Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Within a few days of the promulgation of the expulsion order, the first Moriscos began to arrive at their designated ports from the settlements nearest the coast. It had been arranged that ten passengers from the first embarkation to North Africa would return to announce their safe arrival, but some Christian lords provided further guarantees by accompanying their vassals themselves. On September 28, one of the richest landowners in Valencia, the Duke of Gandía, told Philip that a member of his family would accompany five thousand of his vassals from Denia to North Africa. Though Gandía feared that the loss of his Morisco laborers during the forthcoming sugar harvest might presage the “destruction of this House,” he assured Philip that “I live very content without them, thereby realizing the good and holy intentions of Your Majesty.”7

  Gandía would be generously rewarded for his loyalty, as he undoubtedly knew, and his public compliance convinced others to follow his example. On October 10, Philip received a plaintive letter from a Valencian seigneur named Joan de Vilagrut, who declared his willingness to lose his vassals but nevertheless appealed to the king for compensation so that his children would be able to “live and remain honored in accordance with their status.”8 On the night of October 2, 3,803 Moriscos sailed from Denia for Oran. Three days later, another 8,000 were transported from Alicante on a mixed fleet of Spanish, Portuguese, and Sicilian galleys and chartered ships. From across the plains and mountains of Valencia, Moriscos abandoned their homes and trekked along the dusty roads to the coast escorted by royal commissioners and soldiers. They left behind them a scene of chaos and desolation, as Christian looters plundered their deserted villages and rounded up the unsold livestock and domestic animals that had sometimes entered the houses of their former owners. Some Moriscos rode on horses, mules, and cows, others in carts and carriages piled high with clothes, food, furniture, and cooking utensils. But most traveled on foot, carrying their bundles of possessions on their shoulders and their money and jewelry sewn into their clothes in order to hide them from robbers.

  These columns included men and women of all ages. Some were carried on the shoulders of their relatives or transported in chairs and makeshift litters, such as the 103-year-old woman who arrived in the port of Valencia on a wooden door carried by four of her grandchildren. On arrival at their designated ports, the Moriscos were led directly onto the waiting ships in batches of two hundred or taken in smaller boats to those anchored farther offshore. When ships were not available, the new arrivals were obliged to wait on the docks and beaches. Valencia, Denia, Alicante, Viñaroz, and the small port of Mancofa were soon teeming with deportees, soldiers, and militiamen, with sailors, officials, and royal commissioners overseeing the embarkations, as well as onlookers who had come to watch this unprecedented exodus and in some cases to profit from it. At Alicante, one Christian resident described how “the streets and plazas were almost impassable” on the days of embarkation. The “grau” or port, of Valencia became a giant flea market, in which elegantly dressed Christian ladies arrived in smart carriages accompanied by gentlemen in plumed hats to watch the embarkations and bargain-hunt for Morisco jewelry and embroidered silks and clothes.

  Poignant and often tragic scenes unfolded as the Moriscos were brought to the waiting ships. One old man arrived in Valencia declaring his wish to be buried on Muslim soil but dropped dead while boarding his ship. Other Moriscos died of hunger and exhaustion before leaving the shore. Some parents became separated from their children in the confusion; others left their children behind with local Christians. In the Valencian artist Pere Oromig’s painting Departure of the Moriscos from the port of Valencia, a Morisco father can be seen kneeling to say good-bye to his young daughter, who is standing with a Christian family.

  There were many such farewells as the exodus continued. Even as the Moriscos were boarding their ships, priests, monks, and zealous Christians pleaded with them to leave their children behind so that they could be brought up as Catholics. Caracena’s wife, Doña Isabel de Velasco, personally persuaded many parents to leave their children behind—or had them kidnapped—for their spiritual salvation. Some Moriscos gave in to these importunities because they felt unable to care for their children, but others defiantly refused, such as the Morisca who gave birth on the docks and then “embarked with the infant in her arms on a harsh, windy, and very cold day,” according to a report by the Valencia Inquisition, and ignored the Christians who begged her to leave her baby with them.9

  Amid the sadness, there was also a curious gaiety. At Denia, Moriscos passed the time between voyages by staging Greco-Roman wrestling tournaments, and Moriscas danced on the beach to the sound of lutes and tambourines, while Christian ladies copied their steps. At Alicante, groups of Moriscos came clapping and singing prohibited songs and playing musical instruments “as if they were going to the most joyous fiestas and weddings,” according to Bleda. Many Morisca women dressed in their finest clothes and jewelry for the occasion. Some wore the same wide-brimmed hats and black dresses worn by Christian women, others proudly wore their white almalafas, while their menfolk sometimes wore red caps or turbans to proclaim their intention to “live as Moors.”

