Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  On May 25, 1611, Caracena issued a savage ordinance that offered a reward for every Morisco brought down from the Muela dead or alive. A vicious manhunt ensued as Christian bounty hunters converged on these mountains and began bringing back Morisco heads to claim their rewards, before a Christian resident of Valencia named Simeon Zapata took it on himself to coax the Moriscos down without violence. Showing a humanity that was conspicuously absent in Valencia in those years, Zapata spent months roaming the Muela de Cortes alone and eventually persuaded the Moriscos to leave Spain voluntarily. Between January and February 1612, Zapata personally led these Moriscos down to the coast and sent his brother on one of the ships headed for Algiers to guarantee their safety.2

  In other parts of Spain also, Moriscos had gone into hiding to avoid the commissioners who had come to remove them and had returned to their homes when the royal officials had gone. Others had obtained certificates from local Christian officials allowing them to stay. These developments were a source of great frustration to the king and his ministers. Only days before the thanksgiving celebrations in Madrid, Philip ordered his cousin the Marquis of Carpio to carry out a new expulsion of the Moriscos in Seville “because it is understood that many have never left, and others who did so have returned and managed to hide.” In order to ensure that “this operation should be brought to a perfect conclusion to the service of God and of myself,” the king insisted that all these Moriscos should be expelled “even if they have an affidavit that they have lived as good Christians, because such documents are extremely suspect.”3

  In October 1611, Philip experienced a personal tragedy when his beloved wife, Margaret of Austria, died during childbirth. Before her death, Margaret founded the Convento de la Encarnación in Madrid, in thanksgiving for the expulsion. Philip never married again, and he remained unwaveringly committed to the task that she had supported so wholeheartedly. Lerma also had cause to ensure, as he put it, that Spain was “so cleansed of Moriscos that there should be no memory of these people.”4 Not only was his own reputation intimately bound up with the success of an enterprise that he had done so much to bring about, but his position at court was becoming more precarious. In 1612, Rodrigo Calderón, one of the most corrupt of Lerma’s creatures, was banished from court in a process that would ultimately lead to his execution. It was a significant victory for the duke’s political enemies and another confirmation of Lerma’s waning influence.5 These personal circumstances may have reinforced the determination of both men to “perfect” an expulsion process that had turned out to be more divisive, more damaging, and more complicated than either of them had foreseen.

  In the second part of Don Quixote, written after the expulsion, Cervantes offered a more sympathetic portrait of Morisco Spain than his previous writings on the subject, in the character of Sancho Panza’s expelled Morisco friend Ricote the Moor, a former shopkeeper in Sancho’s hometown. The two men unexpectedly meet again when Ricote returns to Spain from North Africa disguised as a Christian pilgrim in order to dig up the treasure he has buried outside his village. Ricote’s ultimate intention is to bring his wife and daughter from North Africa to Germany, since both of them are “Catholic Christians; and though I am not much more of one myself, still there is more Christian than Moor in me.” The Morisco shopkeeper tells Sancho of the “terror and dismay” that the proclamation of the king’s expulsion order induced among “those of my nation” and laments the disastrous fate of many Moriscos in North Africa, declaring, “We did not know our good fortune till we had lost it, and so ardently do almost all of us long to return to Spain that most of those—and there are plenty—who know the language, as I do, return and leave their wives and children over there unprotected; such is our love for Spain.”6

  There were many real-life Ricotes who succeeded in making their way back to Spain, despite the huge difficulties placed in their way. Consider the incredible odyssey of Diego Díaz, a Castilian Morisco from the town of Daimiel who was arrested by the Inquisition in Belmonte, Cuenca, in 1633. At his trial, Díaz described how he and his family received the order to leave Spain in 1611, when he was in his late teens. His family loaded their possessions on carts and traveled to Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France, where, Díaz told the tribunal, “I saw the sea for the first time, but the country was damp and cold, the language and customs foreign, we longed to return to Spain.”7

  Together with a companion, Díaz slipped back across the border, but the two Moriscos were soon arrested and spent three months in jail before being deported back to France. A few months later, he managed to make his way back to Daimiel, where he worked as a servant. In 1612 Díaz was arrested again and narrowly avoided a stint on the galleys by agreeing to sail with other Moriscos from Cartagena to Algiers. Deposited on a beach a few miles outside the city, Díaz records that he and his companions were well received by soldiers and local Muslims, who, “after comforting us and giving us food to eat, took us back to the city . . . they looked after us well, carrying those who were unable to walk on horseback, on good horses, letting the women ride” on a light saddle behind the man’s.

  On arrival in Algiers, Díaz claimed, he was forcibly circumcised, and later told the tribunal that he was so stricken by conscience that he sought out a Christian cleric to whom he confessed his “sin.” Díaz is not an entirely reliable narrator, and his story may have been intended to escape punishment and disguise a crypto-Islamic past. But there is no doubting his determination to return to Spain. After securing a passage on a fishing boat with a crew of Catalan and Aragonese Moriscos, he left Algiers and swam ashore on reaching the Spanish coast. He then made his way to Zaragoza and back to France in search of his father and brothers, only to find out that they had died or returned to Spain. Díaz then decided to travel to Rome, having been informed that his circumcision could only be pardoned by the pope. On passing through Avignon, he was told that he was in papal territory and that a pardon from the bishop or the papal nuncio would have the same effect.

