Spain in Relation to Moriscos Culture and Islam - Coursework Example

Spain in Relation to Moriscos Culture and Islam Islam in Spain By the time 'Abd al-Rahman reached Spain, the Arabs from North Africa were already entrenched on the Iberian Peninsula and had begun to write one of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history. After their forays into France were blunted by Charles Martel, the Muslims in Spain had begun to focus their whole attention on what they called al-Andalus, southern Spain (Andalusia), and to build there a civilization far superior to anything Spain had ever known. Reigning with wisdom and justice, they treated Christians and Jews with tolerance, with the result that many embraced Islam. They also improved trade and agriculture, patronized the arts, made valuable contributions to science, and established Cordoba as the most sophisticated city in Europe. By the eleventh century, however, a small pocket of Christian resistance had begun to grow, and under Alfonso VI Christian forces retook Toledo. It was the beginning of the period the Christians called the Reconquest, and it underlined a serious problem that marred this refined, graceful, and charming era: the inability of the numerous rulers of Islamic Spain to maintain their unity. This so weakened them that when the various Christian kingdoms began to pose a serious threat, the Muslim rulers in Spain had to ask the Almoravids, a North African Berber dynasty, to come to their aid. The Almoravids came and crushed the Christian uprising, but eventually seized control themselves. In 1147, the Almoravids were in turn defeated by another coalition of Berber tribes, the Almohads. The Arabs did not surrender easily; al-Andalus was their land too. But, bit by bit, they had to retreat, first from northern Spain, then from central Spain. By the thirteenth century their once extensive domains were reduced to a few scattered kingdoms deep in the mountains of Andalusia - where, for some two hundred years longer, they would not only survive but flourish. The Alhambra was begun in 1238 by Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar who, to buy safety for his people when King Ferdinand of Aragon laid siege to Granada, once rode to Ferdinand's tent and humbly offered to become the king's vassal in return for peace. It was a necessary move, but also difficult - particularly when Ferdinand called on him to implement the agreement by providing troops to help the Christians against Muslims in the siege of Seville in 1248. True to his pledge, Ibn al-Ahmar complied and Seville fell to the Christians. But returning to Granada, where cheering crowds hailed him as a victor, he disclosed his turmoil in that short, sad reply that he inscribed over and over on the walls of the Alhambra: "There is no victor but God." In describing the fate of Islam in Spain, Irving suggested that the Muslims were then swiftly and thoroughly wiped out. Never, he wrote, was the annihilation of a people more complete. In fact, by emigration to North Africa and elsewhere, many Muslims carried remnants of the Spanish era with them and were thus able to make important contributions to the material and cultural life of their adopted lands. Much of the emigration, however, came later. At first, most Muslims simply stayed in Spain; cut off from their original roots by time and distance they quite simply had no other place to go. Until the Inquisition, furthermore, conditions in Spain were not intolerable. The Christians permitted Muslims to work, serve in the army, own land, and even practice their religion - all concessions to the importance of Muslims in Spain's still prosperous economy. But then, in the period of the Inquisition, all the rights of the Muslims were withdrawn, their lives became difficult, and more began to emigrate. Finally, in the early seventeenth century, most of the survivors were forcibly expelled. www.islamselect.com/english/conts/newe/1425/3/5.htm The Moriscos in the Sixteenth Century After 1502 the Mudejars in Castile were officially Christianised as Moriscos, but in Aragon they were left unmolested until forcibly converted in their thousands during the Germanías in Valencia in 1520-22. Forced baptisms were usually regarded as invalid, but the authorities after 1522 were reluctant to let the new Moriscos revert to their old religion. Early in 1525 the Inquisition ruled that the baptisms were valid; it now seemed incongruous to tolerate unconverted Mudejars elsewhere in the crown of Aragon. Though many Aragonese nobles resisted interference with the religion of their vassals, steps were taken to persuade these to convert. Eventually in November 1525 Charles V issued a decree ordering the conversion of all Mudejars of the crown of Aragon in Valencia by the end of the year and elsewhere by the end of January 1526. From 1526 the Muslim religion no longer existed in Spain officially: all Mudejars were now Moriscos. Writing to the pope in December that year, Charles V admitted that 'the