The unveiling of Morisca women was only one component of a broader legislative assault on Morisco culture, which prized open the most private and intimate areas of Muslim domestic space to the hostile vigilance of Christian society. Other laws banned Moriscos from closing their doors on Fridays and during wedding ceremonies, in order to ensure that they did not worship or practice Muslim customs in secret. Moriscos were also prohibited from using bathhouses on Fridays, or from marrying without an Old Christian witness present to make sure that their celebrations did not have an Islamic component. This legislation was strongly criticized by the veteran captain-general of Granada, the Marquis of Tendilla, in a letter to one of Charles’s officials:
What, sir, is his highness doing, ordering that the Morisco clothing must be abandoned? Does he think that this is such a trivial thing? I swear by God that the kingdom will lose more than a million ducats in changing and buying clothes.... And what clothing, sir, did we here in Spain wear until the coming of king Enrique the Bastard and how did we wear our hair except in the Morisco style, and at what table did we eat? Did the kings stop being Christians and saints because of this? No sir, by God.
3
These criticisms reflected an ongoing debate within Spain’s ecclesiastical and secular institutions, between the moderate proponents of gradual assimilation like Tendilla and the more intransigent and chauvinistic sectors within church and state, for whom assimilation required the total abandonment of all “memory of the Moors.” Some of the most repressive anti-Morisco decrees bore the signature of the tormented Queen Joanna, but they almost certainly originated from the prelates, inquisitors, and advisers in the Castilian court, including the ubiquitous Cisneros.
These decrees embittered the Morisco population even as they generated a host of practical problems that required further legislation to undo. In parts of rural Granada, it was difficult and often impossible for Morisco butchers to find Old Christians to supervise the slaughtering process because there were no Old Christians living nearby. These butchers could either carry out unsupervised slaughter and risk being fined or punished, or oblige their customers to go without meat until an Old Christian witness could be found. In other cases, Morisco animal herds became infected because their owners were not able to slaughter diseased sheep or cattle. The insistence on Old Christian supervision was also a recipe for exploitation. Some Christians demanded payments for acting as godfathers or witnesses at Morisco weddings, in the form of cash, chickens, or silks. Priests in Granada also charged exorbitant fees for celebrating mass or administering the sacraments to their Morisco congregants.
In theory, the stream of ordinances was intended to promote integration, but if anything, the stigmatization of Morisco culture as something unwanted and inferior reinforced the gulf between the Moriscos and the Christian immigrants coming into Granada. Relationships between these two communities were often characterized by the visceral hostility to which settler-colonial societies are notoriously prone, and the criminalization of Morisco customs did nothing to curb this tendency. Some Granadan Christians refused to allow Moriscos to be buried in churchyards. Others tore
almalafas
from Morisca women in the streets or called Morisco men dogs and turncoats, ignoring the Church’s exhortations to ensure that the new converts were “well-seen, favored, and honored.”
In a letter on May 22, 1524, the renowned ecclesiastical man of letters and future bishop of Guadix, Fray Antonio de Guevara, criticized a friend for insulting a Morisco acquaintance in Valencia named Sidi Abducacim, whom he himself had baptized. Guevara made his disapproval clear in no uncertain terms:
Speaking truly and even freely I say that to call an honorable old Christian a Moorish dog and unbeliever and to defend yourself by saying that this is the way they usually speak in your town, seems to me worthy of punishment by the Inquisition, for with such an apology you defame your native land and harm the Christian religion.... I swear by God and the cross, that if Sidi Abducacim is a descendant of Moors, then your great-grandparents are also in the charnel house.
4
Other ecclesiastical officials condemned the ill-treatment of the Granadan Moriscos and urged Christians to treat them better. But such treatment was facilitated—and even justified in the minds of its perpetrators—by laws and regulations that identified the Moriscos as a suspect population and placed Christian officials and clergymen in positions of power over them. Such powers were routinely abused, whether it was constables who broke into Morisco homes to steal money or impose fines on their owners for real or invented offenses, or priests and sacristans who demanded chickens, silks, or cash payments from their parishioners and obliged them to work in their orchards on Sundays. All this did little to endear the Moriscos toward a faith and a way of life that most of them had not chosen in the first place, and it became increasingly evident that the attempt to bring about the de-Islamification of Granada by decree was not succeeding.
