Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (34 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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Religious chauvinism and cultural prejudice fueled Christian hostility toward the Moriscos, which was expressed in various ways: in discriminatory legislation and
limpieza
statutes; in the refusal of some priests to offer communion to their Morisco congregants; in forcing Morisco galley rowers to cover their heads when mass was celebrated on board; in the taunts of “Moorish dogs” and “Moorish bitches” directed at Moriscos by the Old Christian populace; in physical attacks on condemned Moriscos who attempted to “die as Moors” at Inquisitorial autos-da-fé; and in official documents that variously referred to the Moriscos as a “pestilence,” a “plague,” a “fever,” a “pestilential horde,” or “beasts” or “vipers” within the “bosom of Spain.”
limpieza
statutes; in the refusal of some priests to offer communion to their Morisco congregants; in forcing Morisco galley rowers to cover their heads when mass was celebrated on board; in the taunts of “Moorish dogs” and “Moorish bitches” directed at Moriscos by the Old Christian populace; in physical attacks on condemned Moriscos who attempted to “die as Moors” at Inquisitorial autos-da-fé; and in official documents that variously referred to the Moriscos as a “pestilence,” a “plague,” a “fever,” a “pestilential horde,” or “beasts” or “vipers” within the “bosom of Spain.”
Such language was often found in the seventeenth-century apologetics and anti-Morisco texts written in support of the expulsion, such as the Portuguese Dominican friar Damián Fonseca’s
Just Expulsion of the Moriscos of Spain
(1611). A former preacher in Valencia, Fonseca wrote how the “treason and bad customs” of the Moriscos were inherited in their “corrupted blood” and their mother’s milk, so that all members of the Morisco “nation” had imbibed “the depraved customs of their ancestors . . . in the belly of their mothers.” Fusing
limpieza
discourse and religion, Fonseca cited the Book of Ezekiel and compared the Morisco presence inside Spain to a parasitical “vine” that was “in the insides of its mother” and “fed by a poisonous blood.”
7
The Aragonese priest Pedro Aznar Cardona also depicted the Moriscos as a source of pollution in his condemnation of Old Christians who married Moriscos and thereby “stained what little clean lineage they possessed.” Like Fonseca, Aznar Cardona lived and preached among the Moriscos and spent several fruitless years preaching in a rural Morisco parish in the Jalón Valley in Aragon before writing the ferociously anti-Morisco tract
Expulsión Justificada de los Moriscos
(Justified Expulsion of the Moriscos). This experience contributed to Aznar Cardona’s subsequent denunciation of the Moriscos as
Just Expulsion of the Moriscos of Spain
(1611). A former preacher in Valencia, Fonseca wrote how the “treason and bad customs” of the Moriscos were inherited in their “corrupted blood” and their mother’s milk, so that all members of the Morisco “nation” had imbibed “the depraved customs of their ancestors . . . in the belly of their mothers.” Fusing
limpieza
discourse and religion, Fonseca cited the Book of Ezekiel and compared the Morisco presence inside Spain to a parasitical “vine” that was “in the insides of its mother” and “fed by a poisonous blood.”
7
The Aragonese priest Pedro Aznar Cardona also depicted the Moriscos as a source of pollution in his condemnation of Old Christians who married Moriscos and thereby “stained what little clean lineage they possessed.” Like Fonseca, Aznar Cardona lived and preached among the Moriscos and spent several fruitless years preaching in a rural Morisco parish in the Jalón Valley in Aragon before writing the ferociously anti-Morisco tract
Expulsión Justificada de los Moriscos
(Justified Expulsion of the Moriscos). This experience contributed to Aznar Cardona’s subsequent denunciation of the Moriscos as
The vilest of people, slovenly and enemies of virtue, noble letters, and sciences. In consequence, they were far removed from all urbane, courteous, and polite manners and customs. They brought their children up to run wild like brute beasts, giving them no rational teaching or instruction for salvation, except what was forced upon them, and what they were obliged by their superiors to attend, because they had been baptized. Their sentences were clumsy, their discourse bestial, their language barbarous, their way of dressing ridiculous.... In their meals they were coarse. They always ate on the ground with no table or any other piece of furniture that might smell of other people.... What they ate were vile things . . . vegetables, grains, fruits, honey, and milk; they do not drink wine nor eat meat unless it is slaughtered by them . . . they love charlatanry, stories, dancing, promenading, and other bestial diversions . . . they pursue jobs that require little work, such as weaving, tailoring, shoe-making, carpentry, and the like; they are peddlers of oil, fish, honey, sugar, eggs, and other produce; they are inept at bearing arms and thus are cowardly and effeminate; they travel in groups only; they are sensual and disloyal; they marry young and multiply like weeds overcrowding places and contaminating them.