conversion was not wholly voluntary among many of them, and since then they have not been instructed in our holy faith'. Considerable efforts were subsequently made to evangelise the new 'converts' in the regions of greatest concentration; among the prelates leading the campaign was the distinguished humanist Antonio de Guevara, who labored in both Valencia and Granada. At the same time the activities of the Inquisition were restricted. In 1526 the Morisco leaders of Aragon obtained from the crown and from Inquisitor General Manrique a secret concordia or agreement by which in return for 40,000 ducats and submission to baptism the Moriscos would be free from prosecution by the tribunal for forty years and be permitted to retain some of their customs. The concordia was made public in 1528, the year when the Aragonese Cortes at Monzón petitioned the emperor to prevent the Inquisition prosecuting Moriscos until they had been instructed in the faith. Indeed in the crown of Aragon the Moriscos were tenants of the nobility and therefore enjoyed considerable protection: during the Cortes at Monzón in 1533, 1537 and 1542 loud complaints were raised against attempts by the Inquisition to confiscate land from Moriscos, since that would have been to deprive the real owners, the feudal nobility; and attempts by the king's government to disarm them, as in Valencia in 1563, were also resisted. In the kingdom of Granada, where there was no such protection, events took a different turn. In occupied Granada the Moriscos were some 54 per cent of the total population, the highest ratio in the peninsula. Direct pressure of land-hungry Christians on a free Morisco people created tension between the two communities and provoked grievances in at least three major areas. Firstly, as part of the process of land settlement after the conquest, Moriscos were required to present proofs of the title to their land; those unable to present a title were fined, and if they were unable to pay the fine their lands were sold. In this way some 100,000 hectares passed into the hands of Christian officials during the period 1559-68 alone. Secondly, attempts were made to take over the principal industry of the Granada countryside, silk production. The worst abuses were committed through the illegal import from neighboring Murcia of raw silk which was cheaper because less heavily taxed: this undercut and ruined the Morisco producers. The third and most deeply felt of all the grievances arose out of the evangelization program. Many officials considered that the cultural separateness of the Moriscos was the principal barrier to effective conversion; they accordingly encouraged petty persecution and active social discrimination. These attitudes reached a climax in 1565 when the clergy met in synod in Granada and advised the king that the old policy of patient evangelization should be replaced by one of radical repression: Moriscos should in future be forbidden use of their language, their dress, their literature, their dances and their traditional rites; their houses should be regularly inspected; judicial officers must be stricter; children should be brought up away from the influence of their parents. A royal decree giving effect to these proposals was published in 1567. The Moriscos petitioned against it and one of their leaders, Francisco Núñez Muley, wrote a memorial outlining the grievances of his community: 'every day we are mistreated in every way, by both secular officials and clergy, all of which is so obvious that it needs no proof'. The authorities for their part were alarmed at the security threat posed by the Moriscos. It was well known that both Morocco and Turkey were in contact with them. Prophecies circulating in the villages foretold the conquest of Spain by Islam. Morisco bandits were active throughout the eastern part of the peninsula, and North African pirates were welcomed into the coastal areas. As a result attempts were made to disarm the population, but with limited success. Two generations of tension exploded finally into the revolt that began on Christmas Eve of 1568. The rebellion, which held out successfully for two years and was led initially by an official who gave up his name of Hernando de Córdoba for the Muslim one of Aben Humeya, drew its support primarily from the villages of the Alpujarra mountains, where silk production was concentrated, but gained little support from the Moorish quarter of Granada, the Albaicín. Numbering only 4,000 at the beginning, the rebels of 1569 amounted perhaps to 30,000, the bulk of the adult Morisco population in the region. With Spain's best troops away in Flanders under Alba, the threat to internal security was serious. At the height of the campaign, nevertheless, the royal armies under Don Juan of Austria as commander-in-chief were able to muster some 20,000 men. It was a ferocious war, with massacres on both sides. Particularly notable was the resistance put up against Don Juan in February 1570 by the town of Galera; when it fell