Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  The effective compromise that had existed since Charles V’s visit in 1526 ended in 1556. Many explanations have been produced for this sudden hardening of attitudes toward the Moriscos. Spain had a new king, and “what could be bought under Charles V could not under Philip II.” The rising power of the Ottomans in the western Mediterranean and the clear evidence of Morisco contacts with their coreligionists further heightened fears of the “enemy within.” The authorities began to hear reports that Morisco renegades in the mountains were beginning to form large war bands, and were attacking even well-armed groups of Christian travelers on the roads, and small isolated communities.22 The Inquisition throughout Spain became more active, and on May 4, 1566, the long-suspended edicts of 1526 for Granada were revived and strengthened. The newly appointed president of the Royal Chancellery in Granada, the supreme legal body in the kingdom, was Pedro de Deza. He had instructions to enforce the new decree to the letter. So that there should be no ambiguity or uncertainty, he had copies of the new restrictions printed and planned to publish them on January 1, 1567, in commemoration of the capture of the city by Ferdinand and Isabella.

  In 1568, Francisco Nuñez Muley, a Morisco and a sincere convert to Christianity, pleaded against the edict of 1567, which called for the summary abolition of Morisco customs and prohibited the use of Arabic:

  How is it possible to take away people from their native tongue with which they were born and brought up? Egyptians, Syrians and Maltese, and others speak, read and write Arabic and are as Christian as we are … All Moriscos wish to learn Castilian, but it is difficult if not impossible to learn Castilian in their remaining years. In sum the ordinance was contrived to ruin us. Imposing it by force causes pain to those natives who cannot meet such a burden; they flee the land.23

  When the Moriscos rose in revolt the following year, one of their leaders, Mohammad bin Mohammad bin Dawud, wrote a popular ballad that reminded his listeners of the contamination that Christianity had brought upon them:

  To adore their painted idols,

  Mockery of the Great Unseen.

  When the bell tolls we must

  Gather to adore the image foul;

  In the church the preacher rises,

  Harsh voiced as the screaming owl.

  He the wine and pork invoketh,

  And the Mass is wrought with wine;

  Falsely humble, he proclaimeth

  That this is the Law divine.24

  Each element—the clamorous bells, the owl (a bird of ill omen), the unclean wine and pork—reminded his readers and listeners that Christianity aimed to destroy them.25 Moriscos called Spanish priests “wolves, merciless thieves, characterised by haughtiness, vanity, sodomy, laxity, blasphemy, apostasy, pomp, vainglory, tyranny, brigandage, and injustice.”26

  The new decree had one clear intention. It was designed finally to obliterate the differences that allowed the Moriscos to maintain their separate identity. It systematically prohibited all those distinctions that defined their social structure. They were to learn Castilian within three years, after which Arabic would be forbidden in public and private. All documents written in it would be null and void—and this included any property document or contract. All Arabic books were to be submitted for inspection, and those deemed harmless could be retained, but not for more than three years. Moorish dress was to be permitted only for a maximum of two years, after which Moriscos would have to dress like Castilians. All Islamic personal and family names and all records of lineage were forbidden, as were all forms of traditional dancing and singing, called zambras and leilas. The most threatening provisions were the prohibition on Arabic documents and language, and the extinction of all marks or mention of lineage. For several years, the authorities in Granada had been examining title deeds and confiscating any land holdings that were not precisely as described in the deeds. Wealthy Moriscos saw the edict as a comprehensive means of stripping them of their assets, to the enrichment of officials and other Old Christians. The prohibition on genealogy cut to the heart of the social structure, for it would make marriages within the old clan system impossible.

