In Aragon proper, 50,000 Muslims made up approximately 15 percent of the population, while another 8,000 formed a small minority in Catalonia. Some 20,000 Muslims were scattered across the vast territories of Castile, in addition to small Muslim populations in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, which was annexed by Castile in 1512, and in the newly conquered Canary Islands. In Castile, Muslims were found mostly in small communities in Christian towns and cities. In Aragon, the Muslim population was predominantly rural. Muslim villages and settlements could be found scattered across the underpopulated kingdom of Aragon, from the foothills of the Pyrenees in the north to the windswept southern steppes and the fertile banks of the mighty Ebro River that runs down from Aragon through Catalonia and out into the sea.
In Valencia also, Muslims lived mostly in the countryside. After more than two centuries of Christian colonization, the Muslim population had been gradually pushed back from the coastal littoral into the drier mountainous hinterland known as the
secano
. Though some Valencian Muslims continued to live near the coast and in urban ghettoes in Christian towns and cities, the majority of the Muslim population lived apart from the Christian population centers, in rural villages and hamlets. Across Christian Spain, these communities constituted minorities that remained like rockpools left by the receding Islamic tide. In Granada on the other hand, Muslims remained a majority for some years after the conquest. All these communities varied widely in terms of their relationship to Christian society, their degree of acculturation, and their connections to the Islamic world. And in the aftermath of the War of Granada, these variations were to prove as significant as their similarities, as Spain’s Muslims faced a new future in a united Christian Spain.
In terms of their occupations, Spain’s Muslim communities generally held a similarly humble position in Iberian society. With the consolidation of the Reconquista, the aristocrats, generals, religious scholars, doctors, and men of learning who had once been attracted to al-Andalus had mostly left Iberia to seek new careers in the Muslim heartlands. The communities they left behind were drawn mostly from from the proletarian base of al-Andalus, from its craftsmen and peasants, horticulturalists, artisans, and building laborers. A fourteenth-century chancery document in the Crown of Aragon lists more than thirty different Muslim trades, including accountant, arms maker, carpenter, jester, trumpeter, innkeeper, farmer, and eye surgeon.
3
Muslims also worked as dyers, tanners, shoemakers, armorers, dancers, gardeners, and muleteers.
Muslim women worked as servants, midwives, and wet nurses, some of whom attended Christian women and children despite the prohibitions against such proximity. Even in Granada, where the traditional social structure was largely intact, the majority of the population consisted of peasants, small farmers, and urban artisans. There were exceptions to this proletarian profile. In Granada the landowning nobility had joined the exodus from al-Andalus, but many nobles remained after the conquest and continued to enjoy the wealth and status to which they were accustomed. Elsewhere in Spain, there were wealthy Muslim merchants and landowners who flourished even under Christian rule, some of whom were rich enough to rent land and property to Christians. In Aragon the powerful Belviss clan worked closely with the Christian administration, and its members continued to occupy the important position of
qadi general
—the chief appellate judge in Muslim Valencia and Aragon—as a dynastic post even in Ferdinand’s time. The Bellvis family were also allowed to trade internationally and had commercial connections in the spice trade that extended to Spain, Italy, and North Africa. But these cases were not common: unlike the Jews, Muslims rarely occupied economic and administrative positions in the upper ranks of Spanish society, nor were they associated with despised professions, such as tax collection.
In a Christian society where manual labor was often seen as unworthy, the lowly socioeconomic status of Spanish Muslims tended to generate disdain rather than hatred. At the same time, their reputation for sobriety, frugality, and industriousness made Muslims extremely attractive to Christian employers and landowners—an appeal that was enshrined in Christian adages such as
Quien tiene moro, tiene oro
(whoever has a Moor, has gold) and
cuanto mas moros, mas ganancia
(the more Moors, the more profit). Muslim labor was a particularly prized commodity in Valencia and Aragon, where most Muslims worked as feudal serfs in the service of landowning Christian seigneurs.
These Muslim vassals worked as rent-paying tenant farmers or sharecroppers on seigneurial lands. In addition to providing their lords with labor, rents, and a percentage of their crops, they were often subject to a range of onerous duties that did not generally apply to their Christian counterparts. Muslim vassals might be expected to collect the lord’s firewood, bake his bread, repair and make his family’s clothes, prune his vineyards, and tend his orchards. They might provide animals as gifts for his daughter’s wedding, transport his family and baggage when he traveled, serve in his private army, or deliver his letters—a task that could sometimes take more than a day in the more remote rural estates.
As a result, the nobility in Valencia and Aragon regarded Muslim labor as indispensable to their continued prosperity. The Aragonese Crown also drew substantial revenues from the Muslim vassals, who constituted the “royal treasure” in a variety of ways, including Muslim labor on Crown lands known as
realengo
, and taxes imposed on a wide range of activities, from Muslim bathhouses and halal butchers to the sale of licenses to local shops, beggars, inns, and brothels. All this had mixed consequences for the Muslims themselves. Though Muslim vassals were often ruthlessly exploited, they received the protection of their lords and benefited from a remarkably relaxed attitude among the Aragonese and Valencian nobility toward their religious practices—an attitude that was often at odds with the more militant sectors of the Church. In Valencia, for example, the ecclesiastical authorities were always keen to curb outward expressions of Islam, such as the call to prayer, where Muslims lived near Christians. Yet Christian barons not only permitted the muezzin to summon the faithful to prayer by voice or by horn, but allowed their vassals to build new mosques on their estates.
Such tolerance may have been driven primarily by self-interest, but it was resented by the Inquisition and also by the Christian lower orders in Valencia, whose anti-Muslim sentiments often overlapped with an equally intense loathing of their feudal masters. Many commoners regarded the Muslim vassals as competitors within the feudal system, while Christian urban craft guilds similarly regarded Muslims—and Jews—as economic rivals. In periods of social crisis, these sentiments could easily explode into violence, such as the 1455 riots in the city of Valencia, when a Christian mob razed the local
morería
.
