Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (46 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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Though the bishops were warned by the king to be “very discriminating and to know full well their purpose,” their investigations once again found that most Moriscos fulfilled the new requirements, and once again Philip and his ministers showed themselves reluctant to accept these conclusions. When the curate of Oropresa, near Ávila, claimed that the Moriscos in his parish were “so well instructed in their faith and its things that no Old Christian is better instructed than they are,” Salazar ordered three further investigations to be carried out, each of which produced the same results. Similar procedures were applied elsewhere, as the government increasingly refused to accept evidence that contradicted its own assumptions. In some cases, exemptions were granted to individual Moriscos or whole Morisco communities, which were subsequently annulled. At other times, Philip and his ministers simply overruled the testimonies of their own clerics and officials and expelled the Moriscos anyway. The bishop of Ávila vigorously defended the Morisco “descendants of Old Converts,” who had lived in the city “since time immemorial.” These Moriscos shared the same professions and privileges as Christians. They were allowed to bear arms and vote on the town council, and they formed part of the local militia. Some had fought in Spain’s wars in North Africa.
These considerations brought the Moriscos of Ávila a temporary reprieve. On July 2, 1611, however, one of the oldest Morisco communities in Spain was brought to an end when 770 men, women, and children were assembled at dawn and marched out of the city to France, “smart and well turned out as if they were going to a wedding, without any expression of sadness,” according to one Christian eyewitness.
11
The intransigence of the king and his ministers was partly dictated by practical considerations; the government could not afford to keep ships, soldiers, and officials in place indefinitely, and assessing appeals and petitions was a time-consuming process that threatened to clog the wheels of the bureaucracy. From the point of view of the king and the senior officials in charge of the expulsion, the sheer volume of appeals for exemption from both Christians and Moriscos made it difficult, if not impossible, to examine each individual case without jeopardizing the entire enterprise. As Salazar pointed out to the king in August, so many Moriscos were claiming to be Old Christians that “I fear that entire places will ask to stay.”
12
But the intransigence of Philip and his officials was not merely driven by the bureaucratic requirements of the process; it was also a reflection of the bigotry that had made the expulsion possible. At a meeting of the Council of State in Toledo on June 18, 1611, it was decided that all petitions for exemption should be rejected, whether they came from Moriscos or Old Christians. One of the officials who approved this decision was the archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General, Bernardo Rojas de Sandoval, Lerma’s uncle, who declared that all Moriscos were “prejudicial people” who deserved to be expelled. Philip and his favorite were equally implacable. When a Basque official wrote to Lerma in February 1612 asking what he should do with Lorenzo Bautista, an elderly Morisco expelled from Valladolid who had returned from France with his wife, he received the curt reply to “fulfill the expulsion orders.” All this was very different from 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs had allowed Jews to choose between exile and conversion. Then, expulsion had been intended to promote assimilation and preserve the faith of the Conversos who had already converted to Christianity. More than a century later, their Hapsburg successors no longer seemed willing to believe that assimilation was possible and generally ignored evidence to the contrary.
 
Even as these events were unfolding in Castile, the expulsion machinery was being secretly assembled in Aragon and Catalonia. In April, Agustín Mejía was dispatched from Valencia to Zaragoza to supervise the removal of the Moriscos from Aragon and Catalonia. By this time, rumors of the king’s intentions were so widespread that many Moriscos had already ceased working in the fields and begun to sell their property, while the Inquisition of Aragon had begun to express its concern that they would turn to banditry or rebellion if the expulsion was not carried out quickly.
On May 29, the decree of expulsion was proclaimed throughout Aragon and Catalonia, and Mejía’s
tercios
landed on the coast and began to secure the borders and mountain passes. Cowed by this show of force, neither the Moriscos nor their aristocratic protectors made any significant attempt to oppose their removal. Even when Mejía’s soldiers deserted their posts in protest at their lack of pay, their officers were able to levy enough local replacements to proceed with the expulsion. Once again Philip solicited reports on the Moriscos from the Aragonese clergy, whose results confounded his expectations. Don Pedro Manrique, the bishop of Tortosa, sent an exhaustive list of the Moriscos in his diocese, listing each one by name and profession, together with testimonies from priests and nuns that described how they faithfully fulfilled all their religious obligations.