  The edict was duly issued, and on the same day parties of soldiers entered Granada’s Moorish baths—prohibited under the regulations—and began to destroy them. It was clear that these new laws would not become a dead letter like earlier legislation, and hurried meetings were held in the Albaicin, where it was decided that unless the provisions were eased, the Moriscos would rebel as they had in 1499. Another decree was published ordering that on New Year’s Day 1568 all the Morisco children between three and fifteen were to be taken to the local priest, who would place them in a school where they would be taught Castilian and Christian doctrine. There were many delegations of protest to the president of the Chancellery, Deza, but he told them all that the king was resolved to save the children’s immortal souls and the decision was absolute. There were constant riots during April 1568, in the capital and in the mountains. There was a growing sense that an uprising was planned and the government issued orders to confiscate all the crossbows and harquebuses that had been licensed for hunting.27 The rumors were true, for Moriscos, with the sense of a tightening noose, had made comprehensive plans for a rising on New Year’s Day 1569, both in the city and in the mountains. Eight thousand men, dressed as Turks to arouse fear among the Christians, were to march on Granada, where the Albaicin would close its gates and begin the revolt. But such was the fear and hatred in the countryside that the rising began prematurely. Soldiers and local garrisons were massacred in the villages and small towns. By December 23, 182 places had risen in revolt. A raid into Granada itself was successful but ill-coordinated. The roots and strength of the rising were among the mountaineers of the Alpujarras.

  Yet by mid-February 1569, the marqués de Mondejar, who knew both Granada and the Alpujarras, had virtually suppressed the revolt. In each village he offered terms of surrender, and those that submitted were well treated. Those that did not were killed or enslaved. But then his concessions were overruled and he was replaced as commander by Don John, the king’s half brother. The Moriscos now realized that they were faced with death or enslavement even if they submitted to the king. So they fought on with increasing desperation and conceded each town or village only at a high cost in Spanish (and their own) lives. By the time that the last traces of revolt were put down, on May 19, 1570, the campaign had cost 60,000 Spanish dead and 3 million ducats.28 Moreover, as the Venetian ambassador Leonardo Donato observed, had the Turks sent their fleet to support the Moriscos instead of turning on Venice, they “would have kindled a flame almost impossible to extinguish and had the revolt extended to Murcia, Valencia, Catalonia and Aragon, Spanish statesmen expected half the Huguenots of France to pour over the Pyrenees.”29

  Not all the Moriscos in the Kingdom of Granada had joined the revolt, but those that survived unscathed were all treated in the same way. On November 1, 1570, the remaining Moriscos were told to assemble in their towns and villages.30 A detachment of troops arrived at each point of assembly, and split the population into groups of 1,500, each with an escort of 200 soldiers. Men and women were expected to walk, and to carry their children and old people. Behind them their personal possessions were piled in carts. As they headed north or west, to their destinations in Castile, they were expected to cover about thirteen miles a day. They were supposed to receive two good meals each day. In practice, the initial expulsion of more than 50,000 over poor roads and in bad weather proved impossible to manage or coordinate. By the time the Moriscos reached their destinations in Old and New Castile, at least 20 percent had died on the road between November 1570 and spring 1571.31 In all some 80,000 were uprooted from their hometowns and villages, and were resettled in communities that had no desire to receive them. A few were left, plus a host of bandits and Moriscos who fled to the mountains rather than submit to Christian justice. But this purgation had been achieved at an enormous cost, for a once prosperous region now became a burden on the Sp
anish state; Granada was effectively emptied of its former inhabitants. Even when repopulated with Christians from the north, the kingdom never recovered its prosperity.

  IN CASTILE, UNDER CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE, THEIR CHILDREN TAKEN from them to live in Old Christian families, the Granadine exiles still excited wild fears among Christians. The former Granadines attracted the special interest of the Inquisition wherever they were settled, and yet despite weekly visits from a priest, many still failed to become “good and sincere Christians.” The people of Granada still perversely followed their old ways, both in religion and in their supposed “wildness.” In 1573, a Morisco from Aranda on the river Duero, deep in the heart of Castile, told his local priests that “the Moriscos who were taken from Granada intend to rise up again and to take to the hills when the time is ripe.”32 The Moriscos of Valencia, Murcia, and Aragon represented an even greater danger, for they could unite with the Ottomans and guide the galleys from Algiers in their attacks on the Spanish coast. In 1580, it was widely rumored that the Moriscos in western Andalucia were in contact with North Africa and were planning a landing of troops from Morocco.33 The danger (built upon rumor and some evidence) seemed pressing and required an immediate solution.

