Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  The Morisquillos were a source of obsessive concern to Philip and his senior officials, who were often torn between their religious obligation to bring these “innocents” up as Christians and a residual prejudice and suspicion that regarded even the youngest children as “bad seed,” with the potential capacity to “reinfect” Spain. Adolescents and older children were particularly suspect because they were considered more likely to have imbibed the customs and beliefs of their parents and more capable of reproducing them in the future. Such children were often watched closely by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities for telltale signs of the Islamic virus, such as aversion to pork. In March 1610, even the mighty Duke of Lerma expressed concern at reports of Morisco boys in Valencia who had been found wearing “half-moon medallions.”

  These suspicions were not necessarily related to the length of time these children had spent with their parents. To the more bigoted sectors of Spanish society, who believed that Islam was an inherent quality of Moorish “blood” or “spirit,” even children who had not reached the “age of reason” constituted a potential threat to Spain’s hard-won religious purity. Even babies might not be as innocent as they appeared. Because their origins and background were often unknown, it was impossible to know whether they had been baptized or whether the sacrament had been correctly administered. And even if the Morisquillos had been baptized in accordance with Catholic ritual, there was always an element of doubt that these children might carry the “memory of their sect” into adulthood.

  Would a Christian education be sufficient to ensure that these children “forget their birth and become perfect Catholic Christians who love our religion,” as Philip described it? How should they be looked after? Were the authorities morally obliged to provide these children with care, or was it more expedient, from the point of view of preventing “reinfection,” to expel them all to Barbary, regardless of their fate? These questions were given careful consideration by the clerics, theologians, and royal confessors from whom Philip sought guidance on this issue. In the spring of 1610, a council of theologians in Madrid concluded that Morisco children below the age of seven should not be expelled except for those who were already “so perverted in their sect” that their souls could not be saved. The council nevertheless reminded Philip that this outcome would be tantamount to a death sentence and that such an outcome “would not be in conformity with the holy zeal of Your Majesty.” Instead, they proposed that all the Morisquillos be given to Christian families who would bring them up as good Catholics and “make use of them afterward as servants” to pay for their upkeep and education. In March of that year, the Council of State proposed that the Morisquillos be pressed into the service of Castilian “prelates and gentlemen” and recommended that boys and girls be separated in order to prevent them from “marrying and multiplying”—a prospect that often preoccupied Spanish clerics and statesmen during these discussions. The council’s endorsement of slavery was not seen as appropriate by the king, but Philip himself often appeared unable to make up his own mind about the Morisquillos. The following month, he declared instead that Morisco children would be bought up and educated by Christians until they had reached the age of twelve, after which time they would serve their adopted families for an undetermined number of years “in compensation for the work and cost involved in bringing them up and educating them.”

  The difference between this form of domestic servitude and slavery was not entirely clear, yet barely a month later, Philip reversed his decision and announced his intention to expel all Morisco children over the age of seven from Valencia. But these orders do not appear to have been executed. In August, Archbishop Ribera ordered the rebaptism of all Morisco children in Valencia, regardless of their age, in order to resolve any residual doubts over the validity of their original baptisms. Ribera was widely criticized for what was seen as a breach of Catholic doctrine, but these rebaptisms were not necessarily intended to incorporate the Moriscos into Christian society. Some Christians appeared to have entertained what Jaime Bleda called the “simple hope” that these baptized children would die afterward—an outcome that would have allowed the Church to save their souls and eliminate any threat that these children might have posed in the future. Bleda himself was unconcerned about the spiritual salvation or physical survival of these children and advocated sending all of them to Barbary regardless of whether they lived or died.

