Moriscos

In the 16th century, after the fall of Granada in 1492, use of the term Morisco or "Moorish" became wide-spread in Spanish to refer to people who were descendants of the Peninsula's Muslim population. Some were still practicing Islam, whether in secret or openly, and some were Christians.

How did Andalusis and the Muslims of Christian Spain become the Moriscos who were expelled from the Peninsula if they did not convert to Christianity in 1609?

The fourteenth century marked increased expansion of Christian rulers to the south, as kings such as Pedro IV, "the Cruel" solidified their power in regions that had been under Muslim rule for the last several hundred years.

The rise of Isabel, the daughter of Juan II, to the throne, seems to have been decisive for the non-Christian minorities in the Peninsula.

The last Trastamara ruler, she strategically married the King of Aragón, Fernando, officially uniting the two kingdoms whose ruling families (both Trastamaras) had been developing increasingly close relations over the course of the 15th century. She married her daughter into the Hapsburg royal family of Europe, and it is Hapsburgs who came to rule Spain and the early modern Spanish Empire.

There are very important differences between the Trastamaras and the Hapsburgs. The Trastamara monarchs were born and raised in Iberia and their courts and forms of being were deeply marked byt he cultural norms of the Peninsula (which included many customs that English and French visitors would describe as "Moorish," including eating on low benches from communal platters, eating many foods associated with Morocco, such as couscous, living in palaces either designed by Muslim architects or in imitation of them, maintaining Jewish doctors, holding elaborate equestrian festivals that originated in North Africa and that are perpetuated in the rodeos of Mexico and the American Southwest). Barbara Fuchs has an excellent study on this: Exotic Nation. Olivia Remie Constable's To Live Like a Moor is also excellent.

Despite the high level of acculturation between Muslims, Jews and Christians in 15th-century Spain, or perhaps because of it, the Catholic Monarchs, facing a rebellious nobility and fractured political reality, as well as powerful neighbors, undertook a campaign of self-fashioning to present themselves as the foremost champions of Catholicism.

The Catholic Monarchs and especially Isabel continue to be cast positively in Spanish culture. She is a foundational figure in modern Spanish history.

The super popular tv miniseries, Isabel, created by RTVE, Spanish National television, had 3 very successful season from 2012-2014. They have created a series of resources for teaching, like character maps and interactive visuals. I have included links below.

Isabel personally commissioned chroniclers and poets to present a favorable mention of herself (and vilify opponents, see Weissberger). One of the only contemporary voices critical of Isabel that survives is that of Eliyahu Capsali, a rabbi of Crete. His father (also a rabbi) had welcomed exiled Jews in the first decades of the 15th century and he claims in his history of the Ottoman Empire, to have heard first hand accounts of the expulsion and of the court of Isabel and Fernando. According to Capsali, Isabel offered up the Jews to God in exchange for Him intervening in the siege of Granada.

The Catholic Monarchs establish the Inquisition to reform the Catholic Church and arguably to deal with the large number of newly converted Catholics from Judaism and Islam. This is a transnational early modern Institution in Spain.

They also turn their attention south, to the Muslim kingdom of Granada. Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada was a tributary vassal of the Catholic Monarchs, but they decide to take use military force to take his territory.

Chroniclers like Andrés Bernáldez interpreted the Conquests of the Catholic Monarchs in the kingdom of Granada as part of a larger arc of Spanish history. The idea of neo-Gothic "reconquest" gains much popularity among 15th-century Castilian intellectuals.

The Conquest of Granada opened 1492 (and is still commemorated each year). By March, the Catholic Monarchs, further advanced the creation of a Catholic realm by ordering that Jews be expelled.

"You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler,' he said to his courtiers — 'he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!" --Sultan Beyezid II

The expulsion of the Jews and the Conquest of Granada in 1492, however, did not end Muslim and Jewish belief or customs in the Peninsula. Some Jews and Muslims continued to practice their faith in secret (as crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims) while performing as Catholics in public.

In addition, some Moriscos fled to the Alpujarra mountains in the South, from which they led attacks of the recently occupied towns of Granada.

Many Moriscos left after 1492, joining their families or people they knew in the North of Africa. many, such as Leo Africanus, went to Fez, which to this day has an Andalusi quarter and people who preserve the keys to their homes in Spain.

Núñez Muley was an important Morisco intellectual seemingly from a noble family very close to the Nasrid ruling family. He was born just around the time of the Castilian conquest of Granada and served as a youth in the court of Hernando de Talavera. He penned the Memorial to defend the rights of the Moriscos against increasing repression and prohibitions.

Nuñez Muley mentions in his Memorial a series of prohibitions against Moriscos in various regions of the Peninsula. Notable is the Pragmatica of 1567.

He serves as a living legal record, for he personally witnessed many of the most important events in the history fo the Moriscos.

“the decree states that when the aforementioned natives of this kingdom converted to our Holy Catholic faith they also agreed to change their style of dress and assimilate fully. I do not believe that anyone in this kingdom remembers having agreed to such a pact or agreement, which has actually never existed.”  --Nuñez Muley Memorandum: Capitulation of Granada

He objects to the Castilian monarchs' rewriting of policies and history.

"such as pact or agreement has never appeared in written form, nor do I believe it ever will, because the conversion of the natives of this kingdom occurred by force and against the terms of the agreement signed by the Catholic Monarchs [Fernando II of Aragón and Isabel I of Castile] and King Muley Boabdili, who was ruler of this kingdom, as well as by some of his capitains, who signed it with their own names.” ----Nuñez Muley Memorandum

He makes the distinction between a people's customs and their religious beliefs.

