6
Faith Triumphant
In imposing Catholicism on the Muslims of Granada, the Catholic Monarchs faced a dilemma like the one that had preoccupied their predecessors following the creation of the Jewish “New Christians” in 1391–1412. It was one thing to “convert” one section of the population, but how long could these Muslims remain Christians if they continued to mingle with their former co-religionists? At first Ferdinand and Isabella attempted to solve the problem by banning any contact between the new converts in Granada and the Muslims outside the kingdom, but this quarantine was impossible to enforce. The result was an anomalous situation that the Flemish diplomat Antoine Lalaing, the Count of Hoogstraten, depicted in his account of the visit of Philip the Fair, Isabella and Ferdinand’s Hapsburg son-in-law, to Spain in 1501.
In May the Burgundian archduke arrived in Toledo to meet his in-laws, where Lalaing relates that he repeatedly expressed his amazement at the “multitude of white Moors who lived in the Spains” and asked why their presence was tolerated. Informed of the annual tributes that the Muslims paid to the Crown, Philip warned that “some day they could do more harm to the kingdom than their tribute was worth, as they had done in previous times.” According to Lalaing, “The Archduke repeated these words so often that they reached the ears of the Queen,” who, “knowing that what he said was true” and to please her future son-in-law, promised that all the Moors in her kingdoms would be converted to Christianity by the end of the year.
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These criticisms would not have pleased Isabella, whose loathing of the Moors was not mitigated by her husband’s pragmatism. But it is likely that she had already resolved on the course of action that led her to sign a
pragmática
(royal decree) in July that year, which ordered all Muslims in the Kingdom of Castile and León to receive baptism or leave the country. The pragmatic was not publicized until February of the following year, and it constituted an even more explicit rejection of the medieval past than the recent events in Granada. There the Catholic Monarchs had used the charge of sedition as a pretext for mass conversion, but such accusations could hardly be leveled at the
moros de paz
(Moors of peace) of Castile, who had behaved as loyal subjects of the Crown ever since the failed rebellions of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, Isabella declared her responsibility to “help conserve the holy work” begun in Granada and her determination to remove “any cause or possibility by which the newly converted could be subverted or separated from our faith.”
Ostensibly, the Muslims of Castile were presented with the same alternatives offered to the Jews—they could remain in Spain and become Christians, or they could remain Muslims and leave Spain by the end of April. But the conditions offered by the Crown were heavily tilted in favor of the former option. Prospective emigrants were not allowed take gold or silver with them, and various essential goods were similarly embargoed. They were forbidden to travel overland through Aragon, to make sure they wouldn’t settle there; their ports of embarkation were limited to the Atlantic Bay of Biscay, and they were not allowed to go to any Muslim country with which Castile was at war, thus eliminating most of the Muslim world. Last but not least, they were not allowed to take any male children with them under the age of fourteen or girls under the age of twelve, who were to be given to Castilian families to be brought up as Christians.
These restrictions were hardly likely to facilitate mass emigration, and were probably intended to ensure that Muslims did not leave, thereby enabling Isabella to fulfill her religious obligations while maintaining a valuable labor force and source of revenue. It is not known how many Muslims accepted these conditions, but it is unlikely to have been more than a small proportion. Across Castile, mass conversions were turned into civic celebrations, as mosques were reconsecrated or earmarked for demolition, and entire Muslim families were publicly baptized and took Christian names before joyous Christian crowds. In the ancient city of Ávila, the collective baptism of one of the oldest Mudejar communities in Spain was celebrated with bullfights and festivities.
