Forbidden Passages. Karoline P. Cook
of a certain Captain Borja.”63 Agueda stated that she had always been a good Christian and had known nothing about Islam until the uprising. However, she claimed that Muslims in the Sierra soon taught her “things of the sect of Muhammad, telling her that the said sect was good and that in it they could serve God and be saved, and this confessant took these things to be true and believed what they told her. They showed her how to fast the fasts of the Muslims, not eating during the entire day until night, and they did the guadoc and the zala, washing their faces and entire bodies and raising and lowering their heads and hands, and prayed Muslim prayers.”64 Two other Morisca slaves also described the events that took place during the Alpujarras uprising, their testimonies emphasizing a strong Muslim presence in the province. In 1570, María, a twelve-year-old slave of the count of Chinchón, testified, “All the people whom she knew from her country were Muslims, and she knew this because they communicated with one another, and they are all in the Sierra. Others are captives, and she does not know where they are now.”65 Elena, the eighteen-year-old slave of the count of Chinchón, told inquisitors that before she was enslaved and instructed in Catholicism she practiced Islam “in her land with her parents and brothers and with the entire community, because she knew that they were all Muslims and that they communicated with one another and that the entire place rose up and climbed to the Sierra.”66
The impact of the Alpujarras rebellion and subsequent enslavement of Granadan Moriscos was also felt across Spanish America. Some Moriscos, especially women captured during this uprising were taken to the Americas to serve individuals with temporary travel licenses from the Casa de Contratación. Others became galley slaves and were transported to the Caribbean with the idea that they would remain on the ships and not disembark. Nonetheless, a few were able to gain their freedom. They carried with them memories of peninsular exchanges that paralleled those described in the Spanish inquisitorial sources.
DEBATES OVER EXPULSION
According to many accounts, relationships between new and old Christians deteriorated quickly on the Peninsula, between the second Alpujarras uprising and the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain between 1609 and 1614. However, no consensus existed at the time among Spanish authorities concerning what policies to apply to the Morisco population.67 While Philip III and his council made the ultimate decision to expel the Moriscos, it was by no means clear from the outset that expulsion would be the outcome of the deliberations over Morisco policies. There was no generalized or popular clamor to expel the Moriscos but rather a series of ill-conceived policy decisions pushed by a small number of vocal proponents at court.68 Growing evidence suggests that not all communities felt threatened by their Morisco neighbors, who became integrated into local activities, and informally there may have been many exchanges between old and new Christians.69 During the final decades of the sixteenth century, however, ecclesiastical and secular authorities debated measures that they could apply to the Moriscos. Connected to these debates over policy were heated discussions about who the Moriscos really were—faithful Christian subjects or disloyal crypto-Muslims and apostates.
Persistent rumors that the Moriscos would ally with foreign powers, whether Ottoman, French, or British, led some old Christians to regard them with suspicion.70 Those in favor of expulsion were convinced the Valencian Moriscos posed a real threat to Spain, in light of war with France and growing tensions with the Ottoman Empire, and were likely to ally with foreign powers. Stephen Haliczer charts the problematic placement of the concept of loyalty in sixteenth-century Spanish ideology, demonstrating that it permeated accusations leveled against the Moriscos. By the beginning of the seventeenth century “religious conformity had become synonymous with political loyalty in the Catholic states of Europe. In this process, the Moriscos were the earliest but by no means the only victims.”71 Perceived by many authorities as being unassimilated, Moriscos were cast as subversives in official discourses about the Spanish nation. Increasing paranoia during the second half of the sixteenth century, fed by not entirely unsubstantiated rumors that Moriscos were involved in plots to join the Turks or the French as a “fifth column” to invade Spain, prompted even tighter controls. In Seville in 1580, rumors abounded that the large resettled Granadan Morisco population was on the verge of rebellion.72 Officials obtained confessions through torture of the accused Moriscos that they were planning a revolt and moved swiftly to restrict the movement of the Moriscos. This situation increased the severity of the rumors, as many of Seville’s inhabitants told stories about acts of violence committed by their Morisco neighbors.73 While evidence exists that a few individuals were in early stages of plotting insurrection, the broader Morisco community that had nothing to do with this bore the brunt of the suspicions and reprisals.74 Rumors of rebellion persisted in communities across Spain, and the Inquisition assumed the position of collecting information about Moriscos’ activities, tailoring questions to varying degrees of perceived political threat. For example, the Zaragoza tribunal prepared a questionnaire “designed specifically to test the loyalty of the Moriscos and find out if they were preparing for revolt.”75
Debates over whether the Moriscos could remain in Spain wrestled with questions concerning the legitimacy of their baptism, their lineage, their actions as Christians, and ultimately how these issues contributed to or detracted from their membership in the emerging Spanish nation. Valencian Archbishop Juan de Ribera’s frustrated attempts to minister to the old Christian population in his diocese and improve the Catholic instruction of the Morisco population led him to become an ardent proponent of expulsion.76 In 1602, Ribera addressed a petition to Philip III in which he cast the Moriscos as traitors. Invoking a number of racialized accusations, Ribera depicted the Moriscos as bandits, “avaricious” hoarders of gold, and unrepentant Muslims who were “wizened trees, full of knots of heresy.”77 Ribera’s arguments pushed Philip III to move away from previous royal policies supporting the evangelization campaigns and to carry out the expulsion at a time when he was reorienting his foreign policy away from northern Europe and toward the Mediterranean.78
Catholic Apologists envisioned the expulsion as the culmination of centuries of Reconquest, and they crafted histories to fit this notion. They cast Philip III as “Emperor of the Last Days,” drawing on strains of millennial prophecy that were circulating in Spain during the late sixteenth century, in order to formulate arguments justifying the excision of the Moriscos from the body politic.79 In light of writers such as the Humanist Pedro de Valencia who emphasized the injustice of the expulsion and the harm that would come to the king’s conscience in carrying out such a deed, Catholic Apologists worked hard to legitimize expulsion. In these histories, writers such as Jaime Bleda and Pedro Aznar Cardona presented Spain as the “foremost Christian nation” and Spaniards as a new Chosen People, a line of thinking that was also linked to discourses to justify conquest and Spain’s title to the New World.80
The authors of treatises debating whether it was justified to expel the Moriscos applied racializing arguments to them. The treatises illustrate how Moriscos were perceived by jurists and theologians at the level of imperial policy in ways that had repercussions on the ground across the Spanish world. Writers on both sides invoked Divine Providence in assessing the Spanish Empire and used medical imagery to describe the Moriscos, albeit to very different ends.81 A vehement apologist for the expulsion, Pedro Aznar Cardona wrote that many well-educated men esteem “a bitter purgative to expel bad humors, from which valued health follows, even while they loathe the bitterness of the medium.”82 He cast Christ as a “celestial doctor” who could cure the “pestilential Mohammedan sect” with the sacraments, which the Moriscos refused due to their obstinate nature.83 Aznar Cardona proclaimed, “What cannot be cured by delicate unguents, oils, or softness, should be cured by a rigorous cauterization by fire.”84 As a result, Philip III issued an order that would “tear from their roots and extricate such fruitless weeds of bitter and mortal effects, unworthy of … occupying such a holy and fruitful land.”85 In contrast, Pedro de Valencia advocated in his treatise the “mixture” (permixtion) or intermarriage between Moriscos and old Christians in order to fully assimilate them. Writing to advise Philip III against expelling the Moriscos, Valencia proposed a series of measures to incorporate them into Spanish Christian society and thereby decrease their threat to the Spanish Empire. Valencia wrote