Table Of ContentTable of Contents
ALSO BY MATTHEW CARR
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue: “The End of Spain’s Calamities”
Part I - Conquest to Conversion
Chapter 1 - The Iberian Exception
Chapter 2 - The Victors
Chapter 3 - The Vanquished
Chapter 4 - Broken Promises: Granada 1492–1500
Chapter 5 - Rebellion and Conversion
Chapter 6 - Faith Triumphant
Chapter 7 - The Last Redoubt: Aragon 1520–1526
Part II - One Flock, One Shepherd
Chapter 8 - A “House Full of Snakes and Scorpions”
Chapter 9 - Parallel Lives
Chapter 10 - Dangerous Times: 1556–1568
Chapter 11 - The Granada Pragmatic
Chapter 12 - “A Dirty Little War”
Chapter 13 - Defeat and Punishment
Part III - Catastrophe
Chapter 14 - The Great Fear
Chapter 15 - “The Vilest of People”
Chapter 16 - Toward Expulsion
Chapter 17 - “An Imminent Danger”: 1598–1609
Chapter 18 - The “Agreeable Holocaust”
Chapter 19 - Secrecy and Deception
Chapter 20 - A Perfect Conclusion? 1611–1614
Chapter 21 - The Reckoning
Epilogue: A Warning from History?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright Page
ALSO BY MATTHEW CARR
The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism
My Father’s House
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the work of the outstanding
scholars and historians who came to the subject of the Moriscos long before I
did. While I have followed my own instincts and concerns and brought my own
perspectives to bear, I have to a large extent been a traveler in terrain that was
already explored and mapped out by the investigations of others. I have tried to
include most of their names in the notes and bibliography, but I particularly want
to thank Trevor Dadson, whose helpful recommendations in the early stages of
writing this book sent me down some crucial trails in search of “the voice of the
Morisco.”
I wish to thank Isabel Aguirre Landa at the Spanish State Archives at
Simancas, who did everything to ensure that my visit there was as productive as
possible. I am grateful to Miguel Aparici Navarro, the official chronicler of
Cortes de Pallas, who took me on an unforgettable tour of the Morisco places in
the Valencian highlands and treated me to one of the finest paellas I have ever
eaten.
Once again, I must thank the staff at my local library in Matlock, Derbyshire,
who patiently responded to my endless requests for books and articles from
libraries across the country.
Last but not least, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jane and my daughter,
Lara, my constant and indispensable companions in good times and bad. For two
and a half years, they lived with the Moriscos too, whether they wanted to or not.
I dedicate the result to them, with much love and appreciation.
Introduction
Between 1609 and 1614, King Philip III of Spain ordered the expulsion of the
entire Muslim population from Spanish territory. Some 350,000 men, women,
and children were forcibly removed from their homes and deported from the
country in what was then the largest removal of a civilian population in
European history, even larger than Spain’s previous expulsion of the Jews, which
followed the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492. Unlike the Jews, the
Muslims were all baptised Catholics who had all been forcibly converted to
Christianity at the beginning of the sixteenth century. For more than a hundred
years, the Moriscos, as these reluctant converts were known, lived a precarious
existence in the midst of a Christian society that demanded the eradication of
their religious and cultural traditions and persecuted them when they proved
unwilling or unable to fulfill these demands.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Spain’s rulers had begun to
conclude that the Moriscos were collectively incapable of such a transformation.
An influential consensus depicted them as an alien population with political and
religious affiliations outside Spain’s borders, whose members refused to
assimilate into Christian society and whose presence constituted a threat to
Spain’s religious integrity and a danger to the internal security of the state. In
1609, after years of vacillation and tortuous official debates, Philip and his
ministers took the radical decision to remove all Moriscos from Spanish soil. At
the time, the expulsion was hailed by a plethora of semi-official chroniclers as a
transformative act of religious purification that would bring Spain prosperity,
prestige, and military success. Within a few years of its official termination
however, many Spaniards had begun to regard it as a mistake and even as a
disaster.
