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Acknowledgements
This book includes the translated and updated versions of most of the essays which we published in Spanish under the title Los Moriscos: Expulsion y didspora: una perspectiva internacional (Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, Universidad de Granada, Universidad de Zaragoza) in 2013. We are very grateful to our two translators and dear colleagues, Consuelo L6pez-Morillas, professor emerita of Spanish at Indiana University Bloomington and Martin Beagles, professor at the Instituto Universitario de Idiomas Modernos of the Universidad Pontificia Comillas de Madrid, for their diligent and painstaking work. We would also like to acknowledge the scientific and economic participation of the research project directed by Fernando Rodriguez Mediano, “Orientalismo e historiografia en la cultura barroca espafiola” (HUM200760412/FILO), and the one directed by Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, “Islam y disidencia religiosa en la Espafia moderna” (FF120-17745).
We are indebted to Teresa Madrid Alvarez-Pifier (CORPI project ERC Grant Agreement number 323316 at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid), and Kiki Boomgaard (University of Amsterdam) for their help throughout the editing process of this book. We also thank Prof. Dr. Volkhard Krech, the director of the Kate Hamburger Kolleg at the Ruhr University Bochum, its staff and fellows, in whose midst Gerard Wiegers was able to work on the present edition in the framework of a research fellowship. Finally, we thank the anonymous peer reviewers of Brill’s series The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World (MEMIW).
This book was planned as such. That is to say, its editors started by deciding on a series of important issues, and we then allocated each issue to a specialist who was carrying out first-hand work in that area. To make the book as coherent as possible and in order to prevent overlapping, repetition or contradiction, we asked all authors to write extensive summaries of their respective chapters and these summaries were distributed among all the participants ahead of a conference with the same title as this book which took place in the Biblioteca Nacional de Espafia in September 2009, with the financial support of the Sociedad Estatal para las Conmemoraciones Culturales and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank both institutions, as well as those who attended the conference and took part in the debates and discussions, many of which modified and clearly enriched the final texts presented in this volume.
Introduction
Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers
Out they went, then, the unfortunate Moriscos, on the days marked by the royal ministers, in a disordered order of procession, those on foot mixed with those on horseback, the former walking among the latter, bursting with grief and tears, amid a great uproar and confused shouts, burdened with their sons and daughters and wives and their infirm and aged and children, covered in dust, sweating and panting, some of them packed into carts with their jewels and trinkets; others on beasts of burden with strange contraptions and rustic postures, on saddles, riding gear, baskets, water carriers, surrounded by saddlebags, earthenware jugs, metalware pots, little baskets, clothing, smocks, shirts, cloths, tablecloths, lumps of hemp, pieces of linen and other suchlike things, each one carrying whatever he had. Some went on foot, bedraggled, badly dressed, with an esparto-grass sandal on one foot and a shoe on the other, others with their capes around their necks, others with their little knapsacks and others with their various bundles and packages, all hailing those who looked on: “May the Lord save you from this: seviores, queden con Dios [may God be with you, i.e. farewell].” Among the aforementioned in the carts and the beasts of burden on which they travelled to the very edge of the kingdom (all of which were hired, for they were not able to take with them more than they could carry on their persons, such as their clothing and the money given them for the possessions they had sold), there were from time to time women (those of the wealthy Moors) bedecked with various silver medallions on their breasts or hanging from their necks, and necklaces, chains, rings, bracelets, and a thousand adornments and colours in their clothing, with which they somewhat dissembled the pain in their hearts. Others, the vast majority, went on foot, tired, pained, lost, fatigued, sad, confused, jumbled, enraged, ill, vexed, bored, thirsty and hungry... In short, both those on horseback (despite their sad finery) and those who went on foot suffered at the beginning of their banishment incomparable travails, terrible bitterness and sharp pains and sentiments in their body and soul, and many died from pure affliction, paying for water and shade along the way for it was in the summertime when the poor wretches left.
