Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  Not all Moriscos received this harsh reception. The expulsion was not preannounced, for obvious reasons, and the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of men, women, and children took even the most well-intentioned Muslim rulers by surprise. As the reality of what was taking place became clear, the Valencian Moriscos were treated with more consideration. Some were able to secure guarantees of safe conduct from local rulers and were provided with escorts across the tribal regions. Others were fed and given shelter by local people who recognized them as fellow Muslims and sympathized with their predicament. By the middle of October, however, rumors of the treatment meted out to the Moriscos both during and after their transportation were beginning to filter back to Valencia. On October 28, a group of Moriscos wrote to the governor of Játiva to plead for a pardon because “We know for a fact that many people have died at sea and we have certain letters about this . . . if we are afraid, it is because we are baptized and if we find ourselves among such barbarous people who know we are Christians, they will kill us on arrival.”19 Many other Moriscos were refusing to leave their homes. Others prepared to fight what would prove to be the last desperate battle in the history of Muslim Spain.

  Despite the recurrent fears of Morisco rebellion, it was not until the second half of October that the first signs of armed resistance began to emerge, when Morisco bands around the town of Jalón, near Denia, began killing Christians, and Moriscos who refused to join them. By early November, these attacks were beginning to coalesce into a more serious insurrection, as an estimated twenty thousand Moriscos took refuge with their families, animals, and possessions in the barren and inaccessible sierras of the Laguar Valley to the south of Valencia. Further north there were outbreaks of violence in the Ayora Valley near the city of Valencia, where Moriscos on the estates of the Marquis of Dos Aguas killed a royal commissioner and five musketeers who had been sent to escort them to the coast. In the surrounding area, Moriscos now began to attack and burn castles, churches, and seigneurial houses, killing their defenders and seizing weapons and gathering new recruits. On October 20, one local Christian informed the viceroy that thousands of Moriscos were streaming up toward the Muela de Cortes above the Júcar River “with many muskets and harquebuses,” accompanied by their families and their livestock.

  With its towering cliffs overlooking the town of Cortes de Pallas, the extended plateau that Valencians call the Muela, or “molar,” of Cortes offered a formidable natural refuge, and the rebel encampment quickly grew, as Moriscos from throughout Valencia converged on the area. Once again the Moriscos had taken refuge from Christian tormentors in Spain’s mountain fastnesses, but this time they were not fighting for religious or cultural autonomy but for the right to remain in the country. Despite all the years of warnings about Morisco weapons caches and secret armies, there was little evidence of planning or preparation behind either of these uprisings. Though some Moriscos possessed firearms, their weapons consisted mostly of slingshots, homemade pikes, halberds made from plowshares and reaping hooks, stones, and boulders that they poised on mountain summits, ready to roll down on their attackers. In the Laguar Valley, the rebels elected a “king” to lead them, while the Moriscos of the Muela de Cortes chose a leader named Vicente Turixi, who accepted this promotion with some reluctance and assured his “subjects” that they were protected from Christians by a magic enchantment.

  Neither magic nor the primitive Morisco arsenal stood much chance against Mejía’s battle-hardened tercios, whose disorderly behavior was already a source of concern among the Christian populace. The predatory instincts of these soldiers were now directed toward the Moriscos, as Mejía ordered his forces into action at the beginning of November. In order to facilitate the expulsion, the veteran general initially made the rebels an offer of safe conduct if they agreed to leave Spain. When this offer was contemptuously refused, the tercios and militiamen began to pursue the rebels into the mountains.

  On November 20, Mejía and the commander of the Naples tercio, Sancho de Luna, led two separate columns from different directions in a night march toward the Morisco positions above the Laguar Valley. Weighed down with weapons and armor, soldiers and militiamen were silently climbing up through the craggy terrain in their rope-soled sandals when they encountered a statue of the Virgin Mary that had been hacked and defaced by the rebels. Mejía promised to exact a harsh punishment for this sacrilege, and he kept his word. At dawn the next day, his forces overwhelmed the rebels’ flimsy defensive position at the ruined castle of Pop and cornered large numbers of Moriscos on an isolated plain. The soldiers and militiamen proceeded to enact a fearsome slaughter. Antonio de Corral y Rojas, a soldier who participated in the campaign, described how the arms of the soldiers “were covered in the blood of innocents, women and children.”20 Some Moriscos fought as best they could, but many of them died on their knees pleading for mercy, according to Fonseca, though “not deserving of it, those who had always used it badly.”

  At the end of the day, up to three thousand Moriscos had been killed at the cost of one accidental Christian casualty, and the soldiers proceeded to strip the corpses of clothes and jewelry. Thousands more Moriscos had retreated higher up into the mountains, where Mejía now chose to starve them of food and water rather than carry out a direct assault. On November 28, the starving and dehydrated survivors surrendered. It was, Corral y Rojas recalled “a beautiful and agreeable sight from a distance, worthy of admiration and confusion on closer inspection, to see so many bodies dead from need among those crags, most of whom were children; the living consumed, without strength or vigor and almost without breath, dirty and lice-ridden.”21 Thirteen thousand Moriscos were led down from these mountains, some of whom were so dehydrated that they threw themselves into the first streams they encountered and drank until they became sick or died.

