Even before Philip’s return, the influence of the Mendozas was already waning at the Hapsburg court, where the captain-general was suspected of being too supportive of the Moriscos. With corsairs raiding the Granada coast and even penetrating inland with impunity, the presence of a large unassimilated Morisco bloc with ambivalent loyalties was regarded as a particularly egregious weakness in Spain’s defenses. These anxieties were fanned by reports from the Mendozas’ political enemies in Granada that Moriscos were providing intelligence information to corsairs, kidnapping Christians to sell as slaves, or hoarding wheat and stockpiling weapons in preparation for an uprising.
Some of these stories were products of Christian paranoia. Others may have been more calculated fabrications, according to one of Philip’s own officials in 1561, who accused Christians in Granada of manufacturing stories of such collusion in order to conceal their ruthless exploitation of the Granadan Moriscos.
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A number of Christians, including city councillors and clergymen, had acquired substantial landholdings in the vega and the Alpujarra Mountains, and these gains were often made at the Moriscos’ expense. Between 1559 and 1567, a royal commission, headed by an
oidor
(judge) from Valladolid named Doctor Santiago, conducted a prolonged investigation in rural Granada to discover whether lands allotted to the Crown had been illegally transferred into private hands.
Such frauds had undoubtedly occurred, though, and Christians were their most likely perpetrators. But the main victims of the Santiago commission were Morisco farmers and peasants, whose holdings were confiscated whenever their owners could not produce formal deeds of ownership. Many Moriscos had Arabic land titles and were unfamiliar with Castilian legal procedures, so they were unable to challenge the decisions of the commissioners in a Granadan appellate court that was in any case dominated by their enemies. The result was a steady stream of dispossessions that generated further resentment among a Morisco population already subject to oppressive taxation and the hostile vigilance of secular and ecclesiastical officials—the priests who fined them for not attending mass, the constables who broke into their homes and planted weapons or banned books in order to justify arrests and bribes, and the inquisitors who continued to harass them and send them to prison. In some parts of the Alpujarras, Christian officials routinely celebrated public holidays by touring Morisco villages with their wives, sustaining themselves with chickens, honey, fruit, and money that they stole or extorted from the inhabitants.
In a letter to Philip in 1569, the Spanish ambassador to France, Don Francés de Álava, described various visits to Granada during a twelve-year period in which he had observed how secular and ecclesiastical officials “gave numerous occasions to drive the Moriscos to desperation,” from extortion to the rape and sexual harassment of their wives and daughters. In one Alpujarran village, Álava told Philip, the Morisco population had appealed to the Church to remove the local priest because “all our children have eyes like his.” Álava also described religious services in Morisco parishes in which priests would suddenly turn round in the middle of Communion to direct “arrogant and vituperative words” at their congregations, all of which constituted such “an indecency and offense to God that it that made me shudder from head to foot.” After leaving mass, these priests would then “go through the town with an air of bullying arrogance over the Moriscos.”
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The Crown did nothing to alleviate such oppression and its own actions often added to the burdens the Moriscos were forced to bear. In 1561 the royal tax on the production and sale of Granadan silk was increased by 60 percent, followed by another 30 percent rise three years later. These increases fell heavily on rural silkworm breeders and the weavers and tailors of the Albaicín, in an industry that was already in recession. In the same period, the Granada Audiencia conducted an aggressive campaign against the Morisco
monfíes
(bandits) and highwaymen of Granada. From the early 1560s onward, the Audiencia began to arrest former
monfíes
who had been granted asylum on the estates of Christian lords. In doing so, these officials breached a long-standing tradition in rural Granada in which bandits settled on rural estates with their families and worked on them in exchange for de facto pardons by their new employers. In a direct challenge to the jurisdiction of the captain-general, the Audiencia began to recruit its own militias, known as
cuadrillas
, to pursue the bandits. These soldier–bounty hunters were often billeted in Morisco villages, whose inhabitants they robbed and extorted with impunity even as they pursued the
monfíes
. As former Morisco bandits once again took to the mountains to avoid arrest or take revenge on their persecutors, the lawlessness and instability in the kingdom increased.