all its 2,500 inhabitants, including women and children were slaughtered, the town was rased and salt poured over it. Philip II's concern arose not least from the support given to the rebels by the Turks, and from the realization that if the Moriscos of Aragon and Valencia were also to rise the very existence of Christian Spain would be threatened. In 1570 the Venetian ambassador reported widespread panic in Valencia. In the event the help received by the Alpujarra Moriscos --some 4,000 Turks and Berbers fought among the 25,000 insurgents in spring 1570--was not enough to turn the tide. The sultan was more preoccupied with the conquest of Cyprus, the Algerians with their reconquest of Tunis: both these were achieved in 1570. Even before the end of the rebellion the government had decided on a brutally simple solution to the Granada problem: the uprooting of whole sections of the population. A decree of 1 November 1570 gave it effect: within the month over 50,000 Moriscos were forever expelled from their homeland and resettled in Castile, western Andalucia and Extremadura. Possibly a quarter of these died from the harsh conditions of their departure. Over the whole period 156973 it is likely that some 80,000 were driven out, and expulsions continued well after these years, as in 1584. Taking into account the further impact of deaths and refugees, the kingdom of Granada may have lost up to 120,000 people. It was a province laid desolate. Some 50,000 Old Christians, most of them from elsewhere in Andalucia, were resettled on Morisco land; but they lacked the agricultural techniques of the previous cultivators and the Jesuit Pedro de León, who worked among them, criticized them as shiftless people completely lacking in the moral quality of the old Moriscos. A third of the 400 towns and villages vacated remained empty, and the overall level of population in the province fell by 28 per cent between 1561 and 1591. For both Moriscos and Christians the sixteenth century was a period of cultural confrontation. This was aggravated by the Granada expulsions, which brought into many Castilian communities a Morisco presence they had not hitherto known: where Castile had had about 20,000 Mudejars in 1501, by the end of the century there were over 100,000 Moriscos. Castilians began to share the community tensions which had so far been restricted to the south and east of the peninsula. One of the last vestiges of the mediaeval ideal of convivencia was the romance Abencerraje y Jarifa ( 1565), a story of love between Christian and Moor, which even when it was written was at variance with social reality. Throughout the peninsula uneasy coexistence was disturbed by regular violence and fears of violence. Morisco banditry became more extensive, particularly in Valencia, and there were cases even around Valladolid. From 1585 to 1588 the conflicts in northern Aragon between Old Christian montafieses and Morisco peasants flared into massacres. As hostility increased in the majority community, so did racial antipathy. At no time in all this period did the religious effort slacken: missions were preached, schools founded. Juan de Ribera, the saintly prelate who became archbishop of Valencia in 1568, initiated schemes to make work among Moriscos more congenial to the clergy, and founded a college for Morisco children. For the forty-three years that he held this see, Ribera made every effort to attend to the needs of the Moriscos. There was also religious coercion, directed mainly by the Inquisition. From 1526 there had been an Inquisition in Granada, transferred from Jaén. Its activity, like that of other tribunals, was relatively mild in the early century. From mid century, and in particular from the late 1560s, it intensified: in the three-quarters of a century preceding their expulsion, Moriscos were the principal victims of the Inquisitions of Granada, Saragossa and Valencia. In twelve autos de fe known to have taken place in Granada between 1550 and 1580, a total of 780 persons, or over 78 per cent of the accused, were Moriscos. In the tribunal of Saragossa between 1560 and 1614, 56.5 per cent of the accused were Moriscos. They hated the Holy Office, perceiving it as 'presided over by the devil and informed by falsehood'; and in 1542 the Cortes at Monzón claimed that they were fleeing abroad 'because of the fear they have of the Inquisition'. Afraid of losing their vassals, the lords persuaded the Inquisition to compromise: accordingly in 1556 the Moriscos of Aragon agreed to pay an annual tax of 17,800 reales to the tribunal of Saragossa, provided that no confiscations of property were made because of heresy. A similar concordia was made in 1571 by the Moriscos of Valencia, who agreed to pay 2,500 ducats annually. Though a few Moriscos were assimilated and became genuine Christians, most remained in conflict with the established faith. In Granada and Valencia Arabic was still spoken, circumcision was common, and Muslim clergy, the alfaquis, circulated among the people. In Castile