Read Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain Online
Authors: Matthew Carr
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Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (17 page)
BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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The emperor’s position was made even more explicit in an edict in April 1525, which declared that the Muslims of Valencia “were and must be regarded as Christians because on receiving baptism they were in their right minds and not insane and wanted voluntarily to receive it.”
7
In June of that year, Pope Clement VII released Charles from his oath not to convert his Muslim subjects by force. In September Charles ordered all the Muslims in Valencia who had not been baptized to receive the “water of holy baptism” voluntarily or oblige the Crown to “proceed by other means.” Two months later, he issued a general edict of expulsion, which ordered all Muslims in Valencia to convert to Christianity by the end of December or leave the kingdom. The Mudejars of Aragon and Catalonia were given an extra month to make a choice that was heavily circumscribed. Muslims who chose exile were not allowed to leave from the logical points of embarkation on the Mediterranean coast. Instead they were obliged to obtain passports and travel to the other side of Spain to the Galician ports of La Coruña and Fuentarabia, where they were only allowed to travel to a limited number of destinations, none of which included North Africa.
7
In June of that year, Pope Clement VII released Charles from his oath not to convert his Muslim subjects by force. In September Charles ordered all the Muslims in Valencia who had not been baptized to receive the “water of holy baptism” voluntarily or oblige the Crown to “proceed by other means.” Two months later, he issued a general edict of expulsion, which ordered all Muslims in Valencia to convert to Christianity by the end of December or leave the kingdom. The Mudejars of Aragon and Catalonia were given an extra month to make a choice that was heavily circumscribed. Muslims who chose exile were not allowed to leave from the logical points of embarkation on the Mediterranean coast. Instead they were obliged to obtain passports and travel to the other side of Spain to the Galician ports of La Coruña and Fuentarabia, where they were only allowed to travel to a limited number of destinations, none of which included North Africa.
These restrictions were partly intended to placate the Valencian seigneurs, who continued to reject the validity of the Germanías conversions. Even before its official publication, a deputation from the Aragonese Cortes (parliament or assembly) warned Charles that the “industry and prosperity of the land rested upon the Moors” and predicted that their departure would lead to economic collapse, but the emperor remained inflexible, at least on the surface. In December 1525, a deputation of Valencian Muslims traveled to Madrid in an attempt to get him to change his mind, and the following month, Charles concluded a secret agreement with these representatives in which he accepted an annual payment of between forty and fifty thousand ducats as a special “tax” or
servicio
in return for the same forty-year grace period. During that time the Moriscos of Valencia would be exempt from punishment from the Inquisition. A similar agreement would subsequently be extended to the Moriscos of Granada. The Muslim delegation appeared to have bought themselves a stay of execution, but by the time this news reached Valencia, many of their co-religionists had already abandoned hope in negotiation and begun to take matters into their own hands.
servicio
in return for the same forty-year grace period. During that time the Moriscos of Valencia would be exempt from punishment from the Inquisition. A similar agreement would subsequently be extended to the Moriscos of Granada. The Muslim delegation appeared to have bought themselves a stay of execution, but by the time this news reached Valencia, many of their co-religionists had already abandoned hope in negotiation and begun to take matters into their own hands.
Even before the proclamation of Charles’s edict, many Muslims had begun to leave Valencia for North Africa. Others began to prepare for armed resistance. As in Granada, the more recalcitrant Valencian Muslims withdrew into the more inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Others sealed themselves up in their towns and villages in expressions of defiance that were often short-lived. In the village of María, would-be rebels convinced themselves that a mythical Moorish warrior named Altafimi would come on a green horse to save them and promptly surrendered when he failed to appear. In other places, resistance was more tenacious. At the town of Benaguacil, ten miles inland from Valencia, the local Muslims expelled the Christians from the city in January and sealed themselves off behind their fortified walls, declaring their intention to “save their law.”
8
8
A Christian army was sent to the town from the capital with instructions from Charles to persuade the population to surrender in the first instance. When the leaders of the Benaguacil “parliament” insisted on safe passage for North Africa, this request was refused, and a siege began, which ended two months later with an artillery bombardment of the town walls. Following their surrender, some of the town’s residents claimed that they had been forced to rebel against their will by their religious leaders. Whether or not these claims were an attempt to evade punishment, the rebels were treated leniently, but such magnanimity was not always present elsewhere. The main stronghold of the rebellion was the Sierra de Espadán mountains in the north of Valencia, where thousands of Muslims had taken refuge with their families rather than accept their conversion. In this rugged and inhospitable landscape, the rebels dug trenches and built makeshift huts and shelters, stockpiling boulders and millstones with protruding logs to roll down on potential attackers. Supplied with food from sympathetic local villages, these rebels elected their own king, whom they named al-Mansur, the Victorious, after one of the most famous rulers of Muslim Córdoba.
