by Matthew Carr
Despite these challenges and setbacks, the broad picture of the Spanish kingdoms in the early sixteenth century was one of power and achievement, in which imperial conquest on behalf of the faith was paralleled by the construction of churches and cathedrals throughout Spain, many of which were built on the demolished ruins of mosques or synagogues. “The reason for our triumph is our faith, without which it is impossible to please God,” wrote the royal cosmographer Pedro de Medina in Libro de grandezas y cosas memorables de españa (Book on the Greatnesses and Memorable Things of Spain, 1548). These sentiments were widely shared. Catholic triumphalism was accompanied by a de-Islamification of Spanish society that was evident in various ways, from the search for new “Roman” architectural styles to the criticisms made by the Spanish court physician and humanist intellectual Francisco López de Villalobos, who condemned the use of Arabisms in Toledan Spanish, which “deform and obscure the cleanliness and clarity of Castilian.”2 In the Great Mosque at Córdoba, one of the jewels of the Umayyad Caliphate, a church was built inside the building, in a particularly crass demonstration of Catholic hegemony that was reportedly condemned by Charles himself on aesthetic grounds when he eventually saw it with his own eyes. The king’s criticisms of the poor taste of his architects did not indicate any respect or affection for Islam itself. A devout Catholic, Charles fully accepted the mantle of “defender of the faith” that his position as Holy Roman emperor imposed upon him, and he was equally committed to the Hapsburg dream of a universal Christian empire, which many Europeans regarded as a pretext for the Hapsburg domination of Europe.
Charles was the first of three generations of Hapsburg rulers whose decisions would determine the fate of Muslim Spain over the coming century. Much of his long reign was spent outside Spain on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, leaving his Spanish kingdoms to be ruled by regents and ministerial councils in his absence. In his capacity as Holy Roman emperor, Charles pledged to lead a Christian crusade against the Ottoman Turkish Empire at the beginning of his reign. Though he proved ultimately unable to fulfill this aspiration, it was not for want of trying. Stout and heavyset, with a pronounced Hapsburg jaw bordering on physical deformity that he did his best to conceal with a beard, Charles was a notorious glutton, whose poor diet cost him all his teeth at a relatively young age and obliged him to suck rather than chew his food. He was also physically courageous and dynamic, personally leading his troops in numerous campaigns against both Christian and Muslim opponents.
Charles also devoted considerable attention to affairs of the faith within his vast empire. Like Ferdinand and Isabella, he was committed to the eradication of heresy, and his reign coincided with an intensification of the Inquisition’s activities to include not only Conversos, but suspected Lutherans and deviant Catholic sects, such as the harmless mystics known as Alumbrados (Illuminists), whose members emphasized inner spiritual transformation over outward expressions of religious devotion. The Inquisition also began to take an interest in Spain’s former Muslims, who now fell within its jurisdiction as baptized Catholics. The Holy Office was particularly concerned by reports from Granada and Castile that many Moriscos had yet to abandon the religious and cultural practices from “the time of the Moors” and fully embrace their new faith. Such accusations often failed to distinguish between religious and cultural aspects of Spanish Islam, so that even the clothes of the Moriscos were construed as evidence of backsliding or un-Catholic behavior. But many churchmen and secular officials believed that Morisco cultural traditions were an obstacle to their religious progress and argued that Moriscos would never become fully integrated into Christian society as long as they spoke, ate, and dressed differently from Christians.
Between 1511 and 1526, Spain’s rulers issued a succession of royal decrees, pragmatics, and ordinances devised to eradicate these characteristics completely. Such legislation was aimed primarily at Granada, where Muslim cultural difference was more obvious. On June 20, 1511, a royal decree barred Moriscos in Granada from acting as godfathers at baptismal ceremonies and ordered that their place be taken by Old Christians. On the same day, another edict banned halal butchery and decreed that animals could only be slaughtered by Old Christians or under Old Christian supervision. Another decree subsequently prohibited Granadan tailors from making “Moorish” clothing. Such legislation was particularly concerned with female attire. On July 29, 1513, a decree condemned the fact that Morisca women continued to “walk with their faces covered” and gave the female population a two-year grace period to allow their almalafas to wear out. After that, any woman seen with her face covered would be subject to an escalating series of punishments, from the confiscation of the offending garment at the first offense, to flogging and banishment.