and much of Aragon, by contrast, coexistence with the Christian community had diluted traditional practices, and the survival of Islam owed more to community solidarity and verbal transmission of customs. In general, Moriscos were strongly repelled by the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and felt extreme repugnance at the sacraments of baptism, penitence and the Eucharist. Much of their hostility became directed specifically at the figure of the priest, who was their principal contact with Christianity: hence the ferocious murders of clergy in the Alpujarra uprisings. All the outward practices of Islam were still kept: prayers, the great fast of Ramadan, ritual ablutions, prohibition of foods. The fundamental issue for Christian missionaries was whether converts should also be required to jettison the broad range of completely different cultural habits: in the method of killing animals, in diet, in hygiene (the synod of Guadix noted in 1544 that 'it is suspicious to take baths, especially on Thursday and Friday night'), in festivities (the zambra dance ), in dress, even in language (the form of Castilian spoken was known as aljamía ). In 1538, for example, a Morisco of Toledo was arrested by the Inquisition and accused of 'playing music at night, dancing the zambra and eating couscous', all prima-facie evidence of heresy. While demanding that Moriscos shed all these cultural traits, however, Old Christians refused to make corresponding concessions, and discriminated against them at every level. The statutes of limpieza de sangre were applied against them, as they had been against Jewish conversos. After 1552 Moriscos could not normally become familiars of the Inquisition, after 1573 they could not enter the priesthood. A tiny minority managed to enter private professions, notably as doctors; apart from this, nearly all were denied access to public position and thus to status. Many turned to commerce and industry. While the bulk of the Moriscos of the crown of Aragon were depressed peasantry, there is little doubt that many in Granada and Castile were of comfortable means, and some were very rich. In remoter areas they were able to build up thriving communities. The most striking of these was Hornachos (Extremadura), a flourishing and almost entirely Morisco town with 4,800 inhabitants in the 1580s. Its real estate was valued at 122,300 ducats and in 1590 it purchased its own jurisdiction from Philip II for 30,000 ducats. Tolerated by its neighbors solely out of fear, in 1610 the town emigrated in its entirety and regrouped itself in Salé in Morocco. By the end of the sixteenth century social and religious tensions seemed. to have rendered assimilation or coexistence impossible. Among some Morisco communities there were, particularly in the year 1577, strong millenarian hopes of liberation. In these circumstances the security threat took on sinister proportions: banditry, piracy, plots with the Turks and with the French Protestants, amply proved through intercepted letters. The most disturbing aspect of all was the rapid rate of increase in the Morisco population. In Granada the continuing rise in Morisco numbers was the chief reason for the expulsions of 1584. In Aragon there had been 5,674 Moriscos in 1495 but in 1610 they were 14,190, a fifth of the total population. In Valencia the results of censuses made in 1565 and 1609 suggested that the Old Christians might have increased by 44.7 per cent and the Moriscos by a remarkable 69.7 per cent, a difference explicable in part by the tendency of Morisco girls to marry at a younger age than Old Christians. Various extreme solutions were proposed: removing all Morisco children from parents, forbidding marriages, castration (suggested by Martin Salvatierra, bishop of Segorbe). The view that finally obtained most support was for expulsion. In Lisbon in 1581 Philip II convened a special committee to discuss the matter, and in September 1582 the council of State, after carefully weighing all the factors and interests involved, formally proposed a general expulsion. The decision was supported by the Church and the Inquisition. International events, and considerable opposition from the nobles of Valencia, delayed action for a quarter of a century; but the peace of Vervins in 1598 at last opened the way to implementation (Lynch, 1981). The Expulsion of the Moriscos The acceptance in 1582 by Philip II's council of State of proposals that the Moriscos be expelled from Spain would seem to have been the final signal for action. In fact a generation was to pass before anything transpired, and in that time a major debate broke out over the expulsion, which was never inevitable or even necessarily supported by public opinion. The nobility in Aragon and Valencia had always been tolerant of the religion of the Moriscos, whom they could exploit more readily as a depressed minority. Obstacles put by the nobles in the way of the missionaries caused a Jesuit in 1608 to complain that the tyranny of the lords