A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada 9780226547282

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A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada

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Map of the Iberian Peninsula and northern Morocco, ca. 1550. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007. Paperback edition 2013 Printed in the United States of America. 20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13   2  3  4  5  6 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54726-8  (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10303-7  (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54728-2  (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226547282.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Núñez Muley, Francisco, 1492–1570. [Memorial de Francisco Núñez Muley. English] A memorandum for the president of the royal audiencia and chancery court of the city and Kingdom of Granada / Francisco Núñez Muley ; edited and trans- lated by Vincent Barletta. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54726-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-54726-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Muslims—Spain—Granada (Province)—History. 2. Granada (Spain : Province)—History. I. Barletta, Vincent. II. Title. DP302.G61N8613 2007 946’.82043—dc22 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

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Acknowledgments  vii Editor’s Introduction  1 A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada (1567)  55 Appendix Excerpts from Mármol Carvajal’s History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos of the Kingdom of Granada (Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada)  103 Selected Bibliography  119

Acknowledgments

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n the time that it has taken me to produce this translation and introductory study of Francisco Núñez Muley’s Memorial, many colleagues have contributed bibliographical information, advice, and corrections. I am, of course, most immediately indebted to María Antonia Garcés, who first suggested to me that I take on this project, and who has given me invaluable counsel (and helpful criticism) along the way. In more general though equally important ways, this edition was made possible through the genuine friendship, support, and constructive criticism of a number of colleagues. It would take many pages to list here the specific contributions (past and present) made by each person, so I will simply put their names down in print and hope that they each appreciate how important their help and insights were to me as I labored over Núñez Muley’s text: Abderrahman Aissa, Julio Baena, Josiah Blackmore, Juan Pablo Dabove, John Dagenais, E. Michael Gerli, Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones, George D. Greenia, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ricardo Landeira, Aurelia Martín Casares, Ruth Mas, Alberto Montaner Frutos, Andrés Prieto, Joan Ramon Resina, Francisco Roque de Oliveira, and John Slater. A special sort of thanks is due to the two most important people in my life, Laura Méndez Barletta and Mónica Luisa Barletta. My wife and daughter have been so patient and supportive, and in general have shown such a good sense of humor about my work habits that I can simply never stop counting my blessings. vii

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Acknowledgments

In very practical terms, this edition would have been impossible without the collaboration of the Oficina de Reprografía and the Sala Cervantes of the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid. The administrative staff and librarians there were efficient and helpful to me in all ways. And I also owe special thanks to Dick Gilbreath at the University of Kentucky Cartography Lab for the terrific maps, produced in such a short amount of time. I need to express my sincere gratitude to Randolph Petilos and his colleagues at the University of Chicago Press. Randy was enthusiastic about this project from our very first e-mail exchange, and it is largely been due to his energy (and cruelly inflexible deadlines) that this book has seen the light of day. My appreciation also goes out to Maia Rigas, who copyedited my manuscript with great care and improved the text in many ways. The same can be said for two anonymous readers, who pored over an early draft of this book and made it much better than it would have been otherwise. I’ve worked to incorporate all of their suggestions, although it must be said that any faults that remain are wholly my own. Finally, I have to thank the author of this text, Francisco Núñez Muley, for having produced such a complex, risky, and in its own way, beautiful text. This book, the first ever English edition of what may have been the last thing he ever wrote, is completely his.

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Map of the Kingdom of Granada, ca. 1550. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

Editor’s Introduction

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n February 28, 1482, troops under the orders of Castilian Queen Isabel I and Aragonese King Fernando II assaulted and assumed control of the Muslim town of Alhama. This Christian military victory, achieved just thirteen years after Isabel and Fernando had joined the Iberian Peninsula’s two largest Christian kingdoms together through their marriage, was at once strategic and symbolic. In terms of strategy, it created a Christian enclave just fifty miles southwest of Granada, the capital of the Nas·rid dynasty that had held power in that region since 1231. This enclave, which was quickly joined by its surrounding towns and cities, came to form an important part of the western flank of a pincer movement (cities to the east of Granada would begin to fall in 1488) that would by early 1492 force the Muslim rulers of Granada to accept surrender and exile in Morocco. In symbolic terms, the Christian conquest of Alhama was even more important, as it signified the beginning of Isabel and Fernando’s accelerated military campaign to do away with Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula once and for all. There had been signs of such a campaign prior to 1482, but in each case the Kingdom of Granada had been able to buy its way out of danger by paying enormous (and financially crippling) amounts of money and goods to Castile. In the context of these earlier practices of appeasement and negotiation, the taking of Alhama served notice to Iberian Muslims and Christians alike that such arrangements would be coming to an end, to be replaced by new policies of conquest and colonization. 1

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What exactly did the Christian conquest of Alhama set in motion? The most direct answer to this question is that it initiated a ten-year war in the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula that led to the fall of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada and the absorption of its territory into the Kingdom of Castile. It was also at the end of this war, a moment that coincided with the mass expulsion of Castilian and Aragonese Jews, that Pope Alexander VI (himself a native of Aragon) granted the title of “Catholic Monarch” to Fernando II and, by extension, to Isabel I. This honorific title, which commemorated both the conquest of Muslim Granada and the forced expulsion of thousands of Iberian Jews (Portugal, under pressure from Isabel and Fernando, would expel both its Jews and Muslims in 1497), says a great deal about the very explicit process of sociocultural standardization that would be at the center of Spain’s development into a modern nation-state. It also, not incidentally, speaks volumes about the practical and ideological role of the Spanish monarchy within that process. With the fall of Alhama begins a chain of events that leads, somewhat inexorably, to the difficult political situation that Francisco Núñez Muley decries in his Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada. In brief, less than ten years after the Nas·rid surrender of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs on January 1, 1492, and in spite of written guarantees to the contrary, the Muslims of Granada were forced to convert to Christianity or go into exile with what personal effects they could carry with them.1 The result of these mass conversions (which depended as much upon the

1. On February 12, 1502, this conversion/expulsion order was expanded to cover the entire area of Castile and Leon. The royal decree ordering this general conversion/ expulsion reads, in part, as follows: “acordamos demandar salir a todos los dichos moros e moras destos dichos nuestros reynos de Castilla e Leon e que jamas tornen ni buelvan a ellos alguno dellos, e sobre ello mandamos dar esta nuestra carta, por la qual mandamos a todos los moros de XIII años arriba y a todas las moras de hedad de XII años arriba que biven e moran y estan en los dichos nuestros reynos . . . salgan de todos los dichos nuestros reynos e señoríos e se vayan dellos con los bienes que consygo quisieren llevar, con tanto que no puedan llevar ni sacar ni saquen ellos ni otros por ellos fuera de los dichos nuestros reynos oro ni plata ni otra cosa alguna de las por nos vedadas e defendidas”



Editor’s Introduction

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active participation of constables as it did upon that of priests) was the formation of a large minority community of recent, and mostly unwilling, converts from Islam. These converts came to be referred to as cristianos nuevos de moros (New Christians from Islam) and, more popularly, as moriscos. Francisco Núñez Muley was a Granadan Morisco who most likely converted to Christianity as a small boy. It is not clear whether he did so willingly or not, but he seems to have become acculturated (if not assimilated) rather quickly: as early as 1502 (just three years after the first mass conversions in Granada) he was working as a page for then Granadan archbishop Hernando de Talavera. Like many Granadan Moriscos, Núñez Muley seems to have labored for most of his life to navigate his way through the increasingly difficult economic, political, and cultural realities imposed upon the Moriscos by the local Castilian authorities and the Spanish Crown. Travel restrictions, special dress codes, and subtle forms of institutionalized graft at the local level were more or less the order of the day throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, and yet the Moriscos did manage to maintain— largely through the royal protection that they had purchased in the form of a series of surtaxes—a certain degree of cultural autonomy within Granada. This process of negotiation and appeasement came to an abrupt end in 1567. New laws, passed by the Royal Council in Madrid and proclaimed in Granada on January 1 (the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conquest of Granada) placed previously unheardof pressure on Granadan Moriscos to assimilate fully with their Castilian neighbors or face stiff fines and imprisonment (see the

[we agree to order the expulsion of all of the aforementioned Muslims (men and women) of our kingdoms of Castile and Leon, and that not a single one of them ever return. To this effect we order that this our letter be registered. We order that all Muslim men over the age of thirteen and all Muslim women over the age of twelve that reside in our kingdoms and dominions leave these lands with whatever they might be able to carry with them, with the understanding that they may not take nor export nor have someone export on their behalf any gold or silver (or any other item that we have likewise prohibited) from our aforementioned kingdoms]. Manuel Barrios Aguilera, Granada morisca, la convivencia negada (Granada: Comares, 2002), 82.

