Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (19 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

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There were also reports of continued adherence to the “sect of Mohammed” in Castile. In 1538 a Morisco named Juan of Burgos was accused by the Toledo Inquisition of “playing and dancing zambras at night and eating couscous” and inviting friends and relatives to his house, where they “sang Moorish songs, speaking in Arabic, they called each other by the names they had when they were Moors, valuing these names more than those they had when they were Christians.”
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In the1540s, the Toledo Inquisition conducted a prolonged investigation in the town of Daimiel, in which a Morisca woman named Mari Gómez confessed under torture to being a “confirmed and persistent Moor.” Inquisitors attempted without success to discover the identity of an anonymous Morisco “prophet” in the town, who reportedly claimed to be able to speak with angels and the dead and proselytized Islam at clandestine meetings. In the same period, the Inquisition investigated reports of Islamic worship in the town of Arévalo, near Segovia, involving a “boy held to be a prophet,” who was never located. In the course of these investigations, a number of Moriscos suspected of giving evidence to the inquisitors were mysteriously murdered.
 
The emphasis on persuasion rather than force had always been conditional on the Moriscos’ willingly fulfilling the obligations of their new faith, and incidents like this were cited by hard-liners as proof that sterner methods were required. Repression was never entirely absent during Charles’s reign. Moriscos were routinely fined by priests or secular officials for not attending mass or observing feast days or for calling each other by their Muslim names. They were also increasingly subject to the vigilance of the Inquisition, particularly after the appointment of the ambitious and hard-line Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés in 1546. Devious, paranoid, and determined to nip any expression of Lutheranism in the bud, Valdés presided over a renewed drive against heresy that also affected Spain’s former Muslims.
Few Moriscos were “relaxed to the secular arm” in this period, as inquisitors continued to err on the side of leniency in the punishments imposed upon them and opted for fines, confiscation of goods and property, floggings, and “spiritual penalties” such as obligatory prayers and attendance at confession or special masses. In some cases, the Inquisition waived punishments altogether and pardoned Morisco transgressors. Nevertheless, regional inquisitors were often a law unto themselves, and not all of them were disposed to clemency. In 1535, five Moriscos were burned at the stake in Majorca and another four were convicted and burned in effigy because they could not be found. During the 1540s, 232 Moriscos were paraded in seven autos-da-fé in Zaragoza, including four
alfaquis
and a former monk who had converted to Islam, who were burned at the stake.
Moriscos often pleaded ignorance for their religious transgressions, claiming that they had not known what was required of them, and these appeals were sometimes successful, but even when Inquisitorial edicts of grace were conceded, they were not always respected. In 1546 the pope ordered the Aragon Inquisition not to confiscate Morisco goods or property for a period of ten years, but such confiscations still occurred. The Holy Office depended on fines and confiscations for a large part of its income, to the point where Moriscos often suspected that they were being fined in order to pay the salaries of their persecutors. In Valencia and Aragon, however, the local nobility resented punishments that reduced their Morisco vassals and their descendants to destitution, harming their own economic assets.
In 1556 this conundrum was temporarily resolved when Inquisitor General Valdés conceded a general amnesty to the Moriscos of Aragon for specific offenses. In exchange for a substantial annual payment, the Inquisition agreed not to confiscate Morisco property, and similar agreements were negotiated in Valencia and Granada. Once again, the Moriscos had escaped persecution by paying what amounted to protection money, but such concessions were deceptive. By the mid sixteenth century, the attitude of Spanish officialdom toward the Moriscos was no longer the same as it had been in the immediate aftermath of their conversions. Whereas inquisitors had once been disposed to accept pleas of ignorance as an excuse for Morisco transgressions, they were increasingly inclined to regard their continued intransigence as an obstinate refusal to take advantage of Christian magnanimity.
The changing attitudes toward
la cuestión morisca
(the Morisco question) were also related to the growing ferocity of the struggle between Islam and Christendom in the Mediterranean. Throughout the first half of the century, the Ottoman Turks made steady gains in North Africa, establishing direct or indirect control over a number of cities and territories, which threatened the precarious system of garrison fortresses, or
