Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  Like all administrative categories, the term Morisco concealed within it many subdivisions and local differences. Four generations separated the conquered of 1492 from those expelled in 1608, and much changed over that long period.2 In the old Kingdom of Granada, in the first year, there were initially few Old Christian immigrants, but by the 1560s these “repopulators” made up more than 45 percent of the population.3 Throughout Castile, Aragon, and Valencia, “Moors” and then Moriscos were viewed as the natural allies of Spain’s various enemies: Valencian Moriscos were seen as being in league with the North African pirates or the Turks. The Moriscos of Aragon, living in the foothills of the Pyrenees, were in contact with the French Protestant Huguenots on the other side of the mountains.4 In the eyes of most officials, Moriscos were an undifferentiated, menacing mass. But in reality the scattered communities of former Mudejars in Castile were very different from the large population in the Kingdom of Valencia, where in the highlands they formed the majority. In Granada the problem was, in Christian eyes, acute. This was a newly conquered country and this battle for the “hearts and minds” of the population was fought like an extension of the war. The objective was pacification.

  The two alternatives in Granada after 1492 were the cautious and painstaking approach offered by the archbishop of Granada, Talavera, and the robust strategy of the primate of Spain, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros. For Talavera, well-trained clergy, well versed in the language of the converts, would then bring them to Christ, but by persuasion, not force.5 Jiménez de Cisneros preferred to bring Moors as quickly as possible within the embrace of the church and then to use the Inquisition and other means of social control to prevent dissidence. Cisneros won the debate, and once forced conversion had taken place, the kingdom was divided up into parishes, and priests dispatched to the larger centers of population. There they waged a largely fruitless battle to turn token Christians into true Christians.

  The dilemma was not new. In the twelfth century, Peter the Venerable had already urged that Muslims could better be won for Christianity “not as our people often do, by weapons, not by force but by reason, not by hate but by love.”6 It is worth recalling that an example of a slower and more evolutionary model had already taken place in Iberia, but in Muslim Al-Andalus. There had been no systematic campaign of forcible Islamization in Spain after the Muslim conquest. Yet within two centuries the Christians of Al-Andalus had for the most part adopted Islam. The vigorous methods pioneered by Jiménez de Cisneros were dictated by political motives and they seemed to succeed in the short term. By law, and on paper, Islam was ended and the whole nation made officially Christian. But the instruments of control and repression ultimately proved inadequate. They could not overcome the passive resistance of the Granadine Moriscos, however strenuously they were applied.

  Surreptitiously, the Granadine Moriscos continued to recite the Holy Qur’an, gave their children Muslim names, and circumcised their sons. The authorities underestimated the Moriscos’ capacity to resist and attempted to destroy their faith by means designed to work on Christian heretics and Jews. Their first method of control was to eradicate the texts of Islam. In 1499, Cisneros had ordered that all copies of the Holy Qur’an and other religious works should be collected, and then decreed their destruction. This was a deeply symbolic act. While the Inquisition lit slow fires under the heretics and conversos of Spain, Jiménez de Cisneros provided his own auto-da-fé in the main square of Granada: he burned the holy books of Islam.7

  This was not quite the act of crass barbarism that it now seems. Cisneros was the greatest patron of scholarship in Spain, who almost single-handedly pushed forward the production of the Biblia complutense, which printed the texts of the biblical sources in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean” (or Syriac) in parallel columns. Just as Jiménez de Cisneros believed in the power of the written word and that Christianity would be advanced through this monumental edition of the Holy Bible, so he was convinced Islam in Spain would be mortally wounded by destroying its sacred texts. He was well aware of the reverence with which Muslims regarded the Holy Qur’an and the extraordinary esteem in which they held the Arabic language. The book burning was an essential part of his policy of accelerated conversion, in cutting off newly converted Muslims from the possibility of reversion. In his eyes there would be a natural propensity for Muslim converts to seek the light of Christ, and only the agency of “Islamizers” could draw them back into their old ways. There were no printed versions of the Holy Qur’an and the manuscript texts consumed in Granada could not easily be replaced.

  Certainly, the archbishop of Toledo’s biographers saw the book burning as a supremely potent and meritorious act, evidence of Jiménez de Cisneros’s determination (rectitud) to achieve the purposes of God. So they inflated the number of volumes to more than a million, an unlikely figure that allowed more than three manuscript texts for every inhabitant of the Kingdom of Granada. This total was more metaphor than fact, like the improbably heroic scale of early Christian victories over the infidel on the battlefields of the Reconquest. In the eyes of his advocates, Jiménez de Cisneros had accomplished a majestic triumph in a spiritual war being waged by every means possible. To find a parallel within Christian terms, we need to look to the Catholic horror and revulsion at the Protestant destruction of images and relics in the Netherlands later in the sixteenth century. The bonfire in Granada was an act of purposeful iconoclasm. It was also unsuccessful, because the books themselves were only the apogee of the Muslim structure of belief in Granada. The majority of the Morisco population in Granada lived not in the cities but in the country, where few of the people could read the texts. But the message was known and taught orally, rather as most contemporary Christians learned their faith by ear rather than by eye. So the true strength of Islam resided in the minds and memories of children. Since the days of the Prophet Mohammed they had learned the Holy Qur’an by rote. Thus even within poor village communities there was a human resource of knowledge.

