by Matthew Carr
Both Boronat and Braudel present the expulsion either as a justifiable response or a tragic overreaction to Morisco intransigence, even as they reproduce the monolithic image of Morisco Spain that was taken for granted by sixteenth-century officials and foreign observers. In 1595 the Venetian ambassador, Francisco Vendramino, observed that “In all the kingdoms of Spain, there are different kinds of people who are discontented with the government” and placed at the top of the list “the Moors, who have been obliged to convert to the Christian religion and are obliged by violence to live in that religion and feel an incredible vexation toward it.”20 There is no doubt that many Moriscos did indeed feel this “incredible vexation” and were repelled by their enforced intimacy with Christianity. Nearly a century after their initial conversions, however, Morisco attitudes toward Christianity were often more varied and complex than they appeared.
By this time, even the most devout Muslims inhabited an Islamic milieu that had undergone dramatic changes since their initial conversions. Most Moriscos at the end of the sixteenth century had had little or no contact with the Muslim world outside their own immediate communities for years. Few of them attended a mosque or religious school, and even the most devout were often obliged to practice a partial and improvised version of Islam dictated by the difficult circumstances in which they found themselves. In 1583 the Valencia Inquisition itself noted that some of the Muslim burial rites that it tried to ban were not in accordance with Islamic tradition but consisted of “ceremonies that they have introduced among themselves.” If some Moriscos found moral and spiritual guidance within this broken tradition and continued to reject Christianity, others were unable to choose between Islam and Catholicism and sometimes oscillated from one to the other. There were also Moriscos who integrated elements from both faiths in their everyday lives, such as Francisca Sebastián, a Morisca from Teruel and the daughter of a Morisco father and Old Christian mother, who prayed regularly and took Communion but was arrested by the Inquisition because she made regular donations to the local community fund for the poor in keeping with the Islamic tradition of zakat (almsgiving).
Other Moriscos developed a sincere attachment to Catholicism. In Granada, Moriscos were killed because they refused to renounce their adopted faith. Elsewhere in Spain, Moriscos went to mass and heard confession and appeared to do everything that their new faith required of them. At the parish of Ildefonso near Valladolid, a wealthy Morisco named Lucas de Molina asked in his will to be buried in his local church and that two religious images and a “large paper of the Passion” be placed in his coffin. A Morisca woman from the same parish asked to be buried under the first row of pews in the same church so that she could be closer to the altar—a request that was granted.21 Even in Valencia, despite Ribera’s pronouncements, there were Moriscos who showed a genuine commitment to Christianity. In 1582, a deputation of Valencian Moriscos sent a Christian representative, the Count of Maldonado, to the court in order to assure the king of their loyalty and implore him to provide them with a Christian education. In 1594 the Viceroy of Valencia reported to Philip that a Morisco graduate named Juan Nadal from the city’s royal Morisco school was “showing signs of a good and virtuous Christian” and “taking courses of theology.”
It is impossible to know how many Moriscos made this transformation, since many of those who did had no reason to proclaim their Muslim origins to the world. Yet these varied responses suggest not only that the Moriscos were capable of assimilation, even within the extremely narrow parameters presented to them, but that their forced conversions had not been entirely fruitless. We can only speculate what might have happened had this process been allowed to unfold over a longer period. To the end of his life, Philip continued to favor assimilation, however halfheartedly, though it is unclear whether he really believed that these efforts would succeed or whether he was merely reluctant to authorize the drastic solutions that had been presented to him.
In the last decade of the century, powerful voices within church and state continued to argue that the Moriscos had been given more time than they deserved and further efforts to evangelize them were fruitless. Philip may well have shared these beliefs, but if he did, he was unwilling to act on them. In 1598, however, his failing health finally caught up with him, and he withdrew to his monastic alcove in the Escorial, weakened by fever, arthritis, and dropsy. For fifty-three days, the king hailed by the Italian writer Tommaso Campanella as the Last World Emperor stoically endured an agonizing physical disintegration, before he finally expired on September 13 at the age of seventy-one. And with the country in mourning, the hopes for a definitive solution to the Morisco question now shifted to his successor.