was one of the main barriers to effective conversion in Valencia. Several grandees seem to have accepted that excessive religious zeal would destroy the convivencia between the races. Notable among them had been Íñigo López de Mendoza, second count of Tendilla (d. 1515), grandson of the great Mendoza scholar the marquis of Santillana and himself an outstanding scholar, soldier and statesman. As captain-general of the newly conquered realm of Granada, he shared with Talavera a concern to win the Muslims to Christianity by a policy of toleration and respect for Moorish culture. A bitter opponent of Cisneros' policy and of the harsh methods of the Inquisition, Tendilla in 1514 attacked the attempt to make Moriscos change their dress: 'What does his Highness mean by ordering the Moriscos to abandon their clothing?... What clothing did we use to wear in Spain until the coming of King Henry the Bastard, how did we wear our hair, what sort of food did we eat, if not in the Morisco style? Did the kings cease to be Christians and saints because of this? No, sir, by God'. His son and later his grandson followed his outlook, the latter explicitly calling during the 1569 uprising for 'application rather than force, and if force then not as presently used'. Although racial tension was high at the turn of the century, only a minority thought in terms of expulsion. Philip III was in Valencia in 1599 for his wedding and in 1604 for the Cortes: on neither occasion was an expulsion mentioned. The council of State, which had under Philip II recommended the solution, was now under Philip III divided over it: both Lerma and the king's confessor in 1602 opposed expulsion since it 'would be terrible to drive baptised people into Barbary and thus force them to turn Moor'. In 1606 an opinion was commissioned from the writer Pedro de Valencia: he identified all the difficulties, and proposed instead a more careful policy of assimilation. As late as 1607 two reasoned memoranda from the crown's highest ministers--Juan de Idiáquez and the count of Miranda--emphasized that the policy must be one of teaching and conversion. In all these years there was no pressure for expulsion from the Cortes either in Castile or in Valencia. All arbitristas of the period were uniformly opposed: in his Memorial ( 1600) González de Cellorigo denounced the proposal and, writing after the event, Fernández de Navarrete in 1626 regretted the expulsion and considered that 'it is a most malign policy of state for princes to withdraw their trust from their subjects' (Chejne, 1983). Nevertheless on 30 January 1608 the council of State voted unanimously to proceed to expulsion. What lay behind this astonishing volte-face? Some success must be attributed to the energetic campaign of Juan de Ribera, archbishop of Valencia, who from being a tireless supporter of conversion turned into an implacable enemy of the Moriscos and the leading partisan of expulsion. There is also no doubt that information of secret negotiations between the Moriscos and agents of Henry IV of France sent into Spain by the duke de la Force, governor of Béarn, alarmed the government. Lerma's own personal role was also important: he changed his mind, and presented to the council a proposal that the lords in Valencia--of whom he was one--should be compensated by being given the lands of the expelled Moriscos. The element of personal profit, in this as in all his policy, was crucial to the duke; but it is clear that he could not have proceeded had the lords in Valencia, who all along had bitterly opposed the move, not also changed their minds. And their position was getting desperate. Productivity rose during the good years of the sixteenth century, giving those lords who received tithes (such as the Church) a satisfactory income from their Morisco peasantry; but where seigneurial rents were fixed the nobles were barely able to cover their debts. In the area of Turís, part of the duchy of Gandía in Valencia, seigneurial rents during the sixteenth century rose four-fold, but tithes increased sixteen-fold; meanwhile the principal of the duke's debt in censos rose thirteen-fold between 1551 and 1604. By 1600, the Valencian nobility were paying one-third of their income in censo debts, and were unable to make good their losses from the fixed tenancies of their Morisco vassals. They stood, therefore, to gain from dispossession and expulsion. The actual decree of expulsion was passed in the council of State on 4 April 1609. The militia and navy were alerted. In September the decree was published in Valencia, giving Moriscos three days to embark, but excepting from the expulsion those certified by parish clergy as Christians, and children under the age of six whose parents consented to them remaining. Many Valencian nobles did their best to ease the travails of their former vassals; but there were thousands of tragedies, ranging from those who were robbed and maltreated to those who took up arms to resist and perished at the hands of the soldiers. Subsequent