Many of the rebels were vassals of the Duke of Segorbe, one of the most powerful Christian lords in Valencia, who was ordered by Germaine de Foix to lead an expedition against them in the spring of 1526. To the disgust of the authorities and the Valencian populace, Segorbe’s forces were repulsed with heavy losses, prompting dark rumors that the duke was more concerned with preserving his economic assets than he was with asserting the king’s authority. In July 1526, Muslim raiders from the Espadán attacked the Christian village of Chilches and ransacked the local church, reportedly making off with communion wafers. The reasons for this sacrilegious provocation are unclear, though the attackers may have been retaliating for the assaults on their own mosques during the Germanías revolt. In any case, a wave of vengeful indignation spread across Christian Valencia, as church doors were shut and altars draped with black cloth in mourning at this blasphemous outrage.
The subjugation of the rebellion now acquired the character of a crusade, as the papal legate in Valencia granted indulgences to all those who fought against the infidels. A new seigneurial army of three thousand was rapidly mobilized, supported by four thousand German mercenaries who were in transit through Barcelona. These soldiers advanced on the Espadán with much pomp and spectacle “as if fiery ovens had been lit in their hearts,” according to the Valencian historian Gaspar Escolano, bearing the city of Valencia’s official standard and accompanied by its praetorian guard, the Centenar, in their white silk shirts emblazoned with the cross of Saint George.
9
On September 19, these forces attacked the rebel encampment. Armed with stones, slingshots, and crossbows, the Muslims killed seventy-two Christians, but they paid a terrible price for their defiance, as five thousand prisoners were slaughtered or enslaved by Charles’s German mercenaries.
9
On September 19, these forces attacked the rebel encampment. Armed with stones, slingshots, and crossbows, the Muslims killed seventy-two Christians, but they paid a terrible price for their defiance, as five thousand prisoners were slaughtered or enslaved by Charles’s German mercenaries.
This massacre ended the resistance in Valencia. Though some Muslims escaped to North Africa, the majority joined the ranks of the Newly Converted from Moors. As in Granada, mass baptisms were accompanied by the consecration of mosques into churches and public burnings of the Koran and other Arabic manuscripts. The same pattern unfolded in the kingdom of Aragon and in Catalonia. By the end of 1526, the would-be World Emperor had managed to pull off the seemingly impossible task of eradicating the last outpost of Islam from Spain, while simultaneously retaining the labor force on whom the prosperity of his Aragonese kingdoms depended.
It was in many ways a less than signal triumph, in which conversions enacted in the midst of a seditious revolt had been granted official approval through questionable theology and outright opportunism. This outcome was not regarded with universal favor within Christian society. Bray de Reminjo, a Muslim
alfaqui
from the Aragonese village of Cadrete, near Zaragoza, later described the reaction of a Christian friend, a Carmelite friar named Fray Esteban Martel, to the news “that we had been sentenced to become Christians by force.” Summoned to his friend’s house from his mosque in Cadrete, Reminjo was served a lunch of pomegranates, Valencian conserve, and roast meat. “After we had eaten,” the
alfaqui
later recalled, “we entered the study of his father’s house, and with tears in his eyes he said to me: ‘Bray, Sir, what do you think of all this upheaval, and of the un-Christian way in which you are being used? For my part, I say, and it grieves my heart and soul to do so, that they have done you a great wrong.’” According to Reminjo:
alfaqui
from the Aragonese village of Cadrete, near Zaragoza, later described the reaction of a Christian friend, a Carmelite friar named Fray Esteban Martel, to the news “that we had been sentenced to become Christians by force.” Summoned to his friend’s house from his mosque in Cadrete, Reminjo was served a lunch of pomegranates, Valencian conserve, and roast meat. “After we had eaten,” the
alfaqui
later recalled, “we entered the study of his father’s house, and with tears in his eyes he said to me: ‘Bray, Sir, what do you think of all this upheaval, and of the un-Christian way in which you are being used? For my part, I say, and it grieves my heart and soul to do so, that they have done you a great wrong.’” According to Reminjo:
This friend was so moved by compassion for us that he never ceased to argue before prelates and councils against all those who had given their consent to any such thing and to inveigh against them. Together with many others he issued a summons to protest and to argue strenuously against His Majesty and his ministers. He would have done so to some effect if he had not died within two months. He charged me to pray for him if he should die, for when I visited him he was sick, and I wept when he died, for he was a loyal friend.
10
The touching tribute of this former
alfaqui
to a Christian friar he called “a great friend of the Moors of this kingdom” is another reminder of the more positive relationships between Christians and Muslims that had once been possible under the old order. Other Christians were less well-disposed toward the New Converts and regarded their continued presence in Valencia on the basis of insincere conversions as dangerous and prejudicial to Christian society. Some Christians criticized the moratorium granted to the Valencian Muslim delegation at Madrid, though the details of these agreements were never made public, and blamed Charles’s Flemish and Italian advisers for accepting it. According to one Christian legend, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Aragonese town of Taubet began sweating in protest at the “false baptisms” in Valencia, creating enough drops to fill a glass. But if some Spaniards were not pleased with these arrangements, Spain’s rulers could nevertheless take some satisfaction from the fact that Islam had ostensibly been removed from the surface of Spanish society. For the first time since the fall of the Visigoths, the call to prayer had fallen silent across Spain, and it would not be heard again for some time.
