Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  In their recommendations to the king, Philip’s ministers noted that “What is done with Medina Sidonia cannot be denied with that of Arcos” but nevertheless pointed out that such exemptions would make it difficult “to cleanse the kingdom of these people, because there are many who want to stay.” The counselors concluded that the best policy was “to close the door on all of them,” but it was difficult to ignore appeals that effectively called the legitimacy of the expulsion into question. In February 1610, the town council of Cáceres in Extremadura urged the king not to expel the local Moriscos, describing them as “peaceful and humble people” whose work was essential to “the good of this republic.” The corregidor of Badajoz made a similar appeal on behalf of the Moriscos of his city, who “have always lived well and in accordance with Christianity. They are very poor people, humble, and correct.” Not only were these Moriscos born and bred in the area and “speak no other language except our own,” the magistrate insisted, but their labor was vital to the whole community, for Morisco agricultural laborers “are the ones who do most to cultivate and farm the land.”

  In January of that year, the king received an impassioned appeal from the Duchess of Cardona, who urged clemency toward the Moriscos on her estates at Comares, near Málaga, on the grounds thatFrom all of them have proceeded sons and daughters who, as they have been brought up with the good doctrine and example of Old Christians, have lived and live like good Christians. Some Moriscos have married Christian women, and Moriscas have married Old Christian men, from whose marriages there are sons and daughters of a tender age. Some are so old and so poor that they are useless and cannot walk, or walk with difficulty; others are orphans with no one to look after them or make any choices on their behalf. They serve Old Christians who have them well indoctrinated and instructed in matters of faith; many of them have privileges and evidence of Old Christian descent, and it is a pitiful business to hear them clamor and protest that they are all Christians and wish to live and die as such and fulfill as faithful vassals whatever Your Majesty asks of them.5

  A number of appeals came from Church officials. In Granada, a deputation of clerics wrote to Philip urging him to remember that “Our Holy Mother Church protects those who have erred” and to seek “a more gentle remedy with more hesitation and time.” On January 24, the archbishop of Granada, Pedro Vaca de Castro, wrote to the king to protest an edict that was “so general it includes those who are not guilty.” De Castro insisted on the exemplary Christianity of the Moriscos in Granada and claimed that he had personally admitted some of them to holy orders. He dismissed any suggestions that the Moriscos there constituted a security threat, since most of them were women and old people who, he noted with a sarcasm that bordered on insolence, were “no longer capable of disturbances or taking up arms.” The archbishop was equally outspoken in his criticism of the king’s orders to separate Morisco children from their parents and Morisco husbands from their Christian wives. Pointing out that such couples had “married in good faith with the permission of Your Majesty and in accordance with his laws and those of the Holy Mother Church,” the archbishop thundered, “Why should their wives be taken from them? Nor is there anyone who can do it!”6

  All this was very different from Valencia, where Philip had been able to justify expulsion on the basis of the negative testimony against the Moriscos from the most senior cleric of the kingdom. Yet here was evidence that radically contradicted the charges that he himself had made against them. If the Moriscos were not traitors and constituted no threat to the state, if they had really become Christians “in their hearts,” then why should they be expelled? Faced with these appeals from his own clerics, the king ordered bishops in Andalusia, Granada, and Murcia to carry out a more detailed investigation in order to ascertain whether the Moriscos really were living as Christians, in terms of their language, dress, and customs, their religious observances, and their contacts with Old Christians. The results of these investigations were overwhelmingly positive. The bishop of Córdoba claimed that the Moriscos of the city were “good and faithful Christians and lived as such, observing the Catholic faith without observing the sect of Mahoma.” A report on the Moriscos of Cartagena noted “the great number of them whose good Christianity provides satisfaction,” while the Cathedral Chapter of Seville described the local Moriscos as “like Old Christians in language, dress, and acts of religion.”