On November 26, 1504, Isabella died, exhorting her husband from her deathbed to “wage war unremittingly against the Moors” in North Africa. Two years later, the death of her son-in-law Philip the Fair ushered in a dynastic crisis in Castile, as the throne passed into the hands of his mentally disturbed widow Joanna the Mad, who proved unequal to the task. In the absence of an eligible Castilian contender, Ferdinand briefly became acting king while the inheritance was decided. His death in 1516 was followed by Cisneros’s brief regency until Charles of Ghent, the eldest son of Joanna and Philip came of age. In 1517, the interregnum came to an end when the teenage nephew of the Catholic Monarchs arrived in Spain for the first time to be crowned Charles I of Castile and Aragon, the first of the Spanish Hapsburgs. By that time, a new category had been added to Spain’s bewildering array of cultural and religious identities, as the Muslim converts of Castile and Granada became known as Moriscos—a pejorative adaptation of the adjective
morisco
(“Moorish”), meaning “little Moor” or “half-Moor,” that would soon became the standard reference to all Spain’s former Muslims.
With the dynastic transition to the House of Hapsburg, Spain acquired the Burgundian/Hapsburg possessions in the Low Countries and Germany and a new role in the heart of western Europe. In 1519 the new king was elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and became the secular head of Christendom. Two years later, Cortés completed his audacious subjugation of Aztec Mexico that began the transformation of Saint James, the iconic saint of the Reconquista, from Santiago Matamoros (the Moorslayer) into Santiago Mataindios (the Indian slayer) as the conquistadors invoked his name during the conquest of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. The conquest of New Spain provided a springboard for further acquisitions in the Americas that transformed Charles into one of the most powerful rulers in history, and the head of a vast transnational Christian empire spanning three continents. These stupendous powers were not without limitations. Charles’s expensive election campaign to become Holy Roman emperor had placed him heavily in debt to the Flemish and German bankers who had financed his bid, and he continued to be plagued by financial problems throughout his reign. Between 1520 and 1522, civil war returned to Castile in the form of the Comunero rebellion—an upheaval that was partly a protest against what was seen as the imposition of a “foreign” Hapsburg king on Castile. Though Charles eventually emerged victorious from this confrontation, he faced other challenges, both inside and outside Spain. In 1517 Martin Luther pinned his famous theses to the castle church in Wittenburg, which became the ideological basis for the Protestant Reformation and ushered in a new era of religious and political conflict across Europe.
The advent of Lutheranism coincided with a renewed threat to central Europe from the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, as a Turkish advance along the Danube River conquered the Balkans and Hungary, and culminated in the abortive siege of Vienna in 1529. Further Turkish conquests in Rhodes, North Africa, and Egypt placed Hapsburg Spain at the center of a fierce struggle in the Mediterranean that would dominate much of the coming century.
Despite these challenges and setbacks, the broad picture of the Spanish kingdoms in the early sixteenth century was one of power and achievement, in which imperial conquest on behalf of the faith was paralleled by the construction of churches and cathedrals throughout Spain, many of which were built on the demolished ruins of mosques or synagogues. “The reason for our triumph is our faith, without which it is impossible to please God,” wrote the royal cosmographer Pedro de Medina in
Libro de grandezas y cosas memorables de españa
(Book on the Greatnesses and Memorable Things of Spain, 1548). These sentiments were widely shared. Catholic triumphalism was accompanied by a de-Islamification of Spanish society that was evident in various ways, from the search for new “Roman” architectural styles to the criticisms made by the Spanish court physician and humanist intellectual Francisco López de Villalobos, who condemned the use of Arabisms in Toledan Spanish, which “deform and obscure the cleanliness and clarity of Castilian.”
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In the Great Mosque at Córdoba, one of the jewels of the Umayyad Caliphate, a church was built inside the building, in a particularly crass demonstration of Catholic hegemony that was reportedly condemned by Charles himself on aesthetic grounds when he eventually saw it with his own eyes. The king’s criticisms of the poor taste of his architects did not indicate any respect or affection for Islam itself. A devout Catholic, Charles fully accepted the mantle of “defender of the faith” that his position as Holy Roman emperor imposed upon him, and he was equally committed to the Hapsburg dream of a universal Christian empire, which many Europeans regarded as a pretext for the Hapsburg domination of Europe.