  Whether or not Ribera shared the “simple hope” that these children would not survive, he was certainly reluctant to grant even rebaptized Morisco children the same status as Christians. In November, he proposed that Morisco children be “sold into slavery at moderate prices.” To ensure that they did not become “highway robbers and prostitutes” or run afoul of the Inquisition, Ribera recommended that their masters “correct them, whip them, and shackle them, to punish them, as well as love them and teach them useful skills.” Ribera also saw enslavement as a means of preventing these children from marrying and thereby ensuring that “the propagation of this evil breed in these realms will cease.”13

  We do not know whether these proposals were enacted, and the fate of the Morisquillos remains one of the mysteries of the expulsion. In the end, there was probably no single coherent policy. Some were undoubtedly hustled onto ships and sent to an uncertain fate. Some were enslaved or died in the care of the authorities before their fate was decided. Others, perhaps the majority, were brought up by Christian families and forgot, or never even remembered, their banished parents and the impurities in their blood that had once inspired anxiety and disgust among theologians and statesmen.

  The confusion surrounding the Morisquillos was another indication of the gulf between the abstract vision of religious purity pursued by Philip and his officials on the one hand, and the complexities and practical difficulties in realizing this objective on the other. By 1613, the expulsion had lost much of its original dynamism, and its administrative machinery had been drastically reduced. Though Salazar continued his attempts to root out Moriscos who had remained in the country or returned, some of Philip’s counselors were now anxious for some kind of closure and suspected that Salazar was dragging out the expulsion process to enhance his personal power.

  The last large-scale deportations took place in Murcia, where many Moriscos had gained a reprieve as a result of positive testimonies from the local authorities. The bulk of the Morisco population was concentrated in a cluster of villages in the lush Ricote Valley on the River Segura, which had been given by the Crown to the powerful Military Order of Santiago. Many of these Murcian Moriscos had served as scouts in the armies of Philip II during the War of the Alpujarras, and their proven loyalty to the state and their powerful protectors may explain why they were not removed during the early phase of the expulsion. Nevertheless their presence had not been forgotten. In 1612 the Council of State sent a priest named Juan de Pereda to carry out a full investigation of the remaining Moriscos in Murcia. In a detailed twenty-three-page report based on interviews with some fifty local clerics, Father Pereda wrote that “common opinion” held the “Old Moriscos” of Murcia to be “good Christians and faithful vassals” who complied with all their Catholic obligations.14 Not only did these Moriscos voluntarily receive the sacraments, Pereda reported, but they also made charitable donations to local monasteries, they engaged in “positive acts against the sect of Muhammad,” and with the exception of a few “old women,” they no longer spoke or remembered Arabic.

  Pereda found striking evidence of their devotion to Christianity in the villages of the Ricote Valley, where Moriscos had evolved their own penitent processions and funeral rites, in which “shoeless maidens dressed in white” carried heavy crosses and “covered their faces in mourning.” The priest was particularly impressed by the nocturnal processions in these villages, where Morisca women attended religious vigils in local churches carrying crosses, religious images, and candles and wept as their menfolk flagellated themselves and subjected their flesh to “d
isciplines of blood.”

  Pereda’s report appeared to bear out previous testimonies of a fully assimilated Morisco population whose Christianity was beyond reproach. Yet, as on previous occasions, the government in Madrid refused to accept conclusions that defied its own assumptions. The more intransigent advocates of absolute purity claimed that Pereda was the victim of an elaborate deception by the Murcian Moriscos and their Christian protectors and urged the king to expel them. The fate of the Moriscos in Murcia was debated on numerous occasions at the highest level, and in the spring of 1613, the Council of State voted to expel all the remaining Moriscos in Murcia, with the deciding vote cast by Lerma’s hard-line uncle, Bernardo de Sandoval. Philip accepted these recommendations, and in October, Salazar was summoned to the royal palace at Aranjuez and presented by the king with the signed edict of expulsion. In it the king claimed to have received “very true and certain information,” which proved that the Moriscos of Murcia “proceed with great scandal in everything” and that he had therefore resolved to expel them all.