  We are now beginning to understand the importance of the written Morisco texts, passed from hand to hand and copied, hidden from the eyes of neighbors and from the spies of the authorities. They were written in a variety of languages and scripts. Some were in Arabic, some in the Morisco dialect of Romance called alajamiado, meaning “foreign.” Sometimes alajamiado would be written in Arabic script and sometimes with a Latin alphabet. It suggests a community restricted in its use of Arabic, because to speak Arabic in public risked attracting the attention of the Inquisition. But the written script was created, so they believed, expressly for the writing of the Holy Qur’an. It was a badge of their heritage and identity, and anything penned in it was an act of faith. So the manuscript texts, in Arabic or in alajamiado using Arabic characters, were vital for scholars and for the unity of belief. But they were also prized throughout the Morisco communities as symbols of their hidden faith and true origin. The written and the spoken word were complementary. If the faith were transmitted only through memory and speech, over time this knowledge would become altered or corrupted. But so long as there were those who could read the verses of the Holy Qur’an, write them down, and pass them on, burning the books would have only a limited effect.

  The Moriscos were officially Christian, and monks and priests were drafted into the kingdom to bolster their new faith. For ten years, until 1511, powerful efforts were made to make these notional conversions real. However, they failed to make any tangible inroads with a population that evinced no positive interest in Christianity. Gradually the officials in Granada recognized that the Moriscos could be “Christianized” only by changing every aspect of their lives. In May 1511, and over the following years, sets of rules were promulgated to regulate Morisco life. These embraced all customs that had a specifically religious origin, such as ritual ablutions, marriage practices, methods of ritual slaughter. All Morisco infants were to have an Old Christian godfather and godmother. Every Morisco marriage was to take place with an Old Christian witne
ss.8 At the same time, attempts were made to stop the Moriscos of the city and the plain from fleeing to the “un-Christian” villages of the Alpujarras. In 1513, orders were issued that Old Christian men should not have intimate relations with Morisca women.9 Later, this hedge of restrictions was broadened to include the food Moriscos ate and the conduct of family life.10 In 1526, there was “a pause in the repression of the Moriscos.”11 Charles V came to Granada and ordered the building of a magnificent new palace, of pale stone and gleaming white marble, high on the hill over the city amid the ruddy walls of the Moorish fortress. When the emperor arrived, he quickly saw the scale of the social and political problems and he put in hand an inquiry into the position of the Moriscos. The report made it clear that they had not received proper religious instruction, and that they had been grossly exploited. As a result, it came to the startling conclusion that there were no more than seven true Christians among the considerable number of Moriscos interviewed.

  Charles, who prolonged his stay in Granada for six months through the autumn of 1526, sought to bring about a definitive solution. In the Edict of Granada of December 7, 1526, he ordered that forty major injustices inflicted upon the Moriscos be ended, but he also imposed many new restrictions. They were to be prohibited from using Arabic or wearing what was defined as Moorish dress. Women were to be unveiled. They could not wear jewels or carry any weapons; the doors of their houses should be kept open on Fridays and during weddings lest they engage in Islamic practices. And Muslim names were forbidden. Finally, he defined the meaning of the word and status of Morisco and he ordered a program of preaching and instruction under the aegis of the archbishop of Granada, Pedro de Alba.12

  This was Charles in the role of arbiter of the faith that he had assayed five years before at the Diet of Worms. Then he had been frustrated by Martin Luther, but his efforts were no more successful in Granada. However, the decrees generated revenue. Accepting a payment of 90,000 ducats for six years from the Moriscos, he agreed to a suspension of the punitive decrees, an arrangement that lasted (with several additional payments) until he abdicated in favor of his son Philip in 1556. It was, though, an unbalanced truce: in fact the instruments of conversion and repression were strengthened. In 1529 the Inquisition of Jaen was transferred to Granada and set up in a fine building in the city; formerly, the Inquisition in Granada had only functioned as a suboffice of the Inquisition of Cordoba. More and more priests were sent into the kingdom, and a manual for conversion was produced in the 1530s.13

  However, this increased pressure to convert had an unintended consequence. It heightened the sense of Muslim identity among the people of Granada, who developed particular skills in resisting the overwhelming power of the church. Through the half century after the first war in the Alpujarras, we can see two parallel and connected developments. On one side, there was frustration at every level within Old Christian society at the extraordinary intransigence of the Moriscos, most of whom, people held, were Christian in name only. More than that, they were seen to be becoming ever more dangerous. They seemed to be increasing in numbers faster than the Old Christians, and this impression was often true. This increase was put down to their inherent lustfulness. Even their virtues, like industriousness, now had a negative connotation. They worked hard, but only because they were avaricious: gaining money and never spending it except in their own community. In 1602 the archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, reflected what had long been the common view: “Since they are generally covetous and avaricious and love most of all to save money and not to spend it, they have chosen to take on the easiest jobs, shopkeepers, peddlers, pastry cooks, gardeners … they are the sponge that sucks the wealth out of Spain.”14

  But more than anything else they were seen to be vicious. Moriscos conspired with the external enemies of Spain, while inside the country more and more of them were retreating beyond the limits of the law, becoming bandits or highway robbers (monfies). At an official level, this frustration appeared in increasingly stringent legislation designed to break down the resistance of the Moriscos, but often, these laws were never put into practice. In Valencia, noble landowners relied on Moriscos to farm their estates and so protected them as far as was possible.