In June 1526, Charles visited Granada for the first and only time in his reign, to spend his honeymoon at the Alhambra with his Portuguese wife, Isabella. The whole population turned out to welcome the royal couple to the city, including a troupe of Morisca dancers who danced the
leila
and sang, accompanied by Morisco musicians playing lutes and tambourines. Charles spent six months at the Alhambra, which he later recalled as the happiest of his life. During that time he combined his honeymoon with affairs of state and received visits from numerous foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, from the Venetian envoy Andrea Navagero to the Palatine count Frederick, whose doctor, Johannes Lander, wrote an account of their visit. Both Navagero and Lander were amazed and fascinated by the Moorish cultural world that surrounded the secular emperor of Christendom. Lander described how Charles and his court were entertained on the festival of San Juan with bullfights and pageants of “Moors and Christians,” in which the ladies and gentlemen of the court dressed “a la morisca,” and later witnessed a Moorish dance at the Alhambra, by Morisca women “all adorned with excellent pearls and other precious stones on their ears, forehead and arms.”
5
Such dances might be acceptable as an exotic public spectacle for the royal court, but they were seen very differently when they were integrated into the ordinary lives of the Moriscos themselves. Charles himself was concerned by reports that the Moriscos were not fulfilling their religious obligations, and he was also shocked to hear from leading Granadan Moriscos of their exploitation and abuse at the hands of Christians. He therefore commissioned an ecclesiastical commission to investigate these abuses, chaired by the then bishop of Guadix and future archbishop of Granada Gaspar de Avalos. The commission confirmed these abuses but nevertheless warned that “the Moriscos are truly Muslims; it is twenty-seven years since their conversions and there are not twenty-seven or even seven of them who are Christians.”
These findings were presented to a congregation of clerics, prelates, bishops, and ecclesiastical lawyers convened by Charles in Granada that autumn to discuss the situation of the Moriscos. In the recently completed Royal Chapel, which housed the mausoleum of the Catholic Monarchs, these churchmen condemned the un-Christian treatment of the Moriscos by their own clergy. But the dominant tenor of the debates was summed up by Antonio de Guevara, who spoke of his desire to scrape the henna from the bodies of Morisca women with a knife and shave their hair because they braided and embroidered it “according to African custom.”
Coming from a man who had so forcefully spoken against the rejection of the Moriscos from Christian society, Guevara’s revulsion at these “African” customs was an indication of the ambivalent attitudes within the Church itself toward the former Muslims that it aspired to integrate. After months of debate, the Royal Chapel Congregation delivered a series of recommendations, which ratified all the restrictions of the last two decades and in some cases extended them. The Moriscos were not allowed to write or speak Arabic and were ordered to speak Castilian even in their own homes. They could not use their bathhouses without an Old Christian present to supervise them, nor could they give Moorish names to their children. Morisca women could not henna their hands or feet “publicly or secretly” or cover their faces. The doors on their houses were to be left open on Fridays and during weddings. They could not bury their dead without an Old Christian present. Surgeons and doctors who carried out circumcision operations would face banishment or the confiscation of their property.
On December 7, these mandates were formally approved by Charles himself. The intransigence of these Spanish clergymen—and the official support that such intransigence now received—was another indication of how far Spain had moved from its medieval past. Where Christian rulers had once legislated to preserve Muslim difference in order to avoid the risk of “confusion,” Charles now proposed to legislate such differences out of existence in order to absorb the Morisco population of Granada into Christian society. In the event, the cash-strapped emperor disappointed his more hard-line clerics when he agreed to a forty-year moratorium on these proposals in exchange for an offer from local Morisco representatives of an annual payment and a special contribution of between eighty and ninety thousand ducats as a “national wedding present.” These payments helped finance the construction of the splendid Renaissance palace on the grounds of the Alhambra complex to celebrate Charles’s victory over the French at the battle of Pavia. They also bought the Granadan Moriscos a reprieve from the Inquisition for the same forty-year period. This was neither the first nor the last time in which the needs of the royal purse took precedence over the long-term goal of religious purity. That same year, a similar agreement was negotiated in Aragon, where Spain’s remaining Muslims had only recently undergone their own belated transformation into Christians.
