Many Moriscos lacked even the most elementary knowledge of Catholicism ; they could not recite its basic prayers; they did not understand the sacraments and rituals; they were unfamiliar with its religious calendar. Often they had no one to teach or instruct them. In Granada, the new ecclesiastical bureaucracy had established a parish infrastructure even in the remoter regions of the kingdom by the time Charles came to the throne, but its effectiveness was limited by a poorly motivated lower clergy that was more concerned with fleecing its Morisco parishioners than ensuring their spiritual salvation.
The situation was not much better in Valencia and Aragon. In the more remote
lugares de moriscos
(Morisco places) Moriscos often went for months without ever seeing a priest or a representative of the Church after their initial baptisms. In 1532 Pope Clement VII instructed Cardinal Manrique to establish a parish infrastructure for the Valencian Moriscos. Yet two more years passed before Manrique dispatched an ecclesiastical commission to Valencia to begin this process. Their recommendations eventually led to the establishment of 120 new parishes throughout the kingdom, but these new parishes were starved of funds and often existed in name only. They were generally expected to finance themselves from local rents and church tithes, but because most Morisco parishes were poor, they were rarely able to generate enough income to maintain a permanent resident priest or cover the costs of converting mosques into churches and refurbishing them.
As in Granada, many of these priests attempted to mitigate their own poverty at the expense of their parishioners. Others preferred to avoid Morisco Valencia altogether and left their parishes to their own devices. In 1547, an ecclesiastical commission found that many priests in Morisco Valencia had abandoned their posts and that others had embezzled the funds that were supposed to finance their parishes. The absence of qualified or motivated personnel was such that, in 1542, the Valencian Church was obliged to reinstate a priest named Bartolomé de los Angeles, who had already been punished by the Inquisition for extorting money from his Morisco parishioners. Los Angeles was given personal responsibility for 128 Morisco towns and villages—an absurdly high number even for a more committed cleric, and within two years he was arrested for extortion a second time. Los Angeles was one of the few priests in Valencia who spoke Arabic. The majority of the Valencian clergy spoke no Arabic at all and preached to their apathetic and sometimes hostile Morisco congregations in a language that few of their congregants understood—an experience that was undoubtedly as uninspiring for the priests as it was for their listeners.
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The attempts to provide religious education were equally inadequate. The Manrique Commission had recommended the establishment of a wide network of schools to teach Morisco children. More than a decade later, the only institution providing religious education to Morisco children in Valencia was a private school established on the estates of the Duke of Gandía by the pious Jesuit priest Saint Francisco de Borgia, which had places for twelve Morisco pupils out of a total of eighteen.
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The situation was not much better in Granada. In 1559 the Jesuits established a catechism school in the Albaicín district, where pupils were taught to read and write in Castilian and received religious instruction from a dedicated staff of twelve Jesuit fathers that included a Granadan Muslim convert named Juan de Albotodo. Some five hundred boys lived the demanding ascetic routines of the Albaicín
colegio
, waking before dawn for mass, followed by prayers, rosary, catechism, and a lunch of a bread roll, but within a few years, most Moriscos had dropped out and the school was receiving most of its intake from Old Christian families.
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This lack of enthusiasm was not universal. If some Moriscos were not interested in sending their children to Christian schools or receiving religious instruction, others asked for the authorities to provide such schools and send them priests. There is no doubt that many Moriscos had not wanted to become Christians in the first place and resented the faith that had been imposed upon them, but the slow pace of evangelization was not entirely due to Morisco intransigence. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Church hierarchy continually reiterated the need to provide the Moriscos with religious instruction, without providing the human and financial resources that might have given these efforts a chance of success. The Morisco parishes rarely attracted clergymen with the same level of commitment found among some of Spain’s missionaries overseas.
Not all priests in Morisco parishes were corrupt or poorly motivated “idiots,” as one Spanish clergyman described his colleagues in Valencia, but too many fell short of the standards required or failed to receive the necessary institutional support that might have motivated them. This discrepancy did not go unnoticed. “I do not know why it is that we are so blind . . . that we go off to convert the infidels of Japan, China, and other remote parts,” wrote one anonymous Christian writer during the 1570s, “rather as if someone had his house full of snakes and scorpions yet took no care to clean it, but went to hunt for lions or ostriches in Africa.”
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The same writer pointed out that “It is impossible for us to convert the Moriscos without soothing them first and removing the fear, hatred, and enmity that they have toward Christianity.” Other clerics made similar observations, yet no systematic and coherent attempt was made to realize these objectives. Why did these calls go unheeded? Part of the explanation lies in the institutional weaknesses of the Church itself, which was often barely able to meet the pastoral needs of the Old Christian population, particularly in rural Spain. “It would be useful to have devoted and zealous preachers who wander through the archdiocese and win souls; but where shall we find them?” asked the church reformer Juan de Ávila of the archbishop of Granada in 1547.
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This absence was equally notable in Valencia. Even when the Church hierarchy tried to prevent the exploitative treatment of the Moriscos by parish priests and the lower clergy, these initiatives were rarely followed through and often became snagged in a cumbersome ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
Assimilation was also pursued through other means. Some local authorities tried to promote mixed marriages between Old Christians and Moriscos through tax exemptions or other financial incentives, and such marriages did take place, but their number was not significant enough to break down the ethnic divide between the two communities.
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There were also attempts to force Moriscos to live in Old Christian neighborhoods and vice versa. The re-incorporation of segregated Muslim ghettos into Christian towns was a complex process that involved the re-negotiation of long-standing agreements regarding rents and ownership, and this process was sometimes handled with an arrogant disregard for Muslim sensibilities. In some cases, the Moriscos themselves were required to finance the demolition of their own religious buildings and ghetto walls.
