Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (27 page)
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Authors: Matthew Carr
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BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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Convinced by his advisers that the campaign against the rebels was stalling, the king accepted a proposal from Deza and his allies to allow the Murcian grandee Don Luis Fajardo, the Marquis of Los Vélez, to raise a private army at his own expense and undertake a new expedition against the rebels from the northeast. The appointment of this fiercely anti-Morisco aristocrat effectively divided the Christian campaign into two separate fronts, with little coordination between them. Crossing into the Alpujarras through Almería, Los Vélez quickly confirmed his reputation among the Moriscos as “the iron-headed devil” with a bloody assault on the Morisco mountain village of Félix. Armed mostly with stones, the Moriscos were quickly overrun. Many Morisca women preferred to leap from the mountains to their deaths rather than be taken as slaves. Others fell to their knees holding up makeshift crosses and begging for their lives to be spared.
Little mercy was shown as hundreds of men, women, and children were executed on the spot or tossed into the surrounding ravines, by Los Vélez’s soldiers, who killed even dogs and cats. “Oh terrible Christian cruelty, never seen in the Spanish nation! What infernal fury caused you to show such cruelty and so little mercy?” exclaimed Gínes Pérez de Hita, who fought with Los Vélez’s army. Pérez de Hita’s account of the war was often embellished for dramatic effect, but there is no reason to doubt the Goyaesque horrors that he observed at Félix, such as the Morisca mother lying with her five children, all of whom had been killed by the Christian troops. One baby had survived and was still trying to suckle on its mother’s breast, a sight that so moved the Murcian soldier-poet that he gave the child to some Morisca women to take care of.
6
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Compassion was generally absent from a pitiless conflict that Pérez de Hita called a civil war “between Spaniards.” Even as Los Vélez’s army moved across the eastern Alpujarras, Mondéjar’s troops had begun to rob and loot the Morisco towns and villages that he had placed under his protection. “It is hard to think of an outrage that the Moriscos were not made to suffer, harder yet to think of an author of these outrages who was punished for what he did,” wrote Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in one of many denunciations of a Christian soldiery that he regarded as an undisciplined rabble. To Pérez de Hita, Mondéjar’s soldiers were “the worst thieves in the world, destroyers and robbers who thought of nothing . . . but robbing, looting and sacking the Morisco towns.”
In one incident at Aben Humeya’s hometown of Valor, Christian troops under two of Mondéjar’s junior commanders killed a deputation of Morisco elders who came out to receive them and proceeded to sack the town, leaving with a sprawling baggage train of bound female slaves and mules laden with silks and jewels. In their greed, the Christian soldiers allowed their column to become dangerously extended and they were soon subjected to a deadly counterattack, in which Moriscos from Valor and the surrounding villages killed eight hundred Christian soldiers and freed their women.
One of the worst episodes of the war occurred on March 17, 1569, when Deza permitted members of the city guard to enter the Chancellery prison, where 150 Morisco prisoners, including Aben Humeya’s father, were being held as hostages. This incursion was supposedly justified by reports that the prisoners were opening and closing windows to send signals to the rebels in the Sierra Nevada in preparation for a jailbreak, but these allegations were almost certainly a pretext to rob the hostages, most of whom had been selected in the first place because of their wealth. For seven hours, Morisco prisoners armed with jugs, chairs, and bricks pulled from the walls fought Christian militiamen and other Christian prisoners inside the jail. By the end of the night, nearly all the Moriscos had been killed, and their property and cash was appropriated by the prison warden who had led the assault.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1569, this chain of robberies and massacres brought thousands of new recruits to Aben Humeya’s forces. There is no doubt that many Christians in Granada wanted precisely this outcome and saw a prolonged war as an opportunity to settle accounts with Morisco Granada and enrich themselves in the process. There were also alarming signs that the rebellion was beginning to spread beyond Granada itself. At the Morisco town of Hornachos in Extremadura, there were reports that even young children were receiving weapons training. In Valencia, a number of towns were placed on armed alert following rumors that Moriscos were stockpiling grain in preparation for an uprising.
In March, Philip was so alarmed by the deteriorating situation that he appointed his half-brother Don John of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles and his Belgian mistress, Barbara Blomberg, as overall commander of the Christian forces in Granada. An ambitious, charming, and foppish young man of twenty-four, Don John had only recently been presented at the Spanish court, and he was eager to make a name for himself after years of obscurity. He arrived in Granada in the middle of April at the head of an army of ten thousand troops, where he received an official welcome on the outskirts of the city from Mondéjar, accompanied by a detachment of cavalrymen resplendent in Moorish clothes and silks. Don John was also greeted by a procession of four hundred Christian widows and female orphans who had survived the Morisco massacres in the Alpujarras. Dressed “in simple attire and filled with sadness, watering the ground with their tears and scattering their torn blonde locks upon him,” as Mármol puts it, these women implored Don John to avenge the deaths of their relatives and children at the hands of heretics, in a stage-managed ceremony that was almost certainly arranged by Deza in an attempt to undermine Mondéjar’s conciliatory policy toward the Moriscos.
