These barons were loathed by the Christian masses, and class hatred also accrued to their Muslim vassals. Though Christians and Muslims occupied similar lowly positions within the feudal system, the latter were considered to be more productive by both secular and ecclesiastical landlords and were often subject to more stringent and demanding feudal arrangements. On the sweltering coastal sugar estates of the dukedom of Gandía, south of Valencia, thousands of Muslim vassals toiled in the ancestral seat of the Borgia family in conditions that were not far removed from slavery. Monasteries, convents, and churches, such as the wealthy monastery of Valldigna, also relied heavily on Muslim labor to cultivate their orchards and vineyards, harvest their crops, and tend their herds.
The qualities that made Valencian Muslims attractive to landowners and employers did not endear them to the Christian populace. Not only were these Muslims seen as competitors and rivals by the Christian lower orders, but their willingness to accept higher rents and onerous conditions of vassalage also weakened the bargaining power of Christians within the feudal system. The result was a toxic mixture of economic resentment, religious fervor, and fear of a large Muslim population that was often imagined to be on the brink of rebellion or in secret contact with Moorish North Africa. This sense of insecurity was exacerbated by the endemic lawlessness and crime in the kingdom. Even at the height of its prosperity in the fifteenth century, Valencian society was notoriously prone to banditry, and unsolved murders, rapes, and robberies were common. Such activity was not restricted to any particular social class. In a kingdom where central authority was weak and remote, the aristocracy often behaved like a law unto itself, and the fact that its members were able to murder and rob with relative impunity only intensified the resentment toward them.
In the early sixteenth century, the lawlessness and disorder in Valencia was intensified by economic recession and a series of lethal plagues. In the same period, there was an increase in raids on coastal towns by Barbary corsairs, which local Muslims were often suspected of facilitating. All these factors stirred ethnic and religious tensions throughout the kingdom, particularly in the capital. In the summer of 1519, the more well-heeled residents of Valencia fled to the countryside to escape another outbreak of plague, leaving behind them a hungry, unemployed, and rebellious population that believed itself to be facing a full-scale corsair assault. The collapse of authority in Valencia coincided with persistent and unsubstantiated rumors of Muslim rebellions and sightings of corsair ships. There were also a number of the omens and portents that often preceded major social upheavals in Renaissance Spain, from sightings of mysterious comets to the appearance of a giant magical lion, all of which fueled the prevailing atmosphere of religious fervor, anti-Muslim hatred, and social radicalism.
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By the end of the year, political power in Valencia had passed into the hands of local craft guilds and master craftsmen, drawn primarily from the middle and lower middle classes, who established a governing council to rule the city. They called this the Thirteen, after Christ and his apostles. Initially, the council appeared to take the side of the central government and appealed to the royal viceroy, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, to reassert the Crown’s authority and provide arms to the population to defend the city against a corsair assault. Sensing an opportunity to change the balance of power in the kingdom at the expense of the independently minded seigneurs, Charles gave his permission. In January 1520, the Thirteen authorized the creation of citizens’ militias known as the Germanías (brotherhoods) to protect the city. Over the course of the year, to the horror of the viceroy, the aristocracy, and the urban middle classes, the militias evolved into a radical social movement that set out to destroy the feudal system itself. In the spring of 1521, an army of two thousand Agermanados marched out into the Valencian countryside, declaring its intention to exterminate all the caballeros (gentlemen) in the kingdom.