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appendix). Almost immediately after the proclamation of these laws, the Moriscos of Granada began discussing strategies of negotiation and resistance. One of these strategies involved writing a letter to the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada, King Felipe II’s chief legal representative for the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula, urging him to rethink the specific provisions of the new laws. Francisco Núñez Muley, already well into his seventies, was chosen to write this letter, and the Memorandum is the result of his efforts. It is a well-known fact of Spanish history that the Memorandum fell on deaf ears both in the Granadan Royal Audiencia and in Madrid. Luis del Mármol Carvajal provides the only detailed account of the official reaction to Núñez Muley’s letter in his History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos of the Kingdom of Granada (Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada). However, this account, published over three decades after the events in question and written as part of a broader political project at the end of the sixteenth century to expel the Moriscos from Spain, is not necessarily reliable. For example, Mármol Carvajal presents Deza’s reaction to Núñez Muley’s letter (itself dramatically framed as a performative reading) as reasoned and even sympathetic. This version of the story is not supported, however, by the events that follow hard on the heels of the decree’s proclamation. Without discussing the specific details of life in Granada during the years 1567–68, it is necessary to point out that local and regional abuses of authority were common within the framework of the new decrees of 1567. Morisco properties were confiscated, women were harassed and abused, and men were jailed and fined heavily for minimal infractions. It is for this reason that several thousand Granadans (along with a significant number of Turkish auxiliaries) organized themselves into an army in the mountainous region of the Alpujarras in late December 1568 and initiated a guerilla insurgency against the Spanish Crown. This insurgency, referred to in historical texts as the Second War in the Alpujarras (the first, short-lived war occurred just before the forced conversions of 1499–1500), lasted for over two years and only ended



Editor’s Introduction

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when seasoned troops under the orders Juan de Austria, King Felipe II’s half-brother, finally managed to divide and defeat the forces formerly under the command of Granadan Moriscos Aben Humeya and Aben Aboo. The definitive defeat of the Granadan Moriscos involved in the Second War in the Alpujarras provoked Castilian authorities to take drastic measures to ensure that such a rebellion would never occur again. To this end, they forcibly relocated all but a very small number of Granadan Moriscos to areas throughout the Kingdom of Castile. Many were sent to Extremadura and La Mancha, where they were compelled to find ways to live within cultural and geographic settings that were very foreign to them. The regional archives of these areas of Spain likewise contain ample textual evidence to suggest that local “Old Christians” (i.e., those Castilians whose ancestors had been neither Muslims nor Jews) likewise struggled to find ways to coexist with their new Granadan neighbors. In 1609, the question of coexistence was rendered moot when King Felipe III signed an order to expel all Moriscos from Spain.2 This order was immediately carried out, and by 1614 the expulsion was basically complete. A catastrophe for the Aragonese and Valencian economies and a human tragedy for the many Moriscos who died—from illness, drowning, and pirate attacks—on their way to Morocco and Tunisia, this order effectively brought an end to any significant expression of Muslim culture and social life in early modern Spain. An accelerated process of Christian conquest and forced Muslim assimilation that had arguably begun with the taking of Alhama in 1482 had thus reached its draconian conclusion just over a century later. 2. It is important to note that Portugal’s history with the Moriscos is quite different from that of its peninsular neighbor. While the total population of Portuguese Moriscos was never exceptionally large, important communities (mostly of recent North African immigrants) resided in cities such as Lisbon, Évora, and Setúbal. In fact, a certain number of Extremaduran Moriscos entered Portugal upon their expulsion from Spain in 1609 and settled in the farmlands near Évora. For more on the Moriscos of Portugal, see Isabel Drummond Braga, Mouriscos e cristãos no Portugal quinhentista (Lisbon: Hugin, 1999); and Rogério de Oliveira Ribas, “Filhos de Mafoma: mouriscos, cripto-islamismo e inquisição no Portugal quinhentista” (Ph.D. diss., University of Lisbon, 2005).

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Francisco Núñez Muley did not live to see the mass expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. In fact, it is highly unlikely that he lived much longer after composing his Memorandum and sending it to the president of the Royal Audiencia. But the Memorandum has outlasted even the expulsions themselves and now stands as a central text in the history of Muslim minorities in the Iberian Peninsula. What we know about Francisco Núñez Muley stems for the most part from what he says about his own life in the Memorandum, but we know that he mentions having served as a page to Granadan archbishop Hernando de Talavera (1428–1507) for just over three years: “Demás desto puedo dezir que yo serví al santo Alçobispo por tres años y más por paxe, y fuy con él a una vesita que vesitó a todas las Alpuxarras. . . . [E]sto me acuerdo dello como si fuese ayer, en el año de quinientos y dos” [Beyond this, I can say that I served for just over three years as a page to the holy archbishop, and I accompanied him on a visit that he made to all of the Alpujarras. . . . I remember this as if it were yesterday, in the year 1502 (fol. 319r–v; pp. 81–82)].3 Núñez Muley then speaks of another trip that Talavera made through the Alpujarras, in 1506 or 1507, on which he may or may not have accompanied him as a page: Y desta manera andava por las Alpuxarras y más prençipales villas y lugares dellas, y en pedir el agua en los tiempos estriles, y salir con sus prosisiones y gente en la pedir; e iban al monasterio de la Zubia del Señor San Françisco que hera de su horden, y mandava a todos los otros lugares que viniesen descubiertas sus cabeças con su cruz y sus clérigos a pedir el agua; y mandava a los cristianos nuevos pidiesen el agua en su lenguaxe como lo solían pedir en arábigo; esto fue en el año de seis o siete. 3. Throughout this introduction I will refer to the text of Núñez Muley’s Memorandum in two ways. First, as all Spanish citations come from Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional (BN), MS 6176, in each case I will list the folio number to which the text corresponds. In this way the reader may also quickly find the citation in Kenneth Garrad, “The Original Memorial of Don Francisco Núñez Muley,” Atlante 2 (1954): 168–226, as he lists the manuscript folios of Madrid, BN MS 6176, in his transcription. The page numbers that follow, and all references to the English text of the Memorandum, refer to the present edition.