alfaqui
to a Christian friar he called “a great friend of the Moors of this kingdom” is another reminder of the more positive relationships between Christians and Muslims that had once been possible under the old order. Other Christians were less well-disposed toward the New Converts and regarded their continued presence in Valencia on the basis of insincere conversions as dangerous and prejudicial to Christian society. Some Christians criticized the moratorium granted to the Valencian Muslim delegation at Madrid, though the details of these agreements were never made public, and blamed Charles’s Flemish and Italian advisers for accepting it. According to one Christian legend, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Aragonese town of Taubet began sweating in protest at the “false baptisms” in Valencia, creating enough drops to fill a glass. But if some Spaniards were not pleased with these arrangements, Spain’s rulers could nevertheless take some satisfaction from the fact that Islam had ostensibly been removed from the surface of Spanish society. For the first time since the fall of the Visigoths, the call to prayer had fallen silent across Spain, and it would not be heard again for some time.
Part II
One Flock, One Shepherd
We are forced to worship with them in their Christian rites unclean
To adore their painted idols, mockery of the Great Unseen.
No one dares to make remonstrance, no one dares to speak a word:
Who can tell the anguish wrote upon us, the Faithful of the Lord?
8
A “House Full of Snakes and Scorpions”
Assimilation is a concept that can embrace a wide range of methods and meanings. It can refer to a two-way relationship in which the integration of ethnic or racial minorities is negotiated, rather than imposed, on the basis of mutual equality and respect for difference. But it can also describe a top-down process, in which a dominant majority demands the complete eradication of the cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics of minorities that it regards as inherently inferior and whose separate existence is regarded as incompatible with its own. In sixteenth-century Spain, assimilation belonged firmly to the second category. To Christian society, the conversion of its Jewish and Muslim minorites required not merely the complete abandonment of their religious beliefs and forms of worship, but the disappearance of everything that distinguished them from Christians.
As far as these ultimate objectives were concerned, Spain’s rulers were more or less unanimous, but there was nevertheless a wide spectrum of moderate and extremist opinion on how best to pursue them, which ranged from persuasion, evangelization, and positive inducements to coercion and persecution. Neither Charles nor his advisers had any illusions about the commitment of the Moriscos to their new faith, but they nevertheless saw the removal of the outward trappings of Islam as an essential first step to the permanent transformation of Spain’s former Muslims into “good and faithful Christians.” In the immediate aftermath of the tumultuous events in Valencia, both the ecclesiastical and secular authorities were inclined toward a more gradualist model of assimilation. This attitude was enshrined in the 1526 agreements negotiated between Charles and the Muslim delegations at Madrid and Granada, which spared the Moriscos the “full rigor” of the Inquisition on condition that they voluntarily complied with their new religious obligations.
The exact conditions of this grace period were never entirely clear to the parties involved and were subject to conflicting interpretations on both sides. In a letter to the Valencia Inquisition in 1528, Inquisitor General Alfonso de Manrique denied that a moratorium had been placed on the Inquisition’s activities and condemned “badly informed persons” for spreading rumors that the Moriscos had been given “license to live like Moors for forty years.”
1
In practice, Manrique and his successors generally accepted a policy of leniency, but the Inquisitor General was correct that the grace period was not intended as a reversion to the Mudejar status quo.
1
In practice, Manrique and his successors generally accepted a policy of leniency, but the Inquisitor General was correct that the grace period was not intended as a reversion to the Mudejar status quo.
These agreements were seen very differently by the Moriscos themselves, many of whom interpreted the absence of repression as a permanent dispensation rather than a temporary concession. Others may never have heard of the grace period or the negotiations that prompted it, but continued to “live as Moors” after their conversion because they had not wanted to become Christians in the first place. Many Valencian Moriscos were encouraged to “become Moors” again by their Christian lords and assumed that they would be protected by them. Over the next four decades, the incompatibility of these expectations would become increasingly apparent. Compared with the dramatic events that had brought the Moriscos into Christianity, it was a period of relative calm and inaction, but the absence of overt confrontation was to prove deceptive.
To some extent, the grace period was a recognition of the inadequacies of the initial conversion process. In a letter to the pope in December 1526, Charles admitted that the conversion of Valencia’s Muslims “was not completely voluntary and since then, they have not been indoctrinated, instructed and taught in Our Holy Catholic Faith.” The emperor’s suggestion that subsequent evangelization might compensate for the inadequacies of the Valencia conversions contained a strong element of wishful thinking, but such aspirations were nevertheless taken seriously at the upper levels of church and state. In theory, all Spain’s former Muslims were now subject to the attentions of the Inquisition, yet even the Inquisition Suprema (Supreme Council) recognized that it was unreasonable and even counterproductive to punish Moriscos for failing to meet their religious obligations when many of them had no idea what their new faith required of them.
BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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