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Nor did the removal of the physical barrier of the ghetto walls necessarily lead to greater integration. Many Moriscos remained reluctant to leave the neighborhoods where they had spent their lives, or they were too poor to afford the higher rents elsewhere, while Christians were not keen to live in areas that were generally regarded as “the vilest in the city.”
As baptized Christians, the Moriscos were theoretically liable to the same legal and tax status as Old Christians, but such equality was repeatedly contradicted by discriminatory laws and a range of tithes and taxes that applied only to Spain’s former Muslims. Moriscos were often obliged to make special contributions to the upkeep of roads and bridges. In Granada, they paid the tax known as the
farda
for the upkeep of the kingdom’s coastal defenses. Even after their conversions, they remained barred from certain professions, such as midwifery, medicine, or pharmacology, which were reserved only for Christians. In Valencia, they were not allowed to change residence, on pain of fines or flogging. In Granada, Moriscos could not carry weapons, except for daggers with rounded points, so that they were not able to defend themselves.
Official discrimination was often accompanied by popular prejudice and hostility. In 1537 a wealthy Granadan Christian named Catalina Hernández bequeathed a large donation in her will for the establishment of a female orphanage in the city, on condition that Morisca orphans were excluded from it. The Christian wife of a Morisco once complained to the Inquisition that “Old Christians don’t want me or my daughter because I have the daughter of a New Christian.” In his anti-Islamic polemic the
Antialcorán
(Anti-Koran, 1532), the ecclesiastical writer Bernardo Pérez de Chinchon addressed the Moriscos in the following terms:
You are for the most part people who do not know how to read or write nor do you know anything of God nor of heaven nor of the earth, but you go around the countryside like beasts in the manner of the Arabs of Barbary who are a barbarous people without law nor king nor peace without fixed dwelling, here one place, tomorrow somewhere else: treacherous and thieving people, prone to the vice of sodomy like all the Moors of Africa.
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If these attitudes cast doubt on the willingness of Christian society to accept the Moriscos, there was also growing evidence to suggest that many of Spain’s former Muslims were no more enamored of the identities that had been foisted on them. From various parts of Spain, inquisitors and clergymen reported that Moriscos were not attending mass or going to confession; they were not baptizing their children or observing Christian fasts and feast days. When they went to church, they were often disrespectful and irreverent, entering without making the sign of the cross or exhibiting an “honest posture of the body” during prayer. Church officials were particularly scandalized by the behavior of some Morisco congregations during Holy Communion. The concept of transubstantiation and the transformation of wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ was one of the aspects of Catholicism that had always drawn the ire of Muslim religious scholars, and many Moriscos turned their faces away when the Eucharist was raised, pinched their children to make them cry so as to disrupt the solemnity of the sacrament, or threw breadcrumbs—and in one incident, a soiled cloth—at the altar.
Bad behavior in church was not restricted to the Moriscos. In some parts of rural Spain, Christian peasants took their animals to church with them and spent mass talking, playing dice, and even dancing to the sound of the church organ. But irreverence among Moriscos was always subject to more sinister interpretations than ignorance or rustic backwardness. In 1530 the archbishop of Granada, Gaspar de Avalos, sent a special envoy to report on the status of the Granadan Moriscos to Empress Isabella, who was acting as regent during one of Charles’s absences in North Africa. Avalos provided his envoy with an extensive list of offenses to demonstrate to the queen that “these New Christians are worse in their faith than when they were Moors.” Not only were they continuing to observe the Ramadan fast and giving Muslim names to their children, but they refused to go to confession or attend mass without compulsion, and they were generally disrespectful when they did go “unless there is an Old Christian present whom they fear.”
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The archbishop urged Isabella to take more vigorous action against a Morisco “nation” that he insisted should be “governed more through fear and not from love.” The empress responded with another tranche of prohibitions banning Moorish clothing, songs, and dances, but these do not appear to have been enforced or obeyed. Avalos’s own attempts to ban the
almalafa
and Moorish dancing from the town of Guéjar provoked a riot, and he was eventually forced to back down when Captain-General Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, the son of the count of Tendilla who first occupied the post, intervened on the Moriscos’ behalf. The archbishop was also obliged by the captain-general to abandon an attempt to force Moriscos to go to mass by stationing constables on the roads to burn the saddlebags of any Morisco who traveled on Sundays.
The tolerance shown by the captain-general toward the Granadan Moriscos was even more prevalent among the Christian nobles of Valencia, who continued to encourage their Morisco vassals to “live as Moors” on their estates when churchmen and inquisitors were not present. During his 1544 trial, the disgraced priest Bartolomé de los Angeles described the Moriscos of Valencia as “a disobedient and rebellious people” and claimed that “of forty households . . . only five or six go to mass.”
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Los Angeles blamed this intransigence on their Christian lords, whom he accused of protecting the Moriscos on their estates and impeding the attempts to evangelize them. The Inquisition of Valencia made similar accusations and frequently criticized the seigneurs for impeding the efforts of its officials. One of the most notorious “bad barons” was Sancho de Cardona, the Admiral of Valencia, who was charged by the Inquisition in 1570 with decades of pro-Morisco advocacy.
At his trial, one witness described how Cardona had told the Moriscos on his estates in 1542 to “fake the outward appearance of Christianity, but remain Moors on the interior” when ordered by a local priest to attend mass. Another claimed that the Moriscos on the admiral’s estates had been allowed to live “as if they were in Fez” and had even been permitted to build a new mosque. Cardona’s protection of his Morisco vassals appears to have been based on something more than economic self-interest. Various witnesses claimed that he rarely went to church or attended confession, and one witness claimed that the admiral once proposed to inform the pope that the Moors of Valencia had been forcibly converted and ask him to allow them to return to their faith.
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