29. Cited ibid., p. 66.
30. See Smith, Christians and Moors, vol. 2, p. 94 (my translation).
31. In 1408, Queen Catalina, regent for the young Juan II, ordered that Moors should wear a blue moon on their clothes and, four years later, that no one should address a Moor with the courtesy title Don. She even decreed that all Moors and Jews should live within their own communities and should not work for Christians. But the decrees were not effective, and in 1418, the status quo ante was restored; see Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, p. 129.
32. This story is told in Nirenberg, Communities, pp. 146–8.
33. From the Siete Partidas. The Muslim and Jewish communities were even more anxious to preserve the separation of the communities.
34. This is the point that Gabriel Martinez-Gros raises against Pierre Guichard’s Structures sociales orientales et occidentales dans l’Espagne Musulmane, Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1977. Martinez-Gros regards an “Andalusian identity” as a form of Orientalism: “About the first hundred pages of Pierre Guichard’s book are devoted to defining the characteristics of “Occident” and “Orient” as a benchmark from which we can judge the society of Al-Andalus … The “Occident” is derived from the Carolingian epoch, where we return to the first centuries of the history of Al-Andalus. The “Orient,” by contrast, finds its essential framework and definitions in the studies of modern anthropologists, well versed in understanding the mountains of the maghrib, the marshes of Southern Iraq, or the deserts of Arabia, as if a sort of Eternal East existed, eternally preserved for good or ill within history.” He suggests that the evidence used by Guichard will not sustain the elaborate superstructure built upon it; see Martinez-Gros, Identité Andalouse, p. 117.
35. See Mikel de Epalza, “Pluralisme et tolérance, un modèle Tolédan?” and Jean-Pierre Molénat, “Mudéjars, captifs et affranchis,” in Cardaillac, Tolède.
36. See Lapiedra Gutiérrez, Como, pp. 67 sqq. Logically, Jews should also have been called kafir. No doubt they were, but more often it seems were referred to as yahudun or hudun; see Rubin and Wasserstein, Dhimmis.
37. See Lapiedra Gutiérrez, Como, pp. 189–247.
38. This usage referring to human beings defined, from a negative perspective, a xenophobic hatred of the “Other,” directed toward a barbaric and uncivilized being; it is a usage that has an obviously humiliating connotation. By contrast, the Muslim Arabic speakers possessed, implicitly, the opposite qualities—that is, they were cultivated, civilized; they did not abandon themselves to their brutal passions; they were formed by the constraints of an education and culture that taught them to control their primitive instincts; ibid., p. 193.
39. Abdullah Thabit, “Arab Views of Northern Europeans in Medieval History and Geography,” citing Shams al Din al-Ansari, Kitab Nukhbat al-Dahr fi ‘Ajaib al-Barr wa al-Bahr, in Blanks, Images, pp. 74–8.
40. A modern view is: “As regards the people of the Book [i.e., the Jews and the Christians] who do not accept the Prophethood of Prophet Muhammad bin Abdullah (Peace be upon him and his progeny), they are commonly considered najis, but it is not improbable that they are Pak. However, it is better to avoid them.” See section on kaffir, www.al-islam.org/laws/najisthings.html.
41. “Islamic tradition has long identified the baser human tendencies, referred to collectively as ‘nafs,’ with wild beasts such as the dragon or wolf”; see Renard, Islam, pp. 213–14.
42. For a remarkable and wide-ranging analysis of the “meaning” of the pig, see Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast. Despite its title, much of its content has a resonance for the reaction in Muslim societies to the pig. However a “sea pig” is not najis. See clarification of najis, www.al-islam.org/laws/najisthings.html.
43. Cited in Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, pp. 138–9.
44. Ibid., pp. 142–3.
45. Cited ibid., p. 140.
46. See Sicroff, Controverses, pp. 32–6.
47. Ibid., p. 35, note 37, citing Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorium unitatis Christianae.
48. Ibid., p. 26.
49. Pope Nicholas V condemned the Toledo decree as against the laws of God. I owe the recension of Christian attitudes to the Jews to Professor Robert Michael.