Posterity has continued to generate its own differing interpretations. In the
nineteenth century, conservative Spanish historians hailed the removal of the
Moriscos as a milestone in Spain’s national evolution. To Manuel Danvila y
Collado (1830–1906) the expulsion was a ruthless but essential episode in which
“there was no pity or mercy for any Morisco; but religious unity appeared
radiant and splendid in the sky of Spain and fortunate is the country that is one in
all its great sentiments.”1 The archivist and civil governor Florencio Janer
(1831–1877) similarly praised the benefits that the expulsion brought to Spain in
the form of “the unity of religion and the security of the state” and the removal
of “an oriental civilization without any of the fundamental ideas and components
of modern civilization.”2
Other writers have depicted the expulsion in racial rather than religious terms.
“It is madness to believe that existential battles, fierce and secular struggles
between races can end in any other way than with expulsions and
exterminations. The inferior race always succumbs and the principle of the
strongest and most vigorous nationality ends up victorious,” wrote the
nineteenth-century Spanish scholar and literary critic Marcelino Menéndez
Pelayo.3 To the British military historian J.F.C. Fuller, the expulsion was “a cry
in the blood, of the race, of the soul of the Spanish peoples—an all-compelling
urge.”4 In The History of Spain (1934), the profascist historians Louis Bertrand
and Sir Charles Petrie argued that without the removal of the Moriscos, Spain
would have become “one of those bastard countries which live only by letting
themselves be shared and exploited by foreigners, and have no art, or thought or
civilisation proper to themselves.”5
Liberal historians have generally taken a less positive view of the expulsion.
In his epic thirty-volume General History of Spain (1850–1858) the Spanish
historian Modesto Lafuente described it as “the most calamitous measure
imaginable,” which had contributed decisively to Spain’s subsequent economic
and political decline. The American Hispanist and historian of the Inquisition
Henry C. Lea saw the removal of the Moriscos as a triumph of religious
fanaticism and bigotry over the rational interests of the state, which sacrificed
Spain’s material prosperity and intellectual development in pursuit of unity of
the faith.
Most historians agree on the brutality of the expulsion, regardless of whether
they approved of its aims. The removal of the Moriscos is often described as a
historical tragedy, and for the tens of thousands of men and women who lost
their homes, their livelihoods, and in many cases their lives, their fate was
indeed tragic. But the expulsion was also a monumental historical crime. Even
from the distance of four hundred years, it is a crime that feels disturbingly
modern. The history of the nation-state is littered with episodes in which
unwanted or surplus populations have been driven from their lands and homes or
physically eliminated in order to establish religiously, ethnically, or racially
homogeneous communities within a single national territory. In its aims and
motives, its combination of bureaucratic organization and the deployment of
administrative, military, and economic resources toward the removal of an
unwanted civilian population, the removal of the Moriscos contains many of the
ingredients that we have come to associate with the phenomenon of “ethnic
cleansing.”
The deportations and massacre of Native Americans during the westward
expansion of the American frontier, the deadly “Turkification” campaign that
killed up to a million Armenians in 1915–1916, the mass transfer of Turkish
Christians into Greece and Greek Muslims into Turkey that followed the Greco-
Turkish war of 1923, the Nazi Holocaust, the brutal population exchanges of
Muslims and Hindus that followed the creation of modern India and Pakistan,
the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948, and the civil wars of the former
Yugoslavia—all these events were anticipated in the great purge that took place
in Spain between 1609 and 1614.
If the expectations and assumptions that led to the expulsion were specific to
their time, the tragedy of the Moriscos was part of a recurring dynamic that has
been repeated in many other contexts, in which a powerful majority seeks to
remake or define its own identity through the physical elimination or removal of
supposedly incompatible minorities whose presence is imagined as potentially
defiling or corrupting.
More than any other period in Islamic history, the “Moorish” Iberian civilization
of al-Andalus has often demonstrated an extraordinary ability to make itself
relevant to different historical periods and agendas, and the contrasting historical
perspectives on the expulsion invariably touch on wider debates concerning the
Islamic presence in Spain, the meaning of Spanish national identity, the relative
values of “Oriental” versus “Western” civilization, and the relationship between
Islam and Christianity. In the Muslim world, the historical memory of al-
Andalus is often infused with nostalgia for a vanished period of Islamic cultural
grandeur and accomplishment, whose contribution to that of Europe is often
considered to have been underappreciated. For much of Spain’s modern history,
the Islamic past was regarded with shame and humiliation or as an irrelevant or
destructive deviation from Spain’s European and Christian essence.