Don John entered the city to a rapturous welcome from the Christian population and made his way to the Chancellery offices, or the Houses of Misfortune, as the Moriscos called them, where he was welcomed by the president himself. To the Deza clique, the arrival of Don John’s army was a giant step toward the destruction of Morisco Granada, and in April Don John agreed to Deza’s proposal to deport the entire population of the Albaicín from the capital as a security measure. This proposal was opposed by Mondéjar and, more surprisingly, by Archbishop Guerrero, on economic, logistical, and moral grounds, but it was approved by Philip himself.
On June 23, Christian soldiers poured into the Albaicín, knocking on doors and ordering all Morisco men between the ages of ten and sixty to assemble in the Granada Royal Hospital the following day. The next morning, Mondéjar and the Morisco noble Alonso de Granada Venegas rode through the streets in an attempt to calm the panic-stricken population, as the men were rounded up. Some 3,500 Morisco men were deported from the city and led away to Andalusia and Castile. Even Mármol, who was in no way sympathetic to the Moriscos, was moved by the sight of “so many men of all ages, their heads lowered, their hands tied and their faces bathed with tears, with so much pain and sadness on leaving their pleasant homes, their families, their homeland,” with no idea where they were being taken.
Morisca women were allowed to remain temporarily, to give them time to sell their property and possessions, but they soon followed in separate batches. “Those who had known them when they were thriving mistresses of their households could not but help feeling the greatest compassion,” wrote Hurtado de Mendoza, who watched them leave. Many of these women were never reunited with their families, as their escorts kidnapped them en route and sold them into slavery. They left behind them a gutted community inhabited only by a handful of wealthy Morisco merchants and servants of Christians, the last remnants of one of the oldest and most celebrated Muslim neighborhoods in Spain.
Despite these events, the tide of the revolt outside the capital appeared to be turning in favor of the rebels. In May 1569, Aben Humeya personally led a force of ten thousand Moriscos in a mass attack on the Marquis of Los Vélez’s camp at the town of Berja. Though the attack was repulsed, it was an indication of the new strength and confidence of Aben Humeya’s forces. Increasingly the Moriscos were behaving like a disciplined guerrilla army, with their own commanders, companies, and military districts. In some parts of the Alpujarras, the rebels were so secure that they were able to grow their crops without fear of reprisal, using smoke signals to announce the approach of Christian armies.
Isolated or poorly protected Christian columns traveling through the Alpujarras were likely to be subjected to coordinated ambushes, in which drums, horns, and trumpets would be followed by the appearance of white-turbaned Moriscos armed with anything from scimitars and haquebuses to crossbows with poison arrows, knives, and rocks. Some rebel towns, such as Ugíjar, were transformed once again into North African souks, where weapons and merchandise from the Maghreb were sold openly. Despite the Spanish naval blockade, corsairs continued to land regularly on the coast to exchange weapons, ammunition, and supplies for Christian captives—a traffic that was summed up by the Moriscos in the dictum “one Christian, one musket.”
The rebel ranks also included volunteers from North Africa, as foreign Muslim soldiers fought in significant numbers on Spanish soil for the first time in centuries. In August, the Morisco commander Hernando el Habbaqui returned from Algiers with hundreds of volunteers, after Ochiali granted a pardon to criminals or fugitives from the law willing to fight as
gazis
, or holy warriors, on the Islamic frontier. These recruits also included experienced Turkish soldiers and Berber mujahideen, who wore garlands of flowers and white clothing as they went into battle, an indication of their willingness to achieve martyrdom in war against the infidel. Approximately 4,000 Turkish and Berber fighters participated at various times alongside the Morisco forces, whose numbers have been estimated at anything from 25,000 to 45,000 fighters at the peak of the rebellion. The exact number of armed fighters and civilian supporters was never clear, since many women also fought and died alongside their menfolk, using whatever weapons were available. One Christian eyewitness observed Morisca women in a battle in January 1569 near Almería fighting only with “stones and roasting sticks.” At Félix, Morisca women threw dust in the faces of Christian cavalrymen and tore at the bellies of their horses with knives.