17
“An Imminent Danger”: 1598–1609
Even the most momentous historical tragedies are sometimes precipitated by mediocre and even banal individuals, and there are few more glaring examples of this tendency than Philip III (1578–1621), the ruler who presided over the end of Muslim Spain. According to a legend propagated after the expulsion, on the day of his birth, a priest named Father Vargas warned a Morisco congregation “If you refuse to remove that damned sect from your hearts, know that a prince has been born in Castile who will throw you out of Spain.” This portentous destiny was not evident to Philip’s father, who once lamented to one of his courtiers that “God has given me many kingdoms, but denies me a son capable of ruling them.” Posterity has largely concurred with this negative assessment. Physically frail and intellectually undistinguished, Philip’s character was curiously blank in comparison with his more charismatic and driven predecessors. His most outstanding characteristic was a dogged piety that earned him the label El Santito, the Little Saint, among his subjects. This religious zeal was coupled with a taste for the more frivolous aspects of court life. Though Philip devoted some three hours a day to prayer and religious devotions, he loved masques, theatrical spectacles, music, card games, tournaments, and, above all, hunting, an activity he indulged in whenever possible.
Under his reign, Spanish court life was characterized by a new glitter and ostentatious extravagance that contrasted starkly with his father’s sobriety. Contemporary accounts of Philip’s court are punctuated with descriptions of hunting expeditions, civic receptions, fireworks displays, nocturnal illuminations (luminarias), and banquets, such as the sumptuous feast provided for the court at the palace of the Duke of Uceda in 1611, at which six hundred dishes were served and the royal entourage showered with gifts of gold, silver, jewelry, and perfumed water.
Philip’s reign is indelibly associated with his former tutor Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Marquis of Denia, (c.1552–1625), more commonly known by the title that Philip gave him, the Duke of Lerma. Twenty-five years Philip’s senior, Lerma was the king’s most intimate adviser and de facto chief minister, who embodied the new tendency of European monarchs to delegate their authority to a trusted individual or “favorite”—a position known in Spain as the privado or válido.
None of his contemporaries achieved the power and preeminence that Lerma attained during the reign of Philip III. Lerma only attended 22 sessions out of 739 meetings of the Council of State in the course of Philip’s reign, yet few important decisions were taken without the knowledge or approval of “the duke.” His ascendancy was symbolized in a 1603 portrait by Peter Paul Rubens showing Lerma mounted on a white charger—a heroic martial pose that was customarily reserved for rulers, not their counselors. The main source of Lerma’s power was his adroit management of the royal household though his position as the caballerizo mayor (the master of the horse). This position gave Lerma unrivaled access to the king and enabled him to weave an intricate web of patronage, appointing friends, allies, and family members to key positions in the court and government. Devious, highly intelligent, and charming, with a tendency to debilitating bouts of melancholy, Lerma was also notoriously avaricious and corrupt. Born into an aristocratic family of relatively modest means, he used his influence at
court to acquire a vast fortune whose origins amazed and mystified his contemporaries.
Lerma used his wealth to found convents and religious institutions, to patronize artists and writers, such as Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and also to refurbish and build the palaces and hunting lodges where he entertained the king. His magnificent estates of La Ribera on the banks of the Pisuerga River in Valladolid were large enough to contain a palace, a religious retreat, an artificial lake with ornamental fish, and an open plain where Lerma staged mock battles, bullfights, and jousting tournaments for the royal family and court. Such hospitality was an essential component of the personal and political relationship between the king and his favorite. Despite Philip’s reputation as a lazy ruler who was remote from the business of government, affairs of state were often discussed during these private meetings in hunting lodges and summer houses at Aranjuez, El Pardo, and La Ventosilla. This overlap between the private and the public has made it difficult for historians to establish the decision-making process behind the expulsion or the role played by its principal protagonists.