This moving and expressive description of the Expulsion of the Moriscos was written by the eye-witness Pedro Aznar Cardona. The author was a defender and apologist of the Expulsion, but his words seem to convey pity, perhaps mixed with a certain amount of malicious enjoyment, at the sight of the deported Moriscos leaving Spain. The Expulsion amounted to one of those spectacles, in every sense the execution of a punishment, destined to arouse admiration and applause from those who thought like Aznar Cardona, but it was also designed to be exemplary and aimed to instil fear. It was an event which turned out to have extreme, unimagined dimensions when it actually took place. The scale of the operation may well have gone beyond what was originally sought and argued for in councils and juntas, and the process was fraught with problems and complexities. The expulsion measure was not initially intended to have “total” application and was defended through the use of very varied arguments, none of which applied to every member of all the Morisco communities. The polite farewell uttered by the Moriscos advancing along the path towards deportation to the bystanders who watched the spectacle, “seviores, queden con Dios,” is perhaps the most painful of the details in Aznar Cardona’s account. Or perhaps those words should be read as resembling El Cid’s reaction on receiving the order that banished him to exile: “Albricia, Alvar Fafiez, ca echados somos da tierra” [Rejoice, Alvar Fafiez, for here we have been expelled from the land].?
The Expulsion of the Moriscos constitutes a significant instance of ethnic, religious and political cleansing. It fed off an ideology firmly based on the idea that freedom of word and religion were incompatible with the functioning of a well-ordered society. It was an ideology which valued uniformity over diversity and argued in favour of the Expulsion because it deemed the processes of complete cultural assimilation and full integration which it claimed to pursue to have failed. In more contemporary parlance, it justified the Expulsion because of the Moriscos’ continued production of cultural difference. However, it is unlikely that full assimilation would ever have solved the problem, since this was a society which still placed great store by the notion of limpieza de sangre [cleanliness or purity of blood], an idea that was by then more than two hundred years old and had embedded itself deeply in Old Christian society. In fact, this obsession with limpieza de sangre originated with the great processes of mass conversion which took place in the Iberian Peninsula from the late fourteenth century onwards and brought an end to the legal existence of a plurality of religious groups with clearly defined boundaries whose presence had characterised the Peninsular Middle Ages. The obsession with limpieza de sangre (which had become almost inseparable from religious orthodoxy) carried with it the fear of cultural, political, religious and social infiltration, a fear that was equal to or greater than the feeling of failure brought about by the alleged lack of Morisco integration. The importance of this fear of infiltration, of the contamination associated with the inheritance of shame and the subsequent theological “stain,” became obvious when Moriscos were ordered to leave the country even when they were able to prove that they were good Christians. The unnoticed return of many Moriscos and the way in which some of them stayed on in their places of origin (discussed in this volume by Vincent and Tueller, among others), show that they were often indistinguishable from their Old Christian neighbours in language, dress or social and religious behaviour, as is also demonstrated by the fact that Old Christians were sometimes able to pass themselves off as Moriscos. There is no doubt that genealogical descent from Muslims became the only argument for a purge which according to contemporary providentialist discourse was needed to avoid divine punishment (Pulido). Even so, we know relatively little about why the decision authorising the expulsion was made; or at least, the reasons do not always seem to be sufficient or exclusive, i.e. we cannot be sure why they only affected the Moriscos and not other minorities who were never expelled, such as the judeoconversos or gypsies. We are conditioned, as often occurs to historians, by our knowledge of the ending of this particular story, and we tend to think of it as the natural result of preceding acts. The outcome retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole upon previous events. At the same time, the final catastrophe reveals the random, contingent nature of some of those events.
As far as this book is concerned, Aznar Cardona’s eye-witness account of the Moriscos’ departure from the Peninsula can be seen as representing a central axis.
Part One is devoted to reflecting upon and explaining how the moment described by Aznar Cardona came to be. It deals with the identity of the protagonists, the nature of the debate, the role played by different members of the government, the Catholic Church, the religious orders or the Vatican. It also covers the context, i.e. the moment at which the Expulsion occurred, and explores the issue of why it happened when it did and — very importantly — the nature of the contemporary international situation.
