he left as a corsair with the intention of arriving in the land of the Christians.”103 Martínez claimed he was captured near the Portuguese coast where he tried to appeal unsuccessfully to the Inquisition to allow him to return to Spain and to Christianity but did not have time to make his case. He thus waited to denounce himself until after his arrival in Cartagena de Indias. Inquisitors ruled that he should receive instruction in a local monastery because “it seemed that he spoke from his heart and told the truth in all things.”104
In a contrasting case, on 30 March 1625 the inquisitor Doctor Agustín de Ugarte Saravia addressed a letter to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid. In it, he described how “six or seven Moriscos, of those who had been expelled from Castile” had reached the port of Cartagena de Indias in the galleys.105 They had been captured by the Spanish during a corsairing raid off the North African coast and enslaved on a galley force that was headed for the Caribbean. Ugarte Saravia expressed confusion about the Inquisition’s jurisdiction over them because they had been expelled when they were “young men who were sixteen and eighteen years old. They were circumcised in Berbería, and today they live on the said galleys in the sect of Muhammad and its belief, confessing that they are Muslims and not Christians.”106 Muslims were not subject to the Inquisition, whereas Moriscos—as converts to Christianity from Islam—could be tried as apostates if they were suspected of practicing Islam. Ugarte Saravia wrote that he presumed they had been baptized as children in Spain and should therefore be considered renegades. His argument was complicated by the fact that they were royal slaves, and their removal from the galleys would present a loss to the king. He therefore requested a ruling from higher authorities in Spain. The inquisitors in Cartagena received the Suprema’s reply in 1630, ordering them not to proceed against “the Moriscos who, having been expelled from the Catholic kingdoms of his majesty, were captured as corsairs or who in any other way come to them as slaves or [who] are in his majesty’s galleys professing to be Muslims.”107
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Whether reaching the Americas as the servants of powerful Spaniards, as galley slaves, or as free but clandestine emigrants, Moriscos settled in the New World despite travel restrictions. Many were caught or denounced, but others like María Ruiz appeared voluntarily before the Inquisition for a variety of reasons. They were concerned about their religious identity and social standing, as were Spanish authorities.
In their policies toward Moriscos, Spanish ecclesiastical authorities framed their debates in terms of essentialized notions of what it meant to be a Morisco. Inquisitors, bishops, missionaries, and local parish priests collected information about the Moriscos residing under their jurisdiction in order to better carry out campaigns to convert and Christianize them. Their visions of Moriscos became polarized, presenting them as either potential converts to Catholicism who needed proper instruction, echoing the program of Tridentine reforms that called for well-trained priests and the creation of institutions to administer to the new Christian population, as well as improve instruction of the old Christian population. Another more sinister vision of Moriscos, one that eventually gave way to expulsion, cast them as unrepentant Muslims whose cultural and religious differences would render them traitors to Spain and prompt them to ally with the Ottoman Turks.
Ecclesiastical authorities carried out similar programs in the far reaches of the Spanish Empire, as they encountered new peoples and attempted to bring them into the folds of the Catholic faith. Beyond official discourses, the reach and impact of these policies on the ground, on both sides of the Atlantic, as applied to Moriscos, Africans, and indigenous peoples, had vastly ranging consequences. Early modern Spaniards grappled with how to incorporate new categories of people into their emerging empire. At the same time, individuals labeled Morisco attempted to wrestle with the images applied to them, in their own attempts to secure status across the Iberian world.
CHAPTER 2
Into the Atlantic
Justifying Title and Establishing Dominion
Upon returning from his first voyage westward across the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus penned a statement to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel as prologue to his Diary of the First Voyage that covered the events of 1492–93. While the original copies of his journals and logbook were lost, his account survives in a copy transcribed by Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the first entry of the diary, Columbus articulated a powerful and enduring association between the conquest of Granada, Christian expansion, and Castilian possession over lands encountered. He wrote, “After Your Highnesses ended the war against the Muslims who ruled in Europe, and having ended that war in the very great city of Granada, where this year [1492] … by force of arms I saw the royal flags of Your Highnesses in the towers of the Alhambra, the fortress of that city, and I saw the Muslim king emerge from the gates of that city and kiss the royal hands of Your Highnesses.” Later that month, “by the information I gave to Your Highnesses of the lands of India and of a Prince called the Great Khan … of how many times he and his predecessors requested that Rome send doctors in our holy faith so that they could be taught it.” When the calls for Christian missionaries went unanswered, “so many peoples were lost, falling into idolatries … and Your Highnesses, like Catholic Christians and princes who love the holy Christian faith, and increase it and are enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies, you thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, on the said voyages to India to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of everything, and the manner which should be had for their conversion to our holy faith.”1 This idea was echoed in the papal bulls granting the Spanish dominion over the Americas and upheld by the official policies of subsequent monarchs and the Council of the Indies.
Associations between conquering lands under Muslim rule and spreading Christianity overseas were also echoed in the papal bulls of donation and resurfaced in subsequent Spanish claims to empire and dominion in the New World. As imperial claims became intimately linked to the evangelization of native communities, it became imperative for the Crown to restrict the movement of peoples and ideas to the Americas to devout Catholics. As definitions of Spanishness became increasingly linked to exclusionary attitudes based on genealogy and religious identity, restrictions on overseas emigration also became more and more connected to emerging notions of “race”—to individuals who could prove their lineages were of “pure” old Christian ancestry.
Like the Portuguese, the Spanish presented a “world on the move.”2 Following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, Portuguese ships in search of African gold and slaves began to make voyages into the southern Atlantic. During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established trading posts and colonies in the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores.3 In competition with the Portuguese, the Castilians also staked their claim to the Canary Islands, raiding and enslaving the native guanche population. With growing competition over access to maritime trade routes, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had to negotiate treaties with Afonso V of Portugal. In 1479 they signed the Treaty of Alcáçovas in which Portugal recognized Castilian sovereignty in the Canary Islands and Castile acknowledged Portuguese claims to the other Atlantic islands and the African coast south of Cape Bojador. Following Columbus’s return from his first voyage to the Caribbean islands, Ferdinand and Isabel became concerned the Portuguese would attempt to claim them under the Treaty of Alcáçovas.4 They immediately appealed to Alexander VI to grant them title to these islands and any subsequent “discoveries,” which the pope conceded in the bulls of donation.5
Spanish authorities’ interest in restricting new Christian presence in the Americas was in many ways shaped by the terms of the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493). In this bull, Alexander VI granted dominion to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel to oversee the conversion of peoples encountered in the new territories, effectively rendering the Spanish Crown’s title to the Americas contingent upon the successful evangelization of indigenous peoples.6 The bull highlighted the