  These depictions of a joyous Morisco exodus are a recurring theme in the writings of pro-expulsion apologists, many of whom witnessed the embarkations firsthand. Bleda observed Moriscos who waded into the sea and thanked Allah and Muhammad for allowing them passage to the lands of their ancestors or boasted to Christian onlookers “that they would go where the king sent them, but they would soon return and throw us out.” Blas Verdú saw the “arm of God” in the fact that the Moriscos went willingly to their embarkation points, summoned only by the “sound of a trumpet” that reminded them of the Last Judgment, while Damián Fonseca described the expulsion as “an enterprise more divine than human.” To supporters of the expulsion, this willing exodus was proof of the Morisco duplicity that had justified their punishment in the first place, but such descriptions need qualifying. There is no doubt that many Moriscos celebrated their deliverance from Christian oppression and regarded their religious and cultural survival as a kind of victory. One Morisco song that circulated in Aragon before the expulsion described North Africa as a land of plenty “where gold and fine silver / Are found from one mountain to the next” and declared:Let us all go there

  Where the Moors are many

  Where all good is enclosed

  One aljamiado poet in Tunis compared the Morisco exodus to the biblical exodus of the Jews from Egypt and praised God for transforming the Mediterranean into a “meadow of green flowers” that had allowed his co-religionists to escape the “Pharaoh of Spain.”10 But though some Moriscos celebrated their expulsion, others accepted it out of solidarity with their neighbors or disgust with the society that had expelled them, such as the vassals of the Duke of Gandía who contemptuously rejected his invitation to fulfill the 6 percent quota and stay behind to work on the sugar harvest, declaring that “they would rather be vassals of the Turk than slaves of Spain.” Even among those who appeared to celebrate their expulsion, some must have been trying to put a brave face on what they regarded as inevitable, and not all of them succeeded. The Christian poet Gaspar de Aguilar described how elderly Morisca women left their homes in Gandía “with tears and lamentations . . . grimacing and making faces.”11 This distress was understandable. For whatever their feelings about leaving Spain, few Moriscos could feel confident at their ability to survive a journey that was fraught with danger from the moment they left their homes.

  The king’s expulsion orders stipulated clearly that no Moriscos were to be harmed by Christians, but these instructions were often observed in the breach, as predatory Christian gangs ambushed the Morisco columns on the roads and stripped them of their money and valuables. Some Moriscos were robbed before they even left their homes. At the village of Palomar in the Albaida Valley, three Christians cut the throat of a Morisco farmer who was gathering raisins from his orchard for the journey. When his distraug
ht wife threw herself across her husband’s body she was shot dead with a harquebus. Two members of the gang were subsequently hanged for these killings, but similar incidents continued to occur across the kingdom. On the Duke of Gandía’s estates, a band of Christian cattle rustlers led by one of the duke’s own constables was accused by Caracena of “inflicting infinite harm” on the Moriscos in the area. On October 3, the viceroy informed Philip that more than fifteen Moriscos had been killed in the previous three days and that “the disorders, robberies, and evils” committed by Old Christians against Moriscos had reached the point where “no road is safe for them.”12

  The government did try to prevent these attacks and often punished their perpetrators severely, but it was impossible to protect the Moriscos from a vengeful and triumphant Christian populace that sometimes interpreted the expulsion as carte blanche for robbery and plunder. In some cases, Moriscos were attacked by their own escorts. In one incident, a Christian soldier arrested for raping Morisca women in his charge claimed that it was “God’s fault for having made him a man.” Another officer was arrested by the Inquisition for the rape of four Morisca women and a twelve-year-old girl.