Fear and animosity toward the veiled female face is a recurring theme in the relationship between Western and Islamic societies, which has had different meanings in different historical contexts. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the British consul, Lord Cromer, depicted the veil as a symbol of cultural backwardness and female subjugation, while the niqab (veil) and hijab (female dress code) have been variously depicted in our era as symbols of female oppression, Islamic fundamentalism, or even terrorism.
Needless to say, female emancipation was not a high priority in sixteenth-century Spain. Christian antipathy toward the almalafa was often steeped in prurient fantasies, which feared that women whose faces could not be seen were likely to be involved in illicit amorous relationships or prostitution. These suspicions were evident in the euphemistic references to the “shamelessness and dishonesties” that the almalafa supposedly concealed, and reflected a widespread belief that Muslim women were more sexually active and promiscuous than their Christian counterparts. Suspicions of the almalafa were not confined to its use by Morisca women, however. Some Christian women also wore it, or covered their faces with black lace mantillas in another indication of the Moorish cultural influence on Spanish society. A decree in September 1523 specifically barred Old Christian women from wearing the almalafa in order to avoid “setting a bad example to the Newly Converted” and “committing some excesses against Our Lord.” Another law associated the almalafa with a very different transgression by decreeing that “no man shall dare go about by night or day in women’s clothing, whether Christian or Morisco,” on pain of confiscation of such clothing or public flogging.
The unveiling of Morisca women was only one component of a broader legislative assault on Morisco culture, which prized open the most private and intimate areas of Muslim domestic space to the hostile vigilance of Christian society. Other laws banned Moriscos from closing their doors on Fridays and during wedding ceremonies, in order to ensure that they did not worship or practice Muslim customs in secret. Moriscos were also prohibited from using bathhouses on Fridays, or from marrying without an Old Christian witness present to make sure that their celebrations did not have an Islamic component. This legislation was strongly criticized by the veteran captain-general of Granada, the Marquis of Tendilla, in a letter to one of Charles’s officials:What, sir, is his highness doing, ordering that the Morisco clothing must be abandoned? Does he think that this is such a trivial thing? I swear by God that the kingdom will lose more than a million ducats in changing and buying clothes.... And what clothing, sir, did we here in Spain wear until the coming of king Enrique the Bastard and how did we wear our hair except in the Morisco style, and at what table did we eat? Did the kings stop being Christians and saints because of this? No sir, by God.3
These criticisms reflected an ongoing debate within Spain’s ecclesiastical and secular institutions, between the moderate proponents of gradual assimilation like Tendilla and the more intransigent and chauvinistic sectors within church and state, for whom assimilation required the total abandonment of all “memory of the Moors.” Some of the most repressive anti-Morisco decrees bore the signature of the tormented Queen Joanna, but they almost certainly originated from the prelates, inquisitors, and advisers in the C
astilian court, including the ubiquitous Cisneros.
These decrees embittered the Morisco population even as they generated a host of practical problems that required further legislation to undo. In parts of rural Granada, it was difficult and often impossible for Morisco butchers to find Old Christians to supervise the slaughtering process because there were no Old Christians living nearby. These butchers could either carry out unsupervised slaughter and risk being fined or punished, or oblige their customers to go without meat until an Old Christian witness could be found. In other cases, Morisco animal herds became infected because their owners were not able to slaughter diseased sheep or cattle. The insistence on Old Christian supervision was also a recipe for exploitation. Some Christians demanded payments for acting as godfathers or witnesses at Morisco weddings, in the form of cash, chickens, or silks. Priests in Granada also charged exorbitant fees for celebrating mass or administering the sacraments to their Morisco congregants.
