Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (13 page)

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Authors: Matthew Carr

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Spain & Portugal, #Religion, #Christianity, #General, #Christian Church, #Social Science, #Emigration & Immigration, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #Islamic Studies

BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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Cisneros was unrepentant about the mayhem his actions had done so much to unleash, telling his church colleagues that the rebels should “be converted or enslaved, for as slaves they will be better Christians and the land will be pacified forever.” As always, Ferdinand was more flexible, calibrating his policies according to what the local situation required. In some places, Muslims were allowed to emigrate. Others were offered special privileges and financial incentives if they accepted the faith. For the rest of the year, the “second conquest” of Granada continued to unfold across the kingdom. In January 1501, Ferdinand felt sufficiently confident to order his army to stand down, but no sooner had the demobilization begun than news reached the court of further unrest from the Sierra Bermeja mountains above Ronda, to the southeast of the Alpujarras, where Muslim villagers were reported to have killed priests and sold Christian women and children as slaves in Africa. A force of two thousand infantrymen and three hundred cavalry were hastily dispatched to the Sierra Bermeja under the command of Alonso de Aguilar, one of the most distinguished noblemen in Spain and a veteran of the Granada war.
Few Christians doubted that this powerful expedition would bring the rebels rapidly to heel. But the majority of Aguilar’s troops were members of local Andalusian militias, whose lack of discipline produced a very different outcome. On March 16, Aguilar’s men pursued a small group of armed rebels into the desolate “red mountains” of the Sierra Bermeja. Eventually they found the main rebel forces dug into strong defensive positions on the upper slopes of an elevated summit. On the plateau behind them, women, children, and old people from the surrounding villages were gathered with their possessions and valuables. Excited at the prospect of plunder, an advance detachment of Christian soldiers charged up the hill and forced the rebels back.
As the Christians surged forward onto the open plain, they found themselves subjected to a fierce counterattack, as the rebels were joined by other Muslims from the low-lying villages. A fierce battle now ensued, which continued till dusk, when Aguilar and three hundred of his men were forced to set up a makeshift camp on the open plain. Under cover of darkness, the rebels crept up on the Christian lines and engaged the defenders in a confused hand-to-hand combat that was illuminated briefly by an exploding keg of gunpowder. By daybreak, Aguilar’s troops had been routed. Some fought and died where they stood. Others were hunted down in the surrounding mountains or tumbled into the surrounding ravines while trying to flee. Wounded by an arrow and with all his teeth knocked out, Aguilar died, sword in hand, in a battle that was subsequently celebrated in numerous Christian poems and ballads.
Aguilar’s deputy, the Count of Ureña, was wounded in the battle but managed to escape with his surviving troops to inform the stunned court of the death of one of Spain’s most celebrated soldiers and the near annihilation of the expedition. Ferdinand now prepared to conduct a war of extermination in the Sierra Bermeja, but the rebels themselves were so unnerved by the scale of their own victory that they sued for peace. Once again, the king showed magnanimity and allowed them to choose between exile and baptism, declaring that “If your horse trips up, you don’t seize your sword and kill him, first you give him a slap on his haunches and place a hood over his head; my view and that of the Queen is that these Moors be baptized. And if they don’t become Christians, their children and grandchildren will.”
1
In fact the alternative of baptism or exile was not always the clear-cut choice that it appeared to be. Few Muslims were able to pay the fee of ten gold doblas that Ferdinand exacted in exchange for providing transportation to North Africa, and the imposition of such conditions suggests that the Catholic Monarchs still preferred even unreliable or insincere converts to a depopulated kingdom. In July 1501, the Catholic Monarchs returned to the Alhambra, where Cisneros developed a fever and became seriously ill, to the point where the king and queen feared for their lives. Ironically, his life was saved thanks to the intervention of a Muslim noblewoman, who brought an eighty-year-old female Moorish herbalist to see him. Against the wishes of his Christian doctors, Cisneros was treated with “ointments and herbs” and made a rapid recovery. He went on to become Inquisitor General and wage war against the infidel beyond the borders of Spain. In 1506 he helped organize a military expedition to Oran in North Africa, and three years later personally led a second assault on the city, returning to the University of Alcalá de Henares, which he had founded, like a Roman caesar, accompanied by a procession of Moorish prisoners and camels laden with war booty. He died in 1517 as regent of Castile, bringing to an end an extraordinary career that had taken him from his rustic hermitage near Toledo to the summit of political power.
 