  These accusations directly contradicted everything in Pereda’s report, and the king offered no new evidence to support them. But evidence was never a significant factor in the king’s attitude toward the Moriscos. Aloof in his gilded world of banquets, palaces, and country retreats, flattered and fawned upon by his courtiers and his favorite, Philip never saw the tens of thousands of men and women who left Spain on his orders, and he was unwilling to consider any version of Morisco Spain that contradicted what he already believed.

  On December 18, Salazar entered the Ricote Valley with some 280 soldiers from the Lombardy tercio and gave the Moriscos ten days to sell their property and leave. In January 1614, as many as seven thousand Moriscos were marched down to the coast, where the ships were waiting to transport them to North Africa. Some Morisca women managed to avoid expulsion by marrying Old Christians or entering convents; other Moriscos slipped across the border into Valencia and later managed to return. With this dismal and gratuitous exodus, the expulsion had reached its last act. On January 25, Salazar informed the king that “the expulsion of the Moriscos from the Ricote Valley and the kingdom of Murcia has been done as Your Majesty commanded and with this there is nowhere in the whole of Spain where anyone with the name of Morisco remains.” On February 20, in a memorandum to the king that was more weary than triumphant, the Council of State called for a formal halt to a process that its members clearly believed had outstayed its original purpose:The council has discussed the great importance to the service of God and Your Majesty that the investigations and jurisdictions relating to the subject of the expulsion should now cease and be taken as concluded. Our efforts should be limited only to preventing those who have left from coming back and punishing those who have done so by means of the ordinary justices.... The Count of Salazar should be ordered to stay his hand in this business and the justices should not admit any further Morisco investigations except those connected with those who have returned.... From today onward those who have not left Spain, even if they have court cases pending, should not be molested nor even spoken about, because if this business is not stopped, it will never end, nor will the injuries and inconveniences that would result from it.15

  It was not until August of that year that Philip was ready to announce publicly that “an end had been reached after expelling all the Moriscos” in a contradictory edict that also ordered that “All Moriscos who have not left or have returned must leave under pain of slavery in the galleys and confiscation of goods.”16 These instructions suggested that an end had not been reached after all, but Philip and his officials had clearly gone far enough. Only Salazar was reluctant to abandon his bureaucratic fiefdom. Well into 1615, he continued to press the king to allow him to conduct further investigations into the Moriscos who remained in the country, but these requests were not heeded. August 1614 marked the official termination of an expulsion process that had finally exhausted the patience of its progenitors. In less than five years, Spain’s rulers had sent some three hundred thousand men, women, and children to exile or death and eliminated the last traces of the Moorish civilization that had begun nearly a thousand years before, when the armies of Tariq Ibn Ziyad had first come ashore at Gibraltar.

  21

  The Reckoning

  Long before the expulsion was over, its supporters had begun a sustained attempt to proclaim it as a momentous achievement to the Spanish population and the wider world. From the point of view of the Hapsburg court, publicity was crucial to the honor and “reputation” that it hoped to obtain from the expulsion. In 1610, Philip commissioned a series of narrative paintings from Valencian artists depicting key events from the expulsion, which were copied and presented as gifts to the leading officials responsible. Between 1611 and 1618, twenty-three books and manuscripts were published on the expulsion, from prose chronicles and justifications to anonymous poetic narratives, in addition to a plethora of anonymous broadsheets and popular verses known as literatura de cordel, “string literature,” so called because these cheaply printed pamphlets were displayed on strings in sellers’ booths at fairs and on street corners. Many of the more imposing books were written with the sponsorship of powerful individuals in the court and government, such as Jaime Bleda’s massive Crónica de los moros de españa (Chronicle of the Moors of Spain, 1618), which contained an unctuous dedication to Lerma, praising the duke for the greatness of his blood, for his “love of God and religious ardor in the destruction of the Mohammedan sect,” and for his role in encouraging the king to undertake “great enterprises against the Moors.”