  Others were attacked by vengeful Christians, killed by their escorts because they couldn’t walk, or kidnapped and sold as slaves. Some Moriscos were so comprehensively stripped of their possessions that they arrived naked at their ports of embarkation, where they died of starvation while waiting for the ships to transport them, or sold their children to Christian soldiers and foreign seamen in return for a crust of bread in what Corral y Rojas called “a just punishment of Heaven to deprive them of what they loved most, but merciful considering the sacrileges and atrocities they had committed.”22

  Meanwhile, military operations were being conducted in the Muela de Cortes under the direction of Juan de Córdoba, the commander of the Lombardy tercio. This time the Moriscos accepted an invitation to surrender, but the negotiations quickly descended into violent chaos, as the Christian troops refused to be deprived of their plunder. In Vicent Mestre’s narrative painting Rebellion of the Moriscos in the Muela of Cortes, the tercio companies and Castilian cavalrymen are depicted with their lances, pikes, and banners in perfect battle formation outside Cortes de Pallas, marching up the Muela in orderly fashion. In reality, military discipline was conspicuously absent as the Christian troops embarked on a spree of rape, looting, and slave-hunting.

  Hundreds of women and children were captured by the soldiers as others leaped from the high cliffs with their children to avoid the same fate, before the Christian commanders managed to reassert their authority and escort the survivors down to the coast. On December 5, Caracena informed the king that three thousand Moriscos from the Muela who had arrived at the port of Valencia were at risk of starvation, while Juan de Córdoba reported to Mejía later that month that 160 Morisco men and women were being taken to Játiva, of whom “most are so weak and starving that I don’t know how they are going to arrive there.”23

  Not all the rebels were caught. Hundreds fled into the barren mountains between the Muela de Cortes and Castile, where they continued to carry out sporadic attacks on Christians. With these bloody episodes, however, the threat of a general Morisco rebellion was effectively extinguished. In the Valencian capital, the surrender at the Muela de Cortes was celebrated with pa
geants, processions, and a splendid nocturnal illumination that lit up the whole city. Ribera personally led a solemn procession to give thanks to the “Virgin of Victory” and ordered free red and white wine to be distributed from a fountain outside his Corpus Christi college-seminary. In January, Vicente Turixi was captured in a cave by Christian troops and brought down to Valencia seated on a donkey, where he was presented to Ribera. The last king of Morisco Spain was then sentenced to be drawn and quartered, an ordeal which he endured “with great patience,” according to Cabrera de Córdoba, after confessing his sins and professing his desire to die as a Christian.

  All these events formed part of what Damián Fonseca called the “agreeable holocaust” of Morisco Valencia. In the midst of this immense human tragedy, the king hailed by Lope de Vega as “Jupiter Philip” continued to enjoy his customary pursuits. On November 21, even as the Moriscos of the Laguar mountains were being massacred, Cabrera de Córdoba records a splendid court fiesta in Madrid, where the king and queen enjoyed dances, bullfights, and a horseback masquerade. On December 20, the royal couple went hunting together, and the king’s horse was wounded by a boar during an otherwise successful expedition on which they killed a number of rabbits, foxes, and deer.

  Despite Juan de Ribera’s initial doubts regarding the expulsion, the archbishop continued to lend his forceful support to it for the remainder of his life. “Every day Our Lord brings us new miracles regarding this business, “he informed Philip in February 1610, in a letter that compared the “miraculous work” of the expulsion to “others that we read in the Holy Scriptures.”24 On January 6, 1611, the future saint died peacefully in the Corpus Christi college that he considered his most lasting legacy. There are suggestions that even on his deathbed Ribera remained more ambivalent about the expulsion than his celebratory letters to the king let on. According to some of his biographers, Ribera was stricken by guilt at the economic impact of the expulsion on the Christian population and painfully conscious that many Christians held him personally responsible for it. There is no evidence that he felt any remorse for the 124,000 men, women, and children who had been uprooted from their homes and sent across the sea, or the tens of thousands of Moriscos who were now being removed from the rest of Spain.

  19

  Secrecy and Deception

  Even before the fires of rebellion had been extinguished in Valencia, Philip and his counselors had begun preparations to extend the expulsion to the rest of Spain. The king had always intended a “universal” expulsion, depending on how events unfolded in Valencia. From the point of view of its architects, a phased expulsion made it possible to concentrate the state’s resources on particular areas and eliminate the possibility of concerted Morisco resistence uniting different regions. Staging the expulsion was also necessary to avoid the possibility of administrative chaos that might have undermined the whole enterprise. The Morisco population in Valencia was seen as the most likely source of rebellion because of its size, but the fact that most of their communities were located within a few days’ march of the coast made it relatively easy to bring them to their designated ports once the expulsion process had been set in motion. Elsewhere in Spain, Moriscos were often scattered in smaller numbers hundreds of miles inland, so it was more complicated to organize their transportation and coordinate their escorts, food supplies, and accommodation during their exodus.