By the end of 1501, virtually the entire Muslim population of Granada had become
nuevamente convertidos
, “newly converted,” or
nuevos cristianos de moros
, literally “New Christians from Moors.” In two decades, Granada had undergone the trauma of war and conquest, followed by a bloody rebellion and the mass conversion of its population to Christianity. In the early years of the new century, an anonymous Castilian Muslim author, known to history only as the Mancebo (Young Man) of Arévalo, visited Granada, where he was introduced to a converted Muslim noble named Yuce Venegas.
The Young Man stayed with Venegas and his daughter on their rich estates on the outskirts of Granada. On the third day of his visit, he was invited by his host to tour his extensive orchards, where Venegas began to talk movingly of the “things of Granada.” The story that he told was one of great personal loss, in which three of his sons had been killed “defending their religion,” followed by the deaths of his wife and three daughters, leaving only a single daughter “as consolation.” All this was only one episode in the collective tragedy that Venegas described to his guest:
In my opinion nobody ever wept over such a misfortune as that of the sons of Granada. Do not doubt what I say, because I am one myself, and an eyewitness, for with my own eyes I saw all the noble ladies, widows and married, subjected to mockery, and I saw more than three hundred maidens sold at public auction; I will tell you no more, it is more than I can bear.... Son, I do not weep for the past, for to it there is no return. But I weep for what you will see in your own lifetime, and what you can expect in this land, in this Peninsula of Spain. May it please God, because of the nobility of our beloved Koran, that what I have to say be proved unfounded, and that it does not turn out as I see it, but even so our religion will suffer. What will people say? Where has our prayer gone to? What has happened to the religion of our forefathers? . . . If after such a short space of time it appears that we are having to struggle to survive, what will people do when the end of the season is upon us? If parents now make little of the religion, how are their great-great-grandchildren to exalt it? If the King of the Conquest does not keep his word, what are we to expect from his successors?
2
 
