by Matthew Carr
In little more than six days, the rebels killed some three thousand Christians, of all ages and both sexes, as these horrific scenes were replicated in villages across the Alpujarras. According to Christian legend, the rebels offered to spare their victims if they renounced their faith, but no Christian accepted this offer. The Granadan Church later attempted to have these “martyrs of the Alpujarras” collectively canonized, but these appeals were only successful in the case of Marcos Criado, a monk from the village of Lapeza, whose heart was said to have been cut out and found to have the name of Jesus miraculously inscribed upon it.
The brutality of these killings shocked Christian Spain, which generally saw them as a confirmation of Muslim barbarity and anti-Catholic hatred. Philip himself later wrote, “Just to see what the Moriscos did at the time they rebelled, killing so many priests and Christians, would be sufficient to justify a tough line with these people”—an observation that ignored his own disastrous contribution to the rebellion.1 Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was one of the few observers to recognize the responsibility of Christian society itself, writing, “These crimes were committed partly by people whom we had persecuted for vengeance, partly by the monfíes whose way of life had so conditioned them to cruelty that cruelty had become part of their natures.”2 The rage of the Moriscos was not only directed against people; the rebels also burned church buildings and destroyed what was inside them, smashing crucifixes and statues with hammers, vandalizing altars, and in one case dragging the baptismal font outside into the street to be used as a drinking trough for animals. To many Spanish Christians, this onslaught echoed the “iconoclastic fury” that spread through the Netherlands in the summer of 1566, when Calvinist mobs rampaged through Catholic churches, destroying stained-glass windows and statues of Christ and the Virgin. The Moriscos of the Alpujarras may or may not have been aware of the Council of Trent’s emphasis on devotional imagery, but they had nevertheless experienced these statues and images as symbols of oppression in their daily lives, and their destruction was both a rejection of what they stood for and an act of violent catharsis.
The repudiation of Catholicism was accompanied by the reassertion of Islam, as Moriscos of all social classes openly worshipped as Muslims for the first time in seventy years. Lady Constanca López, a Morisca noblewoman from Aben Humeya’s home village of Valor, was later tried by the Inquisition for praying and praising Muhammad in public early in the rebellion. According to the Inquisition, Lady Constanca used pieces of the destroyed retablo from her local church for firewood and told her Christian neighbors, “What do you think? That the world is always going to be yours? And because you dress us in a certain way, we have to be Christian? Underneath it all, we have done and will do what we want, because we were Moors, and Moors we shall remain.”3 Many Moriscos were undoubtedly motivated by similar sentiments, but their behavior was not always in accordance with Islamic religious tradition, according to Mármol:It was astonishing to see how well instructed they were, young and old, in their damned sect; they said prayers to Muhammad, they conducted processions and prayers. The married women exposed their breasts, and the maidens their heads; and letting their hair fall around their shoulders they danced publicly in the streets, embracing the men as young bucks danced before them waving their handkerchiefs in the air, shouting at the top of their voices that now the time of innocence had arrived.4
Not all Moriscos took part in this “time of innocence.” Many Moriscos refused to join the revolt and some genuine Morisco converts to Christianity were killed because they refused to renounce their faith. Nor were Christians always killed. Most Christians were imprisoned or kept as hostages, and there were cases in which Moriscos helped their friends and neighbors escape. At Órgiva, the Christian population managed to take refuge in the local church and hold off several Morisco attacks. As Hurtado de Mendoza observed, some of the worst atrocities were carried out by monfíes, particularly the bandit chieftain Farax Aben Farax, whose name soon became a byword for cruelty in Christian Granada. At the beginning of January, Aben Humeya called a halt to these massacres in an attempt to impose a semblance of order on the rebellion, even as the inevitable Christian counteroffensive unfolded.
