Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (30 page)

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Authors: Matthew Carr

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Spain & Portugal, #Religion, #Christianity, #General, #Christian Church, #Social Science, #Emigration & Immigration, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #Islamic Studies

BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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Thus ended the last great war between Muslims and Christians on Spanish soil. Deza exulted in his victory and boasted that he had “disciplined Granada with blood.” He was rewarded for this service with the post of captain-general of Granada, in a final triumph over his rival Mondéjar. Deza went on to become a judge at the Valladolid Chancellery before Pope Gregory XIII appointed him a cardinal, at Philip’s request. The scourge of Morisco Granada moved to Rome and died a wealthy man. Don John became the great hero of Spain and the savior of Christendom, leading the Holy League in the crushing victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571, which ended the Turkish advance into the Mediterranean. Farax Aben Farax, the ferocious dyer-turned-bandit, was never found. According to one possibly apocryphal story, one of his comrades attempted to beat his brains out with a rock in order to claim the reward on his head. Farax survived, hideously disfigured, and lived out his life as a beggar, unrecognized and reviled wherever he went.
The soldier-historian Mármol Carvajal hailed the victorious conclusion to a “war for religion and for the faith,” which completed the efforts begun by the Catholic Monarchs to prize Granada from the “subjection of the Devil.” But the rebellion had left a smoking hole in Granadan society. War, slavery, and deportation had reduced its population by as much as 160,000. Hundreds of churches had been burned or otherwise destroyed, many villages and neighborhoods had been abandoned, and the economic life of the kingdom disrupted or paralyzed. The silk industry never recovered from the loss of the Morisco silkworm breeders and spinners. And despite a concerted attempt to repopulate the abandoned Morisco villages and farms with Christian settlers, much of the Alpujarras remained underpopulated well into the next century. Years later, church authorities in Granada and Almería were still writing to the government complaining of their poverty, caused by the lack of workers on their estates, and appealing for financial assistance.
Thousands of Moriscos managed to evade the deportations and subsequently made their way back to their former towns and villages. Some were caught and expelled again. Others managed to survive by remaining as unobtrusive as possible. Morisco Granada had paid a terrible price for defying the orders of His Most Catholic Majesty. Long after the war was over, it was said, farmers and peasants in the more remote parts of rural Granada reported seeing phantom armies clashing in the sky and hearing the sounds of ghostly combat. For the Granadinos obliged to build new lives from scratch in the Christian heartlands of Castile, that world was now part of their past. And for all Spain’s Morisco populations, the rebellion and its cruel aftermath cast a long shadow that would continue to hover over them until they, too, were forced to leave their homes.
Part III
 
Catastrophe
 
Solutions have already been sought for all the injuries you’ve mentioned
and roughly outlined: for I’m well aware that those of which you say
nothing are graver and more numerous and no proper remedy has yet
been found. However, our state is governed by very wise men who
realize that Spain is rearing and nurturing all these Morisco vipers
in its bosom, and with God’s help they will find a sure, prompt and
effective solution to such a dangerous situation.
 