These questions were also being asked in the Muslim world outside Spain. In 1501 the Catholic Monarchs became so concerned at reports that the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt had begun to persecute and harass Coptic Christians and Christian pilgrims, in retaliation for the conversions in Granada, that they dispatched Peter Martyr of Anghieri as a special envoy to Egypt in order to deny reports of Spanish cruelty and betrayal. In an account of his journey, which was steeped in contempt for the Muslims he encountered in Egypt, whom he described as “a barbarous and savage race of men . . . devoid of any virtues,” the faithful Italian scholar informed his sovereigns that the Sultan initially refused to receive him because of “the Jewish and Moorish heretics expelled from your kingdoms, of whom many have found refuge in these regions.”
3
The “mendacious and fraudulent accusations” spread by these exiles, Martyr claimed, had convinced the Sultan that his sovereigns were “violent and perjuring tyrants.” Eventually he was granted an audience with the Mameluke ruler, in which he claimed that the Granada conversions had not been achieved by coercion, arguing that Ferdinand and Isabella had acted magnanimously by sparing the lives of rebels who had carried out “massacres” against Spanish soldiers. Martyr insisted that the Christianized Muslims of Granada were not oppressed victims but “cowards” who had abandoned their faith, while the Jews were dismissed as a “morbid, pestilential and contagious herd.”
These arguments appeared to convince the Sultan, who acceded to Martyr’s requests to grant access to Christian temples in the Holy Land and to end the harassment of Christian pilgrims. In the same period, an anonymous Muslim from Granada contradicted Martyr’s version of events in an unusual appeal to the Ottoman sultan Bayazid in the form of a classical Arabic
qasida
poem, which insisted that it was “the fear of death and of being burned that made us convert” and condemned the violation of the Capitulations as “an infamous and shameful act, prohibited in every region” that was “particularly shameful in a king.”
4
The Granadan Muslim asked the sultan to intercede with the pope in order to seek redress for this “betrayal,” but there is no evidence that this unlikely course of action was taken. Nor is it known whether Bayazid agreed to ask the Catholic Monarchs to allow the Muslims of Granada to emigrate to North Africa “without power, but with religion.”
Within Spain itself, few Christians questioned the methods with which the miraculous conversion of more than two hundred thousand infidels had been achieved. The Catholic Monarchs regarded the conversions as one of their greatest achievements, and a bas relief of the baptisms in Granada was later carved in the altar in the royal chapel containing their mausoleum, alongside Boabdil’s surrender. The transformation of Granada was similarly acclaimed by the Church hierarchy. Only Talavera expressed doubts that these converts would remain constant in their faith unless they were provided with religious instruction, and established a small school in the Albaicín for Morisco boys to ensure that at least some of the new converts received a Christian education.
Granada’s first archbishop was not able to take these initiatives further. In 1501 he fell foul of the corrupt Córdoban inquisitor Diego Rodríguez Lucero, known as
el tenebroso
, “the bringer of darkness,” who accused Talavera of allowing “secret synagogues.” Though he was eventually acquitted of all these charges, he died shortly afterward. Some historians have seen Talavera as a more benevolent alternative to the fanaticism of Cisneros, whose methods might have produced a more positive outcome had they been pursued more diligently.
5
But the divergence between the two men was not as wide as it sometimes appeared. If Cisneros was more impatient and ruthless, he may well have been more realistic than Talavera in his recognition that the Muslims of Granada would never convert to Christianity in significant numbers without coercion. But ultimately the objectives of both clerics converged. In an undated letter written to his converts in the Albaicín, Talavera gave a detailed list of instructions on the behavior expected of Christians, which informed them:
That your way of life may not be a source of scandal to those who are Christians by birth, and lest they think you still bear the sect of Mohammed in your hearts, it is needful that you should conform in all things and for all things to the good and honorable way of life of good and honorable Christian men and women in your dress, the style of your shoes, the custom of shaving, in eating and keeping table and preparing meat the way it is commonly prepared, and especially and more than especially in your speech, forgetting as far as you can the Arabic tongue, and making yourselves forget it, and never letting it be spoken in your homes.
6
 
These instructions were almost certainly issued after Cisneros’s interventions, and Talavera may have intended them to protect his Muslim flock from the attention of the Inquisition. But Cisneros could easily have delivered the same advice himself. In October 1501, the Catholic Monarchs ordered the destruction of all Islamic books and manuscripts in a former emirate on pain of death or confiscation of property. This decision has often been attributed to Cisneros, and he would certainly have approved it, but unlike Talavera, the archbishop of Toledo does not appear to have been in Granada when thousands of Korans and other “books of the Mahometan impiety” were burned in a public bonfire in the city. Many of these books were beautifully ornate Arabic manuscripts, which some of the Muslim spectators begged to be spared from the flames. But only a few medical and philosophical tracts were saved and eventually found their way into the library of Cisneros’s university at Alcalá. As an act of cultural barbarism, the bonfire at Granada ranks with the burning of the Mayan codices in 1562 ordered by the bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa Calderón. In both cases, the collaboration of a conquered people in the destruction of its cultural heritage was a symbolic act of submission that was intended to pave the way for their acceptance of the culture and religion of their conquerors.
Both episodes combined religious intolerance with a concept of statecraft that was widely understood and accepted at the time. In
The Prince
, Machiavelli argued that conquered states were easier to hold when their subjugated populations adopted the “language, customs and laws” of the conqueror. This principle was practiced by imperial Spain in all its conquered territories, and Granada was no exception. And having transformed some three hundred thousand Muslims into “New Christians” virtually overnight, Ferdinand and Isabella were now forced to extend the same dismal process to the rest of Spain.

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