In theory, the stream of ordinances was intended to promote integration, but if anything, the stigmatization of Morisco culture as something unwanted and inferior reinforced the gulf between the Moriscos and the Christian immigrants coming into Granada. Relationships between these two communities were often characterized by the visceral hostility to which settler-colonial societies are notoriously prone, and the criminalization of Morisco customs did nothing to curb this tendency. Some Granadan Christians refused to allow Moriscos to be buried in churchyards. Others tore almalafas from Morisca women in the streets or called Morisco men dogs and turncoats, ignoring the Church’s exhortations to ensure that the new converts were “well-seen, favored, and honored.”
In a letter on May 22, 1524, the renowned ecclesiastical man of letters and future bishop of Guadix, Fray Antonio de Guevara, criticized a friend for insulting a Morisco acquaintance in Valencia named Sidi Abducacim, whom he himself had baptized. Guevara made his disapproval clear in no uncertain terms:Speaking truly and even freely I say that to call an honorable old Christian a Moorish dog and unbeliever and to defend yourself by saying that this is the way they usually speak in your town, seems to me worthy of punishment by the Inquisition, for with such an apology you defame your native land and harm the Christian religion.... I swear by God and the cross, that if Sidi Abducacim is a descendant of Moors, then your great-grandparents are also in the charnel house.4
Other ecclesiastical officials condemned the ill-treatment of the Granadan Moriscos and urged Christians to treat them better. But such treatment was facilitated—and even justified in the minds of its perpetrators—by laws and regulations that identified the Moriscos as a suspect population and placed Christian officials and clergymen in positions of power over them. Such powers were routinely abused, whether it was constables who broke into Morisco homes to steal money or impose fines on their owners for real or invented offenses, or priests and sacristans who demanded chickens, silks, or cash payments from their parishioners and obliged them to work in their orchards on Sundays. All this did little to endear the Moriscos toward a faith and a way of life that most of them had not chosen in the first place, and it became increasingly evident that the attempt to bring about the de-Islamification of Granada by decree was not succeeding.
In June 1526, Charles visited Granada for the first and only time in his reign, to spend his honeymoon at the Alhambra with his Portuguese wife, Isabella. The whole population turned out to welcome the royal couple to the city, including a troupe of Morisca dancers who danced the leila and sang, accompanied by Morisco musicians playing lutes and tambourines. Charles spent six months at the Alhambra, which he later recalled as the happiest of his life. During that time he combined his honeymoon with affairs of state and received visits from numerous foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, from the Venetian envoy Andrea Navagero to the Palatine count Frederick, whose doctor, Johannes Lander, wrote an account of their visit. Both Navagero and Lander were amazed and fascinated by the Moorish cultural world that surrounded the secular emperor of Christendom. Lander described how Charles and his court were entertained on the festival of San Juan with bullfights and pageants of “Moors and Christians,” in which the ladies and gentlemen of the court dressed “a la morisca,” and later witnessed a Moorish dance at the Alhambra, by Morisca women “all adorned with excellent pearls and other precious stones on their ears, forehead and arms.”5
Such dances might be acceptable as an exotic public spectacle for the royal court, but they were seen very differently when they were integrated into the ordinary lives of the Moriscos themselves. Charles himself was concerned by reports that the Moriscos were not fulfilling their religious obligations, and he was also shocked to hear from leading Granadan Moriscos of their exploitation and abuse at the hands of Christians. He therefore commissioned an ecclesiastical commission to investigate these abuses, chaired by the then bishop of Guadix and future archbishop of Granada Gaspar de Avalos. The commission confirmed these abuses but nevertheless warned that “the Moriscos are truly Muslims; it is twenty-seven years since their conversions and there are not twenty-seven or even seven of them who are Christians.”
These findings were presented to a congregation of clerics, prelates, bishops, and ecclesiastical lawyers convened by Charles in Granada that autumn to discuss the situation of the Moriscos. In the recently completed Royal Chapel, which housed the mausoleum of the Catholic Monarchs, these churchmen condemned the un-Christian treatment of the Moriscos by their own clergy. But the dominant tenor of the debates was summed up by Antonio de Guevara, who spoke of his desire to scrape the henna from the bodies of Morisca women with a knife and shave their hair because they braided and embroidered it “according to African custom.”