The failure to seize the Granadan capital was a major blow to the rebellion, which soon became apparent when the Marquis of Mondéjar rode out of the city in pursuit of the rebels on January 3, with a hastily assembled force of two thousand infantry and cavalrymen. Within a week, Mondéjar’s forces had restored control over the insurgent villages of the vega and reached the single bridge across the Tablate Gorge that offered the only route into the Alpujarras. On finding that the rebels had removed most of the timbers from the bridge, making it virtually impassable, a Franciscan friar holding a sword in one hand and a crucifix in the other led a group of Christian soldiers across the precarious framework, while Morisco harquebusiers and crossbowmen peppered them from the opposite slope. These soldiers eventually managed to drive the rebels back and reconstructed the bridge, so that Mondéjar’s men were able to advance unopposed across the Lecrín Valley to relieve the beleaguered Christians at Órgiva, who had resisted a Morisco assault for seventeen days and were on the brink of starvation.
Mondéjar now moved with great speed and decisiveness against the heartland of the rebellion in the former Moorish administrative districts, or tahas, between Órgiva and the Sierra Nevada. With temperatures below zero and blizzards alternating with heavy rain, the Christian troops climbed up into these mountains and engaged the rebels in a series of short and brutal battles. In craggy ravines and remote summits, the old battle cries of Saint James and Muhammad once again mingled with the cries of wounded and dying men, the clash of pikes and swords and the crack of muskets as Christians clashed with Morisco men, women, and even children. Despite their command of the terrain, the Moriscos lacked military training, weapons, and experience, and often fought with nothing but stones.
As a consequence, Mondéjar’s forces soon gained the upper hand and proceeded to reimpose their authority over the rebel villages with ruthless and clinical efficiency. Following a Christian assault on a fortified Morisco position at Los Guajares, the captain-general had the survivors massacred. At the village of Jubíles, dozens of Morisco prisoners were killed in cold blood when they tried to prevent an attempted rape by a Christian soldier. As the Morisco villages fell before the remorseless Christian advance, the rebels retreated into the snow-capped heights, taking their families and their Christian captives with them, with Mondéjar’s forces in hot pursuit. By the end of January, the rebellion was close to defeat, thanks to the captain-general’s rapid response. Aben Humeya’s forces had dwindled to a few hundred isolated fighters in the high mountains, and some of his senior commanders were already considering surrender. Across the Alpujarras, Moriscos sued for peace and appealed to Mondéjar for mercy.
The captain-general generally responded positively to these overtures, promising amnesties and guarantees of safe conduct to Moriscos who had not been directly involved in killing Christians. At this point, the revolt might have ended, but Mondéjar’s political enemies in Granada now began to send reports to Philip and Espinosa accusing him of failing to prosecute the war effectively and being too conciliatory toward the rebels. Mondéjar was too absorbed in military operations in the Alpujarras to counter these accusations, which nevertheless found a receptive audience in the Spanish court. News of the Morisco rebellion was particularly unwelcome at a time when Flanders was still seething with sedition despite the brutal crackdown carried out by the Duke of Alva and his “Council of Troubles” the previous summer. Philip feared—with good reason—that the Morisco revolt might give succor to Spain’s enemies and instructed his viceroy in Naples on January 20, that “It would be good to keep the Granada business secret.”5
Convinced by his advisers that the campaign against the rebels was stalling, the king accepted a proposal from Deza and his allies to allow the Murcian grandee Don Luis Fajardo, the Marquis of Los
Vélez, to raise a private army at his own expense and undertake a new expedition against the rebels from the northeast. The appointment of this fiercely anti-Morisco aristocrat effectively divided the Christian campaign into two separate fronts, with little coordination between them. Crossing into the Alpujarras through Almería, Los Vélez quickly confirmed his reputation among the Moriscos as “the iron-headed devil” with a bloody assault on the Morisco mountain village of Félix. Armed mostly with stones, the Moriscos were quickly overrun. Many Morisca women preferred to leap from the mountains to their deaths rather than be taken as slaves. Others fell to their knees holding up makeshift crosses and begging for their lives to be spared.