presidios
, that Spain had established along the Barbary coast. In 1516 the Greek pirate brothers Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa seized control of Algiers, thus beginning the transformation of the city into an autonomous corsair enclave under Turkish protection that was to survive for another three centuries. Following the death of Aruj in 1518 at the hands of Spanish soldiers during the siege of Tlemcen, Hayreddin Barbarossa was appointed
kapudan pasha
(high admiral) by the Ottoman sultan. This role enabled Barbarossa to construct a powerful fleet that many Christian rulers could envy, which combined the strategic and religious interests of Constantinople in its conflict with Christian Europe with the pursuit of profit on his own account.
Many coastal towns and villages in Spain and Italy felt the impact of the self-styled General of the Sea, or the king of evil, as he was known in Spain. In the summer of 1534, Barbarossa’s refitted fleet ravaged Italy’s Adriatic coast, sacking towns and villages and carrying away thousands of Christian slaves. In 1543, Barbarossa and a fleet consisting of some thirty thousand sailors were welcomed into the French port of Toulon, where the Valois king of France sealed a temporary alliance with the Turkish sultan. To the disgust of much of Christian Europe, a joint French-Muslim fleet sacked the Hapsburg vassal state of Nice.
Turkish ascendancy in the Mediterranean prompted calls from Protestants and Catholics for “peace among Christians and war with the infidel.” Following the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, Martin Luther advocated
Turkenkrieg
(war against the Turks) against an enemy that he regarded as the incarnation of Satan, while successive popes called upon the Holy Roman Emperor to unite Christendom in an anti-Turkish crusade. Charles tried and failed on various occasions to interest other Christian princes in this enterprise, and he increasingly looked to North Africa as an opportunity to strike a decisive blow against the sultan that would enhance his own prestige and remove the corsair threat to Spain.
Initially Charles attempted to recruit Barbarossa in this enterprise and offered him political control over the whole of North Africa if he converted to Christianity, but this offer received an unambiguous rejection when the envoy who made it had his head cut off. When Barbarossa expelled the Spanish puppet ruler of Tunis, Muley Hassan, in 1534, Charles led a fleet with twenty-five thousand soldiers to recapture the city the following year. The successful Christian assault was followed by an orgy of destruction, in which libraries and mosques were razed to the ground and tens of thousands of Muslims who had already surrendered were massacred in the streets or captured as slaves. On his return to Italy, Charles was feted like a Roman Caesar in triumphal processions in various cities, including one particularly elaborate welcome at Messina designed by the painter Caravaggio, which included a chariot carrying an altar covered with spoils surrounded by six chained Muslim captives.
The victory at Tunis may have enhanced Charles’s reputation as a crusading Christian prince, but it did nothing to curb the activities of the Barbary corsairs, who continued to maraud the Spanish coast and threaten Spain’s vital trade links with Sicily. In October 1541, Charles overreached himself when he set out to emulate his success in Tunis with an assault on Barbarossa’s fiefdom at Algiers. This huge expedition was undertaken against the advice of his celebrated Genoese admiral, Gian Andrea Doria, and it ended in disaster when more than a hundred fifty ships were sunk in storms while they waited offshore. Some twelve thousand soldiers were drowned, or killed by the local population, and one Turkish chronicler described how the North African beaches “were littered with the bodies of men and horses.” The death of Barbarossa in 1546 was followed by the rise of a Greek corsair named Turgut, or Dragut, as he was known in Christian Europe, who was appointed
kapudan pasha
in his stead and quickly proved himself an equally formidable enemy of Hapsburg Spain.
This escalating struggle in the Mediterranean inevitably had consequences for the Moriscos, as Spain’s rulers continued with an erratic and sometimes barely coherent attempt at assimilation, in which long periods of neglect alternated with amnesties, bribes, edicts of grace, and unpredictable bouts of repression. Not only were Moriscos suspected of providing corsair raiders on the Spanish coast with intelligence information, but there were also reports that Turkish successes had emboldened some Moriscos to believe that their liberation was imminent. And by the middle of the century, Spanish officialdom was beginning to conclude that the majority of Spain’s former Muslims were inside Christian society but had yet to become part of it.
9
 