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[The archbishop traveled throughout the Alpujarras and visited its most important towns and places. And in praying for rain during the time of the drought, he would go out with his procession and people to pray for it. He went to the Hieronymite monastery of Saint Francis in La Zubia, as he was a Hieronymite himself, and ordered that people from all of the other places go there with their heads uncovered and their crosses to pray for rain. He ordered the New Christians to pray for rain in their own language, as they were accustomed to do so in Arabic. This occurred in the year 1506 or 1507]. (fol. 319v, p. 82)

If Núñez Muley accompanied Archbishop Talavera on his tour of the Alpujarras in 1502 and then again in 1506 or 1507, then it becomes evident that his claim to have served the archbishop as a page for just over three years is either just a bit off or that he has made a mistake with respect to the years he mentions. Whatever the case, it seems clear that Núñez Muley would have been an adolescent during the very first years of the sixteenth century. This puts his year of birth, as Bernard Vincent has suggested, right around 1490.4 This calculation also meshes with Núñez Muley’s later mention of a high-level meeting that he attended in 1513 with King Fernando II and several other Moriscos: “en el dicho año de treze yo fuy entre otros cavalleros de los naturales de este reyno a negoçios que convenía con su alteza del Rrey Cathólico, que aya gloria” [in 1513 I served with other highranking men (caballeros) from among the natives of this kingdom in negotiations that had been convened with His Highness the Catholic King, may he be glorified (fol. 311v; 60)]. Only as an adult would Núñez Muley have attended this assembly, and if we situate his year of birth at 1490 or so, then he would have been roughly twenty-three years old at the time of the meeting he describes with the Catholic Monarch in 1513. Situating Núñez Muley’s year of birth at 1490 also confirms the belief that he was most likely in the very last years of his 4. Bernard Vincent, “Et quelques voix de plus: De Francisco Núñez Muley à Fatima Ratal” Sharq al-Andalus 12 (1995): 131–45, see 135.

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life when he composed the Memorandum in the early months of 1567.5 We have no mention of him after this year, and it is quite possible that he lost his life during the 1568–1571 war in the Alpujarras or afterward in the mass expulsions that followed in its wake. In any case, the years that followed the composition of the Memorandum were extraordinarily difficult and violent ones for Granadan Moriscos, and it is difficult to imagine how a man already in his late seventies could have weathered them for very long. During his long life, Núñez Muley enjoyed a certain amount of social (if not necessarily economic) privilege, largely because it appears he descended from Granadan and Moroccan nobility. He briefly mentions members of his family within the Memorandum: Y en Granada hay probisión y çédula dada en el dicho año de diez y ocho que suspende la premática del vidamiento y cortar y texer la rropa del traxe; y ésta está en poder de Don Hernando Muley, mi sobrino, hijo de Don Álbaro de Fez, su padre, ya difunto, que la avían [sic] traydo su agüelo, mi tío, Don Hernando de Fez, difunto. . . . [In Granada there is also a provision and writ that took effect in 1518 that suspends the decree prohibiting the wearing, weaving, and elaboration of Morisco clothing. These documents, along with another provision, are in the power of my nephew Don Hernando Muley, who is the son of the now-deceased Don Álvaro. His grandfather, my late uncle Don Hernando de Fez, had brought them to him.] (fol. 312r; p. 62)

5. We may reasonably assume that the Memorandum was written sometime during the month of January 1567, given that Núñez Muley refers to the proclamation of the 1567 decree in the past tense (“de lo que ay en contra de la premática que agora nuebamente se pregonó públicamente” [with respect to the decree that has recently been publicly proclaimed], fol. 311r; p. 57), but speaks of the one-month time period for the inspection of all Arabic documents as not yet elapsed (“¿qué diligençia e posybilidad avrá para juntarse tanto número de escrituras para presentarse dentro del dicho término?” [What procedure exists that would make possible such a large quantity of written materials to be brought together for submission within the timeframe allowed by the decree? (fol. 327r; p. 95)].



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As María Jesús Rubiera Mata has pointed out, the names of the two relatives that he mentions suggest a royal and a Moroccan connection: “Muley” (from the Arabic maulá) is a title of respect that is generally bestowed upon nobles, while the surname “de Fez” clearly seems to be a Castilianized version of the Arabic nisba (a surname based on one’s place of origin) of “al-Fa¯sı¯.”6 Núñez Muley’s nephew Hernando Muley confirms this belief in a document written twelve years after the Memorandum: “[Soy] de linaje de los reyes de Fez y Marruecos. . . . Soy del linaje de los reyes” [I am descended] from the kings of Fez and Morocco. . . . I am descended from the lineage of kings].7 Núñez Muley’s uncle, Don Hernando de Fez, was actually connected to royalty along two different lines. His wife Isabel was ˛ the sister of the last Granadan king, Abu ¯ Abd Allah Moh·ammed XII (1460–1527), making Hernando de Fez a brother-in-law to the Muslim king who eventually surrendered Granada to the Catholic Monarchs. Beyond his royal relations by marriage, Hernando de Fez seems also to have himself been a high-ranking member of the fallen Merı¯nid dynasty that sought refuge in Granada after a popular revolt in 1465 brought about the execution of their last king and that left Fez open to the rise of the Wat· a¯sı¯d dynasty.8 These royal connections allowed Núñez Muley to receive a good number of economic benefits throughout his life. According to Vincent, he was paid handsomely to collect royal tax revenues (a post that his son would inherit), and he also received a payment of 9,000 maravedíes per year due to a benefice that was attached to the Alhambra.9 As Rubiera Mata puts it: “This elevated social, political, and economic situation seems to correspond to a member of the Nas·rid royal family, given also that the surname ‘Muley’ is nothing else but the treatment that is given to kings 6. María Jesús Rubiera Mata, “La familia morisca de Muley-Fez, príncipes meriníes e infantes de Granada,” Sharq al-Andalus 13 (1996): 159–167. 7. Bernard Vincent, Minorías y marginados en la España del siglo XVI, trans. by Marina Guillén (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1987), 22. 8. Rubiera Mata, “La familia morisca de Muley-Fez,” 161–62. 9. Vincent, “Et quelques voix de plus.”

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and princes of the royal Granadan family—it suffices to point out Muley Haçen, Muley Baudili, etc.”10 Núñez Muley also served, perhaps more unofficially, as a kind of spokesman for the Moriscos of Granada on a number of occasions. His authorship of the Memorandum does not mark the first time that he was chosen or elected to intercede on behalf of his community. Núñez Muley mentions a number of assemblies, meetings, and audiences that he had attended throughout his life.11 Beyond his presence at the 1513 meeting with Fernando the Catholic, he was also part of a group that welcomed newly arrived Carlos I (Carlos V as Holy Roman Emperor) to Spain in 1518: “el primer año que vino de Frandes a rreynar a Castilla, porque ya hera fallesçido el rrey Cathólico en el año die y siete, fuimos ciertas personas cavalleros prençipales deste Reyno, an conpaña del marqés de Mondéjar, para besar las manos de su rreal magt. y dalle la norabuena de su venida a rreynar en estos sus rreynos” [the first year that he came from Flanders to rule in Castile, because the Catholic King had died a year earlier in 1517,12 a small number of nobles from this kingdom went in the company of the Marqués de Mondéjar to kiss the hands of His Royal Majesty and congratulate him on his arrival to rule in these his kingdoms (fols. 311v–312r; p. 61]. At this particular meeting, Núñez Muley points out, the Moriscos of Granada agreed to pay the Spanish Crown a large bribe in the form of an annual tax in exchange for being allowed, inter alia, to continue using their traditional forms of dress:

10. Rubiera Mata, “La familia morisca de Muley-Fez,” 160. 11. Citing a document located in the Archive of the Alhambra (legajo 159, A.87.26), Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 201, argues that by 1559 Núñez Muley was experiencing serious financial difficulties with his activities on behalf of the Granadan Moriscos: “By 1559 his activities had left him financially exhausted, for he appeared before the Morisco committee that met annually in the Alhambra under the joint presidency of the Captain-General and Corregidor of Granada to distribute tax assessments amongst the Morisco town councils and petitioned them for some recompense in return for his services to the Morisco cause.” It is not clear whether Núñez Muley’s petition for reimbursement from this committee is a sign that he was experiencing some financial trouble (he may have merely felt that he was owed this money), but it is sensible, given Garrad’s arguments, at least to consider it as a possibility. 12. Núñez Muley gives the wrong date here for the death of King Fernando. He actually died on June 23, 1516.



