Barletta, The Moriscos

Moriscos Prof. David Wacks, Dept. of Romance Languages, University of Oregon http://rl.uoregon.edu/people/faculty/profiles/wacks/index.php http://www.pdfcoke.com/davidwacks Vincent Barletta, “About the Moriscos” Fernando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile (better known to history as the Catholic Monarchs) decisively put an end to over eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula in the last months of 1491. They achieved this by finally taking by military force the isolated and very vulnerable Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. Despite the steadily declining political power of Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and the overall importance of Granada's fall in 1491, it is crucial to remember that the end of Muslim rule in the Peninsula did not mean the end of Muslim life and culture there. At the beginning of the sixteenth century — eight years after Granada's fall — nearly half a million Muslims were still living under the Catholic Monarchs' power (out of a total Iberian population of roughly nine million). These mudéjar (i.e., Muslims living under Christian rule) communities were centered to a great extent in and around Granada and Valencia, though there were also sizeable communities in Aragon and smaller, more assimilated groups scattered throughout Castile. Dragged under the Christian umbrella by force, the Granadan Muslims were hardly the sort of citizens that the Catholic Monarchs sought for their burgeoning nation-state: most were monolingual Arabic speakers, and there were numerous cases of Granadans expressing a common cause with other Muslim communities around the Mediterranean, including the ascendant Ottoman Turks. Yet, as evidenced by the surrender terms offered to the Granadans in 1491, there seemed to be little official desire on the part of Christian authorities to change the practices or allegiances of their new subjects. As had been the custom throughout most of the long period of Christian reconquest, these conquered Muslims, new subjects of the Castilian crown, were allowed (de iure if not de facto) a significant amount of political, cultural, and religious autonomy. Shortly after the start of the sixteenth century, however, the fortunes of Peninsular Muslims in general began to change. Pressured by the Toledan Archbishop Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros to take measures to bring the Muslims of Granada into the Christian faith, and aware that alleged Christian abuses had provoked an uprising in the Alpujarras, King Fernando and Queen Isabel issued an order in 1502 requiring all Muslims in Castile and Leon to convert to Christianity or leave at once. The same law would reach Navarre in 1515 and Aragon in 1525. The royal order was widely enforced (executed in large part by mass baptisms and coercive tactics), and by the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the official Muslim population of Spain had been reduced from nearly half a million to nearly zero. Of course the speedy, mostly nominal conversion of Iberian Muslims to Christianity (the Muslims and Jews of Portugal had been expelled from that kingdom in 1497) does not tell the whole story. Because the overwhelming majority of these conversions were

Moriscos performed by coercion and under duress, whole communities of Muslims (now nominally Christians) continued to practice Islam as they had before, some even doing so openly. Oddly enough, even as members of the clergy were actively (and in many cases, brutally) seeking the conversion and religious instruction of indigenous populations in the Americas, there seems to have been only sporadic and largely unsuccessful efforts to catechize Castile and Aragon's newly converted Muslim population. Whether such efforts could ever have been successful in the first place is, of course, open to debate. In any case, as late as 1566 Iberian Muslims continued to practice their religion and maintain their cultural characteristics — in some cases openly — in areas where their population was most concentrated, such as Granada, Aragon and Valencia. Violent and abrupt change came with the 1567 decree issued by King Felipe II. Through these laws, the Spanish crown went much further than it had ever gone in the past with respect to its Muslim — or crypto-Muslim — population of Granada. In a series of specific points, this decree called for the fundamental cultural, linguistic, and religious assimilation not only of crypto-Muslims, but of sincerely converted Christians as well. Besides other troubling points, the 1567 decree (which built in part upon a similar decree passed in 1526 by Carlos V but never enacted) called for Granada's former Muslims — by now referred to as "Moriscos" — to cease dressing in a style different from the Christian population; to cease speaking Arabic; to hand in for inspection and translation all documents (including land titles) written in Arabic; to leave the doors to their homes open for inspection on Muslim holy days; to marry only according to the rules and customs of the Catholic Church; to cease using the public baths; and many other issues. The impact of these new laws was tremendous in largely assimilated Castilian as well as Granadan, Aragonese, and Valencian Morisco communities, as it mandated not only orthodox Catholic religious faith and practice, but also a wholesale adoption of Castilian language and culture as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly (and due largely to Castilian inflexibility) the laws of 1567 — along with new royal policies that actively sought to rob agricultural land from Moriscos — also met with more combative, violent resistance. This was especially true within Granada and Valencia, where Arabic speech and Muslim customs had been most widely preserved. Combative resistance in fact led to open rebellion in Granada, where an army of a few thousand Moriscos took to the hills of the Alpujarras in late 1568, gamely resisting Spanish military forces for over two years. The rebellion was violently put down by a seasoned army under the direction of Don Juan de Austria in 1571, and in its aftermath the Moriscos of Granada — not just the surviving combatants, but the majority of the population — were forced to leave Granada and relocate to other regions of Spain, principally Castile. This mass relocation constituted a significant socio-cultural change for both the transported Granadans and the largely assimilated Castilian Moriscos, who in fact had very little in common with their new neighbors. This massive internal population shift