—Miguel de Cervantes,
The Dialogue of the Dogs
14
 
The Great Fear
 
It would be an exaggeration to speak of
before
and
after
the War of the Alpujarras, but there is no doubt that the rebellion marked a watershed moment in the confrontation between the Hapsburg monarchy and its Morisco subjects. To Moriscos, the Granada pragmatic and its terrible consequences ended any hopes of a de facto return to the Mudejar past. To Christian Spain, the rebellion confirmed the image of the Moriscos as dangerous “household enemies” inside its borders. For years afterward, Granada was cited in official documents as a touchstone of evil Morisco intent and a harbinger of worse things to come. At the same time, the difficulty in suppressing the revolt and the presence of foreign fighters on Spanish soil was a reminder of Spain’s strategic vulnerability. The anxious winter of 1569–1570, when Philip and his ministers had lived in dread of a Turkish invasion in support of the Moriscos, continued to haunt the minds of Spain’s rulers, long after the possibility of such intervention had receded. In 1571 Don John of Austria’s stunning destruction of the Turkish armada at Lepanto reawakened old fantasies of a united Christian crusade against Islam, but once again, Christian unity proved to be ephemeral.
In 1573 Don John added the conquest of Tunis to his list of achievements, but the following year, a Turkish fleet reconquered the city, together with the key Spanish
presidio
of La Goleta. In 1578 King Sebastian of Portugal led a Christian coalition against the sultan of Morocco, Abd al-Malik, which was supported by Philip against his better judgment. This ill-conceived adventure met with disaster at the battle of Alcazarquivir, when Sebastian was killed and his expedition routed by a Moroccan army in which “Andalusian militias” made up of Morisco musketeers from Granada played a major role.
1
This debacle ushered in a new era of strategic stalemate in the western Mediterranean. In 1581 a Spanish-Turkish truce ended the Mediterranean struggle between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, which had dominated much of the century, as both sides concentrated on more pressing priorities elsewhere. For years afterward, however, Spanish statesmen continued to believe that the Turkish sultan was waiting for the opportunity to strike at Spain once again or seeking an alliance of opportunity with the Hapsburgs’ Protestant enemies, at a time when Spain was constantly engaged in a theater of war that ranged from Flanders and northern France to the Caribbean and the shores of Spain itself.
Spain’s wars with Protestantism reflected a paradoxical combination of power and weakness that would have important implications for the Moriscos. On the one hand, Spain was the dominant European superpower, with an unmatched ability to fight multiple wars on land and sea. At the same time, its coasts and shipping remained vulnerable to Muslim corsairs and also to Dutch and English privateers, who engaged in piracy as a form of unconventional warfare. In April 1587, Francis Drake sank the Spanish fleet in Cádiz harbor in an audacious raid that contributed to Philip’s decision to launch his ill-fated invasion of England two years later. Nine years later, a fleet of English and Dutch ships sailed into Cádiz once again and pillaged and burned the city for two weeks without meeting any resistance or counteroffensive. These attacks humiliated the king and reinforced the siegelike atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Spain during the last decades of the century. English and Scottish merchants and seamen, French immigrant workers, and German visitors to Spain all ended up in Inquisitorial jails and sometimes on bonfires during this period. But in the aftermath of the great rebellion in Granada, official paranoia and suspicion were increasingly directed toward Spain’s former Muslims.
 