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Y entonçes se trataron çiertos negoçios, ansí en serviçio de Su Magt. como en cosas cunplideras a los naturales, en que avíamos servido y obligado a Su Magt. el serviçio ordinario de los veinte y un mill ducados. . . . [E]ntre otras cosas que Su Magt. probeyó, en lo que convenía a los dichos naturales deste dicho Reyno, suspendió en el abidamiento del ávito y traxe de las moriscas, y que los ofiçiales texesen y cortasen las cosas y rropas moriscas, y las hiziesen y bistiesen; e con esta condiçión le fué otorgado a Su Magt. el dicho serviçio de los veinte y un mill ducados. [At that time certain agreements were reached, as much to the benefit of His Majesty as to the natives of this kingdom, according to which we were to pay to His Majesty a tax of 21,000 ducats. . . . Among the things that His Majesty assented to in Valladolid in 1518, at least with respect to those things that benefited the natives of this kingdom, was the suspension of the laws preventing Morisco women from dressing in their traditional manner and the suspension of the laws preventing weavers and tailors from producing Morisco clothing and other cloth items. And it was under these conditions that the tax of 21,000 ducats was authorized to be paid to His Majesty]. (fol. 312r; pp. 61–62)

These negotiations with the Crown were of the utmost importance to the Moriscos of Granada, and it is likely that Núñez Muley’s status as a member of the Nas·rid royal family and a descendant of the Merı¯nid dynasty from Morocco were enough to grant him a tremendous amount of authority within his community. It is also entirely possible that Núñez Muley’s lifelong practice of collaborating with and appeasing the Castilian conquerors of Granada may have mitigated his moral authority somewhat among less willing converts. The case of Juan de Albotodo, a Granadan Morisco who joined the Jesuit order, is instructive in this sense. Antonio Gallego y Burín, in his influential Granada, guía artística e histórica de la ciudad (Granada: An Artistic and Historical Guide to the City), describes Albotodo as a “morisco de raza que, por su fe, su elocuencia y su conocimiento del árabe fue uno de los más eficaces propagadores de la doctrina y la lengua de los cristianos

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entre el pueblo sometido” [Morisco by race who, due to his faith, eloquence, and knowledge of Arabic, was one of the most effective propagators among the subjugated people of the doctrine and language of the Christians].13 David Coleman offers a brief but dramatic retelling of the life of the Jesuit Albotodo until the outbreak of the Second War in the Alpujarras: Born in 1527 the son of an Albaicín blacksmith, he studied at Granada’s Colegio de Santa Catalina in the late 1540s and was already one of the frontier city’s few ordained Morisco priests when the Jesuits opened their first local establishment in 1554. He entered the society in 1557 and was soon put to use preaching not only in the streets of the Albaicín, but also on a number of missionary trips to the villages of the nearby Alpujarras. When the Casa de la Doctrina opened in 1559, he became its most important teacher, and he would remain a fixture there for the next decade until the outbreak of the rebellion in 1568 and the closing of the school after the first local Morisco expulsion the next summer. Obviously, many Moriscos considered Albotodo a traitor. When Fárax aben Fárax and his rebel squadron combed the streets of the Albaicín on the tense Christmas Eve night of 1568 hoping to raise the neighborhood in revolt, for example, they made it a point to descend on the Casa de la Doctrina in an attempt to seize the Jesuit. Mármol Carvajal reported that the armed rebels attempted to break down the heavy entrance door of the Jesuits’ Albaicín residence, all the while lambasting Albotodo inside with cries of “renegade dog.” Fortunately for Albotodo and the other Jesuits inside, however, their barricade held through the night.14

Did Núñez Muley, as an openly assimilated New Christian and monolingual Castilian speaker (if we rely on data taken from the

13. Antonio Gallego y Burín, Granada, guía artística e histórica de la ciudad (Madrid: Fundación Rodríguez-Acosta, 1961), 376. 14. David Coleman, Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2003), 156–57.



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Memorandum, his Arabic seems to have been worse than his Latin) receive similar treatment at the outset of the war in 1568? It is likely that his elite status as a descendant of Muslim nobility and his advanced age spared him any sort of real abuse, but there are currently no concrete data that shed light on this issue. It is probable that Núñez Muley, who undoubtedly walked a very thin line throughout his life between collaboration with and resistance to the Castilian settlers in Granada, could not have had an easy time within his own community, especially among the groups who opted for open, armed resistance at the end of 1568. Manuscripts and Editions of the Memorandum The earliest known edition of Núñez Muley’s Memorandum is found in Luis del Mármol Carvajal’s Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada [History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos of the Kingdom of Granada], published in 1600. Within this text, written as an official response to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s history of the 1568–1570 war in the Alpujarras and the events leading up to it (Wars of Granada [Guerras de Granada], 1600), Mármol presents the Memorandum as a speech given by Núñez Muley to Pedro de Deza Manuel (1520–1600), who was president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada at the time. The passage leading up to the transcribed text of the Memorandum reads as follows: Los moriscos de las ciudades, sierras y marinas y Alpujarra enviaron luego como se pregonó la premática, a la ciudad de Granada a entender los ánimos de los del Albaicín, y ver cómo lo habían tomado. Y hallándose todos conformes en una mesma voluntad, acordaron que se contradijesen por reino, y para ello acudieron a Jorge de Baeza, su procurador general, y le dieron que en nombre de la nación pidiese suspensión, como se había hecho otras veces. Y antes de hacer camino a la corte de su majestad, acordaron de hablar al presidente don Pedro de Deza, y informarle de palabra y por escrito, para ver si podrían ablandarte. A esto fue un morisco caballero llamado Francisco

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Núñez Muley, que por edad y experiencia tenía mucha prática de aquel negocio, y lo había tratado otras veces en tiempo de los reyes pasados, el cual puesto delante del Presidente, con la voz baja y humilde le dijo desta manera. . . . [After the decree was proclaimed, the Moriscos of the cities, mountains, coasts, and the Alpujarras sent word to the city of Granada of their state and to see how those of the Albaicín had taken it. And seeing that they were all of the same will, they agreed to oppose the decree collectively. In order to do this they contacted Jorge de Baeza, their attorney-general, and they asked him that he request the suspension of the decree in the name of the nation as had been done in the past. And before making the trip to the court of His Majesty, they agreed to speak with President [of the Royal Audiencia] Don Pedro de Deza and inform him verbally and in writing of their wish to have the provisions of the decree softened. The man who carried this out was a high-ranking Morisco named Francisco Núñez Muley, who because of his age and experience had much practice in such business, and had made similar attempts before during the reigns of previous monarchs. Once he arrived before the president, with a very low and humble voice, he said the following. . . .]15

The rest of this portion of Mármol’s text is a partial transcription of the Memorandum. It was assumed to have been the work of Mármol himself until the discovery by Rafael Contreras y Muñoz of a summary of the Memorandum redacted in 1775 by Lorenzo de Prado, inspector and accountant of the Alhambra at that time, and located in the archive of the Alhambra.16 This summary is 15. Luis de Mármol Carvajal, Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada [1600], II: 9, par. 1, at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/FichaObra. html?portal=0&Ref=5286. 16. Rafael Contreras y Muñoz, “Nuevos datos sobre la guerra y expulsión de los moriscos,” Revista de España 68 (1879): 185–209. Mármol Carvajal’s edition was later used by Valencian cleric and outspoken enemy of the Moriscos Jaume Bleda in his Corónica de los moros de España [Chronicle of the Muslims of Spain, 1618]. For an insightful analysis