Part Two follows the traces of what happened after the Expulsion, i.e. it looks at the Morisco diaspora throughout the Mediterranean region and considers the Expulsion from the viewpoint of contemporary Mediterranean societies. In general, this book shows to what extent the Morisco issue ceased to be a local, Spanish problem. As a result of our desire to place the issue within a wide and complex context, both parts of the book contain a chapter on the judeoconversos. The first of these (Pulido) analyzes and considers the discussions that occurred in different organs of government, including the Council of State, about the possibility and convenience of also expelling Christians of Jewish origin, and the arguments that were used in favour of such a measure, which was of course never adopted. The last chapter of the book (Muchnik), almost by way of conclusion, compares the Morisco Expulsion and diaspora with that of the judeoconversos and considers the former, the focus of our attention, within the framework and parameters used in the study of various other diasporas. This kind of comparison has very rarely been made, since studies of the judeoconversos and of the Moriscos have been carried out within separate academic compartments and disciplines.? But the two religious minorities were equally stigmatized by the statutes of limpieza de sangre, both were subjected to Inquisitorial repression and the social practices of both groups were strongly moulded by clandestinity and the process of marginalization. Comparative analysis has yet to go any further than this, mainly because of an over-estimation of the differences between the two communities, which have tended to be depicted in very broad brushstrokes and have often been exaggerated (as Muchnik explains). These differences, taken together with the Hispanic sociopolitical context of the period, could explain both the non-existence of judeoconverso revolts and the fact that the Expulsion of the Moriscos went ahead whereas that of the judeoconversos, which was planned during the first half of the seventeenth century, never did. Above all, studies of the diaspora of the judeoconversos have blazed a trail and established a series of questions which we seek to address in the second part of the book with relation to the Moriscos (always assuming the term “diaspora” is appropriate in the case of the Moriscos). At all events, an important question remains concerning one huge difference between the two groups: that of the extent to which, for large groups of Moriscos who kept the faith of their elders, the diaspora was not felt as such, but was effectively a return to the dar al-islam [the territory of Islam], an end to exile rather than its beginning.
There is much that is innovative in the various chapters of this book, and a reading of those chapters confirms that a number of different approaches coincide in establishing new outlines of events. We will attempt to summarise some of these coincidences in this introduction, which is, in fact, a sort of conclusion. First, the events and their context. The first chapter of the book (Vincent) explains the various expulsion decrees that were published and the stages in which the Expulsion occurred. It discusses and establishes what is now known about the numbers of people expelled, as well as those who returned or for various reasons were able to evade expulsion. These events are placed, firstly, in an international context: 1609 saw two of the major events that marked the reign of Philip 11: the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce, which opened up a much-needed, hope-filled parenthesis in the long conflict initiated by the Revolt of the Dutch Republic, and the Expulsion of the Moriscos. In a work that sets out to analyze this second process from the perspective of Mediterranean societies of the period, it is also necessary to place it in the context of the general peace policy which characterised the years 1598 to 1617, up until the start of the Thirty Years’ War in Bohemia in 1618 and the later re-initiation of hostilities in the Netherlands and Germany after 1621-22. The signing of the truce agreement gave many leaders, and especially Lerma and Philip III, the impulse they needed to adopt the measure of expelling the Moriscos, which had in one way or another been discussed since as early as 1580 (Feros). This reiterative and committed attempt to find peace in war conflicts, to reach stable agreements with other kings and republics by stressing the importance of politics over religion, and to reduce the war effort in an attempt to put the finances of the Monarchy on a sound footing and present a more conciliatory and protective image, certainly defines the reign of Philip II and the period of influence of his privado the Duke of Lerma. It is for that reason that historians have labelled the period that of a Pax Hispanica. At the same time, the Expulsion was also presented as a peace process, as the true culmination of the Reconquista. And thus came about the very effective mass expulsion of virtually all the members of a productive population that was socially and culturally varied and had lived in Spain for centuries, via the application of a brutal resolution which was made to occur in the same year as the signing of the Truce with the Netherlands, but which had been decided many years earlier.t In fact, the idea had been slowly brewing for almost a century, since at least the time of the War of the Alpujarras. A decision was taken then as a way of showing the Monarchy’s determination in defence of the Catholic faith and its efforts to restore it.
At the same time, and as is shown in the chapter by Miguel Angel de Bunes, Spanish efforts to promote reconciliation and peace with European powers were decidedly not extended to the nearby Islamic world. Philip III's reign was full of interventions of one kind or another directed against that world’s interests, including the sending of aid to the various minorities which had some chance of rebelling against Ottoman power. These actions were fuelled by the permanent dread that Istanbul would follow suit and act in support of Morisco revolts and acts of treason. But at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman empire, embroiled in its harshest wars against Iran and conflicts in Anatolia, left the sea devoid of its presence and freed up the Spanish galleys for the Expulsion. In addition, the Mediterranean situation, so different from what it had been during the reign of Philip II, was propitious. It was a Mediterranean in which the Turks were no longer pre-eminent, but where the English and Dutch were making ever more frequent incursions. To this was added the threatening proximity of Morocco, where Morisco emigration had increased piracy since the middle of the previous century and where the candidate for the Moroccan throne who was supported by Spain had just been defeated in a civil war by his brother, the much-feared Muley Zaydan.