50. The range of occupations open to Jews was restricted.
51. Cited in Sicroff, Controverses, pp. 116–17. He found various manuscript copies of similar letters from the Jews of Spain to those of Babylon. The original texts were attributed by some authorities to Juan Martinez Silíceo, archbishop of Toledo.
52. This episode is described in Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 232–3.
53. Cited ibid., pp. 258–9.
54. See Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, pp. 363–4.
55. “Judaizers” was a term first used in the early church for a group that sought to hold Christianity to the Mosaic law and Jewish traditions. In the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, from the fifteenth century, it became a device to interrogate and control New Christians of Jewish origin. Benzion Netanyahu, in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001, 2nd ed.), has assembled a mass of evidence and argues fervently that “Judaizers” were largely a chimera, constructed to control the mass of converts and prevent them from taking their place in Christian society. The Inquisition presented the vision of a “Judaizing” conspiracy, but it is much more likely that many converts knew little of Christian doctrine and still lived within a culture that carried a strong resonance of their origins. On this view, see David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (February 2002), pp. 3–41.
56. See the works of Dechado Iñigo de Mendoza, Madrid: Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1902–28, 19:72.
57. See Edwards, Spain, pp. 222–3.
58. Cited in D. Nicolle, Granada 1492: The Reconquest of Spain, London: Osprey Publishing, 1998, p. 16.
59. Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra, Granada: Miguel Sánchez Editor, 1976, p. 19.
60. Ibid.
61. Edwards, Spain, p. 169.
62. Cited by Prescott, History, p. 191.
63. This was a Sufi image. For Shi’ites, each seed represented the tears shed for the murder of Hussein at Karbala. See Malek Chebel, Dictionnaire des symboles Musulmans: Rites, mystique et civilisation, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995, pp. 186–7.
64. See Ladero Quesada, Granada, pp. 171–4.
65. D. Nicolle, Granada 1492: The Reconquest of Spain, London: Osprey Publishing, 1998, p. 47.
66. But Ferdinand and Isabella were fortunate when Mohammed XII, known to the Spaniards as Boabdil, who was the son of Granada’s emir, was captured in a skirmish. They signed an agreement with him and thereafter fostered his growing sense of rivalry with his father.
67. It eventually succumbed in 1486 when an incendiary projectile blew up the arsenal.
68. Prescott, History, p. 258.
69. Ibid., p. 264.
70. “Nubdhat al-asyr,” cited by Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 299–300.
71. Prescott, History, p. 269.
72. Ibid., p. 282.
73. Ibid., p. 292.
74. Ibid.
75. Cited in Harvey, Islamic Spain, p. 321.
76. See Dupront, Mythe, vol. 2, p. 791.
77. Cited in Harvey, Islamic Spain, p. 290.
CHAPTER 5: ETERNAL SPAIN
1. Washington Irving, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, London: John Murray, 1829, vol. 1, pp. 648–50.
2. In El Escorial, the royal figures at prayer face the altar.
3. See John Edwards, The Spanish Inquisition, Stroud: Tempus, 1999, p. 88.
4. The account is by the Genoese Senarega, cited in Prescott, History, p. 322.
5. See Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, pp. 131–8.
6. This putative child of La Guardia was canonized in 1807.
7. See Yerushalmi, Assimilation, p. 10.
&nbs
p; 8. See Sicroff, Controverses, pp. 26–7. See also Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la edad moderna, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1955, p. 13. For the complex vocabulary linking pigs and Jews, see Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast.
9. See Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 314–21. The easiest source of the full text of the capitulation is in García Arenal, Los Moriscos, pp. 19–28.
10. Caro Baroja, Los Moriscos, p. 9.
11. Ibid., p. 12.
12. Caro Baroja indicates that most of the Muslim inhabitants appeared content with these arrangements.
13. See Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, “Spain 1492: Social Values and Structures,” in Schwartz, Implicit Understandings, pp. 101–2.
14. Columbus’s Journal, cited in Liss, Isabel, p. 291.
15. “The calamitous century” was how Barbara Tuchman described it in her popular book A Distant Mirror (1978).