  These conclusions were once again at odds with the prevailing consensus at the upper echelons of the state. But even though some exemptions were granted, these investigations did not affect the general thrust of the expulsion. In the first months of 1610, some 20,000 Moriscos left Andalusia and Granada and parts of Murcia. Some 7,500 were removed from Seville alone, where one Christian observer recalled, “They were all crying, and there was no heart that did not soften on seeing so many homes uprooted and so many wretched people banished.”7 One Christian poet described the “Morisca women wringing their white hands / Raising their eyes to Heaven / Wailing Ay Seville, my homeland!” as they called out the names of the city’s churches and the places where they had spent their lives.8

  In Extremadura, the militant Morisco “mini-republic” of Hornachos had already been punished in 1608 under the iron hand of the specially appointed alcalde de corte (roving magistrate), Gregorio López Madera. In the course of his investigation into the numerous offenses attributed to the town’s inhabitants, López Madera found eighty-three bodies buried in a field. In response, he ordered ten members of the town council to be hanged, and hundreds of other Moriscos were flogged or sentenced to galley service. Nevertheless, in an extraordinary concession, he now allowed the expelled Hornacheros to keep their weapons in exchange for a special payment to the Crown. In three weeks, the entire population of 3,500 Moriscos was marched like an undefeated army to Seville, where they were transported to Morocco.

  Not all Moriscos were able to leave with their pride intact. As in Valencia, many lost their possessions, their families, and sometimes their lives during their journey. In January Don Luis de Alcazar, the corregidor of Ecija, near Córdoba, reported that Moriscos were refusing to leave their homes because of the “risk and danger to their women on the roads.” At Málaga, Christian officials forced Moriscos to sell them land and possessions at risibly low prices before expelling them. On arrival at their designated ports, Moriscos were often charged exorbitant fees for their transportation by foreign sea captains, and not all of them reached the opposite shore. On January 22, a royal official in Cartagena reported that French sea captains were kidnapping children less than four years old for the slave market. There were also signs that both the transportation system and the food supply network were becoming increasingly frayed. In February, Luis Fajardo wrote from Cartagena asking for more assistance to be provided to the Moriscos arriving in the city, who were “suffering sickness and hunger like some of those in Valencia.” Two months later, Fajardo was still warning the king that there were not enough ships at Cartagena to transport the Moriscos, who “cannot be obliged to do the impossible . . . they will be left to die if they have nothing to eat nor ships to board.”

  By this time, the next phase of the expulsion was under way. In November 1609, Philip appointed Bernardino de Velasco, the Count of Salazar, and Alonso de Sotomayor, to take joint command of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Old and New Castile. A member of the Council of War, Salazar was a diligent and ambitious bureaucrat whose commitment to what he called the expulsion “machine” was to make him one of the most powerful men in Spain. While Salazar and Sotomayor discreetly toured Castile, appointing commissioners and compiling lists of soldiers and militiamen to expedite the expulsion, Philip and his senior officials continued to go to elaborate lengths to conceal their intentions.

  On hearing that Christians had begun to taunt Moriscos with the prospect of their forthcoming expulsion, Philip ordered that such insults cease. On December 28, 1609, the king granted permission to “disquieted” Castilian Moriscos wh
o wished to leave Spain to do so, declaring that “it is not my intention that any should live here against their will.” This decision was not as generous as it seemed. By declaring his willingness to allow Castilian Moriscos to leave voluntarily, Philip was also sending a signal that he would not be forcing anyone to leave, even as his officials were laying the groundwork for expulsion. Needless to say, even this offer came with strings attached.

  Moriscos who chose to leave were only allowed to take a limited amount of currency with them, half their savings and property were to be given to the Crown, and they were obliged to pass through the city of Burgos, where they were registered and inspected under Salazar’s vigilant supervision to ensure that they did not exceed their allotted quota of currency and valuables. Wealthy Moriscos were sometimes able to use their connections to transfer their money out of the country through bills of exchange negotiated with French diplomats and Portuguese bankers, but many resorted to smuggling. Some buried their valuables in the countryside and then retrieved them after inspection, or concealed jewelry and currency in their luggage and clothing. One Morisco family was caught by Salazar smuggling gold and silver in a hollowed-out wheel axle.