8
Aznar Cardona’s hysterical loathing of a population he regarded as “savage idiots” sometimes acquires a hallucinatory intensity, as in his depiction of Moriscos as “devouring foxes, serpents, scorpions, toads, spiders, and poisonous lizards from whose cruel venom many became sick and died. They were hawkish highwaymen and birds of prey that lived by giving death. They were wolves among sheep, drones in the beehive, crows among doves, dogs in the church, gypsies among the Israelites, and finally, heretics among Catholics.”
9
Other clerics were equally visceral in their rejection of their former parishioners. “They were, like the devil, inimical to the most holy Cross,” recalled Friar Marcos de Guadalajara,
10
while the Dominican friar Blas Verdú later recalled the “terrible, mute, and silent arguments that clamor in the blood. After we preached to them, these wretches responded: my father—Moor; I—Moor.”
11
9
Other clerics were equally visceral in their rejection of their former parishioners. “They were, like the devil, inimical to the most holy Cross,” recalled Friar Marcos de Guadalajara,
10
while the Dominican friar Blas Verdú later recalled the “terrible, mute, and silent arguments that clamor in the blood. After we preached to them, these wretches responded: my father—Moor; I—Moor.”
11
Like the Gypsies, who occupied a similarly precarious and marginalized position in sixteenth-century Spain, Moriscos were often regarded as a malevolent subculture whose members were suspected of blasphemous religious practices, crime, and murder. Such bigotry was able to convert even the more positive characteristics imposed upon them into a source of loathing and disgust. To Fonseca, the inferiority of Valencian Moriscos was confirmed by the fact that many of them lived in “rough and mountainous places, where these savages chose to live the better to flee the company of Catholics.”
12
12
If the Moriscos were loathed because of where they lived or what they ate, they were also despised by their enemies for the same qualities of sobriety and industriousness that made them attractive to Christian employers. In Castile, Christian observers often expressed jealousy and amazement at the rapid economic progress made by some Granadan Moriscos and attributed such advancement to the fact that Moriscos worked harder than Christians and consumed less and therefore enjoyed an unfair advantage. Some anti-Morisco narratives went further and accused Moriscos of deliberately working long hours and living frugally in a collective plot to undermine the Christian economy and take over Spain by stealth.
Moriscos were often imagined by Christians to be miserly and richer than they appeared on the outside, and these beliefs were sometimes accompanied by accusations that they were secretly accumulating Spain’s reserves of gold and silver. The idea that the Moriscos were “the sponge of all the wealth of Spain” to some extent provided a pseudo-explanation for the economic crises and bankruptcies during the last years of Philip’s reign. Like the Conversos before them, anti-Morisco sentiment was sometimes fed by envy and resentment, albeit on a lesser scale. At a meeting of the Council of Castile in September 1607, a councillor named Pedro de Vesga called for Moriscos to be banned from attending medical lectures as unregistered students or
oyentes
, on the grounds that Morisco medical practitioners were using the knowledge they attained to murder Christians. Vesga argued that medicine and other professions of “honor” should be exclusive to Christians. To support these arguments, he informed the Council of a Morisco doctor in Madrid known as the Avenger, who had supposedly murdered three thousand Christian patients with the use of a “poisonous ointment,” and another doctor who mutilated his Old Christian patients so that they would not be able to use weapons. With so many unregistered Morisco students attending Spanish universities, Vesga warned, Morisco doctors would soon be able to kill “more people in this kingdom by themselves than the Turks, English and other enemies.”