Little mercy was shown as hundreds of men, women, and children were executed on the spot or tossed into the surrounding ravines, by Los Vélez’s soldiers, who killed even dogs and cats. “Oh terrible Christian cruelty, never seen in the Spanish nation! What infernal fury caused you to show such cruelty and so little mercy?” exclaimed Gínes Pérez de Hita, who fought with Los Vélez’s army. Pérez de Hita’s account of the war was often embellished for dramatic effect, but there is no reason to doubt the Goyaesque horrors that he observed at Félix, such as the Morisca mother lying with her five children, all of whom had been killed by the Christian troops. One baby had survived and was still trying to suckle on its mother’s breast, a sight that so moved the Murcian soldier-poet that he gave the child to some Morisca women to take care of.6
Compassion was generally absent from a pitiless conflict that Pérez de Hita called a civil war “between Spaniards.” Even as Los Vélez’s army moved across the eastern Alpujarras, Mondéjar’s troops had begun to rob and loot the Morisco towns and villages that he had placed under his protection. “It is hard to think of an outrage that the Moriscos were not made to suffer, harder yet to think of an author of these outrages who was punished for what he did,” wrote Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in one of many denunciations of a Christian soldiery that he regarded as an undisciplined rabble. To Pérez de Hita, Mondéjar’s soldiers were “the worst thieves in the world, destroyers and robbers who thought of nothing . . . but robbing, looting and sacking the Morisco towns.”
In one incident at Aben Humeya’s hometown of Valor, Christian troops under two of Mondéjar’s junior commanders killed a deputation of Morisco elders who came out to receive them and proceeded to sack the town, leaving with a sprawling baggage train of bound female slaves and mules laden with silks and jewels. In their greed, the Christian soldiers allowed their column to become dangerously extended and they were soon subjected to a deadly counterattack, in which Moriscos from Valor and the surrounding villages killed eight hundred Christian soldiers and freed their women.
One of the worst episodes of the war occurred on March 17, 1569, when Deza permitted members of the city guard to enter the Chancellery prison, where 150 Morisco prisoners, including Aben Humeya’s father, were being held as hostages. This incursion was supposedly justified by reports that the prisoners were opening and closing windows to send signals to the rebels in the Sierra Nevada in preparation for a jailbreak, but these allegations were almost certainly a pretext to rob the hostages, most of whom had been selected in the first place because of their wealth. For seven hours, Morisco prisoners armed with jugs, chairs, and bricks pulled from the walls fought Christian militiamen and other Christian prisoners inside the jail. By the end of the night, nearly all the Moriscos had been killed, and their property and cash was appropriated by the prison warden who had led the assault.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1569, this chain of robberies and massacres brought thousands of new recruits to Aben Humeya’s forces. There is no doubt that many Christians in Granada wanted precisely this outcome and saw a prolonged war as an opportunity to settle accounts with Morisco Granada and enrich themselves in the process. There were also alarming signs that the rebellion was beginning to spread beyond Granada itself. At the Morisco town of Hornachos in Extremadura, there were reports that even young children were receiving weapons training. In Valencia, a number of towns were placed on armed alert following rumors that Moriscos were stockpiling grain in preparation for an uprising.
In March, Philip was so alarmed by the deteriorating situation that he appointed his half-brother Don John of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles and his Belgian mistress, Barbara Blomberg, as overall commander of the Christian forces in Granada. An ambitious, charming, and foppish young man of twenty-four, Don John had only recently been presented at the Spanish court, and he was eager to make a name for himself after years of obscurity. He arrived in Granada in the middle of April at the head of an army of ten thousand troops, where he received an official welcome on the outskirts of the city from Mondéjar, accompanied by a detachment of cavalrymen resplendent in Moorish clothes and silks. Don John was also greeted by a procession of four hundred Christian widows and female orphans who had survived the Morisco massacres in the Alpujarras. Dressed “in simple attire and filled with sadness, watering the ground with their tears and scattering their torn blonde locks upon him,” as Mármol puts it, these women implored Don John to avenge the deaths of their relatives and children at the hands of heretics, in a stage-managed ceremony that was almost certainly arranged by Deza in an attempt to undermine Mondéjar’s conciliatory policy toward the Moriscos.