  The penalties for such activities were harsh. At least thirty Moriscos passing through Burgos were hanged for smuggling, on Salazar’s orders. Dozens more were fined or flogged. The punctilious Salazar was ideally suited to the task of ensuring that the Crown profited from the Morisco exodus, and his regular reports to his superiors were accompanied by detailed lists of confiscated Morisco goods, from jewelry to sheets, silk scarves, and other articles of clothing. Despite these conditions, many Moriscos clearly sensed the king’s intentions and preferred to leave on their own terms. In the spring, the numbers of Moriscos passing through Burgos began to increase dramatically; by April some sixteen thousand had crossed into France, and French border towns such as Saint-Jean-de-Luz were flooded with Morisco émigrés. Salazar was so concerned at the departure of so many “men of good class, men of property” into what was potentially enemy territory that he asked for the border to be closed.

  On July 10, the border was reopened when Philip finally made public the decision he had taken nearly a year before and ordered all Moriscos in Castile to leave the country. The publication of the expulsion edict once again prompted a stream of appeals for exemptions from Moriscos and Old Christians alike. As in Andalusia, the Moriscos sometimes had powerful advocates among the clergy and the landowning aristocracy; the Duke of Pastrana asked for ten Moriscos on his estates near Madrid to be exempted, including the brothers Miguel and Luis García, both of whom he claimed led exemplary Christian lives and were “very skilled at working with silk.” The duke was clearly desperate to retain these skilled vassals and pleaded with the king that at the very least they be allowed to stay long enough to teach their trade to their Old Christian replacements.9

  It is not known whether this request was granted, but Philip and his ministers were often suspicious of testimonies to the “exemplary Christian lives” of Moriscos from Christian landowners, who they believed were putting their own selfish economic interests above those of the faith. Similar suspicions were also directed at clerics who defended the Moriscos, because many monasteries and churches also depended on Morisco labor, but such appeals nevertheless required investigation. As in Granada and Andalusia, Philip instructed bishops and priests throughout Castile to provide lists of the Moriscos in their areas and examine whether they were living as Christians. Once again these investigations were generally positive and concluded that the Moriscos attended punctually to their religious obligations without compulsion and demonstrated their sincerity through “good works,” such as confessing to mortal sins or summoning the priest to administer extreme unction to the dying.

  Some responses were more cautious. The bishop of Valladolid listed seventy Morisco households in the city whose Christianity was “not established,” but he still argued that it was not necessary to expel them. When these conclusions were presented to the king by his counselors, Philip nevertheless declared “it is well that the 70 houses go like the rest.”10 In November of that year, the government issued the Castilian bishops a new set of criteria on which to assess the Christian behavior of the Moriscos. From now on, it was not sufficient for the Moriscos to fulfill their Christian obligations; they also had to perform “positive acts against the sect of the Moors,” such as drinking wine and eating pork, and avoiding contact with “those of their nation.”

  Though the bishops were warned by the king to be “very discriminating and to know full well their purpose,” their investigations once again found that most Moriscos fulfilled the new requirements, and once again Philip and his ministers showed themselves reluctant to accept these conclusions. When the curate of Oropresa, near Ávila, claimed that the Moriscos in his parish were “so well instructed in their faith and its things that no Old Christian is better instructed than they are,” Salazar ordered three further investigations to be carried out, each of which produced the same results. Similar procedures were applied elsewhere, as the government increasingly refused to accept evidence that contradicted its own assumptions. In some cases, exemptions were granted to individual Moriscos or whole Morisco communities, which were subsequently annulled. At other times, Philip and his ministers simply overruled the testimonies of their own clerics and officials and expelled the Moriscos anyway. The bishop of Ávila vigorously defended the Morisco “descendants of Old Converts,” who had lived in the city “since time immemorial.” These Moriscos shared the same professions and privileges as Christians. They were allowed to bear arms and vote on the town council, and they formed part of the local militia. Some had fought in Spain’s wars in North Africa.