This is, in brief, the international situation which is analyzed in the first chapters of this volume. Those chapters help to explain to a certain extent why the Expulsion was undertaken when it was, but do not explain why the decision was taken. To do this, it is necessary to analyze the verbal and visual rhetoric which legitimized the Expulsion and induced subjects of the Crown to take advantage of it, outside Spain and within it. This was a golden age of international diplomacy, in which Spanish ambassadors and agents stood out. The negotiations for peace and for its preservation required a huge effort on behalf of the extraordinary and permanent delegations, which used every available means to consolidate their positions and maintain their reputation. Conflicts did not only take place on the battlefield or in the seas of virtually any part of the world, they were above all challenges in which opinion and prestige were at stake. The issue of how the Expulsion of the Moriscos was justified and praised is examined in the chapter by Antonio Feros, who studies the creation of an opinion through texts composed in several genres. This opinion was the reflection of a mood, of emotions such as fear. They were chiefly domestic notions, expressed by and for Old Christian society. Stefania Pastore, for her part, looks at the militant activity in Rome of polemicists like Bleda, Escolano or Fonseca, who also carried out apologetic work in Spain itself.
As is shown by Feros and Pastore, but also Broggio, for the Expulsion to be possible the king and the members of his government needed the existence of an ideology that saw the Moriscos as incapable of integrating within Spanish society as Catholics and loyal subjects of the Spanish monarch. Without that ideology and without the existence of previous debates on the feasibility and legitimacy of the Expulsion, neither the specific expulsion measure nor its justification would have been possible. This was also the moment at which Spain took up as its own cause the defence of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, which, as Broggio shows, was ideologically and politically connected with the Expulsion. Feros starts by analyzing the most significant expressions concerning the Moriscos and their situation as members of the Iberian community, for some ten to fifteen years before the Expulsion, and then analyzes the debates on the Moriscos and their expulsion in the period between 1605 and 1621. His intention is to identify changes in the concepts used, but above all to identify public representations of the Moriscos and their expulsion. Although the Moriscos and everything that related to them had been an object of attention in the literature of previous periods, references to them during the time of the Expulsion become more insistent. One of the outstanding themes now became the question of how to reflect in public opinion Philip III’s view of the Expulsion, and that of his favourite and main minister the Duke of Lerma. The causes and consequences of the Expulsion were discussed in royal institutions, but also in the genre of the novel (by Cervantes, for example), the theatre (by Lope de Vega, and in several of the plays performed during the fiestas which the Duke of Lerma organized in his home town of Lerma in 1617), royal entries (like that of Philip I] in Lisbon in 1619), and many other cultural and textual manifestations. Of special significance in this period is the appearance of the first pictorial representations of the Expulsion, in this case the large-scale paintings on the Expulsion of the Moriscos from the kingdom of Valencia commissioned by Philip III in 1612 and carried out by Pere Oromig, Vicent Mestre, Jerénimo Espinosa and Francisco Peralta.
To sum up this point: the Expulsion of the Moriscos was fed by a particular interpretation of the Reconquista and was carried out in a context of confrontation with the Ottomans and Morocco, at the same time that the religious struggles in Northern Europe had created a favourable atmosphere for a view of Spain as the champion of Catholicism and religious unity. The Expulsion was in turn utilized by anti-Spanish propaganda, just as the work of the monk Bartolomé de las Casas on the Destruccién de las Indias had been, as a way of fuelling mistrust of the Hispanic Monarchy’s policy of peace and agreements with Protestants.