  Faced with the inability of the authorities to prevent these attacks, Moriscos sometimes took matters into their own hands. On October 6, a hysterical Christian burst into the cathedral in Valencia during mass shouting “Moors! Moors!” and announced that four thousand Moriscos were massacring Christians not far from the city. A detachment of cavalry was dispatched to the area, which found only two hundred Moriscos—in pursuit of a Christian gang who had robbed and killed one of their neighbors.

  Despite the confusion and violence in the countryside, the embarkations proceeded with remarkable efficiency. On October 24, Cabrera de Córdoba records that “the principal occupation now is sending letters and receiving updates on the Valencian Moriscos” and that twenty thousand Moriscos had already been transported to the Spanish enclave of Oran, with another ten thousand waiting to embark.13 These arrivals and departures were carefully written down in official records that were sent to the viceroy and the government in Madrid, such as the following register from the port of Valencia:On October 5, 1609, the ships named Santa Ana and San Vicente, captained by Reynaldo Granier, resident of Mallorca, left the beach at the Grau of Valencia with 650 Moriscos from the area of Alcasser and 100 children and 30 infants. On the said day the Mallorcan captain Antonio Jordi left with his ship Santa Maria Buenaventura with 340 Morisco adults and 60 young ones and 18 on their mothers’ breasts.14

  On reaching the coast, the Moriscos were supposed to be given food to tide them over during the voyage, but the authorities often struggled to maintain the flow of supplies. In the first week of November, bad weather forced a number of ships to return to their ports or seek shelter elsewhere. On November 2, a fleet sailing from Viñaroz with 4,500 Moriscos on board was forced to take refuge at the port of Los Alfaques in Aragon due to intemperate weather. Still the Moriscos continued to stream into their designated ports, and the correspondence between local port officials and the central government in Madrid is punctuated with urgent requests for bizcocho (biscuit) and chickpeas, and warnings that the Moriscos in their care were at risk of starvation. On November 7, officials in Valencia reported that a fleet of Portuguese caravels had failed to arrive and worried that they would be unable to feed the Moriscos who were waiting to embark if the delay continued. On December 9, Caracena informed the king and his ministers that the authorities were no longer able to feed the Moriscos arriving at Alicante. Though some of these Moriscos had brought their own food, the viceroy reported, others were entirely dependent for their survival on the charity of their Christian lords because “even though many of them are rich, the poor are infinite.”15

  By this time, the Crown had broken its promise to bear the cost of the expulsion and had begun to oblige wealthier Moriscos to pay for their own food and transportation and finance those who were too poor to do so themselves. Despite these difficulties, the transportation ships continued to sail back and forth between Valencia and North Africa. Many Moriscos who embarked on these voyages never reached their destinations. Some ships were sunk in storms, others were attacked by pirates. Moriscos were robbed and sometimes killed on the high seas by the sailors who transported them. These incidents were particularly prevalent on the privately owned ships that supplemented the Spanish navy. The expulsion was always to some extent a multinational enterprise that included ships from England, France, Italy, and Portugal. Some of these vessels had been commissioned by the Spanish authorities; others came of their own volition, attracted by the prospect of easy profits. Moriscos with money often preferred to travel on these ships rather than those provided by the Crown despite their higher cost, in the belief that they would be safer. These expectations were often brutally disappointed, as their crews robbed their passengers and threw them overboard or dumped them on desert islands and remote African beaches before kidnapping their women and children to be sold as slaves. In some cases, women and even children were raped by Christian sailors and then thrown overboard.

  One of the few of these episodes of which specific details are known concerns a Catalan sea captain named Juan Ribera, who conspired with his Neapolitan counterpart to unite their two ships in mid-voyage and slaughter their passengers. As soon as they were out of sight of land, Ribera and his crew murdered the Morisco passengers on the bridge and threw their bodies overboard. The sailors promised the passengers below deck that their lives would be saved if the men handed over their money and possessions. The male passengers then came up on deck one by one, where each one was robbed, killed, and thrown into the sea. When their women came up on deck and realized what had taken place, many became hysterical and threw themselves overboard with their children. Others were raped before they, too, were drowned.