Many Spaniards have squirmed at the notion first expressed by Alexandre
Dumas and subsequently repeated by other foreign observers of Spain that
“Africa begins in the Pyrenees.” In the nineteenth century, a number of foreign
—and mostly Protestant—writers contrasted an often sentimentalized but
positive view of al-Andalus with a contemporary Spain that they regarded as an
anachronistic outpost of Catholic bigotry. The debate over the Islamic past
continued into the twentieth century. On the one side there are those such as
Bertrand and Petrie, for whom Islam was a “nullity as a civilising element” in
Spain, and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, who described how “Slow-witted,
barbaric Africa . . . twisted and distorted the future fate of Iberia.”6 At the other
there are Spanish intellectuals such as Américo Castro, Francisco Márquez
Villanueva, and the novelist and essayist Juan Goytisolo, who have celebrated
al-Andalus as a positive contribution to Spanish history and lamented its
destruction.
Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Moorish Spain continues
to insinuate itself into contemporary political agendas, at a time when the
Islamic and Western worlds are locked in a complex and multifaceted
confrontation with religious, cultural, and political dimensions. “Let the whole
world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of al-Andalus should be
repeated,” warned Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri in a
videotaped message in October 2001. The perpetrators of the horrendous
bombings of the Madrid subway on March 11, 2004, also listed the “loss” of al-
Andalus as one of the justifications for the “death train operations.” At his trial
for his role in the September 11 attacks on the United States, Zacarias
Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, demanded “the return of Spain to
the Moors.” If al-Qaeda and its offshoots have tried to mobilize the memory of
al-Andalus for their own propaganda purposes, the Islamic past has also been
invoked in Spain itself as an explanation of the present. In a lecture at
Georgetown University in September 2004, the former Spanish prime minister
José Maria Aznar claimed that “The problem Spain has with al-Qaeda and
Islamic terrorism did not begin with the Iraq crisis. In fact, it has nothing to do
with government decisions. You must go back no less than one thousand three
hundred years, to the early eighth century, when a Spain recently invaded by the
Moors refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a
long battle to recover its identity.”7
These debates about the meaning of al-Andalus—and their insertion into
contemporary debates—have tended to ignore or overshadow the traumatic
purge that brought it to an end. Among the general public, there is a tendency to
conflate the end of Muslim Spain with the momentous year of 1492, when Spain
was unified under Christian rule, and the fact that more than half a million
Muslims remained in the country afterward is often forgotten or overlooked. I
first came across the story of the Moriscos in 1992, when I was living in Spain
during the quincentennial anniversary of the fall of Granada and Columbus’s
voyages. Amid the media-driven commemorations and national self-
congratulation, the darker episodes of Spain’s imperial past were often forgotten
or neutralized by platitudes and euphemisms, and the expulsion of the Moriscos
received little attention. It was difficult not to be moved by the predicament of
these Muslims-turned-Christians, who spoke Spanish and wrote in Arabic, who
were regarded as bad Christians by Spanish Catholics and bad Muslims by their
co-religionists, who even after their expulsion were torn by their conflicting
attachments to their Islamic faith and their Spanish homeland.
Since then, the expulsion has become painfully relevant to our own era. In
Europe the September 11 attacks and the subsequent international terrorist
emergency have generated a toxic climate of fear and xenophobia, which has
focused on immigrants in general and particularly on European Muslims. At a
time when many European politicians are replacing “failed” multicultural
notions of citizenship with an increasingly rigid and monolithic conception of
national identity that regards cultural diversity as threatening, the story of the
Moriscos is a grim example of the disastrous consequences that can ensue when
assimilation is pursued by force. At a time when conservative intellectuals
invoke tendentious notions of a “clash of civilizations”—a concept generally
imagined as a clash between Islam and the “Judeo-Christian” West—the ruthless
destruction of al-Andalus is a reminder of how fluid these categories actually
are. At first sight, there may not seem to be much in common between the
politicians of liberal-democratic Europe who call for Muslims to conform to
European notions of secular tolerance or leave and a sixteenth-century Catholic
monarchy that demanded that Jews and Muslims become Christians and burned
them at the stake if they refused, but the underlying dynamics and assumptions
of the two periods are not as remote from each other as they might appear.