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based on a copy of the Memorandum that had been sent to Íñigo López de Mendoza y Mendoza (1512–1580), the third Marqués de Mondéjar.17 As Garrad points out in his 1954 edition of the Memorandum based on the manuscript copy signed by Núñez Muley himself, the summary discovered by Contreras is interesting in that it contains a section not found in either Mármol’s version of the text or the one actually signed by Núñez Muley.18 This section deals with the cosmetic and medicinal uses of henna: Y por lo que tocaba a la alheña que se mencionaba en la pragmática, ésta no era ceremonia de moros, usándola solamente sus naturales para limpieza de sus cabezas y cuerpos cuando iban a los baños, porque sacaban cualquiera suciedad que tenían lavándose con ella, la que, mixturada con jabón, untaban los sarnosos, hombres, mujeres y niños, quedando sanos; y que en poner las mujeres de los naturales en sus cabezas y cabellos colorados con la dicha alheña y para si hallaban algunos humores y dolores de cabeza la dicha algalla se las apretaba y cesaban los dolores y humores que tenía, quebrando la dicha alheña con los pies y manos, con la que pintaban a manera de labor, de lo que había maestras para pintarlas, teniendo por gentileza y usanza entre ellas,tornándolas azules con cierto material, quedando la alheña mudada de color, con lo que parecían bien en el tiempo de sus placeres y bodas, sirviendo asimismo la dicha alheña para si se escocían, poniéndola en cocimientos, lo que asimismo usaban los cristianos viejos viendo sus virtudes, lo que no era la santa fe católica, pues se había consentido por dicho arzobispo y sus sucesores

of Bleda and the context within which he wrote his Chronicle, see Grace Magnier, “Millenarian Prophecy and the Mythification of Philip III at the Time of the Expulsion of the Moriscos,” Sharq al-Andalus 16–17 (1999–2002): 187–209. 17. A transcription of this short document can be found in Antonio Gallego y Burín and Alfonso Gámir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada según el sínodo de Guadix en 1554, introduction by Bernard Vincent (1968; Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1996), 275–79. 18. Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 200.

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hasta que los señores inquisidores hacían mención de ella en sus delitos; y habiendo querido el señor don Pedro de Guevara, obispo de Guadix, cronista de los señores Reyes Católicos y del señor Emperador, trasquilar las cabezas de las mujeres de los naturales y rasparles la alheña de sus manos, por el señor presidente y oidor, con acuerdo del señor marqués de Mondéjar, despacharon un receptor para que hiciese saber a su Ilma, no tratase sobre ello y que pareciese ante sus Señorías, lo que fue en el año 1528. [With respect to what the decree said about henna, this was no Muslim practice. The natives used henna only to clean their hair and bodies when they went to the baths, because when they washed with it they were cleansed of whatever form of dirtiness that they had; and when they mixed it with soap they spread it over the skin of men, women, children who suffered from scabies, and they would be healed. The women also colored their hair with henna, and if these women suffered from humors or headaches, they pressed henna gallnuts against their heads, and the pains and humors ceased. Upon breaking open these gallnuts to release the henna within them, they added other materials so that the henna turned blue. Then they employed artists to paint their hands and feet, which they held to be refined and elegant, and especially desirable during celebrations and weddings. They would also use henna to soothe burns and stings, which the Old Christians, seeing its virtues, likewise did. These practices in no way went against the Holy Catholic faith, as the aforementioned archbishop [Talavera] and his successors had permitted them until the Inquisitors made mention of them in their list of offenses. And when Don Pedro de Guevara, the bishop of Guadix and chronicler of their Lords the Catholic Monarchs and the Emperor, had wanted to shave the heads of the native women and scrape the henna from their hands, a preceptor was dispatched—with the permission of the Marqués de Mondéjar—in 1528 to inform His Lordship the president of this matter before the Royal



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Auditors so that His Most Illustrious Lordship might not let this occur.]19

There are a number of problems with the historical references in this passage. It mentions, for example, a Don Pedro de Guevara who was bishop of Guadix in 1528. In reality, the newly named bishop of Guadix in 1528 was Antonio de Guevara (1481–1545), a Franciscan who would become bishop of Mondoñedo only ten years later. Also, Guevara was not a chronicler of the Catholic Monarchs, but rather an author famous in Spain for numerous philosophical and religious works such as Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio (The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, 1528); Reloj de príncipes (The Clock of Princes, 1529); Una década de Césares (A Decade of Caesars, 1539); Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (Disparagement of the Court and Praise of the Countryside, 1539); Epístolas familiares (Family Letters, 1539); and Monte Calvario (Mount Calvary, 1542). This mistake seems too obvious to have been committed by Núñez Muley, who occasionally gets dates wrong by a year or two (as when he lists 1517 as the year of Fernando the Catholic’s death) but seems to have had an almost photographic memory for names. Also, this passage refers to the Catholic Monarchs as “the Lordly Catholic Monarchs” (los señores Reyes Católicos), a construction that does not appear anywhere else in the text of the Memorandum. From this it is reasonable to assume that this passage on henna, while of undeniable historical value, was much altered by Lorenzo de Prado or some earlier scribe, and that it was quite possibly deleted from Núñez Muley’s Memorandum in a very early draft. Late in the nineteenth century, a sixteenth-century manuscript version of the Memorandum, signed by Núñez Muley himself, was found in the National Library (Biblioteca Nacional, BN) in Madrid. The manuscript occupies folios 311r to 331v of a miscellany codex (MS 6176, olim R.29) that contains a number of Franciscan and poetic texts, some of which have been studied 19. Gallego y Burín and Gámir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada, 278.

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by Manuel de Castro and Brian Dutton.20 How the Memorandum came to be part of this codex is not known, but likely it existed as an unbound group of folios that was incorporated into BN MS 6176 long after Núñez Muley had written it. Some texts contained in BN MS 6176 do suggest more than a casual relation with the Memorandum, such as the Marqués de Santillana’s Doctrinal de privados (Religion of favorites, fols. 52v– 53v) and Gómez Manrique’s Ejemplos contra la mala gobernación del reino (Exempla against the Poor Government of the Kingdom, fol. 53v).21 The Márques de Santillana’s given name was Íñigo López de Mendoza y de la Vega (1398–1458), and he was none other than the great-grandfather of Luis Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco (1489–1566), the Marqués de Mondéjar mentioned throughout Núñez Muley’s text. Also, the texts of both the Marqués de Santillana and Gómez Manrique share with the Memorandum a concern with good government and contain sharp criticisms of official policies. The text of the Memorandum contained in Madrid BN MS 6176 was first edited by Raymond Foulché-Delbosc in 1899 and then in 1954 by Kenneth Garrad. Garrad seems to have been unaware of Foulché-Delbosc’s earlier edition of Núñez Muley’s text, as he does not mention it, although he cites Mármol extensively. For his part, Garrad states the following reasons for having produced his edition of the Memorandum: My objects in publishing the authentic Memorandum directed to Deza and signed by Núñez Muley himself, which was recently discovered in the Manuscripts Section of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, are firstly to show that Mármol condensed his speech out of the original Memorandum; secondly, to reveal

21. For more on these sections of the codex, Madrid, BN MS 6176, see PhiloBiblon: Bibliografía Española de Textos Antiguos, BETA manid 2682, at http://sunsite.berkeley. edu/Philobiblon/BETA/2682.html, accessed 20 December, 2006. 20. Manuel de Castro, Manuscritos franciscanos de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, 1973); Brian Dutton, Catálogo/índice de la poesía cancioneril del siglo XV (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1982).



