Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (39 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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None of his contemporaries achieved the power and preeminence that Lerma attained during the reign of Philip III. Lerma only attended 22 sessions out of 739 meetings of the Council of State in the course of Philip’s reign, yet few important decisions were taken without the knowledge or approval of “the duke.” His ascendancy was symbolized in a 1603 portrait by Peter Paul Rubens showing Lerma mounted on a white charger—a heroic martial pose that was customarily reserved for rulers, not their counselors. The main source of Lerma’s power was his adroit management of the royal household though his position as the
caballerizo mayor
(the master of the horse). This position gave Lerma unrivaled access to the king and enabled him to weave an intricate web of patronage, appointing friends, allies, and family members to key positions in the court and government. Devious, highly intelligent, and charming, with a tendency to debilitating bouts of melancholy, Lerma was also notoriously avaricious and corrupt. Born into an aristocratic family of relatively modest means, he used his influence at court to acquire a vast fortune whose origins amazed and mystified his contemporaries.
Lerma used his wealth to found convents and religious institutions, to patronize artists and writers, such as Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and also to refurbish and build the palaces and hunting lodges where he entertained the king. His magnificent estates of La Ribera on the banks of the Pisuerga River in Valladolid were large enough to contain a palace, a religious retreat, an artificial lake with ornamental fish, and an open plain where Lerma staged mock battles, bullfights, and jousting tournaments for the royal family and court. Such hospitality was an essential component of the personal and political relationship between the king and his favorite. Despite Philip’s reputation as a lazy ruler who was remote from the business of government, affairs of state were often discussed during these private meetings in hunting lodges and summer houses at Aranjuez, El Pardo, and La Ventosilla. This overlap between the private and the public has made it difficult for historians to establish the decision-making process behind the expulsion or the role played by its principal protagonists.
Philip’s treatment of the Moriscos was greatly influenced by his devoutly religious wife, Margaret of Austria (1584–1611). Unlike Lerma, Margaret did not attend meetings of state councils or issue any orders in her own right, and her name does not appear on any documents pertaining to the expulsion. Nevertheless, the Cuencan priest and court chronicler Father Luis Baltasar Porreño later praised the “great insistence” of the queen that had made it possible. At her funeral in 1611, the Granadan friar Juan Galvano also hailed Margaret’s “holy hatred” of the Moriscos and claimed that the expulsion was due “for the most part . . . to Our Most Serene Queen.”
1
The “holy hatred” of Islam was not surprising in a German-speaking princess from Hapsburg Austria, where the Ottomans had remained a constant threat ever since the early fifteenth century. For both Margaret and Philip, their introduction to Morisco Spain took place in Valencia in January 1599 when the fourteen-year-old princess arrived by ship for her arranged marriage with Philip, whom she had not previously met. The princess was welcomed by Archbishop Ribera, who also conducted the wedding ceremony and presided over the elaborate civic celebrations in her honor. Afterward the royal couple were entertained by Lerma on his estates at Denia with an array of bullfights, mock naval and land battles, and theatrical spectacles, including a specially written play by Lope de Vega. Philip spent ten months in Valencia and Aragon with his queen, during which time he exchanged a number of letters on the Morisco question with Ribera. He also met the archbishop’s adviser Jaime Bleda. The presence of the ubiquitous Iago of the Morisco tragedy completed this small cast of characters that would play a crucial role in bringing about its brutal denouement a decade later.
 
The first years of Philip’s reign coincided with a change of course in Spanish foreign policy that would bring that final outcome closer. In 1598, shortly before his death, Philip II signed the Peace of Vervins with France, an agreement that allowed his son to sign a series of treaties with Spain’s enemies in northern Europe. The new emphasis on diplomacy was intended to win a breathing space for Spain’s exhausted population after more than two decades of relentless conflict in which the limits of Hapsburg power were becoming ever more apparent. In 1601 a Spanish expedition to assist Irish Catholic rebels against England ended in humiliation when Spain’s ships were sunk in a storm and their survivors killed or captured. An even greater disaster occurred that same year when a Spanish fleet attempted yet another assault on Algiers, in which dozens of ships were sunk in storms before even reaching the North African coast.