16. See Philip Ziegler, The Black Death, London: Folio Society, 1997, p. 245. The comparison he refers to was made by J. W. Thompson in “The Aftermath of the Black Death and the Aftermath of the Great War,” American Journal of Sociology 26 (1920–21), p. 565.
17. Anwar Chejne observes that the term Morisco was less used than the traditional Moro, Saraceno, Agareno, etc. The term Morisco was also used earlier than 1502, as for example in the fourteenth-century Libro del buen amor. See Chejne, Islam and the West, p. 176.
18. See Arturo Farinelli, Marrano (storia de un vituperio), Geneva: L. S. Olschki, 1925.
19. Pérez de Chinchon, Antialcorán (Valencia, 1532), cited in Cardaillac, Moriscos, p. 355.
20. “Almost nothing is known about the history of Granada from 1492 to 1499, but this period has survived in the ‘folk memory’ as a golden age of peace and prosperity. Disputes over the interpretation of the terms of the capitulation were settled by Zafra to the satisfaction of both Muslims and Christians; Talavera made every effort to convert the Muslims through education and example, established a seminary to train priests in Arabic and in the missionary traditions of the church, and accommodated the new converts’ Muslim dress, customs, and language. This period of peace was possible because both sides were willing to live in mutual toleration of one another, an attitude rooted in tradition and in the personalities of [the count of] Tendilla [the military commander] and Talavera”; Helen Nadar, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979, pp. 157–8.
21. Alonso de Santa Cruz, Crónica de los reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1951, vol. 2, pp. 191–2.
22. See Lea, Moriscos, pp. 27–8.
23. He came from a Jewish converso family.
24. Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Historia del rebelión y castigo de los Moriscos del reyno de Granada (1600), Madrid: Sancha, 1797.
25. Ladero Quesada, Mudéjares, p. 77.
26. Cited in Liss, Isabel, p. 331.
27. See Lea, Moriscos, p. 461.
28. His brother served under Tendilla in the Alpujarras and went on to become one of the greatest soldiers of the age: Gonzalez de Córdoba, el gran capitán.
29. Ladero Quesada, Mudéjares, p. 81.
30. Liss, Isabel, p. 332.
31. Decree of May 12, 1511 (Seville), of Ferdinand the Catholic, authorizing new converts to use knives with a rounded point (cuchillos de punta redonda), Colección de documentos in-éditos para la historia de España, 113 vols., Madrid, 1842–95, vol. III, p. 568. The issue of bearing arms, whether for hunting or for other purposes, was a key area of contention between the Moriscos and the authorities. See Documents 1–6, 9, 11, and 13–17.
32. See Mercedes García-Arenal, “Moriscos and Indians; A Comparative Approach,” in van Gelder and de Moor, “The Middle East and Europe,” pp. 39–55.
33. Casas, Apologética, p. 1037, cited in Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1992, p. 212. See also Document 20.
34. See Casas, Apologética.
35. Ibid., p. 1039.
36. See Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamerica 1493–1810, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953, vol. 1, pp. 32–3.
37. There are well-attested cases of ceremonial consumption of human flesh, especially in early European accounts of the New World. They became an extremely popular form of literature, like Hans Staden’s True History of His Captivity (1557). But at roughly the same time, the nature of the body and blood of Christ, which formed the essence of the ritual of the Holy Eucharist, became hotly contested between Protestants and Catholics. It was established at the Council of Trent that for Catholics “the bread and wine are transformed by the ordained priest into the flesh and blood of Christ so that only the appearance of bread and wine remains.” The nature of this transformation was theologically complex, but it was clear that this was a “real” and not merely a symbolic transmutation. This has resulted in the notion that Christians also practice a form of cannibalism.
38. Tomás de Vio Cayetano, Secunda secundae partis summae totius theologiae d. Thomae Aquinatis, Thomas a Vio Cajetani comentariis illustrata (1517), part 2, 2.66.8; cited by Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1992, p. 214.
39. See Bartolomé de las Casas, Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión, 2nd ed., trans. Atenógenes Santamaría, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975, p. 465.
40. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 16–17.