  Even the viciously anti-Morisco monk Fonseca was outraged by the treatment meted out to passengers he described as “credulous barbarians” by “bad Christians.”16 The sole survivor of this maritime atrocity was a beautiful Morisca woman whom Ribera decided to bring back to Barcelona as his personal trophy. On returning to the city, however, he became anxious that his captive might talk and so drowned her at the mouth of the Llobregat River by clubbing her to death with an oar. The massacre was soon discovered when the crew attempted to sell their spoils, and Ribera was hanged, drawn and quartered—an execution that was observed with satisfaction by Fonseca himself.

  It is impossible to know how many similar episodes took place, for Christian captains often forced their Morisco passengers to sign papers declaring that they had arrived safely, before robbing and killing them and returning to Spain to repeat the process. Nevertheless, these attacks were known to the Spanish authorities. In January 1610, Father Bernardo de Monroy, a Christian priest in Algiers, wrote to Caracena with a request from the ruler of Algiers that a group of Moriscos be allowed to return to Spain temporarily in order to seek redress from the English and French sailors who had robbed and killed their fellow passengers. It is not known whether this request was granted, though the king and his ministers did punish the perpetrators of such crimes when they discovered them.

  Chroniclers of the expulsion such as Bleda and Fonseca often take pains to attribute these attacks to privately owned ships rather than those of the Crown, and this appears to have been generally true, even if it hardly bears out Bleda’s assertion that “the king and his ministers bore no responsibility whatsoever” for the choices the Moriscos made. Nor was the behavior of the king’s own officials always exemplary. At the port of Cartagena, one official document records that four Christian soldiers were arrested “for attacking, wounding, and robbing the Moriscos by night” and there is no reason to believe that this incident was unique.

  The fate of the Moriscos who reached North Africa was often equally grim. Most Valencian Moriscos were shipped to the Spanish garrison-fortress at Oran, near Algiers, where they slept in tents or out in the open before ma
king their way into Muslim lands. In the first weeks of the expulsion, the Spanish commander at Oran, the Count of Aguilar, was able to process and feed these deportees and even negotiate with local Muslim rulers to ensure their protection. But the Spanish garrison was soon overwhelmed by the numbers of arrivals and began driving the Moriscos across the land frontier regardless of whether they had provisions or protection.

  To reach their destinations, the Morisos often had to pass through lawless tribal regions inhabited by Berber and Arab nomads, whom Muslim rulers on the coast had never managed to subdue. Tragically, the Moriscos who had been expelled for being “bad Christians” often found themselves regarded by these Muslim tribesmen as “bad Muslims” who dressed and sounded like Christians. Cast adrift on the lawless roads between Tlemcen and Fez in Morocco without escorts or protection, these defenseless exiles were often robbed, killed, and raped. According to al-Maqqari, a contemporary of the expulsion, so many Moriscos were “assailed on the roads by Arabs and such as fear not God” that “few arrived at their destination.”17 It is impossible to assess these claims, but some contemporary Spanish chroniclers estimated that up to three quarters of the Valencian Moriscos who reached North Africa died from hunger, disease, and violence.

  Though the Spanish authorities received warnings from their own officials in Oran that these attacks were taking place, their overriding priority was always to remove the Morisco population from Valencia as rapidly as possible, and their subsequent fate mattered only in so far as it affected the expulsion process. As a result, nothing was done to slow down the pace of the expulsion or ensure protection for those who crossed the frontier. Some Christian chroniclers found a satisfying irony in the sufferings of Moriscos who had forsaken the “earthly paradise” of Spain for the “barren deserts” of North Africa at the hands of Muslim Alarbes, as these tribesmen were known. Bleda was characteristically exultant at the fact that “Spanish Saracens” were killed by “cruel executioners of their own law,” declaring that “if they had all died it would have been better for Spain.” His fellow Dominican Blas Verdu was equally celebratory, sneering, “This is the hospitality and love with which those who profess this sect treat each other; this is their charity. Why doesn’t Muhammad sustain them in the African deserts? Why doesn’t he open a rock to give them water? Where is the manna? Now you know well the difference between Spanish Christian hearts and the African Moors.”18