With the Spanish army of Flanders teetering on the verge of disintegration and the treasury barely able to fund its military commitments elsewhere, Spain signed a treaty with the king of England, James I, in 1604. Three years later, truce negotiations were opened with Dutch insurgent leaders at Lerma’s instigation, despite strong opposition from hard-liners who rejected any compromise with “rebels and heretics.” These military reversals were paralleled by the worsening social and economic situation within Spain itself. Despite the conspicuous consumption of the court and aristocracy, the early seventeenth century was a period of acute social distress for much of the Spanish population. These were years of hunger, famine, and poor harvests, of price rises and high taxation, in which many Spaniards were reduced to penury and town councils were overwhelmed by vagabonds and disabled or unemployed war veterans, many of whom had no means of support. Between 1599 and 1600, Spain was affected by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague, which killed an estimated six hundred thousand people.
Such periods of social crises are often accompanied by a search for scapegoats, and seventeenth-century Spain was no exception. In Castile, where the plague was especially virulent, the high death toll made fears of Morisco population growth appear more credible. In Valencia, fears of Morisco insurrection coincided with a general breakdown of law and order, in which priests and even adolescent children were convicted of assault and sometimes homicide over the pettiest quarrels, and bodies turned up in the streets on a routine basis. “As soon as night falls you cannot go out without a buckler and a coat of mail in Valencia, for there is no town in Spain where so many murders are committed,” wrote the French traveler Barthélemy Joly in 1603.
2
Joly attributed this proclivity for homicide to the Valencian climate, but the lawlessness and banditry were often seen by the Christian population as a specificially Morisco activity. Between 1602 and 1604, Juan de Ribera served as viceroy and attempted to restore the Crown’s authority with a harsh regime of hangings, floggings, and prohibitions on games of chance and the possession of weapons, but these efforts did not appear to have met with much success. It was a testament to the acrid relationship between the Valencian clergy and the Moriscos that Ribera asked for priests in Morisco parishes to be excluded from the prohibition on carrying flintlock pistols on the grounds that they needed these weapons to protect themselves even when they celebrated mass.
These years were also marked by continued attacks on Spanish coastal towns and shipping by Muslim corsairs and former Christian privateers demobilized by the Protestant-Catholic truces, who continued their activities on their own behalf and frequently operated from the same North African ports. Spain’s inability to prevent these attacks inevitably intensified official concern over rumors of seditious contacts between Aragonese Moriscos and French Protestants and reports of Morisco deputations to Constantinople, Fez, and Algiers seeking assistance for a rebellion. As was often the case, these reports were often less than reliable—or plausible. In 1602, the Inquisition reported that a group of Valencian Moriscos had visited the anti-Spanish king of France, Henry IV, and promised him the support of some one hundred thousand armed Moriscos, Jews, and disaffected Catholics if he invaded Spain.
These figures were almost certainly exaggerated by the Moriscos, if not by the Inquisition itself, and it is unlikely that Henry had any intention of responding to this invitation. Equally phantasmal conspiracies were often cited as evidence of the “imminent danger” that the Moriscos posed to the state. In September 1602, a Catalan monk named Friar Sebastian de Encinas warned Lerma that the Moriscos of Valencia had already organized themselves in secret squadrons and were engaging in military training in expectation of a “Moorish armada” that was due to invade Spain. No evidence was offered to support these allegations, and neither the rebellion nor the Moorish invasion materialized. Other contacts appeared to be more substantive. In 1604, as a gesture of goodwill, the English government passed on internal documents to Spain that revealed that discussions had taken place between the Moriscos of Aragon and the Duke de la Force, the governor of Béarn, regarding the possibility of an uprising with Béarnese assistance.
These documents did not reveal whether any attempt had been made to realize these aspirations, but they did nothing to dispel official suspicions of the Moriscos at a time when the Spanish Hapsburgs had begun to make a tentative attempt to reactivate the struggle against Islam in the Mediterranean. The failed Algiers expedition and Spain’s deepening involvement in Morocco’s dynastic civil wars were both products of a strategic reorientation that was often infused with the old crusading aspirations of the past. On December 24, 1603, a Valencian “Christian astrologer” named Francisco Navarro identified a rare astrological configuration known as the great conjunction, which he interpreted as a sign of the coming destruction of Islam, in which Philip III would lead an army of Spanish “Sagittarians” to retake Jerusalem and usher in the End of Days.
