of indigenous and African descent, pointing to more complex ways of understanding how people negotiated status and defined belonging to a community. The story begins in fifteenth-century Iberia, in changing relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and in the first Spanish and Portuguese voyages to conquer the Atlantic islands and find trading routes that put them in contact with new peoples.
CHAPTER 1
Who Were the Moriscos?
Introducing a Transatlantic Story
María Ruiz was faced with a difficult decision. Born in Spain, in the town of Albolote near Granada, Ruiz found herself in Mexico City fifty years later, married to an old Christian wine merchant and pondering whether she wanted to live and die as a Muslim or as a Christian. In 1594 she denounced herself to Mexican inquisitors for having had thoughts about continuing to practice Islam when she first moved to Mexico City ten years previously.1 Although she had attempted initially to continue to recite the prayers she was taught as a child in Granada, Ruiz now expressed the wish to be reconciled with the Catholic faith and reincorporated into the church, in order to live out the rest of her life as a good Catholic. Whatever the crisis of faith that she faced, she described her attempts in New Spain to reconstruct the prayers and practices she first observed as a child in Albolote. Her story spans the Atlantic, suggesting how individuals struggled with their beliefs and adherence to a religious community in a world that was rapidly changing. What events were occurring in Spain during her lifetime that prompted her and countless individuals to have to choose which faith they considered to be the “true” one in which they might attain salvation?2
Individual struggles differed from officials’ concerns. For example, in Spain, a couple was denounced to the Toledo Inquisition for secretly practicing Islam following a gathering at their home in which they invited their friends to dance zambras and eat dishes piled high with couscous. On the other side of the Atlantic, in New Spain, a man was charged with being a relapsed Muslim because a neighbor claimed to have overheard him invoking Muhammad. Why did sixteenth-century Spanish authorities care about the presence of Muslims in their communities? What did early modern Spaniards imagine Muslims to be like, and what practices did they associate with Islam? Many of the accused were baptized Catholics, and some had been Christians for more than a generation. So how did the purported “stain” on their character and lineage continue to persist in the minds of accusers?
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND IN IBERIA: MUDÉJARES, RECONQUISTA IDEOLOGY
The conquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabel foreshadowed the end of what many historians argue had been a lengthy period of coexistence among Muslims, Christians, and Jews on the Iberian Peninsula. The so-called Reconquista, or Iberian Christian crusading effort to conquer and colonize Muslim territories, spanned the preceding four centuries. Ongoing struggles between armies distinguishing themselves along religious lines—Christian and Muslim—ensued. These struggles have shaped how historians have understood the history of this period that fluctuated between violence and coexistence. Following the Arab conquests in 711, the Iberian Peninsula, known as al-Andalus, became an important commercial and cultural node of the Islamic world. The Caliphate of Córdoba flourished from 929 to 1031 until internal factions began to undermine its cohesiveness. During the Caliphate, al-Andalus was incorporated into commercial networks that extended from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. On the northern parts of the Peninsula, Christian forces began to unify and push south to conquer territories under Muslim control. With the fall of the Andalusi city of Toledo to Christian forces in 1085, the small Muslim kingdoms called taifas that had emerged with the fall of the Caliphate turned to the Almoravid dynasty, based in Marrakesh. The Almoravids were soon succeeded by the Almohads, and by the late thirteenth century they too were driven from the Peninsula by Christian forces.3 Granada remained the last Muslim stronghold from this period onward.
Initial surrender treaties provided a contractual agreement between Christian conquerors and Muslim communities that was borrowed from the Islamic principle of the dhimma, the status conferred on protected religious minorities. Dhimma status enabled Iberian Muslims in Christian cities to maintain their religious institutions and administrative infrastructure, including an Islamic court system.4 Conquered peoples thereby became tributaries in exchange for religious and administrative autonomy. As time passed, Muslims in thirteenth-century Catalonia and Aragon began to participate in the emerging Christian Iberian institutions and were slowly transformed into a mudéjar society.5 Incompatibility between Muslim and Christian social structures such as those governing taxation forced subject Muslim populations to alter their practices somewhat and adopt Christian ones. Social changes came about not through instant Christian domination, but rather by “a bundle of changes in the administrative, judicial, fiscal, economic, linguistic, social, and cultural spheres.”6 Muslim-Christian responses to each other varied regionally, however, due to differences in the demographic and economic importance of Muslim communities. While the Muslims of the Ebro Valley in Aragon tolerated Christian rule, in Valencia, Christian conquerors faced a longer period of resistance.7
The uneven pace of Christian conquests and regional differences produced geographic variations within the mudéjar societies that developed throughout the fifteenth century and remained visible in the Morisco populations of the sixteenth century. This geographic diversity among mudéjar and eventual Morisco populations is important to keep in mind, as it would later have an impact on the claims Moriscos made as they negotiated their status during the period of forced expulsions. It also cautions against settling on a term like Morisco that homogenizes the experiences of individuals who fell into this category. Castile experienced some of the earliest conquests and retained some densely settled enclaves of mudéjares, although the region was predominantly Christian. Aragonese conquests had faced less violent conflict than those of Valencia a century later. Mudéjar religious and scholarly elites, or faqihs active in Christian-controlled lands, maintained contact with jurists in dar al-Islam in order to answer pressing questions that mudéjares faced under Christian rule. The activities of the faqihs can also be traced to the varying histories of the Iberian regions.8
By the end of the fifteenth century, growing tensions on the Peninsula prompted the dissolution of many of these agreements, leaving Muslim minorities with fewer political recourses in an increasingly oppressive society. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile united the two Crowns. While administratively separate for generations, the union of Castile and Aragon pointed to a broader move toward national and religious unity, as would become apparent in the court chronicles.9 They also provided growing stability that allowed the Catholic monarchs to push overseas in their competition with the Portuguese over trade routes to Asia. While these developments were neither neat nor linear, they pointed to a changing atmosphere as Iberians began to wrestle with questions of nation and identity, linked to territorial changes at home and overseas. As Spain began to establish its empire, these anxieties over nation and identity came to the forefront, in tension with regional identities within Spain and the identities of religious and ethnic minorities across the empire, from the Iberian Peninsula, to lands in the Mediterranean and northern Europe, to the Americas, to the Philippines.
In late 1491 the Catholic monarchs presented a surrender treaty to the Muslim population of Granada that granted them a number of freedoms. In exchange for the city of Granada and the Alhambra fortress, the treaty granted Granadan Muslims the right to continue to practice Islam without persecution. It stipulated that the monarchs, “and their successors, in perpetuity, allow … [everyone] to live according to their law, and not consent that anyone remove their mosques or their towers or their muezzins … nor disturb their ways and customs.”10 It provided for Granadan Muslims to maintain their courts, to be judged “by the Shari’a law that they are accustomed to following, with the opinions of their qadis and judges.”11 The capitulations permitted Granadan Muslims to bear arms, emigrate freely to North Africa if they desired, without danger