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those parts of it which were omitted by Mármol for religious and other considerations; thirdly, to clarify some of the more obscure parts of the text with historical and linguistic comments; and last, to offer to those interested in sixteenth-century Spanish one of the few surviving examples of the mismanagement of Castilian construction and spelling by a Morisco who was far from being perfectly “aljamiado.”22

As Garrad makes clear, his approach is resolutely and explicitly philological. His main goal is to produce an edition of Núñez Muley’s text with a critical apparatus that might be compared to the more selective version of the text produced 350 years earlier by Mármol. That Garrad also characterizes the dialectal traits of Núñez Muley’s written Spanish as examples of a fundamental “mismanagement of Castilian construction and spelling” (i.e., bad Spanish) might rightly lead us to wonder about the linguistic ideologies and biases that underlie Garrad’s approach to this material. Before we single out Garrad, however, it is worth pointing out that even into the twenty-first century scholars of Spanish literature have frequently spoken of Morisco discourse in these terms. In this sense, to find fault with Garrad’s comments regarding Granadan Morisco forms of language use means finding fault with an entire disciplinary approach to this material. In 1996 Bernard Vincent reproduced Foulché-Delbosc’s 1899 edition of Núñez Muley’s text and incorporated it as an appendix to the second edition of Antonio Gallego y Burín and Alfonso Gámir Sandoval’s Los moriscos del Reino de Granada según el sínodo de Guadix en 1554 (The Moriscos of the Kingdom of Granada According to the Synod of Guadix in 1554). The text is an unrevised version of Foulché-Delbosc’s transcription and contains no critical apparatus or notes; however, the volume also contains a rich assortment of images and supplemental texts that makes it a remarkably useful text. In any case, the decision to incorporate the text of the Memorandum into a revised facsimile edition of Gallego y Burín and Gámir Sandoval’s study of the 1554 Synod of Guadix 22. Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 200–201.

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is extremely beneficial to modern readers, given the importance of this synod for the formation of the specific provisions of the 1567 Royal Decree to which Núñez Muley responds.23 The Memorandum and Its Immediate Historical Context As we know, Francisco Núñez Muley conceived of his Memorandum as a letter of grievance to Pedro de Deza Manuel, the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada. In this letter, Núñez Muley complains of a royal decree (pragmática) that had just been proclaimed on January 1 of that year. This decree emerged from an assembly (junta) headed by Diego de Espinosa (1513–1572), who as president of the Royal Council in Madrid had had much to do with Deza’s appointment to the presidency of the Royal Audiencia of Granada only months earlier. The decree produced by the royal assembly in 1566 was framed from the start as a kind of reworking and amplification of two earlier rulings. The first was produced by the Congregation of the Royal Chapel of the Catholic Monarchs in Granada in 1526 and was never put into effect due to the urgent negotiations that had taken place between the Moriscos of Granada, the Marqués de Mondéjar, and Carlos V in that same year. The second, issued by the Synod of Guadix in 1554, consisted of a detailed account of Morisco cultural practices and the measures to be taken by Christian authorities to put an end to them.24 The new decree, which was finished in late 1566 but not proclaimed until January 1, 1567 (the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs), placed unrealistically strict prohibitions on Granada’s Moriscos, 23. Most recently, Linkgua Ediciones in Barcelona has released an edition of the Memorandum entitled Memorial: en defensa de las costumbres moriscas [Memorandum: In Defense of Morisco Customs]. Published in 2004, this tiny volume (consisting of roughly thirty pages in all) offers very little in the way of notes or critical apparatus, and there is no mention even of an editor. 24. For more on the Synod of Guadix and the specific cultural traits and practices of the Moriscos of Granada, see Julio Caro Baroja, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada (1957; Madrid: Istmo, 2000); Gallego y Burín and Gámir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada; and Pedro Longás, La vida religiosa de los moriscos, introduction by Darío Cabanelas (1915; Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1990).



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of which Núñez Muley explicitly counted himself: “mi yntençión a sydo y es muy buena en servir a Dios muestro señor, y a Su Magt. y a los naturales sus vasallos deste rreyno, pues son mi sangre y soy obligado a ello, e no los puedo negar” [my intention has been and is very honest: to serve the Lord our God, His Majesty, and his vassals the natives of this kingdom, as they are my blood and I am obligated by that bond, and I cannot deny them (fol. 330r; p. 99)]. According to the decree, the Moriscos of Granada were ordered, inter alia, to learn Castilian and cease speaking Arabic entirely within a period of three years. They were similarly given a period of thirty days to submit all of their Arabic legal documents to be examined, and a period of two years to wear out their traditional clothing and begin wearing only Castilian-style clothing. The women were compelled to cease wearing their veils in public immediately, and families were required to leave the doors to their homes open and cease bathing in their homes or public bath houses so that Christian authorities could be sure that they were not engaging in any sort of Muslim prayer or other ritual. A summary of the decree is contained in Mármol’s history and sheds light not only on the specific measures and provisions against which Núñez Muley was fighting but also provides useful information regarding the reasoning of the Christian officials that authored and instituted it. Mármol’s version of events is a complex mix of objective facts and thinly veiled commentary in support of the policies of the Spanish Crown, and both elements are of value to readers interested in understanding the historical context, from all sides, in which Núñez Muley was operating (see the appendix). For his part, Núñez Muley touches on all of the points mentioned by Mármol except the prohibition on henna. There is, as I have stated above, a passage dealing with henna that has been attributed to Núñez Muley contained in the eighteenth-century summary of the Memorandum found in the archive of the Alhambra, but as I have also mentioned, there exists reason to doubt whether this portion was written by Núñez Muley or, if it was, whether he ever intended to include it in his letter to Deza.

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Beyond his catalog of the specific provisions of the royal decree of 1567, Mármol raises some intriguing questions in his account of how the decree went into effect and how it would be administered. First, Mármol makes clear that the responsibility for developing the language education policy by which all Granadan Moriscos would learn Castilian in three years time was left to Deza as president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada and to Pedro Guerrero Logroño (d. 1576) as archbishop of Granada. Deza himself was no ally of the Moriscos (as Núñez Muley knew, even before he began writing his Memorandum), and it is unclear what expertise he might have possessed that would have enabled him to oversee such a vast process. Guerrero, on the other hand, was a learned and studious man. Made famous in Spain by his participation in the Council of Trent (1545–1563), Guerrero was well versed in contemporary efforts to effect cultural reform and language standardization, as well as the Church’s overriding concern with the growing influence of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Nevertheless, Guerrero was very much committed, like Deza, to the hard line adopted by the Madrid assembly in 1566 toward the Moriscos of Granada.25 However effective the specific policies of language instruction instituted by Deza and Guerrero might have been, these were necessarily put on hold by the outbreak of the Second War in the Alpujarras late in 1568. For example, the Albaicín’s Casa de la Doctrina (Catechism School), established by the Jesuits in Granada in 1559 to provide religious and Castilian literacy instruction to Morisco boys, was shut down only a year after the outbreak of the war. What followed this war, in which several thousand Granadan Moriscos (with paid auxiliaries) fought off the Spanish military (also with paid auxiliaries) for nearly three years, was a massive deportation of Moriscos from the Kingdom of Granada to other areas of Spain.26 Even in the context of these deporta-

25. Coleman, Creating Christian Granada, 156. 26. For a more specific analysis of the social impact of the Granadan Moriscos’ forced relocation to other areas of Spain, see Bernabé Pons (1998), García Arenal (1978), and Perry (2005).