13
oyentes
, on the grounds that Morisco medical practitioners were using the knowledge they attained to murder Christians. Vesga argued that medicine and other professions of “honor” should be exclusive to Christians. To support these arguments, he informed the Council of a Morisco doctor in Madrid known as the Avenger, who had supposedly murdered three thousand Christian patients with the use of a “poisonous ointment,” and another doctor who mutilated his Old Christian patients so that they would not be able to use weapons. With so many unregistered Morisco students attending Spanish universities, Vesga warned, Morisco doctors would soon be able to kill “more people in this kingdom by themselves than the Turks, English and other enemies.”
13
These fantasies may have been motivated partly by the desire to eliminate economic competition, but anti-Morisco prejudice was rarely consistent enough to be reduced to socioeconomic interpretations. Bigotry and hatred generated their own assumptions, which were often contradictory and illogical. If Moriscos were deliberately working too hard in order to undermine Christian society, they could also find themselves accused of parasitism and laziness and amassing their imagined fortunes through undemanding jobs such as gardening and shopkeeping.
All these allegations rested on the assumption that the Moriscos were united in their ultimate desire to destroy Christianity and take over Spain. Once this framework was accepted, even the humblest Morisco shopkeeper or the most ruthlessly exploited Morisco peasant could soon pose a danger to Christian society. This threat was magnified by fears that the Morisco population was multiplying inexorably at Christian expense. It was widely believed that Moriscos were marrying younger and having larger families, while the Christian population was declining, partly because Christians were fighting and dying in the king’s wars and also because Christians were entering the Church and placing a higher premium on celibacy and restraint in their sexual relations.
In his homage to Don John of Austria, the
Austriada
, the poet Juan Rufo y Gutiérez depicted Spain heroically fighting off “homicidal waves” of enemies, while the Moriscos remained at home “out of harm’s way / Having four children in three years.”
14
In 1571 a correspondent of the German Fugger banking dynasty in Seville criticized the deportation of Granadan Moriscos to other parts of Spain, arguing that “in this way Spaniards become more tainted and intermixed with Moors than heretofore. Thus they and the Jews will be the noblest and strongest races, for they multiply like royal rabbits.”
Austriada
, the poet Juan Rufo y Gutiérez depicted Spain heroically fighting off “homicidal waves” of enemies, while the Moriscos remained at home “out of harm’s way / Having four children in three years.”
14
In 1571 a correspondent of the German Fugger banking dynasty in Seville criticized the deportation of Granadan Moriscos to other parts of Spain, arguing that “in this way Spaniards become more tainted and intermixed with Moors than heretofore. Thus they and the Jews will be the noblest and strongest races, for they multiply like royal rabbits.”
The specter of racial or ethnic minorities breeding their way toward cultural domination is a recurring historical phenomenon, which tends to be based more on subjective impressions and worst-case scenarios than on verifiable facts, and Christian attitudes toward the Moriscos were no exception. Modern scholarly research has not found that Moriscos were marrying at a much younger age than Christians, nor does the available evidence support the belief that their families were growing at a faster rate than those of Christians in the last years of the century.
15
In Castile the total number of Moriscos during Philip’s reign probably never reached more than 70,000 out of an overall population of some 6,600,000, yet Inquisitorial reports from cities such as Toledo, Seville, and Avila routinely predicted that the Morisco population would soon outnumber Christians. Even in Valencia, where the Morisco population was larger, it remained at roughly a third of the overall population throughout the sixteenth century.
15
In Castile the total number of Moriscos during Philip’s reign probably never reached more than 70,000 out of an overall population of some 6,600,000, yet Inquisitorial reports from cities such as Toledo, Seville, and Avila routinely predicted that the Morisco population would soon outnumber Christians. Even in Valencia, where the Morisco population was larger, it remained at roughly a third of the overall population throughout the sixteenth century.
Nevertheless, the belief that the Moriscos were “breeding like rabbits” was often taken for granted, and it became another reason to hate and fear them. To some extent, these demographic anxieties were shaped by Christian perceptions of overcrowded Morisco ghettos, which gave observers the impression that their numbers were “spilling out” of their neighborhoods. But the fear of Morisco fecundity was also infused with older stereotypes of “the carnal Moor,” which imagined that Moriscos were more promiscuous than Christians because they practiced polygamy and consanguineous marriages, while Christians were supposedly more inclined to celibacy. In fact, polygamy was never as widely practiced as many Christians imagined, partly because few Moriscos were wealthy enough to afford it. But sexuality was a recurring obsession among anti-Morisco polemicists, such as the Dominican friar Jaime Bleda, who described Moriscos as “Vicious and libidinous, symbols of the goat, they gave themselves up to every kind of sin.”