Coming from a man who had so forcefully spoken against the rejection of the Moriscos from Christian society, Guevara’s revulsion at these “African” customs was an indication of the ambivalent attitudes within the Church itself toward the former Muslims that it aspired to integrate. After months of debate, the Royal Chapel Congregation delivered a series of recommendations, which ratified all the restrictions of the last two decades and in some cases extended them. The Moriscos were not allowed to write or speak Arabic and were ordered to speak Castilian even in their own homes. They could not use their bathhouses without an Old Christian present to supervise them, nor could they give Moorish names to their children. Morisca women could not henna their hands or feet “publicly or secretly” or cover their faces. The doors on their houses were to be left open on Fridays and during weddings. They could not bury their dead without an Old Christian present. Surgeons and doctors who carried out circumcision operations would face banishment or the confiscation of their property.
On December 7, these mandates were formally approved by Charles himself. The intransigence of these Spanish clergymen—and the official support that such intransigence now received—was another indication of how far Spain had moved from its medieval past. Where Christian rulers had once legislated to preserve Muslim difference in order to avoid the risk of “confusion,” Charles now proposed to legislate such differences out of existence in order to absorb the Morisco population of Granada into Christian society. In the event, the cash-strapped emperor disappointed his more hard-line clerics when he agreed to a forty-year moratorium on these proposals in exchange for an offer from local Morisco representatives of an annual payment and a special contribution of between eighty and ninety thousand ducats as a “national wedding present.” These payments helped finance the construction of the splendid Renaissance palace on the grounds of the Alhambra complex to celebrate Charles’s victory over the French at the battle of Pavia. They also bought the Granadan Moriscos a reprieve from the Inquisition for the same forty-year period. This was neither the first nor the last time in which the needs of the royal purse took precedence over the long-term goal of religious purity. That same year, a similar agreement was negotiated in Aragon, where Spain’s remaining Muslims had only recently undergone their own belated transformation i
nto Christians.
7
The Last Redoubt: Aragon 1520–1526
With the conversion of the Muslims of Granada and Castile, Aragon now constituted the last remaining Mudejar enclave in Catholic Spain. But even as Ferdinand was imposing Christianity on the Muslims of Granada, he gave no indication that he intended to inflict the same fate on his own subjects. At the height of the Alpujarras rebellion in 1500, the Catholic Monarchs reassured Ferdinand’s Muslim subjects in Aragon that this was not going to happen and publicly denied rumors “that it is our intention and will to reduce by force to the holy faith and Christian religion all Moors of the said kingdom.”1 These reassurances do not seem to have had their desired effect. In April 1502 , the Valencian Cortes (parliament) informed Ferdinand that many Muslims were so concerned that they were about to be converted that they had stopped working in the fields and begun to flee to North Africa. To prevent further losses and induce these Muslims to return, the nobles called upon Ferdinand to reassure the Muslim population once again that their religious autonomy would be respected.
The Catholic Monarch agreed to this request and promised the regional parliaments of Valencia and Aragon on two separate occasions that the Mudejars in his kingdoms would continue to live as Muslims. Events in Granada and Castile had already shown that such promises were not necessarily binding, and it is difficult to believe that Ferdinand really intended to permit the permanent presence of Islam in one part of Spain when it was being eradicated everywhere else. But whatever his long-term intentions, Ferdinand was too astute a statesman to provoke a confrontation with the powerful lords of Aragon and Valencia that he might not win. For these seigneurs, the interests of their estates were always a higher priority than religious unity, and they regarded any attempt to enforce Christianity on their Muslim vassals as a potential threat to their source of revenue. Both kingdoms were fiercely protective of their ancestral fueros (local laws) or furs, as they were known in Valencia, which limited the jurisdiction of the monarchy in their territories. The Inquisition had never been fully accepted in Aragon or Valencia, where it was often seen as a disruptive Castilian import.