  The other line of development took place inside Morisco society. In Granada and in the rest of Spain, the Morisco community had been largely deprived of its natural leaders, who had departed for North Africa. However, a sufficient number of the educated and religious classes remained to sustain the fundamentals of Muslim belief, and the community also began to develop a new elite. Many of these men, like the scholar Alonso de Castillo, were genuine converts to Christianity, but nonetheless they did not lose their sense of connection to their families and origins.15 The Moriscos quickly became adept at occasional and reluctant conformity to Christian belief. When pressed, they would bring their children for baptism, but after the ceremony, returned home and carefully washed away all traces of the infidel’s holy water. Given Christian names, they never used them amongst themselves. If they attended Christian services, they said the wrong words or spoke at inappropriate places in the ceremony, pleading ignorance. Outraged Old Christians referred to this scandalous irreverence and grave offenses against the holy sacrament. Moriscos continued to give the alms ordained in the Qur’an, to say their prayers when possible, and had their children learn to read the holy books. When someone died the relatives bribed the grave diggers not to bury their Morisco dead in the churchyard but in open and unconsecrated ground. They had no truck with Christian authority. The confessors working in the Morisco community in Tortosa found that they completed their work extremely rapidly, because “when confessing them, they never reveal any sins so they find nothing to confess.”16 We can gain a sense of how they resisted from the formal decree issued in Ottoman-ruled Oran in 1563, which legitimated various compromises with the strict observance of their faith:

  Continue to pray, even if you may have to do so silently or by signs.

  Fulfil the obligation to pay the alms tax by whatever means of doing good to the poor, remember God is not concerned with externals, but with the inward intention of your hearts.

  To fulfil the laws of purification, bathe in the sea or the river; and if that is forbidden, do it at night and that will be as good as doing it by the light of day.

  Make the ritual ablutions before prayer if only by rubbing your hands on the wall.

  If at the hour of prayer you are compelled to venerate the Christian idols … look at the idols when the Christians do, but think of yourself walking in God’s path, even though you are not facing the qibla [the niche in a mosque indicating the direction of Mecca].

  If you are forced to drink wine, drink, but set yourself apart from all intention to commit evil.

  If you are forced to eat pork, do so, but with a pure mind and admitting its unlawfulness, as you must do for any other prohibited thing.

  If you are forced to take interest [forbidden under the laws of Islam] do so, purifying your intention and asking pardon of God.

  If you are being adjudged by infidels, and you can dissimulate, do so denying with your heart what you are saying with your words, which are forced from you.17

  Nowhere was the Morisco determination to resist stronger than on the issue of circumcision. Male Christians were not normally circumcised, while Muslims and Jews invariably were. It was a defining and ineradicable point of identity, an act of blood utterly unlike the pure and cleansing Christian ritual of baptism.18 It was prohibited by Charles V in person in Granada in 1526, except with the permission of the bishop or the senior magistrate of the kingdom. The penalty for circumcising was permanent banishment and loss of all property. Strong efforts were made to track down those who carried it out. Morisca midwives were officially forbidden and Old Christian midwives were instructed to report to a priest if they found an infant had been circumcised.19 But according to Bernard Vincent, the vast majority of males in Granada continued to be circumcised in the decades
between the first and second wars of the Alpujarras. Inquisition records in Valencia indicate that in three villages in 1574 almost 80 percent of the male population were circumcised. But whenever the authorities tried to discover who was responsible, they met with a wall of silence or misleading information. A Morisca in Valencia said she did not know who had done it: her son had been taken from her and when he was returned, he had been circumcised. Others blamed it on unknown persons or on those who were already safely dead. The Christian authorities sought to catch the circumcisers but usually failed; when they did succeed, the circumcisers often suffered the ultimate penalty: one was condemned to be burned alive in Valencia in 1587.20

  However, provided the Christian authorities did not seriously compromise their social and religious identity, the Moriscos remained outwardly pacific. They were content to wait, for they believed that they would be revenged on their enemies, who had been guilty of bad faith in 1499, breaking their sworn word. In Granada and perhaps elsewhere in the Morisco communities of Spain it was believed that the Christian dominion would not last forever. Under Christian rule the Moriscos continued to flout the legal prescriptions that hedged them about. In Christian eyes it was an increasingly insupportable anomaly, as by their dress, language, and demeanor the Moriscos seemed to spurn everything that was offered to them. The rise in hostility at a popular level occasionally entered the historical record. At one trial in Cordoba, an Old Christian was reported to have shouted at Moriscos in the street, “Dogs, who have burned the images and the crosses and the churches and put the Holy Sacrament in a cowpat.” Another cried out, “May these sodomites die who turn from the faith of Jesus Christ.”21