The Inquisition burnt him as a dogmatizing Muslim heretic in an auto in Valencia.
A careful reading of the inquisitorial cases against moriscos in Aragon and Valencia during these years reveals a disturbing picture. As in the case of Diego de Arcos, morisco heretics often confessed to their sins only after they had been tortured.8 The precise number tortured into confessing what they had never done, or who after being mistreated determined to turn to the Islamic faith, can never be known, but was surely considerable. Thus, as with the conversos in the 15th century, the Inquisition began by torturing false confessions out of some and pretending that some cases of secret apostasy were akin to a movement.
Arcos’s case was one among many of the supposedly sincere Islamic converts to Christianity in these years. In Teruel, if some of these old converts had reconverted to Islam, it was not owing to their inherent seditiousness but rather the hostile atmosphere in Spain. They were pushed towards rebellion and rebellion was then held up as evidence against them.
In creating an enemy to destroy, the fantasies of the villagers of Spain were crucial. We should not forget that Diego de Arcos’s sister Luisa de Caminera had said that ‘she had always had the fantasy’ of denouncing the moriscos of Teruel, and her brother, to the inquisitors. Minor squabbles during play in the dusty streets of this remote town could be dramatized on a grand religious stage. In this theatre of the imagination that which was insignificant appeared of lasting importance. Those who knew their Bible and the story of Cain and Abel, or of Esau and Isaac, knew that family rivalries had always shaped the religious history of the peoples of the Book. It was one of the social roles of the Inquisition to breathe life into this sad human tradition, and to give the petty and the unjust a veneer of righteousness and justice.
IN 1566 A CONGREGATION of churchmen met in Valencia to discuss the condition of the moriscos in Spain. Forty years had passed since the decree had been finalized that all remaining Muslims should convert to Christianity. Nevertheless, as the evidence from the Congregation showed, progress in evangelizing the new morisco flock had been, to say the least, halting.
The Congregation noted that since 1526 the moriscos ‘have not been taught any Christian doctrine either publicly or privately, they have not been visited or punished by the bishops or by the ministers of the Inquisition’.9 This absence of inquisitorial attention derived from the amnesty granted by Charles V in 1542,*4 but also from a general lack of interest by the Church hierarchy in its morisco charges.10 While in the first years after the general conversion 213 mosques were consecrated as churches in Valencia, and many others in the Aragonese districts of Tortosa and Orihuela, enthusiasm soon waned. There were few preachers who spoke Arabic and could communicate with the moriscos. The new rectories in the morisco settlements soon fell into debt. The abysmal state of the evangelizing effort was confirmed by the Cortes of Aragon in 1564, which demanded that mosques be converted into churches and that the Korans, trumpets and Muslim ritual objects be taken away forty years after Islam had supposedly been abolished in Spain.11
Meanwhile, even those mosques which had been made into churches were falling into disuse by 1566. The Congregation of Valencia admitted that ‘in many cases it will be necessary to build new churches and in others to repair them, and in all places there is a great need for ornaments and communion cups and crosses’.12 There were many moriscos who had simply not been baptized.13 Most could only speak Arabic and lived in remote mountainous places where the bishops and preachers and inquisitorial commissaries were hardly ever seen.14
Moreover, the few priests who did live among the moriscos set a terrible example.15 These shepherds were so suspicious of their flocks that, as the Spanish ambassador to Paris Francés de Álava noted, in the Alpujarra mountains near Granada they would often turn around suddenly when raising the host to the communion cup to see if the moriscos were on their knees and then let rip ‘horrendous, vituperative and arrogant words’. These priests lived in the towns disposing of ‘absolute power and arrogance over the moriscos, continually picking quarrels’.16
Thus many moriscos knew little or nothing about Christian practice, while those that did know something often learnt to hate it. Typically, moriscos did not know how to cross themselves and could not recite any Christian prayers.17 Yet such ignorance was not, at least in the early years, necessarily a matter of choice.