Let us turn now to the religious issue, including the nature of the theological problems associated with the Expulsion. In the debates which took place before the Expulsion about its legitimacy and justice, a number of serious doctrinal issues arose, and these are laid out in the chapter by Rafael Benitez: to begin with, the Expulsion of the Moriscos would involve deporting Christians to Islamic lands where it was obvious that they would, voluntarily or otherwise, end up reneging on Christianity and embracing the Muslim faith. To make the issue more complex, one of the main arguments used to justify expulsion was that of the Moriscos’ apostasy and the survival among them of Islamic belief. However, when the final decision was eventually taken in Valencia, where the expulsion process began, it was based on reasons of state and cited the imminent danger to the Catholic Monarchy of alleged Morisco conspiracies in alliance with the Moroccan sultan Muley Zaydan (covered in the chapter by Garcia-Arenal). The Council of State’s decision was thus legally justified by the crime of treason (lesae maiestatis humanae) rather than that of heresy-apostasy (/esae maiestatis divinae) (Benitez, Pastore). Top-level advisers had considered taking the second line, but rejected it on account of the legal impossibility of a general conviction covering all Moriscos. The Holy Office of the Inquisition, which would have had to assume the burden of proof, operated within a rigorous legal framework which required individual trials and was not applicable to an entire group of people. These same discussions and arguments were later re-used in considerations of the possibility of expelling the judeoconversos (Pulido). Concerning these principles several issues are raised: firstly, the contradiction between the legal justification for the Expulsion (treason) and the reasoning which was later used to form public opinion and in dealings with the affected Moriscos themselves (apostasy) caused grave complications in the expulsion process. The Monarchy, having publicly insisted on the apostasy of most Moriscos, was forced to establish exceptions for those who could be deemed good Christians, thereby involving the church hierarchy (from parish priests to bishops) in the process and leading to the exercise of casuistry which, in the case of Castile, was to complicate the deportation process tremendously, as can be seen in several chapters of this book (Vincent, Tueller). Exceptions were reviewed in an increasingly strict way and the governing authorities who were requested to apply the measures adopted, such as the Count of Salazar, ended up going so far as to express their opposition to church interventions and making it very clear that they intended to expel all Moriscos, regardless of their religious behaviour. To this should be added the opposition of the Holy See in Rome to the idea of sending children to Islamic lands and the need to prevent this from occurring, either by retaining them or by forcing them to leave for Christian territories (Pastore). The debate on such children was one of the bitterest of all in the initial stages of the Expulsion, in both Valencia and Aragon, but it also affected the expulsion process in other areas (Broggio). The chapter by Benitez focuses, like others, on the difficulty of defining what and who a Morisco actually was, and this difficulty was to crop up continually both in debates and during the expulsion process. It clearly revealed the tensions to which we have alluded above between the desire for assimilation and the fear of infiltration, between the charge of treason and that of apostasy, and between religious belief and cleanliness of blood. This kind of tension allowed for no escape, nor for balanced approaches and solutions.
The issue of apostasy, i.e. of the Moriscos as insistent practitioners of the “faith of Muhammad,” was not just the Monarchy’s main argument. It lay at the heart of debates between several religious orders, or between different factions within those orders, as Paolo Broggio shows. It mobilized the knowledge of different church members concerning what it meant to practise Islam, plus that of individuals with direct experience of Morisco communities. This covered a wide range of men, from the Morisco Jesuit Ignacio de las Casas to the Dominican Jaime Bleda and including the highly influential Luis de Aliaga, also a Dominican and confessor to Philip III. The Expulsion thus emerges as the culmination of tensions between the Monarchy, the Inquisition and the episcopacy which characterised the history of early modern Spain (Pastore, Broggio). The episcopacy was represented on this occasion by the figure of the archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, an ardent defender of the Expulsion. Pastore shows how the issue of Rome’s approval of the expulsion decree, which was expected and discussed by the Spanish for so long, was closely related to efforts to bring about Ribera’s beatification. In reality, and as Pastore shows, the blessing from Rome never arrived, or was never granted. Rome did not see the Expulsion as a continuation of the crusade nor as a Spanish national problem but from the perspective of a new international order within which the Arab Christians of the Middle East were a key element. But we can trace the echoes of the Expulsion in Rome at a time when discussions about how to confront heresy were particularly intense (Broggio, Pastore). The contributions of these two Italian historians, both of whom are familiar with ecclesiastical and theological sources, widen our view of the debate, which ranged from discussion of the validity of the enforced baptisms which had taken place during the reign of Charles V to the very definition of heresy and the possibility that it could be inherited. Again, these contributions stress that the Morisco problem in general and the Expulsion resolution in particular were issues that were far from being restricted to the Peninsular kingdoms. Part 1 of this book closes with the chapter by James Tueller on the Moriscos who stayed or returned, which suggestively complements the first chapter by Bernard Vincent by discussing the Moriscos who avoided being expelled or who came back after the process had concluded.
