dress, language, names, bathhouses, and other traditional customs. The original text of this edict does not survive, but evidently it revived many of the bans originally promulgated by Charles V in 1526.17
Reactions to the 1567 decree included not only Francisco Núñez Muley’s carefully argued memorandum but also the launching of a major rebellion among Moriscos in the Alpujarras in 1568. Neither effort achieved its desired effect. There is no evidence that Christian authorities paid any serious attention to Núñez Muley’s appeal, and the Alpujarras revolt was put down after two years, followed by the deportation and relocation of many Granadan Moriscos to other areas of Castile in 1570. Meanwhile, uprisings in Aragon and Valencia led to forced disarmament of Moriscos in these regions and an intensification of efforts to enforce Christianity and suppress Islamic practices. Whether these goals were even achievable became an increasingly hot topic for debate among Christian administrators and clerics, with the majority eventually deciding that it would never be possible to assimilate the Old and New Christian populations. Between 1609 and 1614, during the reign of Felipe III, the entire Morisco population was expelled from Spanish territories.
The Morisco period in Spain lasted for roughly a century, from the conversions of the early sixteenth century until the expulsions of the early seventeenth. It was only the final chapter in the story of Muslim life under Christian rule in the Iberian Peninsula, yet this Morisco chapter was dramatically different from what had gone before. Until about 1500, and even after the conquest of Granada, Muslims had been able to live openly as Muslims (mudéjares) in the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, although it was often a struggle to maintain the requirements and customs of their Islamic identity. The difficult question of how to continue to live a fully Muslim life under Christian rule became a pressing issue in Iberia from the conquest of Toledo in 1085 by Alfonso VI of Castile, through the watershed victories of Fernando III of Castile and Jaume I of Aragon in the first half of the thirteenth century that consolidated most of the Iberian Peninsula in Christian hands, to the conquest of Granada by Fernando and Isabel in 1492.
From the late eleventh century to the late fifteenth century, it was generally assumed that subject Muslim populations living within the Crowns of Castile and Aragon would continue to be just that: Muslim. They could continue to practice their faith traditions and to live their daily lives much as they always had, even though now under Christian lordship. Latin and Romance documents often mentioned that certain things could continue as they had in the time of the Moors (en tiempo de moros), although life would never really be the same. Christian rulers normally allowed at least some mosques to remain in operation; Muslim communities could live according to their own religious law and custom (sharīʾah and sunnah in Arabic, xara and çuna in later medieval Romance texts); the call to prayer continued; halal butchers were permitted; Muslim schools, cemeteries, bathhouses, and pious endowments stayed in operation; Muslims could go on pilgrimage, they could observe Ramadan, they could circumcise their children, and they could continue to use Arabic and call themselves by traditional Islamic names.
But was this really enough to live a fully Muslim life? In fact, many Mudejars found their lives increasingly restricted and impoverished, their religious practices curtailed, their communities segregated, and they were largely cut off from the larger Islamic world. Within the Muslim community outside of the Iberian Peninsula, especially in North Africa, many Islamic jurists argued that despite Christian promises of continuity for the sharīʾah and sunnah, it was not actually possible to live as a true Muslim under Christian rule. They urged that all Muslims should leave Christian lands, and many Mudejars complied, emigrating to Naṣrid Granada, North Africa, or the eastern Islamic world.18
Many other Mudejars chose to remain in Spain, whether by preference, economic necessity, family commitments, or for other reasons. Continued Muslim life in Spain is recorded in a small number of texts produced by their own community and a much larger body of Christian sources, mainly legal and economic materials, relating to Mudejar affairs and legislation. The realities of Mudejar existence did not remain unchanged in the four centuries between 1085 and 1492, and there were significant regional variations between the large Mudejar populations in Valencia and Aragon, and somewhat smaller ones in Castile and Andalusia. Although these men and women continued to live as Muslims, it is clear that their access to religious and cultural traditions became more restricted over time as Christians around them became gradually less tolerant of public and private practices that they associated with Islam. This shifting context and changing attitudes about certain aspects of Muslim life will be discussed in more detail throughout this volume.
The eve of the sixteenth century ushered in fundamental changes for Muslim life in Spain. After the conquest of Granada, the long-standing though contested toleration of Muslim customs and religious practice under Christian rule quickly shifted into a zealous Christian conversation about how to eradicate these pernicious symbols of Islamic identity. By 1500, most Christian authorities in Spain had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to be Christian and yet still live one’s daily life in a fashion that many people perceived as Muslim (vivir como moro). This was true not only in Granada, where Núñez Muley composed his memorandum in response to the 1567 restrictions, but also in Valencia and other regions of the Peninsula where there were New Christian populations. Among Old Christians, urban administrators, bishops and local clergy, inquisitors, kings, and queens were all openly concerned about backsliding among converts; secret Muslim rituals practiced at home behind closed doors, in bathhouses, and elsewhere; furtive teaching of Arabic and Islamic texts to children; continued adherence to Muslim dietary laws and fasts; attendance at traditional festivals, weddings, and musical events; clandestine funerary practices and circumcisions, as well as many other aspects of earlier Islamic life, especially concerning clothing and appearance. These worries about residual Islam were quite aside from concurrent and significant concerns about improper or insufficient Morisco knowledge of Christian prayers, rituals, practices, and doctrine. And these anxieties were reflected in repeated statutes prohibiting perceived Islamic practices, reiterated throughout the sixteenth century.
Although at first glance such early modern legislation seems a dramatic break from the medieval past, in fact, this new push to eliminate Muslim “rites and customs” was merely the mirror image—reversed yet fundamentally the same—of earlier laws concerning Muslim life and practice. Before 1500, Christian legislation had been largely intended to maintain clear barriers between Muslims and Christians, with laws explicitly designed to assist segregation and to prevent assimilation, intermarriage, social and sexual mixing, or any confusion of religious identity. For example, medieval sumptuary laws in Spain, at least since the rulings of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, had functioned to preserve easily recognizable visual markers of identity in line with differences of religion: Jews must wear a star on their clothing or a particular style of hat or cap; Muslims should wear distinctive types of dress, cut their hair in a certain way, or wear a crescent moon symbol on their clothes. After 1500, and following the wave of forced conversions, the same basic impulses dictated that all baptized Christians should look, dress, pray, eat, and otherwise conduct themselves in the same way. In Granada, according to the edicts of 1567 “with respect to clothing, it was ordered that they [the Moriscos] not make any new dresses, veiled gowns, hose, or any other sort of dress such as those that they wore during the Muslim period; and that all the clothing that they cut and made in the future be like that worn by Christians.”19 If there was no longer any difference of religion, nor should there be any distinctions in dress or daily life.
Because of this, in the sixteenth century, a whole group of practices that had once been open, acceptable, and even required aspects of Muslim culture, even under Christian rule, now became newly dangerous signals of imperfect Christian belief and probable markers of crypto-Islam. Inquisition records and episcopal correspondence from the early sixteenth century onward are filled with accusations not only of the inadequate Christianization of Moriscos (such as not knowing prayers, working on Sundays, failing to attend mass and confession, or avoiding baptizing their children) but also of outright Islamic practices (including prayer, circumcision, fasting, abstaining from pork and alcohol, reading the Qurʾān in Arabic, and ritual washing), together with a