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tions, the use of Arabic was part of Morisco social life in a number of communities right up to the time of their expulsion from Spain in 1609–1614. Manuel Barrios Aguilera summarizes the state of Arabic in Andalusia after the war as well as official efforts to do away with it: The bishop of Badajoz, referring to the Granadan Moriscos who had settled into his diocese after the expulsions that followed the war in the Alpujarras, stated the following in 1589: “they speak their gibberish (algaravía) . . . and sing in Arabic, and here neither clerics nor laymen understand them.” The arrival of a large number of deported Granadans to Córdoba provoked a fierce debate in the municipal government with respect to the application of the linguistic prohibitions adopted in 1566: all of the members of the municipal council are in agreement that the use of Arabic is an undesirable element of distortion, and they blame it as a factor in “the great disorder that existed in the life of the Moriscos,” as it is seen to impede their integration and, in the words of one official, “because they came together and in their language discussed many things that went against the government and could cause harm to the residents of this city.” They are also aware of the difficulties inherent in the eradication of Arabic and the acquisition of Castilian by the recent arrivals “because it is very well known that neither old people nor children nor women speak Spanish [aljama].” The resolutions of 1572 called for even stiffer assimilationist criteria; however, the results did not improve in the short term; in spite of efforts to the contrary on the part of both civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the reluctance [on the part of the Moriscos] to learn Castilian and a tenacious retention of their language, strengthened by widespread illiteracy, are evident. Another episode occurred in Seville and its corresponding territory, where in the year 1571 Archbishop Rojas y Sandoval promulgated his Instrucción para los moriscos (Instruction for the Moriscos), which contains a section that orders clerics not to allow the Moriscos to “speak Arabic or teach it to their children” and instructs them not to let many Moriscos live together “nor

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hold meetings amongst themselves, because in this way they will not forget their language and the customs that they had.” The measures that are promulgated in 1586, after the failed attempt at rebellion, are simply a reinforcement of those adopted in 1571, and they provide evidence that nothing had changed, as the order is repeated that clerics “not allow that the Moriscos possess nor read books or other materials written in Arabic nor speak the aforementioned language within or outside their homes nor write in it . . . .” These measures remained in effect until the very moment of the Moriscos’ final expulsion [from Spain].27

These examples provide strong evidence of a persistent effort on the part of civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Granada and throughout Andalusia to force Moriscos to cease speaking Arabic in favor of Castilian. These policies were of course not limited to Andalusia, and in Valencia and Aragon, where the use of Arabic (and the possession of Arabic and Arabic-script texts) was likewise much higher than in Castile, due to a higher concentration of Moriscos in those regions and greater contact with other Mediterranean Muslims, the Inquisition was very active in the policing of language use. As Núñez Muley states in his Memorandum, the Inquisition was established in Granada by Carlos V, and its principal goal was to root out heretics, which included Moriscos who continued to practice Islam. The option of officially sanctioning and developing a bilingual, Arabic-Castilian community of New Christians was never officially considered.28

27. Manuel Barrios Aguilera, Granada morisca, la convivencia negada (Granada: Comares, 2002), 265–266. 28. This monolingual policy resembles in a broad sense recent “English-only” legislation in the United States. In 2000, for example, Arizona passed Proposition 203, a measure that greatly restricts bilingual education in that state. Among other things, it requires that all public school instruction be conducted in English and that children not fluent in English be placed in intensive one-year English immersion programs. Significantly, the measure allows parents to sue for enforcement of the statute. That is, if any school board member, elected official, or administrator “willfully and repeatedly” refused to implement the terms of the statute, he or she may be held personally liable for fees and actual and compensatory damages by the child’s parents. It also provides



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The last point that commands our attention in this section is presented by Mármol in his chapter on the process by which the decree of 1567 was developed (appendix 2). In specific terms, Mármol discusses Espinosa’s actions and possible motivations at the 1566 assembly in Madrid. He writes, at the very end of his chapter: This was the resolution that was taken in that assembly, although some thought that not all of the chapters should be put into effect all at once, given that the Moriscos were so attached to their customs, and that they would not feel the loss of these as acutely if they were deprived of them little by little. But President Diego de Espinosa, aware of the warnings that arrived every day from Granada, and bracing himself with the force of the faith and the power of so Catholic a prince, advised His Majesty that they should all be put into effect at once.29

Espinosa was inquisitor-general and president of the Council of Castile, and he was widely considered to be Spanish king Felipe II’s most influential advisor on a number of issues. As Geoffrey Parker puts it: Between 1566 and 1572 Cardinal Diego de Espinosa, president of the council of Castile and Inquisitor-General, became an “alter ego”—in the words of Ambassador Fourquevaux, “another king in this Court”—and courtiers advised their friends abroad to run everything of importance past Espinosa because “he is the man in all Spain in whom the king places most confidence and with whom he discusses most business, concerning both Spain and foreign affairs.” The cardinal did not sit on many councils, however, instead he kept abreast of

that any individual found liable be removed from office and barred from holding any position of authority anywhere in Arizona for five years. Currently, twenty-eight U.S. states have established English as the “official language” for all official activities within the state. 29. Mármol Carvajal, Historia, II: 6, par. 11.

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business through a series of informal committees, known as “juntas.”30

The workings of the sort of “government by junta” that Parker describes are very much at the center of the Madrid assembly that developed the royal decree of 1567, and it is also likely that Espinosa’s knowledge of the situation in Granada was limited to the highly slanted reports that he had been receiving from ecclesiastical officials there (some of which are described and contested by Núñez Muley). In other words, Mármol’s rhetorical flourishes are perhaps even more accurate and to the point than he could have imagined: when Espinosa recommended to Felipe II that the provisions of the decree that would be proclaimed on January 1, 1567, should be put into force all at once, he was in fact relying on little more than the “warnings that arrived every day from Granada” and his own faith and power as “so Catholic a prince.” On this point, at the very least, Núñez Muley was in the right. Reading the Memorandum: Some Broader Issues In an effort to work past what Frantz Fanon has characterized as the “Manichean” opposition between the culture of empire and that of resistance in colonial settings,31 Edward W. Said begins his essay on native collaboration and independence movements in the twentieth century by discussing at some length the arguments presented by Ronald Robinson on the issue of imperialism and its “non-European foundations.” Robinson, writing in the context of a seminar on imperialism held at Oxford in 1969–70, explicitly foregrounds the role of the native collaborator in the broader European imperial project: Any new theory must recognize that imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration— 30. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 26. 31. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (1963; New York: Grove Press, 2004), 50.



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of their indigenous politics, as it was of European expansion. . . . Nor [without the voluntary or enforced cooperation of their governing elites and] without indigenous collaboration, when the time came for it, could Europeans have conquered and ruled their non-European empires. From the outset that rule was continuously resisted; just as continuously native mediation was needed to avert resistance or hold it down.32

As Said rightly points out, a very important aspect of Robinson’s argument is what he leaves unsaid, namely, the extent to which “indigenous collaboration” also implies indigenous assimilation and a more or less significant emulation of “modern European ways, to modernize according to what was perceived of as European advancement.” According to Said, this project of cultural emulation stands as a kind of penumbra to the more brightly illumined, and much more fully theorized, process of open resistance. In fact, many of the protagonists of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resistance struggles that eventually led to full-fledged independence movements in Asia and Africa were unmistakably complicit in the perpetuation of various emulatory practices within the intellectual sphere.33 Robinson and Said leave no doubt that if we are to achieve a more contextualized and thus complete understanding of the workings of empire and resistance, it will be necessary to attend more fully to the ways in which colonized subjects internalize and reproduce the values and practices of the former even while consciously engaging in the latter. 32. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 262–81, in particular for a sense of the broader context in which Said employs Robinson’s ideas. See also Ronald Robinson, “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration,” in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, ed. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (London: Longman, 1972). 33. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 262. Said in fact has much to say about the energy with which non-Western officials, intellectuals, and students at various levels of development frequently sought guidance from and within the West during the nineteenth century: “The primary purpose of . . . early [Eastern] missions to the West was to learn the ways of the advanced white man, translate his works, pick up his habits. Recent studies on the subject . . . show how the imperial hierarchy was imparted to eager students from the East along with information, useful texts, and profitable habits” (262–63).