All these developments came to a head at a time when the forty-year grace period negotiated between Charles V and the Moriscos of Granada in 1526 was coming to an end. In the midst of economic recession and administrative chaos, with corsairs prowling the coast and bandits infesting the roads and highways, Granada had become dangerously unstable. And it was in this climate that the “prudent king” took a fateful decision that transformed the situation from a crisis into a catastrophe.
11
The Granada Pragmatic
In May 1564, the combative church reformer and archbishop of Granada, Pedro Guerrero, returned to his archdiocese from the Council of Trent, where he had played a key role in its final deliberations. Before leaving Italy, Guerrero passed through Rome, where he reportedly received instructions from the pope to make a more sustained effort to incorporate the Granadan Moriscos into Christian society. Guerrero returned to Granada determined to take advantage of the termination of the forty-year-grace period and make a more forceful attempt to transform the Moriscos into Christians. Guerrero believed strongly that the continual adherence of the Moriscos to their customs and traditions was an obstacle to their full integration into Christian society. And in September 1565, he presided over a meeting of the Granadan church council, which recommended the implementation of all the 1526 Royal Chapel Congregation mandates regarding Moorish dress and customs. The council also proposed new prohibitions of its own, including a ban on the use of henna, the playing of musical instruments, and the dancing of
zambras
and
leilas
, regardless of whether these dances had an Islamic religious content.
The following year, these recommendations were presented to an ecclesiastical panel in Madrid that was chaired by the powerful new president of the Council of Castile and a future Inquisitor General, Cardinal Diego de Espinosa, who was appointed to the presidency following the death of Luis Hurtado de Mendoza in 1565. An arrogant
bonete
(bonnet), as Spaniards referred to those who wore the cardinal’s cap, Espinosa was described by Philip’s courtier and chronicler Luis Cabrera de Córdoba as “scornful and resolute in what was not his profession.” His influence was such that the French ambassador, Fourquevaux, described him as “another king” at Philip’s court. The cardinal was an ardent supporter of Guerrero’s hard-line policy toward the Moriscos, and his approval was a decisive factor in the astonishingly harsh
pragmática
(royal decree) enacted by Philip on November 7, 1566.
The pragmatic incorporated all the proposals of Guerrero’s provincial council. In addition to banning Moorish dances, songs, and musical instruments, the king ordered the entire Morisco population of Granada to leave its doors open on Fridays and other festival days, to cease speaking and writing Arabic within three years, and to learn Castilian. All books and documents written in Arabic were to be inspected and burned if they were considered religiously offensive. After three years, all Arabic texts in the kingdom were to be destroyed regardless of their content. Public bathing was also prohibited, and existing bathhouses in Granada were to be destroyed. The wearing of male and female Moorish clothing, including the
almalafa
, was strictly forbidden. Moriscas were given two years to allow their clothing to wear out, after which time any woman seen in public with her face uncovered would be subject to a series of escalating punishments. Nearly seventy years after the Moriscos’ forced incorporation into Christianity, Spain’s rulers had issued what was effectively a charter for the total elimination of Morisco culture from Granada, at a time when the accumulated tensions in the kingdom were already close to explosion.
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What explained this terrible decision? Philip piously justified the pragmatic on the basis of his obligation to save Morisco souls, but his implacable determination to enforce the repressive decrees that his predecessors had tried and discarded was undoubtedly motivated by other concerns beyond the spiritual welfare of the Moriscos. To some extent, the pragmatic was a product of official impatience at the slow pace of assimilation in Granada, coupled with the belief that Morisco cultural difference was a major factor impeding their transformation into Christians. To hard-liners like Guerrero and Espinosa, the Moriscos would never abandon these customs and traditions unless they were compelled to do so. But the pragmatic was also influenced by wider geopolitical considerations. The Madrid panel met only a year after the Spanish relief of the siege of Malta. Despite the general rejoicing in Christendom at this victory, rumors of a new Turkish offensive in the western Mediterranean continued to circulate through Europe, and the Spanish court took it for granted that another major clash was imminent.