In the early seventeenth century, a number of religious prophecies, known as
pronósticos
, made similar predictions. Some texts attributed Spain’s recent military reversals to God’s anger at the continued presence of infidels and forecast a spectacular transformation in Spanish fortunes once the Moriscos were removed. As was often the case, these predictions were frequently accompanied by omens and portents. In 1600 the legendary church bell at the town of Velilla in Aragon was heard to ring without human assistance, a periodic miracle that was believed to herald great events and which some Spaniards saw as another sign that the expulsion of the Moriscos was imminent. Valencia, as always, was particularly prone to such phenomena, and the first years of the century were punctuated by reports of earthquakes of exceptional severity, hailstorms with stones the size of hen’s eggs, and the sighting of a “bloodstained cloud,” which Damián Fonseca saw as an expression of “the will of God, that the Moriscos be thrown out of Spain, and if necessary, by blood and fire.” In another incident, Fonseca described how a great “whirlwind” uprooted seven hundred trees before snatching two blaspheming Moriscos up into the air and hurling them to their deaths. In this atmosphere of crisis, recession, and heady millenarian expectation, the Morisco question rose steadily up the official agenda, as Spain’s rulers moved ever closer toward the drastic remedy that their predecessors had resisted.
 
From the first years of his reign, Philip and his ministers received a stream of reports, memoranda, and opinion papers on the Morisco problem. In March 1600, Inquisitor General Fernando Niño de Guevara recommended that a new effort be made to provide the Moriscos with religious instruction. If the Moriscos failed to respond, Guevara informed the king, it would then be legitimate to declare them “common enemies of God and Your Majesty” and use them as rowers on the galleys or slave labor in the mines, not only in Spain, but also in the Indies, where “the Indians have nearly run out.”
3
From Valencia, Juan de Ribera also made a determined effort to bring the gravity of the Morisco problem to the king’s attention. In May 1599, Philip informed Ribera of his decision to enact a one-year edict of grace in Valencia as a prelude to a campaign of evangelization, and he asked the patriarch to assist this “pious and holy work” by publishing the Spanish-Arabic catechism that he had previously commissioned. Ribera complied with these instructions, and the grace period was subsequently extended for another year. His lack of enthusiasm soon became obvious, however, in an unsolicited memorandum sent to Philip in December 1601, in which he claimed that the grace period had failed to bring forth a single confession and denounced all Valencia’s Moriscos as “pertinacious heretics and traitors to the Royal Crown.” Ribera blamed the Moriscos for Spain’s military reversals and attributed the failure of the “enterprise of England” and the recent Algiers expedition to divine anger at the continued presence of the Morisco “fever.” The archbishop warned of even greater disasters to come unless this situation was resolved, predicting that “if your Majesty does not order a resolution . . . I will see in my days the loss of Spain.”
4
This sensational document was intended to have an impact, and it did. The royal confessor Gaspar de Córdoba wrote to Ribera of the “wonder and shock” that his letter had produced in Lerma and the king, while Lerma’s corrupt Valencian placeman Pedro de Franquesa told the archbishop how Philip’s eyes had been opened by its “clarity and zeal.” In January 1602, Ribera was invited by Philip to expound his views on the Morisco question further, and he responded with another fierce anti-Morisco diatribe. Not only were the Moriscos draining the wealth from Spain, he informed the king, but they were responsible for most of the criminal activity in Valencia, so that “Old Christians who live in Morisco areas do not dare to leave their towns at night.” Ribera emphatically rejected any possibility that the Moriscos could be made into Christians. Where proponents of assimilation described the Moriscos as “new plants” to be gently nurtured, Ribera called them “wizened trees, full of knots of heresy,” who needed to be pulled up by the roots “so that they will not cause damage nor send out new shoots that quickly grow into trees.” Ribera urged Philip to undertake this task, which he described as a “new Reconquest” comparable to David’s defeat of the Philistines.
5

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