  In addition, these Moriscos often had a very different relationship to Christian society than their Valencian counterparts. In Valencia most Moriscos lived apart from the Old Christian population and could be identified and rounded up en masse. In Castile, La Mancha, Murcia, and Andalusia, on the other hand, many “Old Moriscos” lived alongside Old Christians and were indistinguishable from them in terms of their language, customs, and religious practices. Not only did these antiguos regard themselves as Christians, but they were generally taken as such by the local Christian ecclesiastical and secular authorities. On October 16, 1609, the city council of Murcia wrote to Philip to express its concern at rumors that the expulsion was to be extended to their region. At this point, no such declaration had been made, and the councillors pleaded with the king not to expel the Moriscos in and around the city, because they “have made such good use of the Christian religion that there is not the slightest sign or trace in them of anything that could give rise to any suspicion or distrust. They are for the most part born and bred in this city and would be offended to be taken for descendants of New Christians.... We regard them as such faithful and loyal vassals of the Royal Crown that we would regard it as astonishing and incredible to find anything in them to the contrary.”1

  The councillors insisted that their appeal was not based on any economic benefits that the Moriscos brought to their community but on “the mutually harmonious relationship that we have established through our continual contact and communication.” These were remarkable claims from a Christian city council,2 and the government received numerous similar petitions from other parts of Spain in the winter of 1609–1610. All these factors made the extension of the expulsion in many ways a more complicated process than it was in Valencia, and they obliged the government to conceal its intentions behind a façade of secrecy, deception, and false trails to mislead Old Christians and Moriscos alike.

  In November, Philip appointed Juan de Mendoza, the Marquis of San Germán, to take overall command of the next phase of the expulsion process in Granada, Murcia, and Andalusia. San Germán was assisted in Murcia by Luis Fajardo, the commander of the Spanish Atlantic fleet, who was already in charge of the expulsion of Valencian Moriscos from Cartagena, and by the captain-general of Andalusia, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the former admiral of the “Invincible Armada” against England. Medina Sidonia was an experienced official with intimate knowledge of the problems of defending the Andalusian coast, and he was not enthusiastic about expulsion, which he believed would increase the ranks of Spain’s enemies in North Africa, but he nevertheless complied with the king’s orders.

  On Lerma’s recommendation, it had been agreed to present this phase of the expulsion as a security measure that applied only to Moriscos who lived within twenty leagues of the sea, so that Moriscos elsewhere in Spain would believe themselves exempt. This maneuver was not entirely successful. In November, the Aragonese parliament sent two eminent representatives to Madrid to find out whether Philip intended to expel the Moriscos of Aragon. These representatives were told only that no such decision had been taken. The following month, the viceroy of Aragon told Philip that many Moriscos were worried that “what has been done to those of the Kingdom of Valencia will be done to them” and asked for a public assurance to the contrary—an assurance that seems to have been given. The same devious strategy was applied in Castile. On October 18, the Council of State was already considering a draft of the expulsion order for the Moriscos of Castile. When a deputation of Moriscos from Ávila asked Philip to reaffirm a special dispensation granted to them by his father allowing them to join the local militia, in a clear attempt to sound out the king’s intentions, Philip played for time, and this request was neither granted nor refused.

  It was not until January 10 of the following year that San Germán officially proclaimed the royal edict ordering the Moriscos of Murcia, Andalusia, and Granada to leave, together with the militant Morisco enclave of Hornachos in Extremadura. In addition to the usual charges of apostasy and sedition, Philip recalled the Morisco atrocities committed during the 1568–1570 Alpujarras revolt as a justification for their expulsion. Accusing the Granadan Moriscos and their descendants of rejecting the opportunity to “live Christianly and faithfully” and colluding with Spain’s enemies, Philip cited the fact that “in so many years not a single one of them has come forward to reveal anything of their plots and conspiracies” as “a clear sign that all of them have been of the same opinion and intention against the service of God and myself.” To ensure “that their contagion does not contaminate others,” the Moriscos were given thirty days t
o settle their affairs and leave the country.

  Despite these specious charges, Philip clearly anticipated Christian opposition and ordered that “no one in all my kingdoms and realms, whatever their pre-eminence and status, dare to receive or defend Moriscos or Moriscas, either publicly or secretly.”3 This order was quickly ignored, as the Council of State was showered with appeals for exemption from Moriscos and Christians alike. Medina Sidonia asked for six Morisco gardeners and beekeepers on his estates to be exempted on the grounds of their exemplary loyalty and Christianity. On February 13, the Council of State considered a similar appeal from another Andalusian aristocrat, the Duke of Arcos, on behalf of some of his Morisco servants, who “have always appeared as good and faithful Christians.” In another letter, Arcos reminded the king that some of these Moriscos had served in his army during the War of Granada and argued that the expulsion orders should not apply to Moriscos who “were too old and infirm to walk . . . nor that innocent children suffer for the offenses that their parents have not even committed.”4