Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (38 page)

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Authors: Matthew Carr

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Not for the first time, this program failed to attract the finance or personnel that might have given it a chance of success. In February 1598, Pedro de Franquesa e Esteve, the secretary of Charles I’s reactivated Morisco Commission in Valencia, reported that many monasteries that had previously promised to send preachers to Morisco parishes were now refusing to do so, on the grounds that these parishes were so poor that their monks and friars would be forced to spend more time trying to feed and support themselves than preaching.
14
Whether Philip sincerely believed that the Moriscos could still be converted, or whether he merely wished to be seen to be fulfilling his obligations as a Christian king, it was a familiar story of worthy intentions followed by institutional inertia, and it did nothing to calm the hard-liners in the Church and government, who were demanding more urgent and radical solutions.
 
Whatever the broader social, political, and economic forces behind them, the most atrocious historical events are often decided during measured discussions among men of power in meeting rooms far removed from the human consequences of their actions. The official correspondence, minutes, and internal records on the Morisco question contain numerous examples in which Spain’s highest secular and ecclesiastical authorities calmly and unproblematically contemplated the cruelest and even genocidal solutions to the “problem” that obsessed them.
In 1584 one of the king’s officials proposed the removal of all the Granadan Moriscos in Castile to a reservation in the isolated flatlands of Sayago near the Duero River, where they would “forget the ferocity and pride that they took from their victories against us.” On May 22, 1590, the Council of State discussed removing Moriscos from all major Castilian cities and placing them in “villages and places of little importance,” where they would provide an annual tribute of rowers to the royal galleys. In February 1599, a Council of State memorandum listed a number of possible options for dealing with the Moriscos: galley service for males aged between fifteen and sixty; dispersing them in small numbers throughout Spain; allowing the Inquisition to act against them “with the full rigor of the law . . . with natural or civil death”; or “perpetual exile,” with the exception of children aged below six or seven years, who would be brought up in Christian seminaries financed through the sale of the property of “dead or banished Moriscos.”
15
Other proposals involved sending Moriscos to non-Muslim Africa rather than Barbary, so that Spain could not be accused of allowing them to become infidels; condemning all Morisco men between the ages of fifteen and sixty to the mines and galleys, leaving behind only women, children, and old people; or a general massacre of the entire Morisco population, like the punishment of a thirteenth-century rebellion in Sicily known as the Sicilian Vespers.
One proposal, which was first made during the 1581–1582 Council of State debates in Lisbon and later resurfaced in other official discussions, was to load the entire Morisco population onto ships without sails that would then be taken out to sea and scuttled, drowning their passengers. In a lengthy memorandum to Philip on July 30, 1597, the bishop of Segorbe, Martín de Salvatierra, suggested transporting the Moriscos to Cape Cod and Newfoundland, where a Christian garrison would watch over them as they died out in the inhospitable climate—an outcome, the bishop suggested, that could be facilitated by “castrating the men and sterilizing the women.”
16
This was not the only time that mass castration was considered. The possibility appears to have been sufficiently well known to appear in the condemnation of the Inqusition by the Exile of Tunis, who wrote that “some of them said that we should all be put to death; others, that we should be castrated; still others, that we should be given a button of fire in that part of our body so that we could not procreate again.”
17
It is not known what this “button of fire” consisted of, but there is no evidence that Philip’s officials felt any moral qualms over such methods.
As is often the case, these fantasies of extermination were facilitated by the distancing language used by these officials, which stripped the Moriscos of their human characteristics and referred to them only as barbarians, swine, heretics, and infidels who had to be “cleansed,” “finished off,” or “uprooted.” Spanish officials often echoed the imagery used by the Church to describe heresy in their depiction of the Moriscos as a diseased organ or limb that had to be amputed to prevent infection spreading through the living organism of Spanish society.
Such language enabled the statesmen and clergymen who discussed the Morisco question to contemplate even the most savage possibilities with equanimity. It is true that these genocidal proposals were not implemented, but they lowered the threshold of what was acceptable and made the physical removal of the Moriscos appear to be a more merciful alternative to mass killing, so that by 1597, the new bishop of Segorbe could tell Philip that the options for dealing with the Moriscos “can be reduced to two; namely, instruction or expulsion.”
18
 
