To this use of torture was allied a sort of routine humiliation. When Beatriz Padilla, wife of Francisco Maestro, a basketmaker from Arcos, brought her husband in the inquisitorial jail of Cuenca a clean shirt, she was put on a donkey and paraded naked from the waist up through Arcos with a preacher crying out her crime, before being given one hundred lashes.50 And when in 1579 the convicted morisco of Murcia, Martin Varuni, broke his sentence of banishment to come back and see his wife and children, the Inquisition ordered him to begin his enforced exile all over again.51
Cases such as Varuni’s reveal that the Inquisition did not merely torture and ‘relax’; it broke up families even with relatively minor penances, shattering the community.52 Often entire villages would be destroyed when the Inquisition descended, as at Cuenca in 1585, when thirteen of the twenty-one prisoners came from the small settlement of Socuéllamos, and Valencia in 1589, when eighty-three moriscos from Mislata were punished.53 Such events inspired fear and hatred, and indeed one came directly from the other; as the chronicler Pedro de Valencia wrote around 1607, the moriscos were worse enemies than the Moors of North Africa ‘as they fear that they will be seized by the Spanish Inquisition which will burn them and confiscate their goods . . . [the moriscos] know that they live with these risks, and that if they were uncovered as Muslims they would suffer these things, and so they hate us just as they would people who want to kill them’.54
It was, therefore, fear of the Inquisition brought about by the Inquisition’s own actions which was recognized by Valencia as the source of the hatred. This fear was so intense among moriscos that they would not intermarry with Old Christians in case this led to denunciations.55 Moriscos suspected of having denounced someone were sometimes murdered.56 Instead of seeing punishment by the Inquisition as a shameful thing, moriscos took to viewing it as a badge of honour, applauding those who were forced to go through the theatre of a public auto and the sanbenitos.57 The macabre ballet of fear and hatred thus reached its zenith in the relationship between the moriscos and the Inquisition.58 This Muslim ‘fifth column’ was terrified of ‘being deprived of our lives, property and children, and that in a moment we can be plunged into a dark cell . . . there to spend many years using up our property and seeing our little children being taken away to be raised by others’.59
Yet the attempt to squeeze rebellion out of the Muslims through cruelty and overwhelming force again had the opposite effect. The moriscos were more drawn towards heresy than before. They learnt to scorn the Inquisition that symbolized their oppression. Far from achieving its aim of crushing opposition, the use of the Inquisition against the perceived Muslim enemy only made matters worse; while it did not ‘relax’ as many moriscos as it had done conversos in the 15th century, the Inquisition was crucial in building up the hatreds which led inexorably to the great morisco tragedy.
THERE WAS, INDEED, a cruelty and a pleasure in the Old Christian treatment of the moriscos, rather like a cat breaking off the wing of a bird and playing with it before biting its head off.
The story moves to the Ebro valley in Aragon, where in the mid-1580s there were repeated clashes between Old Christians and moriscos. Following several violent stand-offs with morisco militias, in 1585 some Old Christians decided to murder a morisco in revenge. They apparently believed that murdering a morisco would be pleasing to God, and that if they died in the process they would gain eternal salvation.60 This belief in the glory of martyrdom derived directly from the ideology of the crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries. It was as old, and as (dis)reputable, as the hills and it was not surprising that the authorities found it difficult to put down the violence. The skirmishes lasted for three years, and in one assault by Old Christians, on the village of Pina, perhaps 700 morisco men, women and children were killed.61
With events such as this increasingly commonplace, communities of moriscos and Old Christians had become almost entirely separated. One Dutch traveller with the party of Philip II in Aragon in 1585 noted that in the small town of Moel, where there was a thriving ceramics industry, there were only three Old Christians in the whole place. The moriscos ate no pork. They drank no wine. The church was almost always empty. When the royal party left the town they broke the plates they had used in disgust.62
The mutual loathing of moriscos and Old Christians had become so deep that they mocked one another openly in the inquisitorial jail of Cuenca rather than find some fellowship in their shared fate. The Old Christian prisoners cooked bacon ostentatiously in front of the moriscos, tossing it around in frying pans greased with lard, while the moriscos made crosses from straw and proceeded to stamp on them.63 Outside the inquisitorial jail it was commonplace for Old Christians to offer moriscos plates of pork, knowing full well that this was both a threat (if they declined they could be denounced to the Inquisition) and a humiliation (through the power of the Old Christians to possess such a threat).64
The chasms in the community were becoming impossible to bridge. The Muslims of North Africa resented, as Pedro de Valencia put it, ‘that a large number of their own kind are – as they see it – oppressed and tyrannized into servitude in Spain, with dishonour and disdain, forced by violence to leave the Mohammedan faith, and for this reason imprisoned and deprived of their property and of their lives, whipped and burnt, as they hear every day from the accounts of those very same Spanish moriscos’.65 This chronicler had a lofty position in the court of Philip III; there is no reason to doubt his account of the daily humiliations visited on Spain’s moriscos.
