Three Portuguese in Marrakesh, 1581
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chapter 2 Three Portuguese in Marrakesh, 1581 Dom Francisco da Costa, Portuguese Ambassador The key to the anonymous work’s Moroccan context is the allusion to a diplo- matic event hidden in the reference to certain “ambassadors accompanied by preaching monks,” whom the author mentions in his prologue. Elsewhere in the dialogue, the Flemish proselyte whom he claims to have met in Marrakesh is presented as a collaborator of an unnamed Portuguese ambassador at the Sharif’s court. In the circle of this diplomat, at least one cleric is mentioned besides a group of military officers called “the fidalgos who were then captured with King Dom Sebastian” (240.18–19). Written between 1579 and 1583, this series of remarks unmistakably places the scene in the context of an historical event. On August 4, 1578, near the North Moroccan town of El-Ksar el-Kebir, the Portuguese invasion had ended in disaster. The Christians suffered eight thousand casualties and at least as many were taken captive.1 King Sebastian was among those killed, but our author, like all Portuguese patriots of the time, believed that the monarch had been captured alive, unrecognized, by the Moors.2 The rank-and-file soldiers were enslaved and then sold or interned in a work camp called the Sagena that the Sharif had established in the kasbah of Marrakesh.3 However, the two hundred noble prisoners, the least of whom was worth a thousand ducats in 1 On the military and political events alluded to in our text, see Pierre Berthier, La Bataille de Oued-El-Makhazen, dite la Bataille des Trois Rois (Paris: CNRS, 1986); Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire: la glorieuse bataille des trois rois (Paris: Seuil, 1992); re-edition with the subtitle Souvenirs d’une grande tuerie chez les chrétiens, les juifs & les musulmans (Paris: Chandeigne, 2009); see also Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (2nd ed., Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), II 460–467. 2 Yves-Marie Bercé, Le roi caché. Sauveurs et imposteurs: Mythes politiques dans l’Europe mod- erne (Paris, Fayard, 1990), pp. 39, 45; Lucette Valensi, “Comment prouver la mort du roi: Le cas de Sébastien de Portugal,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 5 (1990), pp. 1– 11. 3 On the location of the sagena, see P. Henry Koehler, “La Kasba saadienne de Marrakech, d’après un plan manuscrit de 1585,”Hespéris 27 (1940), pp. 1–19; Emily Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 23. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/9789004274020_004 34 chapter 2 ransom,4 became an object of intense negotiations during the year and a half preceeding their release. Meanwhile, they were comfortably lodged in Fez and Marrakesh. At least two of these captives later wrote down memoirs that allow us to reconstruct their Moroccan experience.5 At the time, Marrakesh was a city of fifteen to twenty thousand inhabitants.6 The non-Muslim minorities were confined to two separate quarters, which are both mentioned in the Marrakesh Dialogues: the Christans in the Aduana and the Jews in the Judería. The Christian quarter was not, in reality, an entire neighborhood, but rather a big customs building that operated from 1547 to 1612 on the great plaza, possibly the present El-Fna Square, and that was mainly inhabited by Spanish and Portuguese merchants.7 The ex-captive Jerónimo de Mendoça mentions “the Christian merchants of the Aduana, an enclosed place in which they can live freely among themselves. They are numerous there, many of them well honored.”8 As for the Jews of Marrakesh, a 1557 edict by Muley Abdallah had confined them to a distinct quarter, the mellah, created in the vicinity of the royal palace. According to the traveler Diego de Torres, who visisted the mellah in 1575, the latter was inhabited by more than one thousand Spanish Jews living on foreign trade and shopkeeping. There was also a minor- ity of Arabic-speaking Jews, who mainly worked as gold- and silversmiths, and some Portuguese ex-conversos who were active in the arms trade. It was in the mellah that the Sharif traditionally lodged diplomats and other Christian foreigners.9 This practice, which is crucial for understanding the social envi- ronment of the Marrakesh Dialogues, was adopted mainly because dhimmi were expected to stay segregated from Muslims, and there was no autochtonous 4 Jerónimo de Mendoça, Jornada de Africa [1607] (Lisbon: Jozé da Silva Nazareth, 1785), p. 159. 5 Jacqueline Hermann, “El Ksar El-Kebir: Narrativas e história sebástica na Batalha dos Três Reis, Maroccos, 1578,”História: Questões e debates 45 (2006), pp. 11–28, here p. 24. 6 The urban topography is presented by Mendoça, who visited the Sharifian capital one year before our author, in his Jornada, pp. 186–191. 7 Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, p. 22. 8 Mendoça, Jornada, p. 134. See also António de Saldanha, Crónica de Almançor sultão de Marrocos (1578–1603), ed. António Dias Farinha (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1997), p. 85. 9 Diego de Torres, Relacion del origen y sucesos de los xerifes (Seville: Perez, 1586), pp. 81, 174, 225; José Benech, Un des aspects du judaïsme: essai d’explication d’un mellah (ghetto marocain) ([Baden-Baden, 1948]), pp. 15–16; David Corcos, “Yehudei Maroko mi-gerush Sefarad weʿad ʾemtsaʿah shel ha-meʾah ha-XVI,” in: Shalom Bar-Asher (éd.), Ha-yehudimbeMarokoha-sharifit (Jérusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1977), pp. 74–134, here pp. 114, 116; Tavim, Expansão portuguesa em Marrocos, pp. 154–155..