Muslims in Spain 1500 to 1614 Muslims in Spain 1500 to 1614 L
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MUSLIMS IN SPAIN 1500 TO 1614 MUSLIMS IN SPAIN 1500 TO 1614 L. P. HARVEY The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO AND LONDON The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London C 2005 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2005 Paperback edition 2006 Printed in the United States of America 141312111009080706 2345 ISBN: 0-226-31963-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31964-3 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-31964-4 (paper) The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities toward the publication of this book. Title page illustration: detail from Hoefnagel’s engraving of Granada (1565). Courtesy of the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harvey, L. P. (Leonard Patrick) Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 / L. P. Harvey p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-31963-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Moriscos—History. 2. Muslims—Spain—History. 3. Spain—History—Ferdinand and Isabella, 1479–1516. 4. Spain—History—House of Austria, 1516–1700. I. Title. DP104.H37 2005 946.04088297—dc22 2004015747 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xiii 1 The Beginnings of Crypto-Islam in the Iberian Peninsula 1 2 Spain’s Muslims under a New Order 45 3 The Muslims of Aragon and Valencia up to Their Forcible Conversion 79 4 Crypto-Muslims in the Lands of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, 1525–1560 102 5 The Intellectual Life of Spain’s Clandestine Muslims 122 6 Crisis and War: Granada, 1567–1571 204 7 Assimilation or Rejection? The 1570s and 1580s 238 8 The Last Books Written in Arabic in al-Andalus and the Question of Assimilation 264 9 Expulsion 291 10 International Relations 332 11 Aftermath 353 12 Hornachos: A Special Case 369 Appendices I Religious Freedom and the Modern Spanish Constitution 379 II “Morisco” and “Mudejar” in Glosses by Alonso del Castillo 380 III The Sacromonte Texts 382 IV Góngora on the Sacromonte 399 V Some Specimen Official Texts Relating to the Expulsion of the Moriscos 401 VI The Moriscos of the Canaries and the Guanches 411 VII The Literature of Self-Justification after the Expulsion: A Specimen 413 VIII Popular Reactions to the Expulsion 417 Bibliography 421 Index 443 Preface This history begins in 1500 or, perhaps more precisely, on December 18, 1499. On that day the inhabitants of what was then the principal Muslim quarter of the city of Granada, the Albaic´ın, exasperated with the failure of the Castilian authorities to respect certain fundamental clauses of the terms whereby the city had been surrendered eight years earlier (in particular, failure to keep the promises made to respect their right to live as Muslims), rose in revolt and took over their part of the city. In their own narrow and winding streets the populace easily established control, but theirs was a singularly ill-prepared revolt which collapsed within three days (just when disaffection was beginning to spread outside the city to the mountainous expanses of the Alpujarras, for example, where things went differently). Order was swiftly restored in the Albaic´ın, so what happened in Granada between December 1499 and January 1500 might well by now be remembered, if at all, as a merely local affair, an urban riot stifled by firm police action were it not that it marks a significant divide in the history of the Iberian Peninsula as a whole and the beginning of a process that led to the end of Spanish Islam altogether, 114 years later. For centuries before the end of 1499, the Christian monarchs of the various Spanish kingdoms had ruled over Muslim as well as Christian subjects, and Muslims had had a secure and accepted place in Spanish life. It is true that in certain places and from time to time antagonism against Muslims might manifest itself, but there was never any doubt: they belonged in the land where they were born. In the great medieval Poema de Mio Cid the words “Moors and Christians’’ are to be taken simply to mean “everybody.’’ But from early 1500 onward, there begins in earnest the process whereby Spain’s Muslims were to be eliminated from Spanish society. First they were obliged to convert to Christianity— not all of them at the same time; as we will see, it was not until the mid-1520s that the last Muslims were forced into compliance, then in viii Preface the rest of the sixteenth century there followed periods of persecution, and finally there came the total elimination of Muslims from Spanish soil: the Expulsion of 1609–1614. In theory, at least, no Muslims were left whatsoever after that, and in fact so few did remain that we can say that to all intents and purposes 1614 brought an end to Islam in Spain. Some Western historians, when dealing with the communities of forcible converts who came into existence as a consequence of these events, tend to see them as exotic and strange, almost out of place in their own homeland, and marginal to the great events of the Hispanic imperial drama which was being played out over the face of the globe at this time. As for what has been written about them in Arabic, it has to be said that until the pioneering work of the Egyptian scholar Muhammad <Abd Allah <Inan,1 there was very little indeed available in print on the subject of the closing phase of the long nine-hundred-year history of Mus- lims in the Iberian Peninsula (although there is no lack of works on the early periods, the Umayyad Emirate and Caliphate, in particular). The Arab world, not surprisingly, if it has spared any thought at all for al- Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula), has tended to be far less interested in the closing century of decline and disaster than in the periods of Islamic dominance. Nowadays, however, Arab historians from many parts of the Arab world, and not just from North Africa, are undertaking investigations into the history and culture of the crypto-Muslims of Spain in this final period. The fact that they themselves in their studies usually employ the loan-word moriskiyyun (“Moriscos’’) in speaking of their subject is sufficient indication that their interest was in the first place sparked off by European scholarship in this field (which does not mean, of course, that these modern studies by Arab scholars do not bring important and original insights; some of the most valuable work in recent years, for example, has arisen from the explorations of the Ottoman and other archives undertaken by Tunisian historian Abdeljelil Temimi). This volume is an attempt to look at the final period of Muslim pres- ence in the Iberian Peninsula, making use of materials from both sides of the religious and cultural divide: both the sources in Arabic, disap- pointingly scant though they are for this late period, and the abundant materials in the European languages. But to books written about the Mus- lims in Spain in this final period there is a necessary complement, and one which is frequently ignored: what they themselves wrote, their own underground literature. This was in most cases in a dialect of Spanish 1. “Enan” is the form of his name used by the historism himself on the alternative English-language title page to his study Nihayat al-Andalus (1966). Preface ix (very different from the standard literary language), and was set down by them in a script adapted from the Arabic one (what bibliographers and scholars nowadays term literatura aljamiada). In this study an attempt is made to listen to what the Muslims, crypto- Muslims, Moriscos of Spain, themselves had to say. To do this is no innovation, for the great nineteenth-century pioneer of Morisco studies (the term he himself used) was Pascual de Gayangos, and he made every effort from the beginning to make available to a wider public his unri- valled knowledge of the Arabic and aljamiado sources. His 1839 article, “The Language and Literature of the Moriscos,’’ marks the beginning of modern scholarly investigations in English (it appeared in British and Foreign Quarterly Review). In more recent times, accounts that make ex- tensive use of the Morisco material have not been lacking, as for example Anwar Chejne’s Islam and the West: The Moriscos, a Cultural and Social History (1983), but thanks to greatly increased research activity in this field in recent years, especially in Spain itself, fresh material is becoming available in such abundance that it seems to me that the time has arrived to attempt a new synthesis for English-speaking readers. This book follows chronologically from my earlier study, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (1990), but yet sets out to stand on its own as a completely independent work. It is mainly concerned with events, with what the native Muslim populations of Spain did after 1500, and with what was done to them, but it is also concerned with concepts: how their Christian neighbors thought about these Muslims as well as how Muslims thought about themselves and about the Christians. Such considerations are not mere optional afterthoughts to the narrative of events, they are rather the necessary preliminaries to any understanding of them. The very different ways in which people can speak of events of the very re- cent past in the land that some call “Palestine’’ and others call “Israel’’ bring home to us how “what actually happened,’’ both over the short term and over the longest of periods, may be conceptualized in totally different ways by members of different groups.