  Bleda’s most expansive praise was reserved for Philip himself, whom he hailed as the “last and ultimate conqueror of the Moors of Spain.” Other chronicles of the expulsion were equally effusive. Aznar Cardona hailed “our angelic Philip, our king, guardian, and protector of the Spiritual Paradise of the Christian Church, tutor and pacifier of the Republic, defender of the oppressed, custodian of divine and spiritual laws.” Blas Verdú paid tribute to the “Lion of the House of Austria” who had miraculously pacified and purified his realms “without weapons, without violence.” The illustrated cover of Damián Fonseca’s chronicle of the expulsion depicted Philip as Hercules, slaying a Hydra-headed dragon symbolizing the “seven heresies,” whose seventh head was Muhammad. In 1619, according to the court chronicler Father Baltasar Porreño, Philip visited the Lisbon docks, where he was flattered with an allegorical masque drawn from classical mythology, entitled Fable of the War of Titans, which depicted the king as a victorious Jupiter who repels the “frightful intentions” of the Titans from Mount Olympus.1

  A number of writers based their depictions of Philip on the millenarian prophecies of the period and described him as the Emperor of the Last Days, the Hidden One, and the Lion of Judah, who was destined to unite Christendom in a cosmic conflagration that would usher in the Golden Age. Aznar Cardona urged Philip to follow his “victory of victories” by leading the “Sagittarian Spaniards” in the reconquest of Jerusalem, while Bleda exhorted the king to invest the treasures of the Indies in a holy war with the Ottoman Empire.2

  These panegyrics tended to magnify the stature of an indolent ruler whose experience of warfare was largely limited to watching “naval ballets” and jousting tournaments. Nor did the representation of the expulsion as a heroic “battle” reflect the brutally unequal confrontation between a largely defenseless Morisco population and the armed might of the Spanish state. Such representations to some extent followed the conventions of court flattery, but they also constituted a form of seventeenth-century spin and propaganda, which was intended to orchestrate public approval for an expulsion whose legitimacy was always questionable and whose consequences were rarely as positive as its supporters claimed.

  Even the most despotic monarchies have to be responsive to some extent to public opinion, and there is no doubt that the expulsion was not as popular as the Hapsburg court expected or wanted it to be. It generated an equal
ly divided international response. The English Catholic convert Sir Tobie Mathew, a regular visitor to the Spanish court, declared that the “Moors” deserved to be expelled “for their damnable and inveterate and universal hypocrisy in matters of religion, and for their daily and desperate practices against [the] Crown.” In 1611 the Venetian ambassador to Spain also expressed his approval of the expulsion and described the Moriscos as the “worst of people.”3 Other foreign statesmen were less approving. The English ambassador in Madrid, Lord Francis Cottingham, called the expulsion “a Cruelty never heard of in any age,”4 while French Chief Minister Cardinal Richelieu condemned what he called “the most fantastic, the most barbarous act in the annals of mankind.”5

  The response of the Papacy was also more tepid than the Hapsburg court desired. In 1610 the Portuguese Dominican monk Damián Fonseca was sent by Philip to Rome specifically to garner support for the expulsion from Pope Paul V, and Fonseca’s own apologetic was published in Italian before it was translated into Spanish in an attempt to mobilize approval for the king’s decision outside Spain. Even before the expulsion, Philip had been anxious to secure the Papacy’s approval, and a letter on September 16, 1614, to the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Francisco de Castro, suggests that he failed to achieve it in the aftermath. The letter appears to have been written in response to criticisms from Pope Paul that it had been a “hard thing” to expel Morisco children. To disabuse the pontiff of this notion, Philip instructed his ambassador to inform him of recent reports that “more than eight thousand Valencian Moors” had been well received and given employment in Algiers and Tunis, whose presence constituted firm evidence thatIf the precise diligence of the expulsion had not been realized in time, I would have found myself in the pitiful state of never being able to uproot the Sect of Muhammad from my Kingdoms. It was Divine Providence that assisted me and gave me the vision and firmness to follow it through. If those children had grown up, within a few years they would have increased the number of enemies of our Holy Catholic Faith.6