Communication broke down. The first rule of morisco life was when among the Old Christians to say nothing, since a word out of place would all too easily lead to the Inquisition. With silence came distrust, and with distrust mutual loathing could only grow.66 The real tragedy of the developing ghettoization was that it did not have to happen. The Portuguese had often found that their colonists became Muslims. In 1585 the inquisitors of Goa complained about the Old Christians who had gone to live among the Moors and converted.67 In 1623 Amador Lozado, the captain of the fort at Arguim off the Mauritanian coast, was accused of being a secret Muslim, living with Muslim concubines and oppressing all the Christians in the fortress.68 These were not isolated cases; the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition are filled with stories of people living in North Africa who apostatized.
In Spain, too, it was not unknown in the 16th century for Old Christians to be attracted to Islam. Several Old Christians were penanced by the Inquisition for becoming moriscos in the 1560s69 and in one case an alfaqui managed to convert some friars to Islam.70 Though such stories continue to be found in the 1580s,71 they are somewhat rarer, something which reveals the growing separation between the two communities. There was little dialogue any longer. Propaganda was winning. Where people still lived among one another there was some mutual respect, but where they existed in mutual isolation they all too easily came to despise each other.
This separation allowed increasingly fantastical stories of the other community to gain currency. There was nothing to stop all manner of idiocies being believed. Thus soon even reasonable Christians believed in the archetype of the seditious crypto-Muslim and came to believe that these fanatics had to be stopped before they could succeed in their plan of destroying the nation and its way of life.
HOW DID ONE distinguish these seditious, dangerous people? In his treatise on the moriscos Pedro de Valencia let slip a remarkable fact about the objects of his study: ‘One must consider,’ he wrote, ‘that all these moriscos, as far as their natural complexion is concerned . . . are just as Spanish as the rest of the people who live in Spain’.72
There was no racial distinction between the moriscos and the rest of the Spanish population.73 Indeed, after they were expelled from Spain, many moriscos returned to Aragon, Murcia and Granada, and were concealed by members of the local population. Those who returned to Granada often sought out new villages to live in, and they were such proficient speakers of Spanish (and so indistinguishable from th
e rest of the population) that they were easily able to pass themselves off as Old Christians.74 It would therefore have been very easy to integrate the morisco population into the Spanish nation.75
In fact, the principal differences between the moriscos and the rest of the population were cultural. Yet Old Christian culture itself was an extraordinary mixture of the Christian and the Muslim,*6 which ought to have meant that fusion with the moriscos was possible. The difference in the 16th century was the new culture of intolerance, of which the Inquisition was both the symbol and the spearhead; thus it was that customs which were purely cultural and not religious came to be seen as Muslim and as indicators of heresy.
This cultural intolerance began slowly. In the first years after the conquest of Granada, although Cisneros burnt Islamic books, habits such as taking baths and the wearing of distinctive clothes were not seen as Islamic practices.76 This approach hardened, and by the time of the Congregation of Granada in 1526 it was proposed that the use of Arabic and the wearing of certain styles of clothing should be banned as indicators of Muslim apostasy.
However, the intolerance of the Congregation of 1526 was not as yet universal. In the same year Charles V agreed with a petition from the Moors of Valencia which noted that some recent converts to Christianity would not know how to ‘depart from some morisco ceremonies which they will keep more out of habit than because they wish to be Muslims or to offend the Christian faith’.77 The good sense of this view is shown by the fact that the moriscos themselves did not view their clothes as something Muslim, but rather as a regional costume.78
The moriscos therefore saw themselves as a population with a distinctive culture just as culture within Christian Spain varied from, say, Galicia to Extremadura. There was no racial difference between them and the Old Christians, and in Aragon and Valencia their ancestors had lived peaceably under Christian rule for centuries. The enmity which existed by the end of the 16th century had therefore had to be created, and in order to do this a stereotype had been required of the ‘Muslim enemy’. Stereotypes of the enemy are fed by paranoia, and following the bonfires of Valladolid and Seville of 1559 there was no shortage of this in Spain.
Thus in August 1582 the archbishop of Toledo wrote to Philip II with a notable piece of advice. As the venerable archbishop pointed out, if the Turkish navy were to take advantage of the fact that it could pick up 50,000 morisco infantrymen in Valencia alone the kingdom would be in serious peril, especially if such a force were to join forces with the Huguenots and other heretics. This was clearly intelligence of a considerable threat and moreover it was not an isolated piece of information. Five months earlier the inquisitors of Zaragoza had written with certain knowledge that the plot was for the duke of Orange and Philip II’s rival to the Portuguese crown Dom Antonio to join forces with the Muslims of Morocco through the good offices of Portuguese traders (usually crypto-Jews) and moriscos, and that meanwhile the moriscos of Aragon would link up with the prince of Berne while those of Valencia awaited the Turkish navy, and the French were planning to smuggle gunpowder to them so that they could destroy the Spanish fleet.79
Intelligence of new plots was always being received. The danger was, as the evidence clearly showed, mounting all the time. The extraordinary acuity of the enemy knew no bounds; the plots against Spain were such that no longer was your enemy’s enemy your friend – your enemy’s enemy was also, by some strange quirk of mutual complicity and loathing of the Spanish, their friend as well.