“the style of dress, clothing, and footwear of the natives cannot be said to be that of Muslims, nor is it that of Muslims. It can more rightly be said to be clothing that corresponds to a particular kingdom and province . . .This argument … is rendered invalid by the fact that Christians who live in the holy city of Jerusalem—and that whole kingdom is made up of Christians and men learned in the faith—have been seen in Granada wearing clothing and and headdresses similar to what is worn in the Maghreb and resembling in no way what is worn in Castile—and yet they are Christinas. They also have no knowledge of the Castilian language, and yet they are Catholic Christinas. It follows from what I have just said that Christianity is not found in the clothing or footwear that is now in style, and the same is true of Islam” (p. 70)

In addition to Muly Núñez's valuable account of what was happening in 16th-century Spain, we also have the accounts of a handful of Morisco authors who wrote in what is called Aljamiado (which is Spanish or Aragonese written using the Arabic alphabet).

One of the best-known Aljamiado authors (and one of the only one who we know by name) is the Mancebo de Arevalo.

The Mancebo traveled from Aragón to the South to the recently conquered Kingdom of Granada and he spoke to people there who had witnessed the Conquest, and in his accont, he includes dialogues he had with them. One of these is Yuçe Banegas.

The Mancebo also talks to a very revered ascetic religious teacher, a woman he calls the Mora de Ubeda, who had also been a rubricator in the scriptorium of the Alhambra Palace of the Nasrids. He studies the Quran with her.

Another fascinating vestige of Morisco culture are the Lead Books that were discovered buried on a hillside in Granada that had long been a site of religious pilgrimage (Sacromonte) for both Muslims and Christians.

The Lead Books offer a syncretic world view in which the lines between Islam and Christianity are blurred. Arabic is exalted and the Virgin Mary becomes prophetic, dialoguing with figures identified with the Christian tradition (and dear to the medieval Castilian imaginary), Isidro and Santiago. If hey had been accepted as valid Holy Texts, they would have opened up a cultural space for Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain. They were unsuccessful and soon taken to the Vatican and put in the secret archives, only to be returned to Sacromonte in the 2000s.

In the Memorial of Nuñez Muley we see the series of increasing restrictions (banning of traditional customs, use of Arabic and Arabic names, principle economic activities such as silk cloth manufacture) on the Moriscos implemented over the course of the sixteenth century. In 1609 the Moriscos were forced to convert or to leave the realm.

What is a better date for the end of the Middle Ages in Spain, 1492 or 1609? What value do such definitive temporal demarcations have?

Elizabeth Perry tells of how the children of Moriscos who would not convert were taken from them at the docks as they were put on boats to be expelled. The descriptions are heart-rending.

The character of Ricote in Cervantes' Don Quijote is a Morisco who disguises himself as a German pilgrim and who crosses paths with his former neighbor Sancho Panza. The episode, although fictional (which is probably the only way a 17th-century Spanish intellectual could opine on the Moriscos critically), is valuable because it offers a glimpse of how the expulsion and its aftermath was experienced by everyday Moriscos. He appears in the second half of the Quijote, written after the Expulsion.

“But as he was passing, one of them who had been examining him very closely rushed towards him, and flinging his arms round him exclaimed in a loud voice and good Spanish, "God bless me! What's this I see? Is it possible that I hold in my arms my dear friend, my good neighbour Sancho Panza? . . . Sancho was surprised to hear himself called by his name and find himself embraced by a foreign pilgrim, and after regarding him steadily without speaking he was still unable to recognise him; but the pilgrim perceiving his perplexity cried, "What! and is it possible, Sancho Panza, that thou dost not know thy neighbour Ricote, the Morisco shopkeeper of thy village?" 

“Sancho upon this looking at him more carefully began to recall his features, and at last recognised him perfectly, and without getting off the ass threw his arms round his neck saying, "Who the devil could have known thee, Ricote, in this mummer's dress thou art in? Tell me, who has frenchified thee, and how dost thou dare to return to Spain, where if they catch thee and recognise thee it will go hard enough with thee?" 

"If thou dost not betray me, Sancho," said the pilgrim, "I am safe; for in this dress no one will recognise me; but let us turn aside out of the road into that grove there where my comrades are going to eat and rest, and thou shalt eat with them there, for they are very good fellows; I'll have time enough to tell thee then all that has happened me since I left our village in obedience to his Majesty's edict that threatened such severities against the unfortunate people of my nation, as thou hast heard." 

“Wherever we are we weep for Spain; for after all we were born there and it is our natural fatherland. Nowhere do we find the reception our unhappy condition needs; and in Barbary and all the parts of Africa where we counted upon being received, succoured, and welcomed, it is there they insult and ill-treat us most. We knew not our good fortune until we lost it; and such is the longing we almost all of us have to return to Spain, that most of those who like myself know the language, and there are many who do, come back to it and leave their wives and children forsaken yonder, so great is their love for it; and now I know by experience the meaning of the saying, sweet is the love of one's country.”

Constable, Olivia Remie. To Live Like a Moor

Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. U Pennsylvania P, 2009.

Harris, Katie. From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City's Past in Early Modern Spain. Johns Hopkins, 2007.

Harvey, L. P. Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. Chicago, 2005.

Kimmel, Seth. Parables of Conversion.

Koningsveld P.S. van & Wiegers G.A. (1997), "Islam in Spain during the Early Sixteenth Century: The Views of the Four Chief Judges in Cairo (Introduction, Translation, and Arabic Text)." In: Zwartjes O., Gelder G.J. van, Moor E. de (Eds.) Poetry, Politics, and Polemics. Cultural Transfer between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Amsterdam, Atlanta. 133-152.

Perry, Mary Elizabeth. The Handless Maiden.

Weissberger, Barbara. Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power. U Minnesota P, 2003.