Important aspects of the Morisco diaspora are reflected in the following text by an Arab chronicler of the Maghreb who was alive at the time of the Expulsion. In Cairo in about 1038/1629, al-Maqqari wrote the following words about the expulsion and exile of the Moriscos:
Thousands left for Fez and thousands of others for Tlemcen, via Oran, and masses of them for Tunis. As they made their way overland, they were captured by Bedouins and other people who do not fear God, in the lands of Tlemcen and Fez; they stripped them of their wealth and few were freed from these evils; by contrast, almost all of those who went to Tunis and the areas surrounding it arrived in good health. They built towns and villages in the uninhabited territories; they did the same in Tetouan, Salé and Mitidja in Algeria. Then the sultan of Morocco took some of them as armed soldiers. They also settled in Oran. Others took up the noble trade of warfare at sea and became very well-known in the defence of Islam. They fortified the castle of Salé and built palaces, baths and houses which are still there. One group arrived in Istanbul, Egypt and Greater Syria, as well as other Muslim regions. This is how the Andalusis are [distributed] now.5
This account bears witness to the difficulties encountered by the Moriscos on arrival, and which followed the looting and other outrages they had suffered at the hands of the crews on the ships which transported them overseas. It also establishes a series of general traits which are elaborated upon in the following chapters in the book, especially in those by Krsti¢, Garcia-Arenal, Villanueva and Missoum. At first, Morisco exile followed a similar pattern in all the countries which received them, ie., mainly, the Regencies of Algeria and Tunisia, territories then belonging to the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco, the only North African country to maintain its independence from Istanbul. The expelled Moriscos, like those who had preceded them since the second half of the fifteenth century, mainly settled in the coastal towns and cities (Rabat-Salé, Tetouan, Mostaghanem, Cherchell, Algiers, Béjaia, Annaba [Bona], Bizerte, Tunis, Tripoli, etc.), where they took to corsair activity, fighting against Christians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and constantly intercepting ships on the way back from the Indies with vessels which they were granted permission to sail by the political authorities. In Morocco and Algeria in particular, they were able to settle into structures already created by the emigration of Mudejars and Moriscos throughout the sixteenth century (Garcia-Arenal, Missoum).
Corsair activity was a defensive resort for these countries, which had no navy and most of whose ports (Mazagan, Tangier, Ceuta, Melilla, Pefion de Vélez de la Gomera, Oran, La Goleta [Halq al-Wadi]) were occupied by the Portuguese or Spanish. The Expulsion of the Moriscos coincided with the Spanish occupation of the Moroccan port of Larache in 1610. The inclusion of Moriscos in defensive structures and in the North African armies, especially in their artillery corps, was acommon phenomenon. Moriscos, under the protection of the political authorities in these regions, also settled in the capitals and other towns and cities under their control, occupying posts close to the sultan, or the Ottoman beys, fulfilling administrative duties as translators, traders, artisans etc, and also holding agricultural property outside the cities. In general, they took part in the significantly cosmopolitan life of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Mediterranean ports, alongside other groups of Muslims and Jews, also of European origin. Most inhabitants of these towns and cities were Arabic-speaking, but they were usually polyglot. Turkish, Berber and a melange of all the languages of the Mediterranean lands were spoken in such places because of the large number of traders and captives living in them. The Moriscos contributed to this multitude of languages, and Spanish became omnipresent in the towns and cities of the Maghreb, especially in Morocco. Under the control and protection of the political authorities, the Moriscos occupied farming land in the valleys and deltas of the Maghreb, in the areas surrounding the towns and cities.