41. Ibid., pp. 21–2.
42. Genesis 16:11–12.
CHAPTER 6: “VILE WEEDS”: MALAS HIERBAS
1. See Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 80–81.
2. See L. P. Harvey, “Los Moriscos y los cinco pilares de Islam,” in Temimi, Prácticas, pp. 93–7.
3. See John Lynch, Spain 1560–1598: From Nation State to World Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 313.
4. See Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 2, pp. 376–82.
5. Nigel Griffin makes the point that there was a constant shortage of competent missionaries, and many were being absorbed by the missions in America. See Nigel Griffin, “ ‘Un muro invisible’: Moriscos and Cristianos Viejos in Granada,” in Hodcraft, Mediaeval, pp. 133–66. He also observed that the records of the Granada chancellery and the archives of the Alhambra are “still incompletely utilized by historians.” This was certainly true when I was working there almost twenty years earlier. Before my time in Granada only K. Garrad (among Western scholars) had used the material in a systematic way. And Garrad’s splendid thesis has never been published.
6. Cited in Kritzeck, Peter, p. 161.
7. Ordered on October 12, 1501. The limited effect of his ordinance may be gauged from a decree of Ferdinand on June 20, 1511, issuing a pardon to Moriscos who had books in Arabic and ordering them to hand them over to the authorities. They were to examine them, to pass on the books of philosophy, medicine, and history, and to burn the rest; Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, 113 vols., Madrid, 1842–95, vol. XXXIX, p. 447.
8. See Document 21. There was a further decree in 1523 against attempts by Moriscos to bypass this provision. Then there was a further letter issued in 1530 on the enforcement of the regulations.
9. See Document 22.
10. See for example a copy of a 1530 letter from the empress in the archive of the cathedral of Granada that the Moriscos should alter their form of dress; Document 24.
11. See Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, Historia, pp. 25–33.
12. Decree of December 7, 1526, cited in Gallego y Burin and Gámir Sandoval, Moriscos, pp. 206–13.
13. See Document 23. See also Antonio Ga
rrido Aranda, “Papel de la iglesia de Granada en la asimilación de la sociedad Morisca,” Anuario de Historia Moderna y Contemporanea 2–3 (1975–76), pp. 69–103.
14. Ribera’s second “Memorial,” translated and cited in Hillgarth, Mirror, pp. 206–7.
15. See Cabenalas Rodriguez, El Morisco Granadino.
16. Cardaillac, Moriscos, pp. 36–43.
17. On this process, called taqiyah or dissimulation, and the mufti of Oran’s advice, see Chejne, Islam, pp. 24–5.
18. See Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, pp. 112–19.
19. The age at which boys were circumcised varied: “Jurists are not unanimous regarding the age at which circumcision should be carried out … Al-Mawardi suggests that circumcision be done at 7 years of age at the latest, but preferably at 7 days or at 40 days, except in case of inconvenience.” See Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, “To Mutilate in the Name of Jehovah or Allah: Legitimization of Male and Female Circumcision”; http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/600/610/617/Circoncision_anglaise.html#RTFToC18.
20. See Bernard Vincent, “The Moriscos and Circumcision,” in Cruz and Perry, Culture, pp. 78–92.
21. Juan Aranda Doncel, “Las prácticas Musulmanas de los Moriscos Andaluces a traves de las relaciones de causas del tribunal de la Inquisición de Córdoba,” in Temimi, Prácticas, pp. 11–31.
22. See B. Vincent, “Les bandits morisques en Andalousie au XVIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 1974, pp. 389–400, and Reglá, Estudios, p. 44. The military headquarters in the Alhambra at Granada received reports of monfies and Moriscos attacking fishermen on the beach at Velez Malaga in 1564 (see Document 10); of Christians being taken prisoner by monfies in 1566 (see Document 12); and of murders Moriscos are supposed to have committed in La Cuesta de Cebeda (see Document 7).
23. Cited in Chejne, Islam.
24. The full text is in Lea, Moriscos, pp. 434–7.
25. For these symbolic meanings, see Malek Chebel, Dictionnaire des symboles Musulmans: Rites, mystique et civilisation, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.
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