With the defeat of the Granada rebels, these fears were concentrated primarily on the three kingdoms belonging to the Crown of Aragon, which between them had the largest Morisco population in Spain as a result of the Granada expulsions. In 1570 the Venetian ambassador wrote of the “great fear among Old Christians” in Valencia that the Muslim population might “rise up and do as those of Granada had done.” These fears were exacerbated by a stream of reports of incipient Morisco conspiracies and attempts to solicit assistance from Constantinople and North Africa, which also percolated through Catalonia and Aragon proper.
The majority of these reports emanated from the Inquisition, which increasingly functioned as an internal security apparatus in addition to its traditional role as the enforcer of religious orthodoxy. In Aragon, inquisitors regularly reported secret contacts between Moriscos and French Protestants in the Pyrenean kingdom of Béarn. The evidence to support these allegations was often flimsy and based on what contemporary security agencies would call “chatter.” In 1575, for example, the Inquisition of Aragon informed the Suprema of an incident in the Aragonese town of Pina de Ebro the previous year, in which two Morisco tailors had been overheard discussing the imminent prospect of a Turkish-Protestant invasion of Spain. According to the inquisitors, the two tailors had been “laughing and showing great contentment” at the prospect of slaughtering the Christian population.
2
Some alleged conspiracies were based on unsubstantiated rumors that bordered on the fantastic. In January 1577, Aragonese inquisitors reported that four hundred Turks had infiltrated Aragon and Valencia in preparation for a Morisco rebellion. That same year, the Inquisition of Aragon claimed that a Morisco exile named Josu Duarte had slipped into Spain bearing a message from the Turkish sultan, written “in golden letters,” promising naval support in the event of a Morisco uprising. Neither Duarte nor the letters were ever discovered, nor was there any attempt at rebellion, but these reports were never officially refuted and reinforced an official image of Moriscos that was already taken for granted.
Other alleged plots were equally nebulous. In 1582 the Aragon Inquisition claimed that an exiled Valencian Morisco named Alejando Castellano had returned to his native land after two decades in Turkey in order to confirm certain religious prophecies that predicted a new Turkish conquest of Spain. According to the Inquisition, these prophecies claimed that Valencian Moriscos would participate in this Islamic reconquest, under the leadership of a giant local youth with “six fingers on each hand.” Once again, neither Castellano nor the six-fingered youth were ever found, and there was no Turkish invasion. In other cases, inquisitors conflated disloyalty with seditious intent. In 1578 the Aragon Inquisition cited rumors that Aragonese Moriscos were organizing bullfights to celebrate the defeat of Sebastian’s forces at Alcazarquivir as evidence of disloyalty and potential treason.
Reports like these were often used by Aragonese inquisitors to persuade the hesitant Philip to impose his authority—and their own—on the Moriscos and their insubordinate Christian lords. Rumors of seditious conspiracies and imminent rebellion were intended to instill anxiety, and they often succeeded, regardless of the quality of the evidence to support them. In January 1575, a French Huguenot named François Nelias was charged with heresy and tortured in the Inquisition dungeons in Zaragoza, where he eventually claimed to have witnessed Aragonese Moriscos and the son of the governor of Béarn plotting an uprising.
There is no way of knowing whether Nelias was telling the truth or telling his interrogators what they wanted to hear in order to save himself from further torment. Other plots were based on testimonies from spies and informers, who had a personal interest in keeping themselves employed. In 1582 a group of Moriscos was arrested and tortured by the Valencia Inqusition on charges of sedition following denunciations by a Morisco informant named Gil Pérez, who was subsequently indicted for perjury and blackmail. Equally phantasmal rumors of Morisco plots and rebellions spread periodically through the south of Spain. In Seville in 1580, the authorities carried out a series of arrests following reports that the Moriscos were about to rise up throughout Andalusia, with assistance from the Ottomans and North Africa. Similar episodes subsequently occurred in Jaén and Málaga, and again in Seville in 1596, where the authorities imposed a curfew on the city’s Morisco districts following the English assault on Cádiz, fearing that the Moriscos might rise up with English help. In another incident in the same period, the Count of Sástago informed the government that Moriscos in Aragon had mined the town of Calatayud with barrels of gunpowder with the intention of blowing it up, though no such preparations were ever uncovered.
Not all plots were due to official paranoia. There was credible evidence of contacts between Aragonese Moriscos and the rulers of Béarn, even if these contacts do not appear to have produced any tangible results. Valencian Moriscos did make occasional attempts to solicit arms and military assistance from the Turkish sultan for an uprising, but once again there is no evidence that such support was given. In the last decades of the century, the Ottomans were too embroiled in conflicts further east in Anatolia, Persia, and the Crimea to devote much attention to Spain or the Mediterranean.
3
Nevertheless, Spanish officials were often prone to the most alarmist and unsubstantiated scenarios regarding Turkish intentions. In the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of La Goleta, the Council of State received a panicky letter from an official in Valencia, which warned that the Ottomans were poised to launch an invasion from North Africa and bring about “the destruction of Spain from the same place where the Africans had done so” eight centuries before, with the help of the Morisco “enemies in our own houses.”
4
No evidence was offered to support these claims, but in any event the invasion did not materialize. Modern governments with far greater resources have often formulated policies on the basis of equally improbable threats and snippets of pseudo-intelligence, so we should not be surprised by the lack of skeptism shown toward these reports. Not all Spanish officials were prepared to take them at face value, however. In December 1576, the vice chancellor of Aragon, Bernardo de Bolea, dismissed the possibility of a Morisco rebellion in the kingdom, claiming that the Moriscos were outnumbered, lacking in fortified castles, and certain to be “discovered, broken up, and slaughtered” if they attempted to rebel.
5
At a meeting of the Council of State in March 1577, an Inquisition report of an imminent Morisco uprising in Valencia with Turkish support was dismissed by the assembled counselors, including the Duke of Alva, the hammer of the Flanders rebels, on the grounds that they lacked weapons, resources, and secure ports for the Turkish fleet. The viceroy of Valencia, Vespasiano Gonzaga was equally skeptical of these reports, which he described in a letter later that year as a “very suspicious curiosity,” adding, “Either I am deceiving myself or all this is a lie.”
6

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