Moriscos had less of an impact on Morisco communities in Aragon, though it is safe to say that the decree of 1567 itself, as well as the unsuccessful rebellion in the Alpujarras, made things difficult for Moriscos everywhere in the Iberian Peninsula. By the turn of the seventeenth century there was a wide debate in Spain about what should be done in response to the "cuestión morisca." A number of Christian clerics advocated renewed efforts to give the Moriscos the religious instruction necessary for their full assimilation into Spanish society. Aragonese and Valencian nobles, whose large tracts of agricultural land depended extensively upon Morisco labor, were often outspoken advocates for patience and tolerance with respect to the Moriscos. On the other side, however, there were much louder and more powerful voices calling for the immediate expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. In one of the more unfortunate political coincidences of Spanish history, the public debate regarding the Moriscos heated up during the reign of the exceptionally weak King Felipe III, who reigned from 1598-1621. King Felipe’s government was run by the ambitious Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma (1533-1625), who personally saw to it that the policies of the Spanish state reflected his will during his tenure as the king's right hand. One of a relatively small but influential group that strongly favored Morisco expulsion, the Duke of Lerma convinced Felipe to sign into law the forced expulsion of all Moriscos from Castile in 1609, and from the rest of Spain by 1614. It is estimated that by 1609 there were roughly 350,000 Moriscos in Spain, making up over four percent of the total Spanish population. This percentage increases significantly in areas such as Aragon and Valencia, where Moriscos made up a much higher portion of the regional population. Especially in Aragon, the expulsion of the Moriscos left whole villages empty, large quantities of crops ruined, and the local economy devastated. Beyond its economic cost, the expulsion exacted a high human cost as well: having to leave Spain by sea, many people, including the elderly and children, died in the rough waters of the Mediterranean or found themselves under attack by thieves, brigands, and even regional authorities upon landing in North Africa. As with its expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and its policies and practices in the Americas during the same period, Spain's treatment of the Moriscos stands as a tremendous scar on its national history. As early as the first decades after the fall of Granada, Spanish authorities began to single out this minority population of several thousand people, harassing them to varying degrees for over a century before expelling them by force. A cruel and narrow-minded solution to a difficult but workable — and hardly novel — question of coexistence. But, as Francisco Márquez Villanueva has argued, the Morisco expulsion was but part of a series of policies that allowed a powerful minority to chart a future for Spain that would transform it into the nation they desired it to be: homogeneous, resolutely Catholic, and secure from unwanted outside influences (1991). During this entire century-long period of conversion, adaptation, negotiation, and flux, Spanish crypto-Muslims did a number of things to continue practicing Islam and hold themselves together as communities. One of these was the practice of taqiyya, a religious

Moriscos dispensation by which Muslims under compulsion or threat of injury were relieved of their religious requirements, including the observance of Ramadan, daily prayers, and dietary restrictions (Harvey 1993, 211). This flexibility built into Islamic religious practice allowed crypto-Muslims to adapt their faith and religious practice to their difficult situation, and thus continue on as Muslims in a real sense despite serious limitations and even danger. The concrete form of taqiyya practiced by crypto-Muslims in Spain throughout the sixteenth century varied from community to community, from person to person. An important and effective means by which the Moriscos were able to maintain their religion and culture was the production and use of traditional narratives handwritten and actively recopied despite their illegality. These narratives were copied down in Castilian and Aragonese (with varying amounts of intercalated Arabic) using an adapted form of Arabic script known to modern scholars as aljamiado (pronounced al-ham-ee-AH-do). This term comes from the Arabic adjective 'ajamiyya, which means, in different though related contexts, "barbarian," "non-Arabic," or "foreign" and serves to mark the liminal status of Morisco written discourse. Defined in negative terms (as neither fully Castilian nor in any real sense Arabic), the written narratives of the Moriscos have been framed by Christian Spaniards and Arabs alike as the discourse of an intellectually, culturally, and spiritually impoverished "Other." Yet these narrative texts played a number of very complex and important roles within Morisco communities, roles that were neither negatively defined nor instantiated without a keen first-hand sense of the frequently dire situation in which the readers of these texts, and their scribes, found themselves. Adapted from Vincent Barletta, Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005). Works Cited Harvey, L.P. "The Political, Social, and Cultural History of the Moriscos." The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1993. I: 201-234. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. El problema morisco (desde otras laderas). Madrid: Libertarias, 1991. . Accessed 23 march 2009.