside Granada that Talavera’s methods were not producing results fast enough. Tensions were also visible in Granada itself, and there were a number of violent disturbances in the capital in the first years after the surrender, including one whose leaders were drawn and quartered in order to instill “the necessary fear and obedience” in the population, as one chronicler described it.
These tensions may have contributed to the steady flow of Muslim emigrants to North Africa, mostly from the upper classes. In the autumn of 1493, Boabdil himself abandoned his rural estates in the Alpujarras Mountains and went into exile in North Africa, where he died some years later. Other nobles followed suit, including Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, better known as the geographer and traveler Leo Africanus, whose family emigrated to Fez. Years later he still recalled the glazed tiles of his native city, the feasting and dancing that accompanied his circumcision ceremony, and the white almalafa worn by his mother.
In a letter to his sovereigns in the summer of 1495, the royal secretary, de Zafra, expressed satisfaction at this exodus and claimed that “all the rest are on their way out, and not on account of any harsh treatment they have received, for never were people better treated.”5 On September 22 of that year, he reported, “These Moors are all very quiet, and entirely at the service of your Highnesses. . . . However, I would rather there were not so many of them, not because I have any grounds for suspicion, thank God, but with an extra turn of the screw the person of least importance whom your Highnesses have in your kingdoms might expel them.”6 There is no indication that Ferdinand and Isabella had any such intention at this stage, beyond some tentative attempts to stimulate emigration among the Muslim elite, but the fact that many Moorish nobles continued to leave certainly suggests a diminishing confidence in their future under Christian rule.
In the same period, Christian immigrants were flowing into the city of Granada, encouraged by tax exemptions and other inducements, from urban artisans and small farmers to middle-class bureaucrats looking for positions in the new administrative machinery that was being established in the new kingdom. Many of these immigrants had little sympathy with the model of coexistence enshrined by the Capitulations or the moderation shown by their archbishop to a population they regarded as conquered infidels. Contact between these immigrants and the local Muslim population was frowned upon by religious leaders of both faiths, who regarded their proximity as a potential source of conflict—and contagion. In March 1498, Talavera banned Christians from renting property to Muslims, wearing Moorish clothing, visiting bathhouses, or buying meat from Muslim butchers.
These regulations were followed by a mutual agreement to divide t
he city into two separate zones, with the Muslim population concentrated mostly in the upper area around the Albaicín. And in the summer of 1499, the Catholic Monarchs returned to the scene of their greatest triumph to see the city for themselves, and they would shortly bring with them the man who would do more than any other single individual to bring the Capitulations to an end.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s arrival in Granada after a seven-year absence was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, including thousands of Muslim women whose white almalafas, according to the chronicler Alonso de Santa Cruz, presented a spectacle “worthy of great admiration.” It is difficult to believe that the conquerors of Granada would have been similarly impressed by the public expressions of Islamic worship that they would have seen and heard as they looked out on the Albaicín quarter from the Alhambra.
That autumn, Ferdinand and Isabella were joined in Granada by the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. Born in 1436, Cisneros was one of the most emblematic and dominant figures of his age, whose career straddled politics, religion, and military conquest. Like Talavera, he was a former confessor to the queen and a man of great personal piety, whose religious zeal was infused with a ruthlessness and inflexibility that did not lend itself to compromise. Cisneros came to public life relatively late. After studying law at the University of Salamanca, he entered the Church and appeared to be destined for high ecclesiastical office, when he was imprisoned because he took an appointment for a position that one of his superiors had promised to someone else. Cisneros served a prison sentence for his defiance and subsequently decided to become a Franciscan monk and withdraw completely from worldly affairs. For some years, he lived as an anchorite in the woodlands of a religious retreat near Toledo in a makeshift hermitage barely large enough to lie down in. Living on plants and wearing nothing but a hair shirt, he devoted his days to prayer, spiritual contemplation, and the mortification of the flesh.