This prospect undoubtedly served to concentrate the attention of Spain’s rulers on a kingdom whose proximity to North Africa made it the most likely launching pad for an attack on Spain itself. Not only were the Granadan Moriscos potential allies in the event of a Turkish assault, but they had already demonstrated their disloyalty through their collusion with the corsairs. Was the pragmatic a desperate attempt to eliminate the Morisco security threat by speeding up the process of assimilation? Or was it intended to reassert the Crown’s authority over a deviant Morisco population that was considered too weak to resist?
Both possibilities may be partially accurate. Before giving his approval to the pragmatic, Philip sought advice from a professor of theology at the University of Alcalá, who reportedly conflated the two familiar sayings, “The more Moors, the more profit” and “The fewer enemies, the better” into a new adage: “The more dead Moors, the more profit, for there will be fewer enemies.” Philip was reportedly pleased by this formulation, which suggests that he was aware of the potential impact of his decision. But if he anticipated rebellion, neither he nor any of his ministers appears to have done anything to prepare for this possibility.
In May 1566, Philip appointed Pedro de Deza, a member of the Inquisition’s Supreme Council, as president of the Granada Audiencia. The appointment of this ambitious
letrado
was another sign of the changing political atmosphere at the court. Not only was there a long-standing feud between the Deza family and the Mendozas, but Deza was one of Espinosa’s henchmen, and he arrived in Granada with explicit orders to enforce the pragmatic to the letter and reject any attempt to soften its provisions. It was a sign of the times that Iñigo López de Mendoza, now the Marquis of Mondéjar following his father’s death, was not informed of the pragmatic until after Deza’s arrival.
As soon as he discovered its contents, the captain-general traveled to Madrid in an attempt to persuade the king to change his mind, but he was only granted an audience with Espinosa himself, who informed him that it had been “determined from above to uproot the Morisco nation” from Granada. When Mondéjar warned that there were not enough troops in Granada to quell a Morisco revolt, Espinosa promised him another three hundred soldiers and dismissed the possibility of rebellion, because the Moriscos were “vile people, unarmed, without industry or fortresses or any guarantee of assistance.”
Such complacency was not shared in Granada itself, where the potentially disastrous consequences of the pragmatic were obvious to Moriscos and Christians alike. Shortly after his arrival, Deza instructed Alonso de Orozco, the canon of the San Salvador church in the Albaicín, to speak to a specially invited group of leading Moriscos and enlist their help in disseminating the pragmatic’s contents to the local population. Some of the motivations behind the king’s decision can be gleaned from Deza’s instructions to Orozco, who was told to explain to the Moriscos that Arabic books “were no use to them and very upsetting for their minds” and that their style of dress “seemed to say that they truly did hate being Christians, and it was dishonest and did not look right that Christians should go around dressed as Muslims.”
Orozco did as he was told, assuring the Moriscos that “by doing all of this voluntarily, and seeing that they carried themselves as did the Christians of other kingdoms, they would be honored, favored, and respected.” But his audience were horrified by the pragmatic’s proposals and they refused to convey these instructions to the population on the grounds that they would be stoned. As news of the pragmatic spread, other Moriscos reacted with anger, despair, and consternation and sent emissaries to Deza and the court in an attempt to convince them to reverse their decision. But the king and his ministers remained unmoved by all appeals.
The most eloquent defense of the Morisco position was made by Francisco Núñez Muley, the former page of Hernando de Talavera, who on various occasions in the past had represented Granada’s Moriscos in negotiations with the Spanish authorities. Now in his twilight years, Núñez Muley personally delivered an impassioned appeal to Deza, asking him to rescind the pragmatic or compromise on some of its provisions. His arguments were later published in what remains one of the key documents in the history of Morisco Spain. The importance of Núñez Muley’s moving memorandum lies not only in its lucid insights into the cultural world of Morisco Granada from one of its own members, but in what it reveals of the incomprehension and prejudice through which that world was viewed by Christian Spain.