colonization drawn from both their experiences with non-Christians on the Peninsula and in the Mediterranean, and their interpretations of Greek and Roman texts. The role that Muslims played in these understandings of “Spanish” nation and identity, and by extension empire, was crucial. In creating their global empire, Spanish authorities drafted and debated a series of policies that were informed by their interactions with peoples in various parts of the world and at home. They aimed to create a Catholic empire, and in doing so, they focused their attention on molding the religiosity and customary practices of peoples in the Americas.
Moriscos inspired extraordinary fears among many Spanish imperial authorities, who associated Muslims with rebellion and disloyalty. These officials conflated religious and political loyalty, and they viewed Moriscos as a fifth column that would ally with the Ottoman Turks or with North African corsairs. Peninsular attitudes toward Moriscos hardened by the late sixteenth century, at a moment when royal officials were also concerned with maintaining their empire and jurisdiction over Amerindians. Anxieties about native rebellions and incomplete conversions were increasingly embedded within these fears of Muslims and Moriscos. Royal authorities’ restrictions on travel to the New World also tightened during this period, as they required prospective emigrants to prove their purity of blood and exemplary Christian conduct. Accordingly, depictions of Morisco and Muslim bodies became increasingly racialized, and eventually colonial officials composed treatises that projected these images onto indigenous bodies in the form of arguments advocating native groups’ subjugation and enslavement.
During the sixteenth century, Muslims and Moriscos were being incorporated into colonial legal categories, and anyone suspected of being a Morisco was obliged to define themselves in relation to these categories.2 Individuals labeled Moriscos could negotiate their status in court, by arguing in Spain that they were “good and faithful Christians,” or in Spanish America, that their actions during the conquests gave them the same rights to rewards and status as any other Spaniard. In the case of Moriscos, religious identity contributed greatly to how individuals were perceived and incorporated into the emerging Spanish nation.
Much of the prevailing work on citizenship, identification, and belonging in various corners of the early modern world has focused on the eighteenth century, but a rich and growing body of scholarship addresses these questions for the earlier period.3 My work intervenes to shed light on how these relationships operated in the lives of suspected Moriscos in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America. For example, the ways that people described each others’ public behavior and appearance, and by extension a group’s religious and customary practices, had legal implications. Descriptions of individuals and of peoples informed legal identities such as Spaniard, Indian, African, the mixed-race castas, new or old Christian, noble or commoner, slave or free person. These public identities could be appropriated, manipulated, or redefined through litigation or self-presentation to establish oneself through “public and notorious” behavior to which witnesses could testify.
Printed and manuscript works such as titles of nobility, accounts of services to the Crown (probanza de méritos y servicios), and histories of conquest also rendered an individual’s status public in a variety of legal settings. A copy of an individual’s méritos y servicios could have many afterlives, circulating from the viceroyalties of New Spain or Peru to Spain and back again, before being transmitted to heirs who could request recognition for their ancestors’ deeds during competing claims for lands or encomiendas. A conviction by an inquisitorial tribunal could similarly impact future generations through the hanging of sanbenitos in churches and the circulation of pamphlets naming individuals penitenced or executed in autos–da–fé. Witnesses who testified in each case, whether an individual wanted a license to emigrate, freedom from slavery, or to enslave others through claims to just warfare, or increase in status, dredged up rumors and gossip about families that carried weight in the courtroom. In this context, ideas about Muslims and Moriscos played a critical role in defining colonial relationships. Some Spanish authorities increasingly associated Moriscos with racialized qualities and invoked anxieties about converted Muslims and their descendants to justify both imperial policies and the outcome of local court cases. By studying the often-overlooked references to Muslims and Moriscos in colonial documents, we can better understand how sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century inhabitants of Spanish America conceived of their relationships to each other and of their own location within the empire.
The black North African slave Estevanico who accompanied Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca on his journey across the American Southwest is one of the better-known converts from Islam. Like many Moriscos in Spanish America, traces of his presence survive in few sources. Unlike the three other survivors of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, Estevanico did not produce an account (probanza de méritos y servicios) describing his sufferings and heroic deeds during the expedition. Instead, he is only glimpsed in the writings of Cabeza de Vaca, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and Friar Marcos de Niza, whom he later accompanied on an ill-fated expedition to the Zuni. Reputed to have been from Azemmour in the Kingdom of Morocco, and the slave of Andrés Dorantes, also a survivor of the Narváez expedition, Estevanico acted as scout and intermediary during Cabeza de Vaca’s journey.4 He was not the first Arabic speaker to be sought out to accompany an expedition in Spanish America. In fact, some officials requested Moriscos for their perceived skills as interpreters or artisans. Yet from the earliest voyages to the New World, the Spanish Crown issued decrees that restricted the overseas presence of new Christians of Muslim and Jewish descent. Throughout the sixteenth century, additional royal decrees issued by subsequent Spanish monarchs reinforced and expanded these initial measures.
Perhaps the most we know about Estevanico concerns his death at the hands of the Zuni. The surviving Spanish accounts describe him in contrasting ways, from fellow Christian and “persona de razón” to, in Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s words, the object of indigenous rage who assaulted local women and behaved like a “bad man, and not like the Christians who never kill women.”5 Were his associations as an alárabe, the term Cabeza de Vaca used to describe him in his Relación, enough to cause him to be cast as such a violent figure? Suspicions that someone was a Morisco carried with them a series of associations that surface in the denunciations housed in the inquisitorial archives. Similarly contradictory images appear in trials from the royal courts (audiencias) across Spanish America, as in the case of Diego Romero, an encomendero in New Granada who was accused of being a runaway North African slave. As will be explored in later chapters, Romero defended himself successfully as one of the privileged first conquerors of the region whose services to the Crown entitled him to retain his encomienda. Depictions of Estevanico in the Spanish sources remain consistent with contemporary perceptions of Moriscos, revealing the local contests and rivalries as individuals negotiated their status in their new surroundings. While Estevanico could not speak for himself in the colonial records, other cases like Romero’s step in to suggest some of the dynamics taking place.
Estevanico’s case, and the language his contemporaries used to describe him, raise the question of what model we can apply to studying Moriscos in the early modern Spanish world. The meaning of the term “Morisco” was slippery and varied depending on who was using it. It would therefore be problematic to accept the narrowest definition of Morisco, as a Muslim convert to Catholicism.6 I move away from trying to determine who was or was not a Morisco, thereby mirroring Spanish authorities’ assumptions about Moriscos, by shifting the focus to practices and attitudes that early modern Spaniards associated with Moriscos.7 Expanding the term Morisco to include its usage in Spanish as an adjective, “Muslim-like,” can also broaden and pose questions about a range of cases in which the accused may or may not have resembled what we traditionally think of as Morisco. Defining Morisco as Muslim-like would have also resonated with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish audiences. Accusations ranged from religious practices to language, dress, occupation, and racially inflected physical descriptions.8
I use the term Morisco in its broadest sense, in a way that would have been intelligible to Spaniards during the early modern period. The word “Morisco” had appeared in Castilian beginning in