Moriscos generally gathered and settled in their own communities, though protected by the authorities (especially in the Ottoman territories), where they served those authorities as economic instruments. Sometimes they found themselves on the margins of the host society, within which they constituted an alien body and their status as true Muslims was placed in doubt. It is worth asking to what extent it might ever have been possible for these communities, moulded by the experience of marginality and clandestinity during their lives in the Peninsula, to become truly integrated within the host society. The fact is, they did not. Many of them tried to return to Spain or seek refuge in the Spanish garrison towns like Ceuta, Melilla, Tangier or Oran, even when they knew that the price was to reduce themselves to slavery. Some tried to settle in other territories dependent on the Spanish Crown, such as Sicily, or to stay in France on their way to exile (El Alaoui). There are many known cases of Moriscos who died because they were good Christians and proclaimed their status as such, or who refused to be circumcised. The Moriscos often associated, both in the areas where they lived and in the professions they carried out, with other groups on the peripheries of society, such as the so-called “renegades” (European captives converted to Islam) and the Jews of Hispanic origin, with whom they shared a language and cultural characteristics. These three groups all took part in corsair activity: the first two as armed soldiers or in the supply of ships; the third in the ransoming of captives and in trade. However, the vast majority of Moriscos did what they had often done in Spain, working their irrigated vegetable plots, implanting the working techniques and the crops for which they had been known in their old homeland, or working as artisans in industries like the cloth and silk industry, the manufacturing of firearms or construction.
An examination of the kind of issues analyzed in studies of the judeoconverso diaspora will reveal that this phenomenon is not understood as a mere “dispersion,” but as the movement of a migrating population which maintained a link with its land of origin and the feeling of a common destiny. This is one reason why the role of the judeoconversos, and especially that of the Marranos, in the Sephardic diaspora, has given rise to such a profusion of studies. In Part Two of this book we look at issues which have been studied in depth in the case of the judeoconverso diaspora, but scarcely at all in that of the Moriscos. In the chapters by Bernabé Pons and Gil we see the familial and professional networks which linked the Spanish Morisco nuclei with the Morisco or “Andalusi” communities in exile, the circulation of individuals, goods and ideas (such as millenarianism) or the long-upheld efforts of religious polemic required by the religious re-education of the exiled Moriscos who were not sufficiently Islamised and were in need of a new process of confessionalisation (Wiegers). We also examine in a way that produces very innovative results as far as the Moriscos are concerned (extensive work has been carried out in this respect on the judeoconversos) issues such as the consequences of Morisco emigration to North Africa for local socio-economic structures or the “political” role of the Morisco elite (Villanueva, Missoum). Other authors consider the role of Morisco pressure on certain aspects of foreign policy in the countries where they settled, as seen in the case of the treaties with the Dutch which were directly propitiated by Moriscos (Garcia-Arenal, Krstic). Attention is also paid to the permanence of a culture and specific social practices (e.g. endogamy), the language and literature of exile or the process of assimilation and mimicry, all of which raise complex social and cultural issues. It is perhaps in the processes of insertion within the societies that received them where the greatest differences are to be found: the Moriscos were, in a proportion and to a degree which it is difficult to determine, Muslims, but another proportion was “re-Islamised” by the Expulsion. They became “New Muslims” in a process of confessionalisation that was not very different from that of the “New Jews” of Amsterdam or Livorno. The dissension and ambiguity which are the product of hybridization, and which had shown up very starkly while the Moriscos were still living in the Peninsula, also reared their heads in North Africa. At all events, within a century of the Expulsion, the Moriscos’ origins had been partially erased in most of the countries where they settled as they blended with the indigenous populations — except in the case of a number of important family lineages who proudly continued to bear the nisba “al-Andalusi.’ A whole series of gastronomic, lingustic, artisanal and construction practices imported by them did, however, linger on in the countries which had accepted them (Villanueva, Missoum). Many Moriscos managed to return to Spain and erase all trace of their origins there, once they had ceased to be considered a problem during the reign of Philip IV (Tueller).