In such circumstances moriscos ceased to be seen as individuals. They were a generalized mass, ‘the enemy’,80 a stereotyped evil which had to be destroyed.81 By the 1580s it was assumed that all moriscos were, without exception, secret Muslims.82 Old Christians would often denounce entire villages for the same crime, as if there could be no nuance to behaviour.83 In Mislata in the region of Valencia the labourer Francisco Corzo was denounced in part because ‘it was generally said that all the people of Mislata were Moors’.84 Juan de Ribera, an archbishop of Valencia later declared a saint, wrote to Philip III early in the 17th century that ‘the hatred and obstinacy [of the moriscos] against the Catholic faith is as one in all of them [uno en todos]’85 – it may take someone who cannot differentiate individuals among their enemy to perceive this trait in others.86
In actual fact, however, the situation was complex. Just as some Old Christians had been attracted to Islam in the 16th century, there were innumerable cases of moriscos who genuinely wanted to be Christians. Christian members of morisco families would frequently denounce their relatives for Islamic practices, which alone shows that moriscos had widely differing approaches to Christianity.87 That assimilation was possible was revealed by cases such as that of Juan de Soria, denounced in Toledo in 1596 by his twenty-year-old daughter for expressing doubts regarding Christianity which she, as a good Christian, found deeply offensive.88 The way in which religious practice was anything but uniform across morisco families was revealed in 1602, when the wife of Miguel Arapel denounced him for Islamic behaviour; all was clearly not rosy in their marital home, since she professed shock and scandal at his apostasy in spite of the fact that he was circumcized.89
Such a litany of cases of family members denouncing one another to the Inquisition feels wretched. The Inquisition is, after all, a better ossuary of memory than most institutions to the interdependency of love and hatred. The ministers of the Inquisition professed love for their prisoners; they treated them with hatred. One intense emotion was, after all, so easily transformed into another.
Segorbe 1608
IN THIS ANCIENT TOWN on the plain of the Palancia river tensions had always run high between the morisco community and Old Christians. The great port of Valencia – and the tribunal of the Inquisition – were not too far distant, while the town lay between two sierras dotted with isolated morisco communities. It was inevitable that as tensions grew, they would break out in Segorbe, for there was little time left before the terrible decision taken by Philip III to expel all moriscos from Spain.
Maria Xaramfa’s large and comfortable house, the witness said, was used by the moriscos of Segorbe as a mosque. Various alfaquis met there. It was here that they preached to the moriscos, reading from the Koran which was placed on a bench before them. The oldest and most learned among them wore head-coverings (tocados) fringed with gold and silk, and held staffs in their hands as if they were bishops. They taught the moriscos how to perform their ritual ablutions, how to pray and which festivals they should keep. And as they read aloud, the gathered moriscos would respond, in the manner of a priest and his congregation.
The anonymous witness was able to give such a graphic description since he himself had attended these prayers in Segorbe on several occasions. Xaramfa, he said, derived great personal benefit from these events. The community of Segorbe paid her thirty ducats to hire her home. They provided her with three poor women to help with cleaning and whitewashing it for the four major festivals of the year. Xaramfa had also been given some mats woven in black and white which had been blessed by the alfaqui, and Islamic symbols had been painted upon them.
Maria Xaramfa, naturally, denied all the charges. While it was true that numbers of moriscos did come to her house, there was nothing Islamic about this. The accuser was merely trying to gain the favour of the inquisitors. The inquisitors gave her defence short shrift, however. With the gathering evidence against her entire community, they clearly could do nothing but accept the evidence of large numbers of moriscos attending her ‘mosque’ each Friday, having performed their ablutions in their homes. Aft
er eighty years of what they saw as sincere attempts at evangelization, there was a despair at the recalcitrance of the Muslims and at their refusal to integrate with the national culture.
By this time there was no doubt that increasing numbers of moriscos were indeed actively turning to Islam. In the village of Buñol, the priest Damián de Fonseca wrote just four years later that if twenty children were born in a short space of time the parents would get together and choose one of them to be baptized twenty times, switching his name each time with the priest unable to do anything about it.91 Meanwhile, Fonseca claimed, there were many moriscos condemned to be ‘relaxed’ by the Inquisition who refused to accept Christian confession so that they could be garrotted before being burnt: ‘and as soon as they declared [in the auto] “You are all witnesses that I die in the law of Muhammad” the executioner leapt off the stairs in two bounds and covered himself up, for fear of being stoned to death [by the mob, along with the morisco]’.92
On top of resistance to Christian rites, Fonseca wrote, there was an active Islamizing movement. Many moriscos kept Ramadan, wandering about for the month-long fast ‘thin and pale, hardly able to stand up, trying to divine the heavens without being astrologers, and looking longingly up at the sky until they caught sight of the first star in the evenings, at which they all disappeared as one from the squares and streets’.93 Circumcision was routine,94 as was the use of Muslim funerary rites, with corpses being wrapped in clean linen with silk headdresses decorated with gold thread and black silk.95 At weddings people danced and prayed and ate as Muslims.96