As the militias burned and looted the estates of aristocratic and ecclesiastical landowners, Mendoza and the nobles closed ranks and combined their military forces in an attempt to crush the rebellion. These efforts were initially unsuccessful, and the rebels inflicted a series of stinging defeats on royal-seigneurial armies, whose foot soldiers included many Muslim vassals. The rebels were increasingly turning their violence against the Muslim population. In July the militias attacked Muslim settlements around the city of Valencia, urged on by a Franciscan friar who shouted “Long live the faith of Christ, and war to the Saracens!” That same month, the rebels fought fierce battles with a coalition of royal and seigneurial armies whose ranks contained large numbers of Muslim vassals. These battles further inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment. On July 14, Germanía fighters captured the town of Játiva and attacked the local Muslim quarter. Hundreds of Muslims were dragged to the main cathedral and ordered to choose between baptism or death. Most chose the former option, though some were killed anyway. The following week, the Germanía general, a stonemason named Vicent Peris, led the rebels to another victory against a royal-seigneurial army that included some three thousand of the Duke of Gandía’s Muslim vassals.
Flushed with their victory, Peris’s men surged into the Muslim ghetto in the town of Gandía, shouting “Death to the Moors!” and obliged the population once again to choose beween baptism or having their throats cut. In the space of three days, so many Muslims were reportedly baptized that they had to be sprinkled with drops of water from branches dipped in irrigation ditches. These “conversions” were driven by a curious combination of ethnic revenge, religious fervor, and class hatred. On one hand the rebels hoped to please God and ensure success for the rebellion by baptizing infidels. At the same time, the Agermanados appear to have believed that transforming the Muslim vassals of the despised seigneurs into Christians would make them less attractive to their feudal overlords and remove the “privileged” position they supposedly enjoyed within the feudal system.
The circumstances in which these baptisms were administered and the degree of force involved were later to become a major theological bone of contention for the ecclesiastical authorities. Not all Muslims were dragged to the baptismal font at the point of a sword. In some cases, Muslims shouted “Christians! Christians!” at the mere approach of the militias and expressed their wish to be baptized, either to save themselves from ill-treatment or because they believed that was what would be demanded of them. Others bowed to what they regarded as the inevitable triumph of Christianity, just as some Muslims had done in Granada. If some baptisms were carried out “with mop and broom,” the majority were administered in churches by priests and friars in accordance with Catholic ritual, regardless of whatever pressure had brought the Muslims to the baptismal font in the first place. What is indisputable is that all these conversions, whether or not they were the result of direct threats, took place in a climate of violence and terror that was not exactly conducive to a considered choice.
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Throughout the summer of 1521, as Cortés completed his subjugation of Aztec Mexico in the name of the faith, bands of militiamen conducted their class war
cum
religious crusade in the Valencian countryside, killing, robbing, and converting Muslims and consecrating their mosques as churches, sometimes merely by pinning pictures of Christ and the Virgin on their doors.
4
The combination of class hatred and religious fervor that motivated the rebels was sometimes expressed in chants of “Death to the gentlemen! Death to the Moors!” In other cases, the rebels shouted “Death to the Moors unless they become Christians!” At the town of Oliva, Muslims were robbed and killed even as they were being taken to the church to be baptized, and eyewitnesses reported dozens of corpses littering the roadsides. Not all Christians engaged in these activities or approved of them. Some Muslims at Oliva were protected by a local friar and a group of local Christians, and this was not the only occasion in which Christians intervened to save Muslims from the rebels. But the ethnic and religious character of the rebellion was further inflamed as the royal-seigneurial armies began to prevail on the battlefield. At the coastal town of Polop, the Agermanados massacred some six hundred Muslims after they had already been baptized; the killers proclaimed their desire to “raise souls to heaven and put coins in pockets.”
By the autumn of 1521, at least fifteen thousand Muslims had been baptized, and Peris was calling for the conversion of all Muslims in Valencia. During the winter, the nobility began to exact bloody revenge on its would-be exterminators, while the royal authorities regained control of the city of Valencia itself. In March 1522, Peris was killed, and the rebellion passed into the hands of an anonymous figure who assumed the biblical name El Encubierto (the Hidden One)—a figure that often appears in sixteenth-century Spain in moments of social and political crisis.