13
This report may well have spared the Moriscos of Tortosa the fate of 70,000 of their compatriots who left Aragon and Catalonia, the majority of whom passed through the nearby port of Los Alfaques. An estimated 22,000 Moriscos crossed into France in the heat of high summer, in an exodus that was witnessed by their archenemy Pedro Aznar Cardona, who described them “bursting with grief and tears, in a great commotion and confusion of voices, laden with their women and children, their sick, the old and young, covered in dust, sweating and panting.” The departing Moriscos were often mercilessly exploited and abused by their royal escorts, who even charged them money for drinking from rivers or sitting in the shade. Lerma issued orders prohibiting such behavior, but with expulsion now unfolding across the whole of Spain, the authorities were not always able to provide the Aragonese Moriscos with food and shelter, let alone guarantee their safety. The strains being placed on the expulsion system were evident in a letter to the Council of State from the captain-general of Barcelona, who complained that there were not enough rowers on his galleys that were supposed to transport the Moriscos “because a large number of those they had in the embarkation of the Moriscos had died” in Valencia.
14
The Moriscos also faced attacks from bandits, particularly in Catalonia, which experienced an epidemic of banditry between 1609 and 1615. In one incident in the summer of 1612, a party of two hundred Moriscos traveling from Lérida to Barcelona were ambushed by a large group of bandits that included armed horsemen and stripped of all their money and possessions. Even when the Moriscos reached the French border, their safety was not guaranteed. At another point that summer, fourteen thousand Moriscos were turned back from the border village of Canfranc in the Aragonese Pyrenees and forced to walk all the way back down to Los Alfaques on the coast. Many died of illness or exhaustion and arrived at the port in such bad shape that the authorities feared an outbreak of plague on the ships that were waiting to transport them. After so many years of conspiring with the Aragonese Moriscos, the Béarnese governor, the Duke de la Force, was less than hospitable to the exiles who now appeared on his borders. In June, nearly five thousand Moriscos found themselves stranded without food along the border when the duke refused to allow them to enter France and threatened to massacre them if they attempted to cross the border. The following month, the Moriscos were allowed to enter the country in separate batches, and de la Force subsequently allowed them to cross the border in exchange for fees of ten to twelve reales each.
The expulsion orders in Aragon and Catalonia expressly stipulated that Moriscos could only sail to North Africa if they left their children behind, but many Moriscos sailed with their children on private ships to France and then persuaded their captains to take them to Muslim lands. Some chose to settle in France, where they received a mixed reception. The French authorities were not enthusiastic at the prospect of a transient population of impoverished Moriscos, but Henry IV eventually allowed Moriscos to remain permanently in the country on condition that they converted to Catholicism and settled south of the Dordogne. Moriscos who were unwilling to accept these conditions were permitted to travel to other destinations from French ports. As in Spain, royal decrees were not a guarantee of safety, and Moriscos traveling through French territory or on French ships were robbed and extorted so often that the Ottoman sultan Ahmad I asked the French authorities to take more energetic measures to protect them. In 1612, the Moroccan sultan Mulay Zidan sent a delegation to France to seek restitution for Moriscos who had been robbed in France, whose members included the Granadan Morisco Ahmad bin Qasim al-Hajari, the translator of the Sacromonte
plomos
. In his account of his travels, al-Hajari describes how he presented a sealed letter from the sultan to the courts of the
ifranj
(French), which stipulated that “whatever is found of what had been stolen from the Andalusians should be returned to me” and which listed “twenty-one sea commanders, each of whom had robbed the Andalusians who had rented their ships” in the town of Olonne.