16
16
Such depictions echoed the condemnations of the “carnality” of the Prophet in medieval anti-Muslim polemics. One sixteenth-century Spanish writer described the orgiastic celebrations of Muhammad’s followers at parties and weddings, where they whipped themselves into a state of delirious intoxication and “gave themselves over to the bestial vice of the flesh and without understanding that it was evil, took advantage of the young girls of tender age and as if all their happiness lay in food, drink, and lust.”
17
These accusations of sexual debauchery and licentiousness were also directed at particular racial or ethnic Muslim groups, such as Turks and Moors. European travelers to North Africa frequently depicted its inhabitants as promiscuous and prone to sodomy and even bestiality. To the Scottish traveler William Lithgow, the women of Fez were “damnable libidinous, being prepared both wayes to satisfy the lust of their luxurious villaines,”
18
while Diego de Haedo insisted of the inhabitants of Algiers that “bestiality is very common among them, in this they imitate the Arabs, who are infamous for this vice.”
19
17
These accusations of sexual debauchery and licentiousness were also directed at particular racial or ethnic Muslim groups, such as Turks and Moors. European travelers to North Africa frequently depicted its inhabitants as promiscuous and prone to sodomy and even bestiality. To the Scottish traveler William Lithgow, the women of Fez were “damnable libidinous, being prepared both wayes to satisfy the lust of their luxurious villaines,”
18
while Diego de Haedo insisted of the inhabitants of Algiers that “bestiality is very common among them, in this they imitate the Arabs, who are infamous for this vice.”
19
Such imagery was easily transplanted onto the Moriscos and sometimes generated semipornographic fantasies of the type described in a 1594 Inquisitorial prosecution of the female Morisca slave of a Christian cleric in Antequera for magical practices. According to the trial, these practices included “pronouncing certain words” till “the devil appeared to her in the form of a Negro man,” who flew with the Morisca to the countryside to have “carnal access” before returning home at dawn.
20
20
It is not necessary to be a psychoanalyst to detect the same undercurrent of repressed desire in such fantasies that was often found in European witch trials. This disgust and fascination with Morisco sexuality was also a product of the differing attitudes between Catholicism and Islam toward sex. Whereas the Catholic Church venerated chastity and celibacy, Islam was a religion whose founder had married several times and whose sacred text was filled with lyrical descriptions of the sensual delights of heaven. Whereas Catholicism regarded sex as an unavoidable but sinful activity that was necessary for the procreation of the species, Islam saw sexual activity as sacred—provided it was carried out within the confines of marriage. One seventeenth-century
aljamiado
manuscript attributed to an anonymous author known as the Exile of Tunis contains an erotic manual for married couples, which advises husbands to call out
bicmi ylahi
(“in the name of God”) on penetration and to delay sexual climax “until he is sure that both partners reach it at the same time: much love is attained when [sexual union] is performed this way.”
21
aljamiado
manuscript attributed to an anonymous author known as the Exile of Tunis contains an erotic manual for married couples, which advises husbands to call out
bicmi ylahi
(“in the name of God”) on penetration and to delay sexual climax “until he is sure that both partners reach it at the same time: much love is attained when [sexual union] is performed this way.”
21
This celebration of matrimonial sexual relations did not mean that unrestricted sexual activity was sanctioned within Islam—far from it. Nor did the Catholic veneration of chastity and celibacy mean that all Christians subscribed to it. The proliferation of brothels in Hapsburg Spain and the large numbers of Christians prosecuted by the Inquisition for bigamy, “simple fornication,” or the “nefarious sin” of sodomy are a testament to the perennial gulf between theory and practice, while the licentiousness of Spanish priests was an ongoing source of scandal to the ecclesiastical and secular authorities—and to the Moriscos. But prejudice tends to construct its own version of reality, which ignores inconvenient facts that contradict its assumptions, and the attitudes of sixteenth-century Spaniards toward the Moriscos contain numerous examples of this tendency.
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