other garments that had long been characteristic of styles in al-Andalus and the Maghrib. This conscious fascination with Moorish fashions (vestidos moriscos) among Spanish Christians, particularly the elite who wore them for festivities and special events (especially the popular juego de cañas), was a trend that appeared in the later Middle Ages and extended well into the sixteenth century. Kings and nobles, such as Enrique IV of Castile and his constable, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, were known for wearing Moorish garb. A letter sent from the sultan of Granada to Alfonso V of Aragon in 1418 described an accompanying gift of richly adorned garments, included a gilded aljuba, a burnūs, two silk tocas, and a marlota embroidered with gold.111 This Christian delight in “Moorish” clothing has been amply discussed by Carmen Bernis, Barbara Fuchs, and others as a facet of the maurophilia that was so prevalent in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.112 But although late medieval Christian kings, queens, and their courtiers may have enjoyed dressing up in the luxurious and exotic alharemes, almaizares, quiçotes, and albornoces described in their chronicles, inventories, and account books, it is highly unlikely that anybody would actually have mistaken these prominent public figures for Muslims.113 Certainly, there was no sudden legal or clerical outcry denouncing this fashion trend.
Overall, there were very few complaints about Christians being mistaken for Muslims before 1500, although Christians had certainly worn many similar styles, including versions of the toca, aljuba, and almejía, at least since the thirteenth century.114 According to Iñigo López de Mendoza y Quiñones, who was writing in 1514 to object to new ordinances against Muslim clothing and hairstyles, it had been perfectly normal for Christians to dress in vestidos moriscos and to wear their hair in Muslim styles until the middle of the fourteenth century (he dated the change to the accession of Enrique II in 1369).115 It has already been noted that medieval Christians in Spain had long valued Islamic luxury textiles, and these items have been found in church treasures and royal tombs dating back to the twelfth century. Ramon Llull commented favorably on the fact that loose-fitting “Saracen” clothes were cool and healthful.116 Even more ordinary people seem to have appreciated their worth, taking them as booty in war and loot from theft.117
For the most part, the choice of medieval Christians to wear these styles passed without comment, a fact that raises significant questions about how such clothes were perceived, and how they fitted within a broader dialogue about religious visual identity. Even though medieval sources persistently tagged certain styles as “Christian” or “Muslim” (and this tendency has been mirrored by modern scholars), the realities of day-to-day appearance were surely more complex. But it is difficult to see beyond the centuries of complaint about confusion of identity and consequent legislation, to get an idea of why people dressed in certain ways, how they perceived the appearance of themselves and others, and what they intended to look like. On the one hand, there is the ongoing evidence of muddled visual identity; on the other hand, there is the relentless rhetoric (probably reflected to some degree in reality) that there was—or at least it was possible to create—something that was recognized as a “Muslim” or a “Christian” appearance.
One factor here is that many clothing items widely worn by medieval Christians were simply seen as ordinary “Christian” styles, even if they had names clearly derived from Arabic, or were a type of textile or garment known to have been originally created or worn by non-Christians. Some of these styles may have been genuinely shared, effectively removing their religious valence and making visual distinction impossible—hence the ongoing legal concerns. This was very different from the situation in which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Christians consciously donned exotic vestidos moriscos as fancy dress (although this had probably happened in earlier periods too). If appearance was not always easily differentiated by clothing, which could in any case be easily changed, this may explain the ongoing attempts to define “Muslim” appearance through more lasting hairstyles, such as the garceta in the Crown of Aragon.
But there are also other ways to explain the fact that medieval Christians were rarely censured for wearing “Muslim” clothes. Perhaps they simply never wore them, but the evidence is against this conclusion. Alternately, and perhaps more likely, garments of similar names and styles actually had subtle but recognizable differences depending on the religious identity of the wearer, differences that would have been familiar to medieval contemporaries but which have been erased by time. Fashions have long had the ability to project aspects of social and economic identity, but these meanings—though well understood at the time—leave little long-term imprint in a world of changing aesthetic tastes. It is likely, also, that sumptuary laws about “Muslim” dress were often ignored and that periods of enforcement tended to focus on non-Christian violators rather than Christian infractions.
Overall, it appears that the legal burden of differentiation was generally placed on Muslims rather than Christians. This tendency even extended to new converts from Islam, who were ordered to cease dressing as Muslims and strongly urged not to attend Muslim weddings or other festivities that might tempt them to don Muslim clothing and ornaments.118 Laws requiring that New Christians must dress in the same manner as Old Christians can be found in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they became strident in the sixteenth century, after the promulgation of edicts demanding conversion or expulsion.
The conversion of entire populations from Islam to Christianity, from moro to morisco, fundamentally changed the language of legislation about identity in sixteenth-century Spain, but without shifting any of the underlying assumptions about the proper relationship between appearance and religion. New Christians should now look the same as Old Christians, and if they did not, the burden was on them to change their appearance just as their faith had been changed by baptism. The fact that this did not happen, and that many Moriscos (and especially Morisca women) continued to dress as they had before conversion, presented a huge problem. Castilian administrators and inquisitors demanded that there be a rupture with the past, and they interpreted the continuity of appearance as representing active resistance by Moriscos to their new religious condition. In many cases, they were probably perfectly correct in this assumption. But in others, the persistence of earlier clothing traditions was surely also due to the varying pressures of inertia, familiarity, comfort, convenience, aesthetic preference, and economy.
Inquisition records indicate that a perception of non-Christian appearance was one among many indicators of imperfect faith. An accusation that somebody either routinely or occasionally donned Morisco clothing immediately generated suspicions of heresy, and in concert with other evidence it could land the accused in court, in jail, or on the scaffold. As early as 1498, even before the official edicts of conversion, a letter from King Fernando indicates that the Inquisition in Valencia was already paying close attention to Moorish dress.119 In 1526, when the Moriscos of Granada purchased their forty-year exemption from laws requiring that they abandon their traditional dress, it came along with a promise that they would also not be subject to inquisitorial attention during that grace period. After this expired, however, inquisitorial attention again included appearance among its measures of unbelief, and Moriscos were well aware of the dangers of continuing to wear clothing that did not distinctively mark them as Christian. When inquisitors visited Morisco communities in the region of Málaga in 1568–69, they inspired such fear that “they found all the women dressed in Castilian costume” (por este temor de la Inquisición hallaba vestidas las mujeres a la castellana).120 Likewise, in the Aragonese village of Gea de Albarracín, where the Morisco community would come under intense inquisitorial scrutiny and persecution, local officials insisted to the inquisitor general in 1566 that the inhabitants never used Moorish dress or language any more, and that they did whatever else was necessary to be good Christians (“los deste lugar jamas usaron el habito de moros ni la lengua … hizieron lo demas que es necesario para qualquier pefecto christiano”).121 Both reports reflect an assumption, on the part of the inquisitorial recorders, that moriscos did not normally dress like Old Christians, and they only put on Christian clothing in order to avoid inquisitorial attention. This may have been the case, but it is also possible that by the 1560s some Moriscos had genuinely made the