decrees extended the expulsions to the rest of Spain during 1610, despite pleas from the authorities in Aragon, Murcia and other areas; the whole operation continued in various phases up to 1614. Out of over 320,000 Moriscos resident in peninsular Spain, representing in Valencia 30 per cent of the population and in Aragon one-fifth, close to 300,000 were expelled. The great majority went to north Africa, to Moroccan and Tunisian towns where they were close to Spain; in some areas they were well received, in others they were hated as foreigners. Several thousands went to Christian lands, mainly France, but eventually settled in Salonika and Istanbul. Apologists of the expulsion then and later alleged religious or security motives; but the operation was undoubtedly racial. In 1611 when it was proposed to expel the Moriscos of the valley of Ricote, a community of six towns in Murcia, a special report pointed out that the 2,500 inhabitants were truly Christian; but the expulsion went ahead regardless in 1613. It was one of the most ill-considered policy acts of the century, carried out against the views of a large body of informed opinion in Spain, denounced by foreigners--cardinalRichelieu condemned it as 'barbarous'--and very quickly regretted on all sides. Cervantes spoke for many when creating in his Quixote the sympathetic character of the Morisco Ricote, who like his people longed to return to his country: 'wherever we are we weep for Spain, because we were born there and it is our native land'. As late as 1690 a Moroccan envoy in Madrid heard court officials denouncing the expulsions and the duke of Lerma's responsibility for them (Davis, 2000). Although the human losses of the expulsion represented little more than 4 per cent of Spain's population, the real impact in some areas was very severe. Where Moriscos had been a large minority-in Valencia (which lost nearly a third of its population), and in Aragon--there was immediate economic catastrophe; but even where they were few in number the fact that they had a minimal inactive population, with no gentry or clergy or soldiers, meant that their absence could lead to grave economic dislocation. In community after community tax returns fell and agricultural output decayed. Rents drawn from Morisco tenants disappeared: the income of the see of Saragossa fell by 40 per cent, that of the see of Valencia by 30 per cent. In Valencia the duke of Gandia lost 13,000 Morisco tenants, a number barely compensated by the entry of 1,300 Christian peasants in 1610. In all Valencia some 14,000 new settlers entered to occupy lands left vacant by the Moriscos; 94 per cent of them were landless Christians from elsewhere in Valencia, only a fraction coming from outside the realm. Even so, some 45 per cent of Morisco villages--205 out of 453--were still deserted in 1638, in part because they were situated in less fertile territory. Aware of the special problems in Valencia, the government intervened to help the nobles with the repopulation: they were allowed to grant resettlement charters ( cartas pueblas ) which sometimes imposed even more onerous conditions than the Moriscos had accepted; and the interest rate payable on their estate debts was reduced, aggravating the financial problems of the municipal bank or Taula of Valencia, which went bankrupt in 1613. There was thus considerable truth in the report made to Lerma that 'the lords have suffered greatly, but some have certainly also gained'. In Aragon, where the absence of Moriscos likewise disrupted agriculture, an official in 1635 reported that the lack 'was made up in part by French, from Béarn and Gascny'. The expulsions were being cited a decade later by towns and arbitristas as a major cause of ruin in Spain. The truth, inevitably, was not so simple. The fecundity of the Moriscos --so often commented upon at the time--had itself been slowing down since the 1580s, in line with the falling birth-rate among Old Christians, so that the expulsions aggravated rather than initiated a depopulation that was already well under way. Moreover, in most communities agrarian production was already falling in the 1580s, and for a while the loss of the Moriscos (who did not eat much wheat and drank no wine) had a muted impact: 'the tithes ', commented the Valencian Jaime Bleda in 1618, 'are not yielding a great deal less than before the expulsion'. Only with the growing crisis of production in the early seventeenth century did writers begin to point to the absence of Moriscos as a root cause of all ills. The disasters unleashed by the expulsion were serious, but in the long term merely intensified problems that were already developing in Spain's economy. Reference: Chejne, Anwar G., 1983. Islam and the West: The Moriscos, Albany, Suny Press. Elizabeth B. Davis, 2000. Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. University of Missouri Press. John Lynch, 1981. Spain under the Habsburgs, new ed. Oxford. www.islamselect.com/english/conts/newe/1425/3/5.htm Read More