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Little is known of this charismatic would-be messiah, who claimed to be a relative of the Catholic Monarchs and first appeared in the town of Játiva in March, predicting the imminent Day of Judgment. Surrounding himself with a retinue of servants, he began preaching a mixture of antifeudal radicalism, biblical prophecy, and religious hatred of Muslims and Jews that soon drew a substantial following.
A new round of anti-Muslim violence and conversions now ensued before the Hidden One was murdered in May 1522 by assassins sent by the viceroy. At least three more “Encubiertos” laid claim to his title before the rebellion was finally extinguished in December. By this time, an estimated twelve thousand people had been killed, and much of rural Valencia had been devastated. For the traumatized Muslim population, the future was now uncertain. Having shown exemplary loyalty to the established order and to the king himself, many Muslims expected the baptisms to be nullified, while the victorious Christian barons also assumed that their conversions would be declared invalid. Both parties would soon be disappointed.
From a theological and legal perspective, the Valencia conversions raised questions of legitimacy that recalled the 1391–1412 anti-Jewish pogroms. In both cases, an eruption of popular violence had created a category of New Christians, using methods that were not in keeping with the Church’s theological opposition to forced conversion. But like the Jews before them, the fact that the Valencian Muslims had been baptized meant that they were now Christians, regardless of whether their conversions had been voluntary or not. Though the circumstances in which these baptisms had taken place were not ideal, some members of the clergy argued that they had produced a positive outcome. Others pointed out that if these baptisms had been administered in accordance with Catholic ritual, they could not be nullified retroactively without denying the transformative power of the sacrament.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the rebellion, the lords and barons of Valencia denied that the conversions were valid and called for them to be annulled. The question of whether or not their vassals had been correctly baptized became particularly urgent when Inquisition officials in Valencia began to report that many were reverting to Islam, in some cases with the encouragement of their Christian lords. If their baptisms were considered legitimate, then these Muslims were guilty of apostasy and were liable to investigation and punishment. Though some Muslims were prosecuted, inquisitors were generally disposed toward leniency until their ambiguous theological status could be clarified.
In 1524, Inquisitor General Cardinal Alonso de Manrique instructed the Valencian inquisitor Juan de Churruca to investigate how many Muslims had converted and clarify the circumstances in which their conversions had taken place. Even before the results of this investigation were known, Charles made his own intentions clear, when he wrote to Pope Clement VII asking to be relieved from his previous oath not to convert Muslims by force. The emperor may have been influenced by a political testament prepared for him in the winter of 1523–1524 by his Italian and Flemish advisers while the court was staying in Pamplona, which advised the youthful king of the steps he needed to take in order to avoid God’s anger and secure divine approval for his reign. Among other recommendations, Charles was advised that he should expel all Moors and infidels from his kingdoms unless they embraced Christianity.
In November 1524, Churruca’s commission began to travel through Valencia compiling lists of Muslims who had been converted and eyewitness statements on the circumstances in which the conversions had occurred. The following April, these findings were presented to an ecclesiastical assembly convened by Charles in Madrid. For nearly four months in the Franciscan monastery in Madrid, prelates, inquisitors, clerics, and experts on canon law laboriously debated the status of Valencia’s Muslims. These debates often consisted of convoluted attempts to define what constituted “force.” Some clerics simply argued that the conversions were voluntary, because Muslims had chosen to convert rather than be killed. Others, such as the future Barcelona inquisitor and ecclesiastical author Fernando Loaces, reached the same conclusion by arguing that the violence used in the baptism of the Valencia Muslims was “conditional” rather than “precise,” because these converts had not converted at the point of a sword. Even though the actions of the rebels were criminal, Loaces argued, the baptisms demonstrated God’s ability to bring “good out of evil” and should be regarded as valid.
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Charles himself accepted this position, writing to Ferdinand’s widow, Germaine de Foix, in her capacity as viceroy of Valencia that the violence used to convert the Muslims was “not precise nor absolute enough to exclude them from maintaining the faith that they promised in their baptism.”