  Barely ten years after the depopulation of Granada, Philip II and his advisers met in Lisbon to discuss the Morisco question. In 1580 Philip had gained the throne of Portugal, so that he now ruled all the lands of Iberia. But this achievement seemed threatened by the insoluble problem of the Moriscos. It was accepted that a complete and permanent solution had to be found, for Spain could no longer risk their presence. The king asked for suggestions. One proposal was that the entire Morisco population should be crammed onto old ships that would then be scuttled at sea, drowning all aboard. But the logistical difficulties proved insuperable, and the fleet was needed in Flanders. Over the next two decades other imaginative schemes were suggested as the king extended the inquiry. Another proposal was to work all the males to death in the galleys, to the great benefit of the state. Another, from a priest of Morisco origins, Durrical, proposed a stockbreeder’s solution: the king should command that “no Morisco shall marry a Morisca; but only with Old Christians. The Children will be brought up as Christians, while the adult males would not reproduce and the line would die out.”34

  In 1587 the bishop of Segorbe, Martin de Salvatierra, answered Philip’s request for a solution with a program of Swiftean audacity. In Salvatierra’s view it was too dangerous to allow the Moriscos, this “evil and pernicious people,” to go to North Africa, where they would only reinforce Spain’s enemies. The better answer was that all Moriscos, men and boys and all grown women, should be gelded or spayed, and then they could be taken to empty zones of the New World and left there.35 In the following year, Alonso Gutiérrez of Seville proposed a kind of clan system where each Morisco would be branded on the face with a mark, so that they could be identified and then set to work. If the numbers grew too great, some should be selected for castration, “which is what they do in the Indies without any great difficulty.”36 These procrustean solutions had one factor in common: effectively abandoning all hope of conversion and assimilation. While the immediate dangers were political—from the Turks and the Protestants—dealing with the Moriscos was essential because, as had been long suspected, they were by birth pernicious. The bishop of Segorbe bundled Jews and Moriscos together as dangers confronting Spain: “This abominable people is blind and contumacious in its infidelity by its pure malice and spirit of rebellion, as it was and is with the Jews, resisting the holy spirit.”37

  There was undoubtedly a political dimension that made fear of the Moriscos appear a reality rather than merely a phantasm. The idea of a conspiracy between the Spanish Jews and conversos and an external enemy (the Jews of Constantinople, the French, or the Protestants) was insubstantial, and although it occasionally surfaced, it had little or no foundation in reality. The Jewish conversos were pursued for sins of the spirit. But the connections between Moriscos and external Muslim enemies were real enough. A contingent of Ottoman soldiers fought with them in the Alpujarras, Morisco pirates raided the coasts, and the crime of “fleeing to Barbary” appears time and again in the records of the Alhambra, the military headquarters in Granada. Inquisitors ordered the “application of the cords,” or sanctioned the slow crushing and fracturing of the leg bones, to extract confessions of the full extent of Morisco intransigence. They learned that Moriscos, many of whom were peddlers or carriers, crisscrossed Spain, carrying with them news and sometimes Muslim books. They brought news of Christian defeats in the Mediterranean, which were greeted with joy, while Ottoman defeats such as Lepanto were received with resignation. Small communities, sometimes only a few families in an Old Christian town or village, or a Morisco living in the same house as Christians, learned the whispered prophecies.

  In 1569, in the midst of the war for the Alpujarras, the Inquisition in Granada extracted a confession from a Morisco called Zacharias. He told them that his people were sure that they were about to wreak their revenge upon the Christians. “They have learned,” the secretary to the tribunal wrote, “in the books and stories that they will regain this land, and the ‘Moors’ of Barbary will win.” All the Spanish towns in Africa would fall to them, and then the Moriscos believed “a bridge made of copper would appear at the straits of Gibraltar, and they would pass over, and take all Spain as far as Galicia.”38 Many of these prophecies were entirely new, not ancient traditions. The hopes of revenge grew from the recent successes of Islam elsewhere. Moriscos told themselves that “the Turks would march with their armies to Rome and the Christians will not escape except those who turn to the truth of the Prophet; the remainder will be made captive or killed.”39 The Moriscos seemed persistently to most Spaniards to pose a danger to the faith and a danger to the state.40