  He eventually confessed to a Spanish-speaking friar, and returned with a certificate of absolution to Spain, where he worked as a butcher in various parts of the country before finally ending up in Belmonte, Cuenca, where he was denounced to the Inquisition for Mohammedanism by a disgruntled female servant. At his trial, Díaz pointed out, not unreasonably, that “if I wanted to observe the law of Muhammad I could be in Algiers, which is a land abundant in everything,” and he managed to convince his prosecutors to allow him to remain in the country.

  Many other Moriscos exhibited the same tenacious desire to return to their homes. Some traveled from North Africa to Europe and made their way overland. Others chartered ships to bring them to the Spanish coast. One English ship was intercepted near Alicante with a cargo of five hundred Moriscos. The captain, Thomas Taller, insisted that they “had made him come to Spain, even if they were enslaved, saying they would rather be slaves in Christian lands than live in those of Moors.” Taller’s suggestion of coercion was probably intended to save him from punishment, but he was nevertheless ordered to take his passengers back to North Africa. In May 1613, the vice chancellor of Aragon, Gaspar de Castelví, asked Philip how he should respond to a French captain from Algiers who had approached him as an intermediary on behalf of four hundred Moriscos who wished to return to Spain so that they could “live and die as good Christians.” According to the Frenchman, these Moriscos had offered to bring some Christian captives with them, in return for financial assistance from Spain to pay for their voyage. Philip’s reply was typically devious: he instructed Castelví to cooperate with this arrangement until the Christian captives had arrived safely, after which he was to “let the Moriscos go where they want, as long as it is not Spain.”8

  Moriscos caught returning to Spain faced a wide range of harsh punishments, from flogging and imprisonment to long sentences on the galleys and even execution. In June 1613, Salazar expelled eight hundred Moriscos who had returned to their homes in Almagro, La Mancha, after sentencin
g a large number of others to the galleys and the mercury mines. But even the most draconian repression was not enough to seal Spain’s porous frontiers, and Moriscos of all ages and both sexes continued to find their way into the country. Though some returned to their towns and villages, others were impossible to trace, since, as one of Philip’s officials reported from Málaga in November 1610, they “reside in any place where they are not known” and blended in with the local population “as if they were Old Christians.”

  In the summer of 1611, about 600 Moriscos were removed from the town of Villarubia de los Ojos in La Mancha and escorted to Madrid. In the course of the journey, 250 of them broke away from their escorts and occupied the vacant palace of their lord, the Count of Salinas, who was then absent from the capital, in protest at their expulsion. Though some of the more incapacitated Moriscos managed to secure exemptions through this protest, the remainder were marched through Burgos and into France. By the end of the year, nearly all these Moriscos had slipped back into Spain and made their way back to Villarubia, so that the authorities were obliged to carry out a second expulsion. Incredibly, many Moriscos from the town managed to find their way back once again, so that a third expulsion of Villarubia was carried out in 1613. Even then, according to the monumental study of the expulsion in Villarubia by the English historian Trevor Dadson, many of these Moriscos came back to their homes yet again and may even have succeeded in remaining in them permanently.9

  The king and his senior officials were particularly concerned by evidence that Old Christians were helping Moriscos to return to Spain or evade expulsion. At Villarubia, Christians refused to buy the vacated houses of their Morisco neighbors, apparently so that their former owners could return to them later. On the French border, Spanish officials sometimes allowed sick or elderly Moriscos back into the country and even gave them money and food for their journey. In some cases, landowners secretly allowed their former vassals to return to their estates, particularly in Aragon, where it was easy for Moriscos to slip across the border from France. In September 1612, Salazar complained to Lerma that many Moriscos were returning from France with encouragement from their former lords and complained of “the little care that the justices have shown in arresting and punishing them.”

  The government made various attempts to prevent such collusion. On April 20, 1613, a royal cédula (order) reminded officials throughout the country of their obligation to expel “all the Moriscos, men and women, who have returned or remained” and condemned the “diverse tribunals and persons” who had provided Moriscos with “sinister reports and false proofs” that had enabled them to claim exemptions. The following month, Philip was obliged to issue another edict, which condemned the “carelessness” of Christians who had allowed “Moors and Turks” to reenter Spain and demanded that all officials “of whatever quality and condition” fulfill the expulsion orders.

  The task of enforcing these instructions fell primarily to the indefatigable Count of Salazar, who assumed sole command of the expulsion in Castile following the death of Alonso de Sotomayer in 1610. Cervantes later paid an ironic tribute to Salazar’s role in the expulsion, when Ricote the Moor hails the man who “by prudence, sagacity and diligence, as well as by terror . . . has borne the weight of his vast project to its due execution; and our arts, stratagems, pleadings and frauds have had no power to dazzle his Argus eyes, which are ever on the watch to see that not one of us remains or lies concealed, to sprout like a hidden root in times to come and bear poisoned fruit in Spain.”10 The fate of many Moriscos was decided by these “Argus eyes” as Salazar rode back and forth across Spain, checking genealogies and local records in search of Moriscos who had evaded the expulsion, soliciting and overruling lists of Moriscos from local authorities that he deemed to be incomplete or inaccurate, and hunting for Moriscos who had returned to the country.