In 1570 the moriscos of Valencia repeatedly petitioned the local authorities to be taught Christian doctrines. They wanted to be given priests and have churches built for them. Otherwise, as they quite reasonably pointed out, ‘[we] will never be good Christians’.18 In the village of Altzira, for instance, the moriscos demanded visitors and people to teach them the articles of the faith.19 How could they possibly adhere to Christianity if no one deigned to teach them its principles?
That after the Church’s abject failure to evangelize or impart doctrine these ‘Christian’ converts should be subjected to an Inquisition into their religious practices seems obscene. What becomes apparent is that there were many among the priestly hierarchy who, perhaps unconsciously, had no desire to see the moriscos join the faithful. Humiliation and distrust do not encourage others to share your beliefs – as Francés de Álava moderately put it ‘this certainly seemed to me a bad way of teaching them Christian doctrine’20 – and yet this was the recipe concocted by the priests ‘of bad example’ who went among the moriscos.
The reality was that nations, like all clubs, defined themselves by excluding others as well as through more affirmative means. Now that the ‘Jewish’ conversos had been dealt with, the role of sacrificial lamb was to be assumed, with perhaps even more suffering, by the seditious, dangerous, heretical moriscos.
Granada 1566–70
HERE WERE THE LAST remnants of one of the great civilizations of the medieval period. The Alhambra burnt red nightly in the gloaming. The city’s 200 mosques, still active in the first years after the Spanish conquest,21 were naked of their original adornments. Reconsecrated, a new sacral language echoed in the empty buildings.
Moorish Granada had not lasted long after the conquest of 1492. Following the intolerant behaviour of Cisneros in 1500,*5 in 1502 the Muslims had been forced to convert or leave. While at first there was no inquisitorial tribunal in Granada, by the time of the forced conversions in Aragon and Valencia in the 1520s attitudes were changing. A tribunal was established in Granada in 1526, and that same year a religious Congregation met and adopted a series of repressive measures against the moriscos: they were prohibited from speaking Arabic; their bath houses had to be run by Old Christians; they were not to practise circumcision or marry under Muslim rites; they were not allowed to bear arms or kill animals according to Muslim ritual.22
The 1526 Congregation of Granada was effectively a declaration of assimilation by force. These foreigners within the national body would have to learn to speak like ‘us’, behave like ‘us’, and become like ‘us’. And yet such demands, backed up by force, revealed a searing tension in the minds of policymakers between the desire to assimilate and the desire to exclude. Something of the state of mind among even those who were supposedly the most enlightened members of the Congregation is revealed by the friar Antonio de Guevara, who was a famous writer and humanist thinker: Guevara wanted personally to shear off the hair of the morisco women living in the land of the marquess of Cenete, and to scrape off their henna with his bare hands.23
The desire to inflict such physical humiliation revealed the passions which were disguised in the blueprint for the spiritual transformation of the moriscos. Here, in all its fear and guilt-ridden contradictoriness, was the tortured psychology of these holy men, who wished others to submit (to conversion), and yet at the same time could not escape the desire for that submission to come by force; the incompatibility of logic and desire would mean that the most refined theological and political thought was always undone.
The sole respite for the moriscos of Granada in the decrees of the 152
6 Congregation was that they managed to forestall their implementation, paying 80,000 ducats in return for a forty-year postponement. While this protected them for a time, there was a steady erosion of their freedom to live as they had always done. Gaspar de Ávalos, archbishop of Granada from 1529 to 1542, banned them from performing their traditional dances, the zambras.24 By 1560 the Inquisition was renewing its interest in them: seven moriscos were burnt in two autos in 1560, two more in 1562 and again in 1566, while over seventy moriscos were being reconciled each year in these autos.25 Then on 1 January 1567 the 1526 Congregation of Granada was enforced, in spite of renewed appeals from the moriscos.26 Again, the Inquisition was a key arm of the state in enforcing the new policy, and in the auto of 2 February 1567 in Granada four moriscos were burnt alive and sixty reconciled.27 The stage was quite naturally set for rebellion.