  These considerations brought the Moriscos of Ávila a temporary reprieve. On July 2, 1611, however, one of the oldest Morisco communities in Spain was brought to an end when 770 men, women, and children were assembled at dawn and marched out of the city to France, “smart and well turned out as if they were going to a wedding, without any expression of sadness,” according to one Christian eyewitness.11 The intransigence of the king and his ministers was partly dictated by practical considerations; the government could not afford to keep ships, soldiers, and officials in place indefinitely, and assessing appeals and petitions was a time-consuming process that threatened to clog the wheels of the bureaucracy. From the point of view of the king and the senior officials in charge of the expulsion, the sheer volume of appeals for exemption from both Christians and Moriscos made it difficult, if not impossible, to examine each individual case without jeopardizing the entire enterprise. As Salazar pointed out to the king in August, so many Moriscos were claiming to be Old Christians that “I fear that entire places will ask to stay.”12

  But the intransigence of Philip and his officials was not merely driven by the bureaucratic requirements of the process; it was also a reflection of the bigotry that had made the expulsion possible. At a meeting of the Council of State in Toledo on June 18, 1611, it was decided that all petitions for exemption should be rejected, whether they came from Moriscos or Old Christians. One of the officials who approved this decision was the archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General, Bernardo Rojas de Sandoval, Lerma’s uncle, who declared that all Moriscos were “prejudicial people” who deserved to be expelled. Philip and his favorite were equally implacable. When a Basque official wrote to Lerma in February 1612 asking what he should do with Lorenzo Bautista, an elderly Morisco expelled from Valladolid who had returned from France with his wife, he received the curt reply to “fulfill the expulsion orders.” All this was very different from 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs had allowed Jews to choose between exile and conversion. Then, expulsion had been intended to promote assimilation and preserve the faith of the Conversos who had already converted to Christianity. More than a century later, their Hapsburg successors no longer seemed willing to believe that assimilation was possible and generally ignored evidence to the contrary.
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  Even as these events were unfolding in Castile, the expulsion machinery was being secretly assembled in Aragon and Catalonia. In April, Agustín Mejía was dispatched from Valencia to Zaragoza to supervise the removal of the Moriscos from Aragon and Catalonia. By this time, rumors of the king’s intentions were so widespread that many Moriscos had already ceased working in the fields and begun to sell their property, while the Inquisition of Aragon had begun to express its concern that they would turn to banditry or rebellion if the expulsion was not carried out quickly.

  On May 29, the decree of expulsion was proclaimed throughout Aragon and Catalonia, and Mejía’s tercios landed on the coast and began to secure the borders and mountain passes. Cowed by this show of force, neither the Moriscos nor their aristocratic protectors made any significant attempt to oppose their removal. Even when Mejía’s soldiers deserted their posts in protest at their lack of pay, their officers were able to levy enough local replacements to proceed with the expulsion. Once again Philip solicited reports on the Moriscos from the Aragonese clergy, whose results confounded his expectations. Don Pedro Manrique, the bishop of Tortosa, sent an exhaustive list of the Moriscos in his diocese, listing each one by name and profession, together with testimonies from priests and nuns that described how they faithfully fulfilled all their religious obligations.13

  This report may well have spared the Moriscos of Tortosa the fate of 70,000 of their compatriots who left Aragon and Catalonia, the majority of whom passed through the nearby port of Los Alfaques. An estimated 22,000 Moriscos crossed into France in the heat of high summer, in an exodus that was witnessed by their archenemy Pedro Aznar Cardona, who described them “bursting with grief and tears, in a great commotion and confusion of voices, laden with their women and children, their sick, the old and young, covered in dust, sweating and panting.” The departing Moriscos were often mercilessly exploited and abused by their royal escorts, who even charged them money for drinking from rivers or sitting in the shade. Lerma issued orders prohibiting such behavior, but with expulsion now unfolding across the whole of Spain, the authorities were not always able to provide the Aragonese Moriscos with food and shelter, let alone guarantee their safety. The strains being placed on the expulsion system were evident in a letter to the Council of State from the captain-general of Barcelona, who complained that there were not enough rowers on his galleys that were supposed to transport the Moriscos “because a large number of those they had in the embarkation of the Moriscos had died” in Valencia.14