Charles was the first of three generations of Hapsburg rulers whose decisions would determine the fate of Muslim Spain over the coming century. Much of his long reign was spent outside Spain on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, leaving his Spanish kingdoms to be ruled by regents and ministerial councils in his absence. In his capacity as Holy Roman emperor, Charles pledged to lead a Christian crusade against the Ottoman Turkish Empire at the beginning of his reign. Though he proved ultimately unable to fulfill this aspiration, it was not for want of trying. Stout and heavyset, with a pronounced Hapsburg jaw bordering on physical deformity that he did his best to conceal with a beard, Charles was a notorious glutton, whose poor diet cost him all his teeth at a relatively young age and obliged him to suck rather than chew his food. He was also physically courageous and dynamic, personally leading his troops in numerous campaigns against both Christian and Muslim opponents.
Charles also devoted considerable attention to affairs of the faith within his vast empire. Like Ferdinand and Isabella, he was committed to the eradication of heresy, and his reign coincided with an intensification of the Inquisition’s activities to include not only Conversos, but suspected Lutherans and deviant Catholic sects, such as the harmless mystics known as
Alumbrados
(Illuminists), whose members emphasized inner spiritual transformation over outward expressions of religious devotion. The Inquisition also began to take an interest in Spain’s former Muslims, who now fell within its jurisdiction as baptized Catholics. The Holy Office was particularly concerned by reports from Granada and Castile that many Moriscos had yet to abandon the religious and cultural practices from “the time of the Moors” and fully embrace their new faith. Such accusations often failed to distinguish between religious and cultural aspects of Spanish Islam, so that even the clothes of the Moriscos were construed as evidence of backsliding or un-Catholic behavior. But many churchmen and secular officials believed that Morisco cultural traditions were an obstacle to their religious progress and argued that Moriscos would never become fully integrated into Christian society as long as they spoke, ate, and dressed differently from Christians.
Between 1511 and 1526, Spain’s rulers issued a succession of royal decrees, pragmatics, and ordinances devised to eradicate these characteristics completely. Such legislation was aimed primarily at Granada, where Muslim cultural difference was more obvious. On June 20, 1511, a royal decree barred Moriscos in Granada from acting as godfathers at baptismal ceremonies and ordered that their place be taken by Old Christians. On the same day, another edict banned halal butchery and decreed that animals could only be slaughtered by Old Christians or under Old Christian supervision. Another decree subsequently prohibited Granadan tailors from making “Moorish” clothing. Such legislation was particularly concerned with female attire. On July 29, 1513, a decree condemned the fact that Morisca women continued to “walk with their faces covered” and gave the female population a two-year grace period to allow their
almalafas
to wear out. After that, any woman seen with her face covered would be subject to an escalating series of punishments, from the confiscation of the offending garment at the first offense, to flogging and banishment.
Fear and animosity toward the veiled female face is a recurring theme in the relationship between Western and Islamic societies, which has had different meanings in different historical contexts. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the British consul, Lord Cromer, depicted the veil as a symbol of cultural backwardness and female subjugation, while the
niqab
(veil) and
hijab
(female dress code) have been variously depicted in our era as symbols of female oppression, Islamic fundamentalism, or even terrorism.
Needless to say, female emancipation was not a high priority in sixteenth-century Spain. Christian antipathy toward the
almalafa
was often steeped in prurient fantasies, which feared that women whose faces could not be seen were likely to be involved in illicit amorous relationships or prostitution. These suspicions were evident in the euphemistic references to the “shamelessness and dishonesties” that the
almalafa
supposedly concealed, and reflected a widespread belief that Muslim women were more sexually active and promiscuous than their Christian counterparts. Suspicions of the
almalafa
were not confined to its use by Morisca women, however. Some Christian women also wore it, or covered their faces with black lace mantillas in another indication of the Moorish cultural influence on Spanish society. A decree in September 1523 specifically barred Old Christian women from wearing the
almalafa
in order to avoid “setting a bad example to the Newly Converted” and “committing some excesses against Our Lord.” Another law associated the
almalafa
with a very different transgression by decreeing that “no man shall dare go about by night or day in women’s clothing, whether Christian or Morisco,” on pain of confiscation of such clothing or public flogging.