Don John entered the city to a rapturous welcome from the Christian population and made his way to the Chancellery offices, or the Houses of Misfortune, as the Moriscos called them, where he was welcomed by the president himself. To the Deza clique, the arrival of Don John’s army was a giant step toward the destruction of Morisco Granada, and in April Don John agreed to Deza’s proposal to deport the entire population of the Albaicín from the capital as a security measure. This proposal was opposed by Mondéjar and, more surprisingly, by Archbishop Guerrero, on economic, logistical, and moral grounds, but it was approved by Philip himself.
On June 23, Christian soldiers poured into the Albaicín, knocking on doors and ordering all Morisco men between the ages of ten and sixty to assemble in the Granada Royal Hospital the following day. The next morning, Mondéjar and the Morisco noble Alonso de Granada Venegas rode through the streets in an attempt to calm the panic-stricken population, as the men were rounded up. Some 3,500 Morisco men were deported from the city and led away to Andalusia and Castile. Even Mármol, who was in no way sympathetic to the Moriscos, was moved by the sight of “so many men of all ages, their heads lowered, their hands tied and their faces bathed with tears, with so much pain and sadness on leaving their pleasant homes, their families, their homeland,” with no idea where they were being taken.
Morisca women were allowed to remain temporarily, to give them time to sell their property and possessions, but they soon followed in separate batches. “Those who had known them when they were thriving mistresses of their households could not but help feeling the greatest compassion,” wrote Hurtado de Mendoza, who watched them leave. Many of these women were never reunited with their families, as their escorts kidnapped them en route and sold them into slavery. They left behind them a gutted community inhabited only by a handful of wealthy Morisco merchants and servants of Christians, the last remnants of one of the oldest and most celebrated Muslim neighborhoods in Spain.
Despite these events, the tide of the revolt outside the capital appeared to be turning in favor of the rebels. In May 1569, Aben Humeya personally led a force of ten thousand Moriscos in a mass attack on the Marquis of Los Vélez’s camp at the town of Berja. Though the attack was repulsed, it was an indication of the new strength and confidence of Aben Humeya’s forces. Increasingly the Moriscos were behaving like a disciplined guerrilla army, with their own commanders, companies, and military districts. In some parts of the Alpujarras, the rebels were so secure that they were able to grow their crops without fear of reprisal, using smoke signals to announce the approach of Christian armies.
Isolated or poorly protected Christian columns traveling through
the Alpujarras were likely to be subjected to coordinated ambushes, in which drums, horns, and trumpets would be followed by the appearance of white-turbaned Moriscos armed with anything from scimitars and haquebuses to crossbows with poison arrows, knives, and rocks. Some rebel towns, such as Ugíjar, were transformed once again into North African souks, where weapons and merchandise from the Maghreb were sold openly. Despite the Spanish naval blockade, corsairs continued to land regularly on the coast to exchange weapons, ammunition, and supplies for Christian captives—a traffic that was summed up by the Moriscos in the dictum “one Christian, one musket.”
The rebel ranks also included volunteers from North Africa, as foreign Muslim soldiers fought in significant numbers on Spanish soil for the first time in centuries. In August, the Morisco commander Hernando el Habbaqui returned from Algiers with hundreds of volunteers, after Ochiali granted a pardon to criminals or fugitives from the law willing to fight as gazis, or holy warriors, on the Islamic frontier. These recruits also included experienced Turkish soldiers and Berber mujahideen, who wore garlands of flowers and white clothing as they went into battle, an indication of their willingness to achieve martyrdom in war against the infidel. Approximately 4,000 Turkish and Berber fighters participated at various times alongside the Morisco forces, whose numbers have been estimated at anything from 25,000 to 45,000 fighters at the peak of the rebellion. The exact number of armed fighters and civilian supporters was never clear, since many women also fought and died alongside their menfolk, using whatever weapons were available. One Christian eyewitness observed Morisca women in a battle in January 1569 near Almería fighting only with “stones and roasting sticks.” At Félix, Morisca women threw dust in the faces of Christian cavalrymen and tore at the bellies of their horses with knives.7