  It has been observed, however, that the point at which the Moriscos were expelled coincided with the lowest level of threat from the Ottomans in the Mediterranean for many years. The expulsion, though, was designed as a cure not for an acute illness but for a chronic disease. Cervantes expressed the popular attitude to the Moriscos when he wrote through one of his canine characters in his novella The Dialogue of the Dogs, “They are the slow fever that kills as certainly as a raging one.”41 While the Moriscos remained in Spain, so the argument went, the nation could never thrive. Better and more rational cases were made against the expulsion on economic grounds, but in a debate that extended over decades, those opposed to removing the Moriscos could not answer an argument that had no basis in facts and figures. For their enemies, the Moriscos were a disease of the body politic, and they had, like some evil humor, to be drained from it by any means necessary. Although the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was present in the minds of all concerned, the situation was not exactly parallel. In 1492, the line had been drawn, approximately, between believing Jews and New Christians of Jewish origin. In effect, the Jews went and the New Christians stayed. In recent years there has been an acrimonious debate as to whether the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was on the basis of race or belief. That question is still open; however, it is clear that the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609–14 was predicated upon the basis of race.42

  The polemic that the scholar Pedro Aznar Cardona turned on the Moriscos in 1612 was different from any past vituperation against Muslims. Moriscos were

  a pestilence, vile, careless and enemies of letters and the sciences; they bring up their children as animals without any education; they are dumb and crude in speech, barbarous in language and ridiculous in dress; they eat on the floor and live on vegetables, grains, fruits, honey and milk; they do not drink wine nor meat unless it is slaughtered by them; they love charlatanry, stories, dancing, promenading and other bestial diversions; they pursue jobs that require little work such as weaving, tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, and the like; they are peddlers of oil, fish, paste, sugar, eggs and other produce; they are inept at bearing arms and thus, are cowardly and effe
minate; they travel in groups only; they are sensual and disloyal; they marry young and multiply like weeds (malas hierbas) overcrowding places and contaminating them.43

  Not everyone agreed with him. The complex and often anguished debates recognized the injustice and sinfulness of expelling adult Moriscos who were sincere Christians and sending away innocent children. There were proposals that very young Morisco children should be kept in Spain and raised as good Christians, away from the corrupting influences of their parents. But it was eventually agreed, and as the impassioned historian of the expulsion Pascual Boranat y Barrachina later put it,

  the law of providence made its heavy weight felt, not only on the guilty individuals, but upon an entire people, on father and sons, on great and small alike: the sin of descent [pecado de raza], the sin of the whole nation that infused the [obstinate] prevarication of the baptised “Moors,” that could not be exculpated by the punishment of an individual, but only through the punishment of all those guilty of complicity in the crime and of solidarity with the common apostasy … The children were paying for the sins of their fathers.44

  He was expressing, centuries after the event, the still-violent feelings of nineteenth-century Catholic Spain toward the Moriscos. Of the decree of expulsion of September 2, 1609, he wrote, “We now come, at last, to the hour when the Moriscos root and branch [la raza Morisca] atoned for the interminable sequence of profanations, blasphemies, sacrileges, apostasies and political conspiracies within the breast of our dear country. Alea jacta est [the die is cast].”45

  The final decision was for expulsion to North Africa rather than genocide, and to that degree, humanity had triumphed over realpolitik. In exile, the Morisco resentment of their expulsion continued among their descendants. In the twentieth century, some families could still produce ancient keys and said they would open the doors of their old homes in Spain. In the decree, there were some concessions. Not all those of “Moorish” descent were required to go. Moriscos could leave behind children of up to four years to be brought up as Christians. Children of up to six years born to an Old Christian father and a Morisca mother could remain, and their mother with them; but if their father were a Morisco and their mother an Old Christian, then he would be expelled while they could remain. There were possible exemptions for those Moriscos who had lived only among Christians, and those who could obtain from a bishop and a local priest a certificate of their unimpeachable Christianity. These clauses were to salve the conscience of those who could not bear to punish the innocent.46 No time was allowed for Moriscos to make representations. The expectation was that the expulsion should be total.