Philip’s treatment of the Moriscos was greatly influenced by his devoutly religious wife, Margaret of Austria (1584–1611). Unlike Lerma, Margaret did not attend meetings of state councils or issue any orders in her own right, and her name does not appear on any documents pertaining to the expulsion. Nevertheless, the Cuencan priest and court chronicler Father Luis Baltasar Porreño later praised the “great insistence” of the queen that had made it possible. At her funeral in 1611, the Granadan friar Juan Galvano also hailed Margaret’s “holy hatred” of the Moriscos and claimed that the expulsion was due “for the most part . . . to Our Most Serene Queen.”1
The “holy hatred” of Islam was not surprising in a German-speaking princess from Hapsburg Austria, where the Ottomans had remained a constant threat ever since the early fifteenth century. For both Margaret and Philip, their introduction to Morisco Spain took place in Valencia in January 1599 when the fourteen-year-old princess arrived by ship for her arranged marriage with Philip, whom she had not previously met. The princess was welcomed by Archbishop Ribera, who also conducted the wedding ceremony and presided over the elaborate civic celebrations in her honor. Afterward the royal couple were entertained by Lerma on his estates at Denia with an array of bullfights, mock naval and land battles, and theatrical spectacles, including a specially written play by Lope de Vega. Philip spent ten months in Valencia and Aragon with his queen, during which time he exchanged a number of letters on the Morisco question with Ribera. He also met the archbishop’s adviser Jaime Bleda. The presence of the ubiquitous Iago of the Morisco tragedy completed this small cast of characters that would play a crucial role in bringing about its brutal denouement a decade later.
The first years of Philip’s reign coincided with a change of course in Spanish foreign policy that would bring that final outcome closer. In 1598, shortly before his death, Philip II signed the Peace of Vervins with France, an agreement that allowed his son to sign a series of treaties with Spain’s enemies in northern Europe. The new emphasis on diplomacy was intended to win a breathing space for Spain’s exhausted population after more than two decades of relentless conflict in which the limits of Hapsburg power were becoming ever more apparent. In 1601 a Spanish expedition to assist Irish Catholic rebels against England ended in humiliation when Spain’s ships were sunk in a storm and their survivors killed or captured. An even greater disaster occurred that same year when a Spanish fleet attempted yet another assault on Algiers, in which dozens of ships were sunk in storms before even reaching the North African coast.
With the Spanish army of Flanders teetering on the verge of disintegration and the treasury barely able to fund its military commitments elsewhere, Spain signed a treaty with the king of England, James I, in 1604. Three years later, truce negotiations were opened with Dutch insurgent leaders at Lerma’s instigation, despite strong opposition from hard-liners who rejected any compromise with “rebels and heretics.” These military reversals were paralleled by the worsening social and economic situation within Spain itself. Despite the conspicuous consumption of the court and aristocracy, the early seventeenth century was a period of acute social distress for much of the Spanish population. These were years of hunger, famine, and poor harvests, of price rises and high taxation, in which many Spaniards were reduced to penury and town councils were overwhelmed by vagabonds and disabled or unemployed war veterans, many of whom had no means of support. Between 1599 and 1600, Spain was affected by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague, which killed an estimated six hundred thousand people.
Such periods of social crises are often accompanied by a search for scapegoats, and seventeenth-century Spain was no exception. In Castile, where the plague was especially virulent, the high death toll made fears of Morisco population growth appear more credible. In Valencia, fears of Morisco insurrection coincided with a general breakdown of law and order, in which priests and even adolescent children were convicted of assault and sometimes homicide over the pettiest quarrels, and bodies turned up in the streets on a routine basis. “As soon as night falls you cannot go out without a buckler and a coat of mail in Valencia, for there is no town in Spain where so many murders are committed,” wrote the French traveler Barthélemy Joly in 1603.2
Joly attributed this proclivity for homicide to the Valencian climate, but the lawlessness and banditry were often seen by the Christian population as a specificially Morisco activity. Between 1602 and 1604, Juan de Ribera served as viceroy and attempted to restore the Crown’s authority with a harsh regime of hangings, floggings, and prohibitions on games of chance and the possession of weapons, but these efforts did not appear to have met with much success. It was a testament to the acrid relationship between the Valencian clergy and the Moriscos that Ribera asked for priests in Morisco parishes to be excluded from the prohibition on carrying flintlock pistols on the grounds that they needed these weapons to protect themselves even when they celebrated mass.