The latter possibility always assumed that the Moriscos remained resolutely and collectively hostile to Christianity—an assumption that was rarely questioned in the Morisco debate. Official documents of the period frequently made the damning indictment “
todos son uno
” (“they are all one”) to describe the Moriscos, and the Spanish government appears to have taken this depiction for granted. The same picture of Morisco Spain has been repeated by historians who approved of the expulsion, such as the Valencian priest Pascual Boronat y Barrachina. In his copious compilation of documents justifying the expulsion,
Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión
(The Spanish Moriscos and their Expulsion, 1901), Boronat refers repeatedly to the failure of assimilation and insists that the Moriscos were both incapable and unworthy of Christianity, in a bigoted assessment of Morisco Spain that echoes the views of his idol, Juan de Ribera. Even such a sophisticated and humane historian as Fernand Braudel, who did not approve of the expulsion, has written that the Moriscos “remained inassimilable” and “refused to accept western civilisation” at the time of their removal.
19
Both Boronat and Braudel present the expulsion either as a justifiable response or a tragic overreaction to Morisco intransigence, even as they reproduce the monolithic image of Morisco Spain that was taken for granted by sixteenth-century officials and foreign observers. In 1595 the Venetian ambassador, Francisco Vendramino, observed that “In all the kingdoms of Spain, there are different kinds of people who are discontented with the government” and placed at the top of the list “the Moors, who have been obliged to convert to the Christian religion and are obliged by violence to live in that religion and feel an incredible vexation toward it.”
20
There is no doubt that many Moriscos did indeed feel this “incredible vexation” and were repelled by their enforced intimacy with Christianity. Nearly a century after their initial conversions, however, Morisco attitudes toward Christianity were often more varied and complex than they appeared.
By this time, even the most devout Muslims inhabited an Islamic milieu that had undergone dramatic changes since their initial conversions. Most Moriscos at the end of the sixteenth century had had little or no contact with the Muslim world outside their own immediate communities for years. Few of them attended a mosque or religious school, and even the most devout were often obliged to practice a partial and improvised version of Islam dictated by the difficult circumstances in which they found themselves. In 1583 the Valencia Inquisition itself noted that some of the Muslim burial rites that it tried to ban were not in accordance with Islamic tradition but consisted of “ceremonies that they have introduced among themselves.” If some Moriscos found moral and spiritual guidance within this broken tradition and continued to reject Christianity, others were unable to choose between Islam and Catholicism and sometimes oscillated from one to the other. There were also Moriscos who integrated elements from both faiths in their everyday lives, such as Francisca Sebastián, a Morisca from Teruel and the daughter of a Morisco father and Old Christian mother, who prayed regularly and took Communion but was arrested by the Inquisition because she made regular donations to the local community fund for the poor in keeping with the Islamic tradition of
zakat
(almsgiving).
Other Moriscos developed a sincere attachment to Catholicism. In Granada, Moriscos were killed because they refused to renounce their adopted faith. Elsewhere in Spain, Moriscos went to mass and heard confession and appeared to do everything that their new faith required of them. At the parish of Ildefonso near Valladolid, a wealthy Morisco named Lucas de Molina asked in his will to be buried in his local church and that two religious images and a “large paper of the Passion” be placed in his coffin. A Morisca woman from the same parish asked to be buried under the first row of pews in the same church so that she could be closer to the altar—a request that was granted.
21
Even in Valencia, despite Ribera’s pronouncements, there were Moriscos who showed a genuine commitment to Christianity. In 1582, a deputation of Valencian Moriscos sent a Christian representative, the Count of Maldonado, to the court in order to assure the king of their loyalty and implore him to provide them with a Christian education. In 1594 the Viceroy of Valencia reported to Philip that a Morisco graduate named Juan Nadal from the city’s royal Morisco school was “showing signs of a good and virtuous Christian” and “taking courses of theology.”
It is impossible to know how many Moriscos made this transformation, since many of those who did had no reason to proclaim their Muslim origins to the world. Yet these varied responses suggest not only that the Moriscos were capable of assimilation, even within the extremely narrow parameters presented to them, but that their forced conversions had not been entirely fruitless. We can only speculate what might have happened had this process been allowed to unfold over a longer period. To the end of his life, Philip continued to favor assimilation, however halfheartedly, though it is unclear whether he really believed that these efforts would succeed or whether he was merely reluctant to authorize the drastic solutions that had been presented to him.
In the last decade of the century, powerful voices within church and state continued to argue that the Moriscos had been given more time than they deserved and further efforts to evangelize them were fruitless. Philip may well have shared these beliefs, but if he did, he was unwilling to act on them. In 1598, however, his failing health finally caught up with him, and he withdrew to his monastic alcove in the Escorial, weakened by fever, arthritis, and dropsy. For fifty-three days, the king hailed by the Italian writer Tommaso Campanella as the Last World Emperor stoically endured an agonizing physical disintegration, before he finally expired on September 13 at the age of seventy-one. And with the country in mourning, the hopes for a definitive solution to the Morisco question now shifted to his successor.
17
 
“An Imminent Danger”: 1598–1609
 
Even the most momentous historical tragedies are sometimes precipitated by mediocre and even banal individuals, and there are few more glaring examples of this tendency than Philip III (1578–1621), the ruler who presided over the end of Muslim Spain. According to a legend propagated after the expulsion, on the day of his birth, a priest named Father Vargas warned a Morisco congregation “If you refuse to remove that damned sect from your hearts, know that a prince has been born in Castile who will throw you out of Spain.” This portentous destiny was not evident to Philip’s father, who once lamented to one of his courtiers that “God has given me many kingdoms, but denies me a son capable of ruling them.” Posterity has largely concurred with this negative assessment. Physically frail and intellectually undistinguished, Philip’s character was curiously blank in comparison with his more charismatic and driven predecessors. His most outstanding characteristic was a dogged piety that earned him the label El Santito, the Little Saint, among his subjects. This religious zeal was coupled with a taste for the more frivolous aspects of court life. Though Philip devoted some three hours a day to prayer and religious devotions, he loved masques, theatrical spectacles, music, card games, tournaments, and, above all, hunting, an activity he indulged in whenever possible.
Under his reign, Spanish court life was characterized by a new glitter and ostentatious extravagance that contrasted starkly with his father’s sobriety. Contemporary accounts of Philip’s court are punctuated with descriptions of hunting expeditions, civic receptions, fireworks displays, nocturnal illuminations (
luminarias
), and banquets, such as the sumptuous feast provided for the court at the palace of the Duke of Uceda in 1611, at which six hundred dishes were served and the royal entourage showered with gifts of gold, silver, jewelry, and perfumed water.
Philip’s reign is indelibly associated with his former tutor Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Marquis of Denia, (c.1552–1625), more commonly known by the title that Philip gave him, the Duke of Lerma. Twenty-five years Philip’s senior, Lerma was the king’s most intimate adviser and de facto chief minister, who embodied the new tendency of European monarchs to delegate their authority to a trusted individual or “favorite”—a position known in Spain as the
privado
or
válido
.

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