7
The Last Redoubt: Aragon 1520–1526
With the conversion of the Muslims of Granada and Castile, Aragon now constituted the last remaining Mudejar enclave in Catholic Spain. But even as Ferdinand was imposing Christianity on the Muslims of Granada, he gave no indication that he intended to inflict the same fate on his own subjects. At the height of the Alpujarras rebellion in 1500, the Catholic Monarchs reassured Ferdinand’s Muslim subjects in Aragon that this was not going to happen and publicly denied rumors “that it is our intention and will to reduce by force to the holy faith and Christian religion all Moors of the said kingdom.”
1
These reassurances do not seem to have had their desired effect. In April 1502 , the Valencian Cortes (parliament) informed Ferdinand that many Muslims were so concerned that they were about to be converted that they had stopped working in the fields and begun to flee to North Africa. To prevent further losses and induce these Muslims to return, the nobles called upon Ferdinand to reassure the Muslim population once again that their religious autonomy would be respected.
The Catholic Monarch agreed to this request and promised the regional parliaments of Valencia and Aragon on two separate occasions that the Mudejars in his kingdoms would continue to live as Muslims. Events in Granada and Castile had already shown that such promises were not necessarily binding, and it is difficult to believe that Ferdinand really intended to permit the permanent presence of Islam in one part of Spain when it was being eradicated everywhere else. But whatever his long-term intentions, Ferdinand was too astute a statesman to provoke a confrontation with the powerful lords of Aragon and Valencia that he might not win. For these seigneurs, the interests of their estates were always a higher priority than religious unity, and they regarded any attempt to enforce Christianity on their Muslim vassals as a potential threat to their source of revenue. Both kingdoms were fiercely protective of their ancestral
fueros
(local laws) or
furs
, as they were known in Valencia, which limited the jurisdiction of the monarchy in their territories. The Inquisition had never been fully accepted in Aragon or Valencia, where it was often seen as a disruptive Castilian import.
The result was an increasingly anomalous policy that was continued after Ferdinand’s death by his widow, Germaine de Foix, in which the Muslims of Aragon continued to live according to the Mudejar arrangements of the past, even as their co-religionists were being forcibly transformed into Christians everywhere else. Nearly two decades after Cisneros’s dramatic intervention in Granada, this situation still remained when Charles I arrived to claim his Spanish inheritance in 1519. That same year, his Italian chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara, informed the young king that he had been chosen by God to bring about a “world monarchy . . . the uniting of all Christendom under a single shepherd” and gave him a detailed account of the responsibilities that this role conferred upon him. Yet the Universal Emperor, who likened himself to Hercules, was also obliged to swear an oath at his coronation ceremony that he would not attempt to enforce Catholicism on the Muslims of Aragon. Within a few years, this promise also would be broken, as a popular rebellion in the kingdom of Valencia provided Charles with an opportunity that had not been available to his predecessors.
The complex chain of events that brought about the end of Mudejarism in Aragon originated in the city of Valencia itself. In the late fifteenth century, Valencia was one of Spain’s most fortunate and prosperous cities. With a prime location alongside the irrigated wetlands, or
huerta
, known as the garden of Spain for its abundance of fruit orchards, Valencia was also a thriving port that maintained trade links across the Mediterranean with the great city states of the Italian Renaissance and with Alexandria. The city’s commercial success was symbolized by the
lonja
silk exchange and a cosmopolitan population of 45,000 residents that made Valencia one of the largest urban centers in Spain. However, beyond the mercantile prosperity and Renaissance sophistication of “Valencia the Beautiful” lay an oppressive feudal hierarchy dominated by a rapacious aristocracy whose wealth was largely dependent on serf labor and whose members were renowned for their arrogance, ostentation, and violence.