These years were also marked by continued attacks on Spanish coastal towns and shipping by Muslim corsairs and former Christian privateers demobilized by the Protestant-Catholic truces, who continued their activities on their own behalf and frequently operated from the same North African ports. Spain’s inability to prevent these attacks inevitably intensified official concern over rumors of seditious contacts between Aragonese Moriscos and French Protestants and reports of Morisco deputations to Constantinople, Fez, and Algiers seeking assistance for a rebellion. As was often the case, these reports were often less than reliable—or plausible. In 1602, the Inquisition reported that a group of Valencian Moriscos had visited the anti-Spanish king of France, Henry IV, and promised him the support of some one hundred thousand armed Moriscos, Jews, and disaffected Catholics if he invaded Spain.
These figures were almost certainly exaggerated by the Moriscos, if not by the Inquisition itself, and it is unlikely that Henry had any intention of responding to this invitation. Equally phantasmal conspiracies were often cited as evidence of the “imminent danger” that the Moriscos posed to the state. In September 1602, a Catalan monk named Friar Sebastian de Encinas warned Lerma that the Moriscos of Valencia had already organized themselves in secret squadrons and were engaging in military training in expectation of a “Moorish armada” that was due to invade Spain. No evidence was offered to support these allegations, and neither the rebellion nor the Moorish invasion materialized. Other contacts appeared to be more substantive. In 1604, as a gesture of goodwill, the English government passed on internal documents to Spain that revealed that discussions had taken place between the Moriscos of Aragon and the Duke de la Force, the governor of Béarn, regarding the possibility of an uprising with Béarnese assistance.
These documents did not reveal whether any attempt had been made to realize these aspirations, but they did nothing to dispel official suspicions of the Moriscos at a time when the Spanish Hapsburgs had begun to make a tentative attempt to rea
ctivate the struggle against Islam in the Mediterranean. The failed Algiers expedition and Spain’s deepening involvement in Morocco’s dynastic civil wars were both products of a strategic reorientation that was often infused with the old crusading aspirations of the past. On December 24, 1603, a Valencian “Christian astrologer” named Francisco Navarro identified a rare astrological configuration known as the great conjunction, which he interpreted as a sign of the coming destruction of Islam, in which Philip III would lead an army of Spanish “Sagittarians” to retake Jerusalem and usher in the End of Days.
In the early seventeenth century, a number of religious prophecies, known as pronósticos, made similar predictions. Some texts attributed Spain’s recent military reversals to God’s anger at the continued presence of infidels and forecast a spectacular transformation in Spanish fortunes once the Moriscos were removed. As was often the case, these predictions were frequently accompanied by omens and portents. In 1600 the legendary church bell at the town of Velilla in Aragon was heard to ring without human assistance, a periodic miracle that was believed to herald great events and which some Spaniards saw as another sign that the expulsion of the Moriscos was imminent. Valencia, as always, was particularly prone to such phenomena, and the first years of the century were punctuated by reports of earthquakes of exceptional severity, hailstorms with stones the size of hen’s eggs, and the sighting of a “bloodstained cloud,” which Damián Fonseca saw as an expression of “the will of God, that the Moriscos be thrown out of Spain, and if necessary, by blood and fire.” In another incident, Fonseca described how a great “whirlwind” uprooted seven hundred trees before snatching two blaspheming Moriscos up into the air and hurling them to their deaths. In this atmosphere of crisis, recession, and heady millenarian expectation, the Morisco question rose steadily up the official agenda, as Spain’s rulers moved ever closer toward the drastic remedy that their predecessors had resisted.