The Alpujarra mountains had long been a centre for cultural resistance. On Christmas Eve 1568 the moriscos of these beautiful mountains rose against their Christian masters. At first the rebellion was restricted to a few isolated spots, but gradually it spread throughout Andalusia. Contingents of supporters came to help the moriscos from North Africa.28 By the end of 1569 there were 20,000 Spanish troops fighting 26,000 rebels, and more reinforcements were needed as the moriscos attempted to gain revenge for seventy years of suffering:
They robbed, burnt and destroyed the churches, stoned the images of veneration, destroyed the altars, and grabbed hold of the priests of Christ . . . dragging them naked down the streets and through the squares to great public scandal. They knifed some and burnt others alive, and made many suffer a range of martyrdom. They were equally as cruel to the lay Old Christians who lived in these places, and there was no respect from neighbour to neighbour, fellow godparent to fellow godparent, friend to friend . . . they looted their houses, and those who took refuge in towers and forts were trapped inside and surrounded by a ring of fire.29
These violent assaults naturally confirmed the Old Christians in their belief that the moriscos were dangerous foes. A new internal enemy was at hand, and needed to be dealt with in the same manner as the Lutherans of Valladolid and Seville. Yet the reality was that the Islamic credentials of this rebellion were at best partial. For while the rebels destroyed the churches and recited some Muslim prayers, they also engaged in activity which was hardly consonant with Muslim practice and ritual:
The married women stripped off and exhibited their breasts, and the virgins their heads; and with their hair falling around their shoulders they danced publicly in the streets, embracing the men as young boys pranced before them waving their handkerchiefs in the air, shouting loudly that now the time of innocence had arrived.30
There was no belief here in the need for women to cover their heads and conceal their flesh. What existed was hatred of their humiliators and a desire to cast off decades of cultural and sexual repression. The violence with which they murdered their priests was a mirror to the violence which had originally been directed at them. In effect, the persecution of the ‘Muslim’ fifth column had fomented the revolt.
The Alpujarra insurgency marked a turning point in the history of the moriscos of Spain. Some 80,000 troops were assembled to extinguish the rebellion.31 After their final defeat in 1570, 80,000 moriscos were expelled from the region and dispersed throughout the rest of Spain, leaving just 10,000–15,000 in the old capital of Moorish Spain.32 Just as the Jews had been expelled from Andalusia in 1483, so now it was the turn of the moriscos. Purge and purify; in Iberia the past returned inexorably, together with the errors of the past.
The expulsion created more problems than it solved. The moriscos of Granada were not – unlike their counterparts in Aragon and Valencia – Hispanicized.33 The refugees had no intention of being amenable in the land of their breaking. Their new neighbours started making scandalized depositions to inquisitors about moriscos who declared papal bulls to be ‘not glory but shit’,34 or about morisca widows who dug up the bodies of their husbands after their Christian burials so as to bury them with Islamic rites.35 Thus the solution to the morisco problem of Granada exacerbated tensions in Castile and further divided the moriscos who lived there from the Old Christians.36
Of course the Inquisition was not the sole cause of these problems. It was not the Inquisition which enforced the expulsion of moriscos from Granada or defeated the Alpujarra revolt of 1568–70. Nor was it the Inquisition which came up with the original proposals of the Congregation of Granada. The Inquisition was, rather, an enforcer, the agent of ideological repression in what was then the most powerful country in the world. And thus it was to the Inquisition that Philip II turned as the atmosphere hardened against the moriscos in the late 1550s. It was the Inquisition which seized all the weapons of the moriscos in organized searches in Aragon (1563) and Granada (1565).37 And it was the Inquisition which the moriscos would come to blame for their misfortunes.
Valencia 1587
WITH THE DISPERSAL of the moriscos of Granada, attitudes began to harden nationwide. The courts of the Inquisitions of Valencia and Zaragoza – now the areas with the largest numbers of moriscos in the country – were thick with denunciations leading to torture, reconciliation and ‘relaxation’. A curious relationship developed between the year of the Islamic heresy and the actual spread of that heresy itself: just as with the theoretical implications for physics of Schrödinger’s cat, so in history and politics – the perception of danger and enemies contributed decisively to the reality.