  Salazar was also determined to annul the exemptions that Moriscos had managed to obtain through local courts. Despite the Council of State’s orders that all such petitions were to be rejected, many Moriscos continued to challenge their expulsion on various grounds; some pleaded old age and infirmity; some insisted that they were good Catholics or pleaded on behalf of their Morisco husbands, while others denied their Moorish ancestry or claimed that expulsion breached longstanding legal agreements with Christian rulers that dated back centuries. These petitions were often supported by ecclesiastical and secular officials, who continued to challenge the government’s expulsion agenda and sometimes appeared to be actively undermining it. In 1612 the archbishop of Seville explicitly instructed his priests not to compile lists of “Old Moriscos” in open defiance of the king’s orders. In August of that year, the former scourge of Hornachos, Gregorio López Madera, informed Salazar’s secretary of a “very pernicious” priest in Villarubia de los Ojos named Father Naranjo, who claimed that there were no Moriscos in his parish. In the summer of 1612, the town council at Plasencia in Extremadura arrested one of Salazar’s own subordinates who had been sent to compile lists of Moriscos in their area. Despite Salazar’s protests, his official remained in prison for more than a year.

  For the most part, Christian opposition took more covert forms. In some cases, officials lower down the bureaucratic chain attempted to delay expulsion by asking Salazar for further clarifications or pointing out difficulties in fulfilling his orders. Some Christian men married Morisca women to save them from expulsion. In October 1612, Salazar complained to the king that many of these newly married Moriscas were then divorcing their husbands to take religious orders, with the collusion of monasteries and convents who were “selling entrances like a basket of pears”—a phenomenon that Salazar claimed was “destroying and scandalizing the Kingdom.”11

  The diligent count was often obliged to lean on “forgetful” officials whom he suspected of providing incomplete lists of Moriscos in their areas or to issue new definitivos (definitions) of what constituted a Morisco in order to counter the more positive assessments of local clergymen. Salazar also attempted to impose the king’s authority over the secular courts and justices, whom he accused of providing Moriscos with “false reports and other means” that enabled them to plead exemption. In November 1612, Lerma granted Salazar a special dispensation that enabled him to personally supervise all appeals for exemptions in order to avoid the “embarrassment, lengthiness, frauds, and confusions” emanating from the secular courts. Even armed with these extraordinary powers, this dogged and ruthless bureaucrat was never able to eliminate these activities.

  Not all Spaniards, it seemed, shared the ruthless commitment of their rulers to religious purity. Aristocrats, churchmen, and ordinary Christians all supported the expulsion with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But members of the same groups also opposed it. Some did not want to lose a source of income, some believed that the expulsion was unjust and un-Christian, others balked at the prospect of sending old people and young children to what they knew was certain death, and there were also those who did not want to expel their friends and neighbors. Conservative historians have often attributed the expulsion to an overwhelming racial or national imperative, but the collusion that Salazar tried to prevent suggests a very different picture, of an expulsion process that was instigated and implemented from above, and which continued to grind on year after painful year, long after the euphoria and triumphalism that had accompanied the great exodus in Valencia had subsided.

  The perfection of the expulsion was further complicated by the large numbers of Morisco children, known as Morisquillos, or little Moriscos, who remained in Spain after their parents and families had been expelled. In Seville alone, some three hundred children were left behind after the first wave of expulsions from Andalusia. In January 1610, Caracena warned Philip that many “boys and girls of lesser age” who remained in Valencia were at risk of being enslaved and recommended that these children be placed in the care of “rich persons of quality” until permanent homes could be found for them. In April of that year, the Cou
ncil of State heard that nearly two thousand Morisquillos under the age of seven remained in Valencia. Thousands of older children and adolescents were also scattered across the kingdom. Some of these children had been abandoned by their parents, others had been kidnapped as slaves or retained by Christian lords who saw them as a means of rebuilding their Morisco workforce. A number of children had been prevented from leaving—either by force or persuasion—by zealous Catholics who saw it as their religious duty to bring them up as Christians. The local authorities tried to keep track of these children, listing their names, ages, and distinguishing features in official registers, together with the names of their guardians, if they had any.

  A typical register from the Valencian town of Onil lists, for example, “Juan—three years old, white and blonde with dark eyes and large mouth,” whose guardian was a local Christian named Juan Molina; and “Alicia—3 years-old, small mouth,” and “Antonia—12 years, dark, large mouth,” both of whom were in the care of the Duchess of Mandas.12 Many of these guardians were female; their title Doña was an indication of their social pedigree, and the children left in their care were probably fortunate, whatever the circumstances that had brought them there. Many of the Morisquillos listed in these registers had no guardians, names, or even ages. Some were babies and toddlers who were identifiable only by their outstanding physical features.