Faith, Race, and Identity As Reflected in Spanish Diplomacy During the Reign of Charles V

A Distorted Mirror: Faith, Race, and Identity as Reflected in Spanish Diplomacy during the Reign of Charles V by Alex Wall A Thesis presented to The University of Guelph In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Guelph, Ontario, Canada © Alex Wall, May, 2021 ABSTRACT A DISTORTED MIRROR: FAITH, RACE, AND IDENTITY AS REFLECTED IN SPANISH DIPLOMACY DURING THE REIGN OF CHARLES V Alex Wall Advisors: University of Guelph, 2021 Professor Susannah Ferreira Professor Karen Racine This thesis examines how the ministers and officials of Charles V sought to cultivate a specific state identity that defined Spain and its people against non-Christian ‘Others’—namely the Jews, conversos, and Moriscos of Iberia, as well as the Lutheran heretics of Europe. These officials utilised various narratives and policies that emphasised the ideas of Christian purity and crusade, thus building off of the work done by the Catholic Monarchs. Charles V and his ambassadors expressed these narratives on the stage of European diplomacy and projected Spain’s state identity abroad. More importantly, this thesis explores how these ambassadors were often challenged in their attempts to define Spain on the world stage, as the foreigners they encountered presented them with counter-narratives that destabilised their image. Such counter- narratives often played upon the contradictions and complexities that were inherent in Spanish society regarding its constructions of religious and ‘racial’ barriers. The clashes between the Spaniards who sought to defend Spain and its reputation and those who disparaged it demonstrate the weakness of Spanish state-identity during the reign of Charles, as well as the anxieties that Spain’s ambassadors often felt when projecting Spain’s image abroad. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Susannah Ferreira for her invaluable help and advice during the course of my Master’s Degree. I would also like to thank my co-advisor Dr. Karen Racine for her help and support. I extend my gratitude to the Department of History at the University of Guelph for their funding that allowed me to complete this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who continually supported and encouraged me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................1 Historical Context ....................................................................................................................5 Historiography ....................................................................................................................... 11 Sources: The Spanish State Papers ......................................................................................... 21 Chapter I: Jews and Conversos during the Reign of Charles V .................................................. 25 The Projection of the Narrative of Spain’s Crusade against Judaism Abroad .......................... 26 Spanish Critiques of Other States’ Policies towards Jews and Conversos ............................... 29 Blood Purity and the Question of Jewish ‘Race’ .................................................................... 40 The Jewish ‘Taint’ in Spanish Society: Complexities and Anxieties....................................... 43 European Anti-Narratives: Spain as a Land of Jews ............................................................... 47 Spanish Responses: Denial and Embarrassment ..................................................................... 51 Chapter II: The Moriscos and Moors during the Reign of Charles V.......................................... 54 Moriscos as a Fifth Column ................................................................................................... 54 Morisco Discrimination and the Question of Race ................................................................. 58 Spanish Anxieties regarding Spain’s Moorish Heritage .......................................................... 60 European Anti-Narratives: Spain as ‘Moorish’ ....................................................................... 64 Spanish Responses to Foreign Criticisms ............................................................................... 68 Chapter III: The Figure of the Luterano and the Symbol of the Spanish Inquisition ................... 72 The Black Legend Emerges: An Anti-Narrative of Spanish Cruelty and Tyranny .................. 77 Spanish Responses: Embarrassment, Denial, and Reaffirmation ............................................ 84 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 90 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 96 Introduction On March 11, 1521, the College of Cardinals wrote to Charles V (1519-1556)—King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor—on the election of Pope Clement VII. The cardinals told him that his predecessors had earned their “great reputations” by “making war upon the Jews, putting heretics to death, and reducing almost the whole of Africa to the obedience of the Christian religion.”1 This image was exactly how Charles V wanted the world to see his Spanish kingdom. For indeed, Convivencia—the idea that Spain was a multicultural society in which the three Abrahamic faiths coexisted in harmony—perished in Spain with the ascension of Charles V’s grandparents, Isabella I of Castile (1474-1504) and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1479-1516). The Catholic Monarchs had implemented a policy that marked a crucial break from the past: the rejection of Spain’s medieval identity as a multicultural realm.2 This policy entailed the propagation of rhetoric that defined Spain’s subjects against a group of people who had once been seen as cohabitants of the Iberian Peninsula: the Jews and Moors. In the new construction of Spain that the Catholic Monarchs and their successors propagated via their policies, edicts, and propaganda, to have membership in the state—to be Spanish—meant to be Catholic. This new identity was thus grounded in the idea of extreme Christian purity and defined in opposition to non-Christians.3 Indeed, Spaniards came to 1 “Spain: March 1524,” in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 2, 1509-1525, ed. G. A. Bergenroth (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1866), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state- papers/spain/vol2/pp606-613, accessed 14 April, 2021. 2 Maria José Rodríguez-Salgado, “Christians, Civilised and Spanish: Multiple Identities in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 8 (1998): 241. 3 Rodríguez-Salgado, “Christians, Civilised and Spanish,” 241, 238; Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, “Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems (after a recent book by Ángel Alcalá),” Journal of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2013): 3; Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms from the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 143-144; Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85. 1 understand the world and their place therein through a fundamentally religious lens during this period, a sense of providentialism having become rampant in their society.4 A zealous crusading mentality had developed that was founded on a sense that Spain was unique among the nations and that Spaniards were divinely tasked with defending the Catholic faith against any threat.5 The Spanish monarchs and elites of this era drew upon and propagated this sort of religious rhetoric in order to support a newly-unified state.6 Whereas before Spain was divided into many kingdoms, the coming together of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile united Spain not only politically but also ideologically through the monarchs’ propagation of this new state identity, which enabled Aragonese, Castilians, and any other ‘Spaniard’ under their domain to feel a part of this community so long as he was Catholic.7 Such rhetoric imposed unity that transcended administrative and linguistic boundaries.8 Indeed, the Catholic Monarch’s Kingdom of Spain was the first largescale “proto-nation state” (as historian Anthony Marx terms it) to emerge in early modern Europe in which political centralisation was married with state policies and rhetoric that were aimed at creating cohesion—namely, unification through the elimination of religious difference.9 This was not a seamless process—indeed, the kingdoms that made up 4 Rodríguez-Salgado, “Christians, Civilised and Spanish,” 244, 239; Michael J. Levine, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 207. 5 John H. Elliott. “Spain and its Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Spain and Its World, 1500- 1700: Selected Essays (New Haven and London: Yale University

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