That night the main door of Dobber’s house was locked but the five good citizens of Buñol found another door in the side of the house. Bursting in, they came upon Dobber seated with a lute in his hands and without his shoes, reading and chanting from a book which another morisco had opened before him. Dobber was surrounded by about fifty moriscos in an open courtyard encircled by four pillars. On each side there was a stone bench which functioned as a sort of altar, on which were large shells filled with water and a blue cloth. The courtyard, the witnesses said, was reminiscent of the mosques which they had seen in the kingdom of Granada. The women were sitting on clothes and pillows with the men around them on stone benches.39
For the Inquisition this was the equivalent of a smoking gun. Here was Dobber caught by five upstanding citizens leading Islamic prayers. However, Dobber denied the charges. The moriscos of the town had come to him because he was the public scribe and accountant. There was nothing Islamic about the meeting at all.40 Indeed, when one thinks about what the witnesses had actually seen, doubts surface as to what had gone on. Dobber had been seen playing a musical instrument and reading a book; there had been shells with blue cloths and water which the witnesses saw as ‘altars’. But there is little notably Islamic about these objects, which could have been decorative. The building ‘looked like the mosques of Granada’, but it was natural for the architectural heritage of Islamic Spain to live on in the aesthetic choices of the moriscos. There were fifty moriscos at the meeting, but a large gathering of friends is not necessarily a sign of heresy.
The Old Christians of Buñol would probably have been suspicious whatever they had found. Dobber was one of the richest moriscos of the town, and this in itself marked him out as a leader of the community. Thus perception and preconception played its part in the denunciations that were made against him. Of course, it is possible that there was some substance in the accusations, but the lack of clear evidence shows just how far
the atmosphere made it difficult to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Dobber, for one, knew that it would be impossible to get a fair trial so while he was incarcerated in the inquisitorial prison of Valencia he attempted to escape. He broke open his window and tried to jump to freedom using a rope strung together from his bed sheets. The sheets became unknotted and he fell to the street, breaking his leg. At this, the Inquisition proceeded apace with his trial. He was tortured. He continued to deny everything. Unable to break him down, the Inquisition sentenced him to 400 lashes and ten years in the galleys.41
In many ways the Dobber case epitomizes the condition of the moriscos in Valencia and Aragon as the 16th century came to an end. The fear and suspicion felt by Old Christians was matched by the prejudices of the moriscos: any meeting of moriscos was seen as Islamic and Dobber was ready to risk his life escaping rather than continue his incarceration.
BY THE END OF the 16th century the Inquisition had become the most effective means of repressing the moriscos.42 Between 1545 and 1621, a total of 232 moriscos were ‘relaxed’ across Spain, with the greatest concentration in Zaragoza.43 By the late 1580s there were so many moriscos under arrest in Cordoba that they could not all fit into the inquisitorial jail.44 Moriscos constituted three-quarters of the inquisitorial caseload in Valencia between 1570 and 1614, and 56 per cent of the caseload in Zaragoza.45 Their arrest and potential ‘relaxation’ fostered fear, but even more central to the dissemination of hatred among the moriscos was the Inquisition’s use of torture, which became completely routine in these years.
Reading through the cases of moriscos in the inquisitorial courts of Valencia and Zaragoza of the time, it is sobering to see that of the majority it is said ‘diligences [of torture] were made’. Frequently, it was only in the torture chamber that a morisco would confess ‘to having been a Muslim all their lives’. Not infrequently, these ‘Muslims’ would revoke their confessions once out of the potro;46 however, this was a mistake since a retraction could often lead to their being tortured again.47 Of course, as we saw in Chapter Three, some moriscos were spared torture because of their physical condition or age, but nevertheless the fact that most moriscos arrested by the Inquisition at this period were tortured speaks for itself. Although the Inquisition could not deal with the vast number of apostate moriscos which they believed to exist48 and was only capable of trying a small proportion of the total, the indiscriminate use of torture was decisive in creating hatred of the Inquisition among all moriscos.49