7
gazis
, or holy warriors, on the Islamic frontier. These recruits also included experienced Turkish soldiers and Berber mujahideen, who wore garlands of flowers and white clothing as they went into battle, an indication of their willingness to achieve martyrdom in war against the infidel. Approximately 4,000 Turkish and Berber fighters participated at various times alongside the Morisco forces, whose numbers have been estimated at anything from 25,000 to 45,000 fighters at the peak of the rebellion. The exact number of armed fighters and civilian supporters was never clear, since many women also fought and died alongside their menfolk, using whatever weapons were available. One Christian eyewitness observed Morisca women in a battle in January 1569 near Almería fighting only with “stones and roasting sticks.” At Félix, Morisca women threw dust in the faces of Christian cavalrymen and tore at the bellies of their horses with knives.
7
Despite the weaponry they received from North Africa, the Moriscos were always poorly armed compared with their enemies. They were also outnumbered by an array of Christian forces that included professional soliders, private feudal armies, and militia levies raised by town councils across Granada and Andalusia. Some Christians were motivated by revenge, such as the nobleman Hernando de Quesada, who founded a private army known as the Gentlemen of the Cross when his father was killed by Moriscos in the early stages of the rebellion. But many Christian soldiers were attracted to the war by the prospect of pillage, and in the absence of opportunities for plunder, their morale quickly plummeted. In the summer of 1569, the Marquis of Los Vélez and his army were stranded without food on the Granadan coast because corrupt Christian officials and quartermasters were siphoning off the supplies that they should have received. Reduced to catching fish to feed themselves, the marquis’s soldiers melted away, leaving him with less than a thousand fighting men.
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza blamed such corruption and maladministration on the “men in power who were only too happy to let the disorders grow in order that the crisis might get worse.” But these were the men whom Philip appeared to be listening to. The following month, the king recalled Mondéjar to Madrid, thus removing the most effective Christian commander from the conflict. Throughout the second half of 1569, Don John’s army remained inexplicably passive in the Granadan capital, while the rebellion began to settle down into a bloody stalemate. In general, the more mountainous areas of the Alpujarras were controlled by the rebels, while the plains and river valleys below were crisscrossed by Christian cavalrymen with lances, breastplates, and plumed helmets, and by rows of harquebusiers and pikemen, accompanied by baggage trains laden with goods looted from Morisco homes and processions of bound slaves and herds of stolen sheep and cattle.
In June that year, a detachment of soldiers from the Naples
tercio
(legion) arrived in Granada, under the command of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Luis de Requesens. Based mostly outside Spain, the veteran Spanish soldiers who filled the companies of
tercios
were probably the toughest and most efficient fighting men in the world at the time, and they soon demonstrated their prowess with an assault on the Morisco fortress of Frigiliana in the bleak highlands of the Sierra of Bentomiz. In the desperate battle that followed, Morisco men and women rolled boulders and millstones with protruding timbers down on the soldiers, before the fort was successfully stormed and the customary bloody retribution enacted on the survivors.
tercio
(legion) arrived in Granada, under the command of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Luis de Requesens. Based mostly outside Spain, the veteran Spanish soldiers who filled the companies of
tercios
were probably the toughest and most efficient fighting men in the world at the time, and they soon demonstrated their prowess with an assault on the Morisco fortress of Frigiliana in the bleak highlands of the Sierra of Bentomiz. In the desperate battle that followed, Morisco men and women rolled boulders and millstones with protruding timbers down on the soldiers, before the fort was successfully stormed and the customary bloody retribution enacted on the survivors.
That summer, in the midst of this carnage and devastation, in an effort to raise the morale of his troops, Aben Humeya staged a series of games and festivities in Purchena, Almería, the seat of Boabdil before the fall of Granada and one of the few towns controlled by the rebels. These festivities are described in extravagant detail by Pérez de Hita with a delicacy and lyricism that contrasts strikingly with the hallucinatory violence that he depicts elsewhere. In his imaginative recounting, Purchena becomes a microcosm of al-Andalus, as the whole town is draped in silks and pennants, and Aben Humeya and his subjects gather in the main square to witness Turkish and Morisco captains participate in chivalrous sporting events. There are weight-lifting competitions and wrestling matches and prizes for the men who dance the most gallant
zambras
and singing contests for women. In one of these competitions, a “beautiful Mora” steps up to sing before the Morisco king, dressed entirely in black in mourning for her father and four brothers who have been killed during the war.
zambras
and singing contests for women. In one of these competitions, a “beautiful Mora” steps up to sing before the Morisco king, dressed entirely in black in mourning for her father and four brothers who have been killed during the war.
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