15
The Tagarinos who reached North Africa generally found a better reception than their Valencian counterparts. Travelers making their way across the lawless tribal hinterlands were still subject to the depredations of the Alarbes, but the Ottoman sultan also instructed his North African vassals to look after the exiles who were dumped on their shores, and the burgeoning “Andalusian” communities of Algiers, Tetuán, Fez, and other cities make it clear that that many Moriscos did find sanctuary. The Moriscos were especially well received in Tunis, whose ruler, Uthman Dey, made special provision for them, on the sultan’s orders. But these Spanish-speaking Moriscos were not always accepted by local Muslims, and in some cases, Moriscos were obliged to prove that they were not Christians by showing that they had been circumcised or agreeing to circumcision. Not all Moriscos were willing to do this. In Tetuán, a group of Moriscos was reported to have remained so committed to Christianity that they refused to enter a mosque and were stoned to death.
 
It is difficult, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, to imagine how daunting these journeys must have been to those involved. Many Moriscos had never left their homes and villages, let alone the country, and were no more familiar with North Africa than they were with the towns and cities of Christian Europe that they passed through. Peasants and craftsmen, notaries and merchants, silk weavers and gardeners, the richest and the poorest, even the Morisco tailor who attended the ladies of the court, all participated in an exodus of which only a few firsthand accounts have survived.
One anonymous
aljamiado
manuscript offered “information for the road” to Moriscos looking to cross France and Italy and make their way onward to Muslim lands. In addition to details of accommodation and food and transportation costs for each phase of the journey, prospective exiles were also given various strategems to enable them to conceal their Muslim identity from potentially hostile Christians, such as pretending to be debtors fleeing their creditors or posing as Christian pilgrims visiting churches and Christian holy places. This pretense was to be maintained all the way to cosmopolitan Venice, where the boundaries between the Islamic and Christian worlds began to dissolve and travelers could openly seek assistance:
Go out into the plaza to buy whatever thing you need. There, those that you see with white headgear are Turks, those with yellow headgear are Jews, merchants from the Grand Turk, and from those you should ask whatever it is you wish, for they will lead you aright to it. Tell them that you have brothers in Salonica and that you wish to go there; you will pay one ducat per head and for the passage you will also give for water and firewood. Purchase provision for fifteen days, buy stew and rice and vinegar and olives or other white beans and fresh bread for eight days and cake at ten pounds per man.
16
 
Some glimpses of this exodus are contained in the letters written by expelled Moriscos to their former Christian employers or acquaintances in Spain. On November 22, 1610, the Granadan Morisco Pedro Hernández wrote to his former lady, Doña Catalina de Valdés, describing how he and his wife had sailed from Málaga and spent twelve days at sea before their crew robbed them and dumped them on an island off the North African coast wearing nothing but “linen breeches and without cloaks or clothes.” The couple made their way to Tetuán, where Hernández wrote how “God Our Saviour . . . frees us from the Devil and bestows his grace upon us so that we may serve him.”
17
Despite his ordeal, Hernández expressed his desire to return to “the most beautiful nation in the world” and pleaded with Doña Catalina to send him money so that he and his wife could travel to Marseille and escape from the “evil people” among whom they found themselves. Such nostalgia was not unusual. Many Moriscos struggled to adapt to their adopted countries and pined for the friends, neighbors, and landscapes they had left behind. Diego Luis Morlem, a Morisco from La Mancha, traveled overland to France with his wife Elsa, where the two of them joined the large Morisco émigré community at Saint-Jean-de-Luz. On November 10, 1611, he wrote to his former lord in the Campo de Calatrava of a predicament that was undoubtedly shared by many of his exiled compatriots:
I wanted to inform Your Grace of the suffering and upheavals that we are going through here. May God receive them for our sins, for we are in such a bad way that not a day or night passes when we do not remember our lands and neighbors, from which they threw us out without us having given any cause or offense. Some of us have agreed that we can prove our Old Christian descent through the male line [and] send this information through representatives to Madrid, for we are resolved a thousand times over to leave these monotonous roads, finding ourselves in a strange land outside our own, we are crying tears of blood for it and intend to go back even if they hang us.
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