These riots were fueled partly by recurring fears of a Muslim uprising, a possibility that haunted a kingdom where Muslims made up more than a quarter of the population. The belief that Valencia’s Muslims were waiting with “ears up and lances sharpened” was exacerbated by fear of the corsairs who raided Valencia from North Africa in search of slaves, booty, and captives for ransom. The Spanish expression for “the coast is clear,”
no hay moros en la costa
, literally “no Moors on the coast” derives directly from the long centuries in which Barbary corsairs terrorized Christian communities near the sea. With North Africa only twenty miles away from its extended and undefended coastline, Valencia was particularly susceptible to these raids, which were so common that some coastal Christian towns maintained permanent funds to pay the ransom of captives taken to Barbary. This vulnerability and insecurity could rebound with devastating consequences on the Muslim population of Valencia, and it was to prove a decisive factor in shaping official policy toward them in the century that followed the fall of Granada.
All Spain’s Muslims inhabited an Islamic cultural and religious world whose basis was the Koran and the Hadith—the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Their lives were based around four of the five pillars of Islam, the
shahada
(testament of faith), fasting, daily prayer, and almsgiving—few could undertake the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition to the festivals and holidays in the Islamic calendar, Spanish Muslims had their own sites of religious pilgrimage, hermitages, cults of saints, festivals, and traditions. In parts of Granada, Muslims celebrated Ramadan with street processions of dancers and musicians, who showered each other with fruit and colored water. In Valencia, Muslim women marked the New Year with visits to the local cemetery, where they adorned themselves with henna and wove flaxen shrouds to cover the dead. In rural Murcia, Muslim farmers and peasants celebrated the harvest with festivals of music, singing, and dancing in their vineyards and orchards.
The introduction to the Muslim community began seven days after birth with the namegiving ceremony known as the
fada
, in which newborn infants were anointed with henna and given amulets with Koranic verses to wear around their neck. In the case of male children, circumcision was followed by festive celebrations to which relatives and neighbors were invited. The lives of Spanish Muslims ended with burial in the prescribed Islamic manner, washing and dressing the body in clean linen and laying the corpse in virgin soil, turned on its side to face Mecca. Many Muslims buried their relatives with raisins and food and a “letter of introduction” that identified the deceased to the angels of death as true believers and helped them find their way to paradise.
Other features of Iberian Islam were less obviously religious. Like Christians, Spanish Muslims were great believers in astrology and numerology. They consulted horoscopes and almanacs and recorded propitious or unlucky dates in the calendar that might indicate bad or good harvests, rain or drought, peace or war. Like Spanish Christians also, they were often superstitious, to the dismay of their religious leaders. They wore amulets and bracelets with Koranic quotations to bring good luck or ward off the evil eye. They conjured spells and made potions that could hurt their enemies, cause individuals to fall in and out of love, cure jealousy, arouse sexual desire, or prevent evil spirits from entering a new house. There were potions that could make people invisible, enable them to travel vast distances quickly, or make it possible to see spirits by mixing the skin of a black and the fat of a white chicken and rubbing the mixture in the eyes.
Some of these potions and spells served a medicinal function. Medicine had once been one of the most important fields of study in al-Andalus, but by the end of the fifteenth century the hospitals and medical schools of Islamic Spain had mostly disappeared, and the treatment of illnesses increasingly fell to herbalists and
curanderos
(folk healers), many of whom were women, who often used practices that would once have been regarded as superstitious or unscientific.
Despite their reputation for sobriety, music, song, and dance were ubiquitous features in the lives of Spanish Muslims. Their most common instrument was the oud, the forerunner of the Renaissance lute and the guitar. Other instruments included horns, flutes, trumpets, psalteries, and a wide array of percussion devices, all of which were employed to accompany singing and dancing at parties, circumcision feasts, weddings, and other occasions. The most popular Muslim dances were the nocturnal dance known as the
leila
and the
zambra
(meaning “group of musicians”)—a dance that was unique to Spain and later became the basis for the “Moorish dance” that became popular in Renaissance Europe, which some claim evolved into English Morris (“Moorish”) dancing. Muslim wedding celebrations were particularly raucous occasions, which invariably spilled out into the streets, as the bride was led on a white mule to the nuptial chamber, accompanied by musicians, singers and dancers, and families and well-wishers throwing sweets.
Though Spanish Muslims remained symbolically connected to the wider
ummah
(Islamic community) with its center in the Arab world, these connections had often become frayed during centuries of Christian rule. Granada retained most of the trappings of an independent Islamic society, with its traditional social hierarchy, religious institutions, and cultural elite and its trade and cultural links to North Africa. Here most Muslims still spoke Arabic, although those who lived closer to the frontier often spoke
castellano
(Spanish) as well, while the educated classes retained the classical Arabic that was the traditional language of high culture and learning.
Arabic was also widely spoken in Valencia, with its geographical proximity to North Africa and Granada. In Castile, on the other hand, there were Mudejar populations that had lived under Christian rule for the best part of three hundred years, many of whom spoke only Castilian or a bastardized street Arabic. Cut off from the wellsprings of Islamic religion and culture, without books or calligraphers, schools, and opportunities for further study, the continued survival of Islam was largely due to the indefatigable efforts of local imams and
alfaquis
(religious teachers), who assumed responsibility for the religious and cultural education of their communities in their local mosques. It was a difficult task that often demanded improvisation and compromise, in which preachers were forced to write and preach in Spanish to transmit Islamic religious doctrine to an audience that could not speak the sacred language of the Koran.