There is a vast scholarly literature on the Moriscos, which has analyzed the
period from a range of perspectives—historical, linguistic, cultural, religious,
literary, and anthropological. This book is not intended to contribute to their
efforts or break new scholarly ground. My aim is more humble: to bring the
story of the Moriscos to readers who may never have heard of it. It is a complex
and dramatic story of religious and cultural oppression, rebellion, prejudice, and
hatred. It is also a story of missed opportunities, poor decisions and bad policies,
and perspectives and possibilities that were ignored or not acted upon. And
today, in the year of the four-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion, I would
like to offer this dark chapter of Spanish history to the general reader and see
what lessons, if any, can be drawn for our current predicament.
Prologue: “The End of Spain’s Calamities”
Only thirty-one miles of ocean separate the Moroccan city of Tangiers from
Spain, the narrowest point in the Mediterranean barrier between Europe and
Africa. It was here that the history of Muslim Spain began one night in the
spring of 711, less than a century after the death of Muhammad, when a Muslim
general named Tariq ibn Ziyad and seven thousand Berber warriors crossed the
narrow strait and landed on the rock that now bears the name Gibraltar, from the
Arabic djebel Tariq, “rock of Tariq.” The purpose of this expedition has never
been clear. For the previous three centuries, the former Roman province of
Hispania had been dominated by Visigothic tribes from Germany who had
crossed the Pyrenees and occupied Iberia during the breakup of the Roman
Empire. In 589, the Gothic ruling caste in Spain had converted from Arian
Christianity to Catholicism and established a powerful Iberian Christian
kingdom with its capital in Toledo. It is unlikely that Tariq believed he could
topple the Visigoths with such a small army, and his aspirations at this stage
were probably limited to raiding and plundering.
The Visigothic king Rodrigo was campaigning in the Basque country when he
learned of the Muslim presence, and he immediately marched southward at the
head of a powerful host whose numbers have been estimated at thirty thousand
or more. In July, the two armies clashed on a battlefield somewhere near the
Guadalete River in the present-day province of Cádiz. Despite their
overwhelming superiority in numbers, the Visigoths were routed and Rodrigo
himself was killed, together with most of his leading warriors.
In the wake of this stunning victory, Tariq seized the initiative and launched
an audacious two-pronged assault into Andalusia and northward toward the
Visigothic capital of Toledo. By the end of the year, Toledo had surrendered
without resistance, and Tariq’s forces were able to spend the winter in the capital
unmolested. Bolstered by reinforcements from North Africa the following
spring, the Muslims rapidly extended their control over the rest of the peninsula.
Within three years, the Christian presence south of the Pyrenees had been
reduced to a small enclave in the inaccessible mountains of Asturias, and
Visigothic Spain had effectively ceased to exist.
The Muslims gave the name al-Andalus, the land of the Vandals, to the
territories they occupied. To Iberian Christians, their conquerors became known
as moros, Moors, from the Latin mauri, or maurusci, as the Romans had called
the Berbers of North Africa. From the perspective of Latin Christendom, the
conquest of Visigothic Spain by infidels was a barely credible catastrophe.
“Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human
nature to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils,” lamented the
anonymous Latin Chronicle Estoria de 754 (Chronicle of 754), written nearly
half a century after the events it described.1
Some Christians saw the collapse of the Visigoths as a divine punishment for
the moral depravity of Rodrigo and his court. Others found an explanation in the
treachery of the Jews, who were alleged to have opened the gates of Toledo to
the invaders. Some Christian chronicles blamed the mysterious Byzantine
official Count Julian, the Great Traitor, who was said to have encouraged the
Muslims to enter Spain and acted as their guide in revenge for the rape or
seduction of his daughter by King Rodrigo. For a brief period, the Muslim
advance looked set to continue beyond the Pyrenees, as Arab commanders in
northern Spain launched a series of predatory raids into the Rhone Valley and
Aquitaine regions of Gaul. Following the defeat of an Arab-Berber raiding
expedition in a confused series of battles around Poitiers in 732 by the Frankish
king Charles Martel, the Muslims consolidated their control over their territories
south of the Pyrenees.
From Edward Gibbon onward, western historians have often cited Poitiers as a
decisive what-if moment in European history, in which western civilization was
saved for the first time from the Muslim hordes, but the raiders who crossed the
Pyrenees were probably more interested in booty than conquest, and the
Andalusians showed little interest in the Frankish kingdoms during the coming
centuries. Removed from the main centers of Muslim and Christian power, al-
Andalus evolved from a remote frontier province of the Islamic empire into a
unique Moorish-Iberian civilization whose components included Syrian and
Yemeni Arabs, North African Berbers, the Slavic “slave soldiers” known as
Saqaliba, who came to Spain as servants of the caliphs and later formed their
own fiefdoms, Visigothic and Hispano-Roman Christians, and the largest Jewish
population in Europe. As the Muslim population expanded through immigration
and conversion, Spain’s Roman and Visigothic cities were gradually orientalized
and islamicized, with mosques and minarets, palaces, public bathhouses, gardens
with ornamental ponds and palm trees, and the pungent smells and vivid colors
of the North African souk.
The Moors also transformed the Iberian landscape. They brought new crops,
such as sugar and rice, oranges, lemons, silk, and coffee. Expert farmers and
horticulturalists, they introduced new techniques of irrigation and expanded
already existing systems, from the fertile plains of the Granada vega and the
Guadalquivir River valley to the foothills of the Sierra and the lush coastal
littoral of Valencia. Agricultural production and trade links with both the Islamic
and Christian worlds laid the economic foundations for a cosmopolitan urban
culture that attracted scholars, musicians, and intellectuals from across the
Islamic Empire. The most glittering period in the history of al-Andalus began in
755, when an exiled Umayyad aristocrat named Abd al-Rahman made his way
from Baghdad to Spain, following the massacre of his family by the rival
Abbasid dynasty. Abd al-Rahman founded a new Iberian Caliphate, with its
capital in Córdoba, that rivaled Baghdad and Damascus in its opulence and
splendor.
At its peak in the tenth century, Córdoba was a metropolis without parallel in
the Christian world, boasting paved roads and streetlights, hospitals, schools,
public baths, and libraries. At a time when the largest library in Christian Europe
had no more than six hundred volumes, a cottage industry of Arabic
calligraphers in Córdoba was churning out some sixty thousand handwritten
books every year, and the libraries of the bibliophile Umayyad caliph al-Hakam,
the “majestic, learned, and administrative,” were said to contain some four
hundred thousand manuscripts on a variety of subjects from poetry and theology
to philosophy, medicine, and agriculture.
This eclectic range of concerns was reflected in a number of outstanding
Andalusian scholars and intellectuals, such as the Jewish philosopher and
theologian Maimonides (1138–1204), the polymath Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), or
Averroes, as he was more commonly known in Europe, where his commentaries
on Aristotle were widely read. Lesser known figures included the fourteenth-
century Granadan statesman and author Ibn al-Khatib, the author of more than
fifty books on music, poetry, medicine, and travel, and Abbas Ibn Firnas, the
ninth-century Córdoban music teacher, mathematician, and astronomer who once
jumped off a mosque tower with a makeshift parachute to see if he could fly. The
cultural world of al-Andalus drew inspiration from various traditions—Islamic,
Jewish and Christian, and Greco-Roman—and the attempts of its principal
protagonists to reconcile secular knowledge and philosophy with the rigid
parameters of the sacred were not always viewed favorably by the religious
authorities of any of its three faiths.
These concerns also had important repercussions outside Spain. Together with