There is much that is original in the contributions presented here and it is not necessary to highlight every new idea in this introduction, which would be extended beyond a reasonable length. We would however like to point out some of these features, which not only shed light on the Expulsion and the diaspora themselves, but also on the society which produced them and on the characteristics of the Morisco communities. For one thing, it will be seen that different adaptations and reactions to emigration reveal the very varied characteristics of the Morisco populations of the Iberian Peninsula. They show the tremendous differences that existed between different Morisco communities with regard to their knowledge of Islam, as well as other social, cultural and religious characteristics. Several studies included here (Bernabé-Gil, El Alaoui, Garcia-Arenal) coincide in showing that in the years before the Expulsion there existed networks of Moriscos who were able to escort fellow-Moriscos out of the country in the best possible conditions, usually through France but also via some southern Spanish ports. It is shown in this volume that Morisco emigration prior to the Expulsion (throughout 1608 and the first half of 1609) increased considerably, particularly among the wealthiest Moriscos. These departures demonstrate the existence of a well-informed, enterprising Morisco elite, who had the entrepreneurial instinct and the wherewithal to remove a significant percentage of Moriscos from the country. This forces us to revise estimates of the total number of Moriscos expelled, a task rigorously performed in the contribution by Bernard Vincent. Most members of these networks were Granadan Moriscos who had already undergone one deportation process and had therefore suffered the experience of an expulsion: that which removed the Moriscos of the kingdom of Granada to Castile after the War of the Alpujarras in a kind of “general rehearsal” for both expelled and expellers. The significance of the War of the Alpujarras is fundamental in the long ponderation of the decision to expel the Moriscos, and awareness of the activities and belligerency of the Granadan contingency, even after they were deported to Castile, explains why the first impulse was to expel the Castilian Moriscos even before those of Valencia (Bernard Vincent). The importance of the Granadan Moriscos can be perceived in Tunisia, and above all in Morocco where, as a result of simple geographical proximity, numerous inhabitants of the old kingdom of Granada were to shelter. Several chapters (Garcia-Arenal) show the intrepidness and bellicosity of the Granadan populations which settled in places like Tetouan and their determination, by means of journeys back into the Peninsula, to continue to help Moriscos depart before the Council of State made its final decision. The Moriscos of Morocco provide a good example of uprootedness, belligerency and a characteristic swinging between desire for revenge and desire to return to the Peninsula. Their attitudes show how persistent over time was the idea of reconquering, from the southern shore, the territory of the old kingdom of Granada. Such desires were also revealed in the pressure they exerted on Moroccan sultans to undertake a conquest of Spain, or to negotiate for the surrender of a Spanish military stronghold in which they lived, such as Rabat-Salé until the midseventeenth century, in exchange for permission to return to Spain. They possessed a desire for independence and autonomy, a wish to continue living in their own communities even in the new lands, and this echoes events that had already taken place in the Peninsula in places such as Hornachos or those with a dense population of Granadan emigrants like Pastrana, or in the kingdom of Valencia, where Morisco communities had virtually been able to isolate themselves from Old Christian society and its authorities. These communities had the determined will to construct an Andalusi identity in their new homelands.
One particularly innovative contribution of this volume lies in the information it provides on the Moriscos who settled in Istanbul (Wiegers, Krstic). Here also one sees the belligerency, the uprootedness and the unrest which the presence of the expelled Moriscos brought to many places in the countries to which they were exiled. Of particular interest, in our opinion, is their desire to form, in Istanbul, a uniform place of their own in a Spanish rather than an Ottoman way, i.e. doing everything possible to cast others out of the city and cause bitter confrontation between the Christian and Jewish communities which lived in it. This was a process and a set of ambitions not very different from those of the Moriscos of Rabat-Salé (Garcia-Arenal), who provide a good example of how the Morisco contribution was often a source of conflict and disturbance in the countries where they settled, i.e. on the Western and Eastern shores of a Mediterranean which was definitively starting to lose its leading role. Behind all these transfers of population and their interwoven elements of Islamic and Hispanic culture we are left, sometimes in the background and at others in the form of case studies, with hundreds of thousands of individual tragedies. For the Expulsion was a partly fortuitous event, but one which sealed the fate of all those who were involved. As is shown by Vincent and Tueller, it was a highly efficient measure, to such an extent that it seemed to bring an end to what had for more than a century been the so-called “Morisco problem.’ Yet the history of crypto-Islam does not seem to have come to a complete end, and in the centuries that followed a number of stories arose in which Moriscos or underground currents of Islamic beliefs emerged. This is not the place to record such stories, but we will give one example. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Inquisition of Granada detected the existence of a group of cryptoMuslims who venerated the Lead Books, the fabrications in Arabic which had appeared in the late sixteenth century on the slopes of the Sacromonte of Granada. These books were a Morisco forgery, but were regarded by this group as genuine Islamic texts. Were these crypto-Muslims a group of Moriscos who had somehow evaded the Expulsion? Were they converts to Islam? That is another story.
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