Parallel Lives
 
Even in the absence of systematic persecution, the Moriscos often occupied a precarious and increasingly claustrophobic position in the midst of a Christian society that was determined to eliminate all “memory of the Moors” from Spain in the long term. For those unwilling to submit to the new dispensation, armed resistance was not generally an option. Another alternative was to leave the country, but emigration was strictly forbidden, and Moriscos caught attempting it were subject to harsh punishments, from confiscation of their worldly goods to hanging. Despite these risks, a steady stream of Moriscos did manage to escape to Barbary, with help from either corsairs or from their relatives and friends who had already left. But the majority of Spain’s former Muslims remained in their homes and attempted to adapt themselves to their new identities as Christians. Many Moriscos availed themselves of the Koranic injunction known as
taqiyya
, “precaution,” which permits Muslims faced with persecution to outwardly dissimulate when the wider interests of the faith are at stake.
In 1504, this principle was explicitly applied to Muslim Spain by Ahmad ibn Bu Jumah, the mufti of Oran, in a fatwa issued in response to requests from Spanish Muslims for religious guidance, which exhorted the Moriscos to “hold fast to their religion, just as somebody might clutch to himself a burning ember.” Bu Jumah was clearly aware of the repression to which the Moriscos were being subjected, and he advised them to remain steadfast in their faith by maintaining a rigid barrier between their external appearance and behavior and their true thoughts and feelings. If they were forced to recite Christian prayers or receive the sacraments, they should inwardly reject them and silently proclaim the name of Muhammad. If they had to eat proscribed foods such as pork, Bu Jumah told them to “eat it, but in your heart reject it.” If they were unable to perform their ritual ablutions, they could still purify themselves before prayer by “wiping their hands clean on a wall” or “plunging into the sea.” If they were unable to perform their daily prayers, Bu Jumah advised them to pray at night instead.
1
To Muslim religious scholars, both inside and outside Spain, dissimulation was a desperate response to a desperate situation. In the Middle Ages, the proximity of Muslims with Christians had often been cited as a potential scource of theological contamination, and these risks were clearly magnified by the daily immersion of the Moriscos in Christian rituals, prayers, and beliefs. Who could tell whether Moriscos who uttered Christian prayers or bowed their heads at mass were really rejecting them “in their hearts”? How was it possible to distinguish a good Muslim from a bad Muslim when all Moriscos were obliged to adopt the appearance of good Christians on the surface?
These questions also preoccupied the Christian religious authorities in Spain, for very different reasons. The Moriscos were not the only religious group in sixteenth-century Europe to be forced underground by official persecution. Protestant Huguenots in Catholic France were also obliged to practice their faith in secret, as were English Catholics and Protestants at various times. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tens of thousands of women were burned as witches in both Protestant and Catholic Europe for their imagined religious transgressions. But the suppression of Spanish Islam was not merely aimed at religious belief: it was intended to eliminate an ethnic minority whose customs and traditions were not necessarily religious in origin. Moriscos did not need to be devout Muslims in order to face persecution. Even the least zealous Moriscos were still suspect in the eyes of Christian society because of their clothes, their language, or the way they ate their meals. The more Spain’s ecclesiastical and secular authorities set out to eradicate these cultural differences by coercion and punishment, the more these differences were regarded as expressions of willful defiance. The result was a covert struggle that was unlike anything else in sixteenth-century Europe, which often began from the moment Moriscos entered the world and continued even after they had left it.
 
The Oran fatwa was widely reproduced in clandestine manuscripts throughout the sixteenth century, but Moriscos did not need to be aware of its specific recommendations in order to practice their own variants. Long after their initial conversions, many Moriscos continued to inhabit a parallel Islamic world beneath a façade of Christianity. Wherever possible, they observed the Islamic religious calendar. They observed the Ramadan fast and celebrated Muslim feast days. In the absence of mosques, they prayed and worshipped in their own homes, individually and sometimes collectively. In 1587 a Morisco
alfaqui
named Damián Doblet, from Buñol in Valencia, was arrested by the Inquisition a second time for Islamic practices. At his trial, various witnesses described how Doblet had preached to congregations of up to fifty men and women who sat on stone benches in the courtyard of his house, where he delivered sermons and accompanied himself on a lute. One witness described how
On many Friday nights the Moriscos and Moriscas went to Doblet’s house dressed in finery and made up. Suspecting that he was preaching the sect of Muhammad, one night we determined to take them by surprise, and finding the main door locked we entered by a false door. We found Doblet seated in a chair with a lute in his hands and one foot unshod, and a Morisco held an open book in front of him from which he read and sang.
2
 

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