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The seemingly paradoxical intersections between collaboration/emulation and resistance are of central concern to even the most elementary understanding of Núñez Muley’s Memorandum. Núñez Muley, an elite and profoundly assimilated member of sixteenth-century Granada’s large community of recent Muslim converts to Christianity, strives both to appease his authoritative, Castilian, Old Christian reader and openly contest the injurious social policies adopted by this same reader and the legal body over which he presides. As a result of this complex rhetorical and social project, Núñez Muley adopts, whether consciously or not, a wide range of seemingly divergent discursive strategies throughout the Memorandum. In fact, his prose at times appears strained and tortured almost to the breaking point by his attempts to demonstrate his allegiance to the broader mission assimilatrice of the Spanish Crown (and its Castilian settlers) in Granada while simultaneously questioning its specific strategies regarding the Moriscos. Even the phrase that initiates the closing of his letter (already cited above) seems to work at cross-purposes: “mi yntençión a sydo y es muy buena en servir a Dios muestro señor, y a Su Magt. y a los naturales sus vasallos deste rreyno, pues son mi sangre y soy obligado a ello, e no los puedo negar” [my intention has been and is very honest: to serve the Lord our God, His Majesty, and his vassals the natives of this kingdom, as they are my blood and I am obligated by that bond, and I cannot deny them (fol. 330r; p. 99)]. This is a remarkably economical utterance, and Núñez Muley uses it to invoke both the Moriscos’ legal obligation to serve King Felipe II (as well as the king’s duty to protect them from his dishonest officials) and his own responsibility—framed not as legal requirement but as a blood tie—to serve his community. Dealing in a meaningful way with the tensions inherent in such a dichotomous presentation of self is at the very heart of any careful reading of the Memorandum. One of the more subtle strategies that Núñez Muley employs throughout the Memorandum involves the ways in which he frames the tense “Morisco problem” (cuestión morisca) in Granada as a specifically colonial one. For example, even the phrase that he persistently employs to refer to the Moriscos of Granada—“the



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natives of this kingdom” (los naturales de este reyno)—implicitly underscores the status of the Castilian authorities, as well as the broader Old Christian population, as recently arrived, foreign administrators and settlers to what had for centuries been an autonomous Muslim kingdom stretching across the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.34 In a very real sense—and this seems to be at the forefront of Núñez Muley’s thinking—Granadan Moriscos were by the middle of the sixteenth century being forced to confront the almost inevitable and imminent “death of indigenous society” as a result of the cultural, political, and fiscal policies imposed upon them from the metropole in Madrid.35 And while Núñez Muley, like many other native Granadans, does not seem to have been ready to accept the option of armed resistance later chosen by figures such as Aben Humeya and Farax Aben Farax, in his Memorandum he nonetheless engages in a difficult, risky, and textually mediated struggle to renegotiate the terms of the Granadan Moriscos’ relation to their Castilian overlords. Núñez Muley’s efforts in fact reveal an important feature of Granadan Morisco social life that has frequently been overlooked, although Coleman’s recent work on Granada as a “frontier society” has done much to fill in many of the larger blanks. In brief, Granadan Moriscos were forced to deal with the by no means inconsequential burdens that came with their new identity as Christians even as they dealt with the often more severe difficulties that accompanied the expectation that they become culturally Castilian. These two burdens are of course intertwined to a significant degree (i.e., the authorities that were in charge of religious instruction and oversight in Granada were overwhelmingly Castilian), but it is important not to efface the differences that

34. For a detailed account of the extent to which waves of Castilian settlers had radically altered the very social fabric of the former kingdom of Granada by the middle of the sixteenth century, see Coleman, Creating Christian Granada, 13–31. For a modern account of the Castilian conquest and occupation of Granada as a colonial enterprise (compared specifically to the French colonization of Algeria), see Henri Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1959). 35. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 50.

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separate them altogether. Núñez Muley makes this point clear in his statements regarding the linguistic repertoire of Christians in Jerusalem and Malta: “y no la saben la lengua castellana y son xristianos católicos” [they also have no knowledge of the Castilian language, and yet they are Catholic Christians (fol. 315v; p. 72)]; and “[En la ysla de Malta] hay los católicos cristianos y [sic] hijos de algo: asimismo hablan arávigo y escriben arávigo lo que toca a la santa fe católica y lo demás de cristianos y creo que dizen las mismas, ansý en las partes susodichas como en la ysla, en arávigo, y no saben hablar ni escrevir en castellano ni los unos ni los otros” [Here (in Malta) there are Catholic Christians and nobles, and they likewise speak Arabic and use Arabic to write texts having to do with the Holy Catholic faith and other Christian matters. I also believe that they say mass in Arabic, as is also the case in Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and neither of these groups knows how to read or write in Castilian (fol. 326r; p. 94)]. What Núñez Muley is stressing here and in many other sections of the Memorandum is the importance of parsing out what corresponds to Christian belief and practice and what is merely a feature of Castilian regional culture. That he does so provides strong evidence for the theory that part of the exercise of Castilian power in Granada involved erasing the distinction between “Castilian” and “Christian” and foisting regional mores on the Moriscos in the guise of Christian ones. In a related line of argumentation, Núñez Muley repeatedly maintains that the Moriscos of Granada were at once “New Christians” and “natives” of a formerly independent kingdom. Nonetheless, much of their struggle involved parrying Castilian attempts to identify them solely on the basis of the first of these terms while essentially erasing the second. In this way, the Castilian colonization and eventual consolidation of Granada came instead to be framed as a decisive Christian victory within a region desperately in need of evangelization and spiritual order. It is worth analyzing the extent to which Castilian dominion in Granada was aided by a persistent denial on the part of the dominant group that anything resembling a colonial apparatus had ever taken root there. That the military defeat of Nas·rid Granada



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in 1491 has consistently been framed, from the end of the fifteenth century to the present day, as a “conquest” (conquista) rather than a “reconquest” (reconquista) seems to suggest that this denial could never be complete. And Núñez Muley’s Memorandum, which provides a subtle and at times self-contradictory narration of indigenous agency—whether as emulation and appeasement or outright resistance—in the face of Castilian colonial administration in Granada, stands as an invaluable and scarcely studied document in the long history of European imperial expansion. Given its complexity and historical significance, Núñez Muley’s Memorandum also stands as one of the most important texts that emerged from early modern Spain’s large minority community of Christian converts from Islam. Together with the extensive corpus of aljamiado (Romance texts handwritten in Arabic script) texts actively read and recopied by Spanish Crypto-Muslims throughout the sixteenth century and the ingenious, subtly polemical writings of Miguel de Luna (ca. 1545–1615) and Alonso del Castillo (d. 1610),36 the Memorandum presents an invaluable and specific example of how Granada’s former Muslims made active use of written texts to challenge, subvert, and even openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown and the none-too-subtle imposition of Castilian culture by royal and ecclesiastical authorities. 36. The bibliography on the aljamiado literature of the Moriscos is extensive. For examples, see Vincent Barletta, “Aljamiado literature,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Castilian Writers, 1400–1500, ed. Frank Domínguez and George Greenia (Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2003), 279–87, idem, Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and idem, “The Aljamiado ‘Sacrifice of Ishmael’: Genre, Power, and Narrative Performance,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 40, no. 3 (2006): 513–36; and Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, “Características literarias de los escritos aljamiado-moriscos,” in Actas de las II jornadas internacionales de cultura islámica (Teruel, 1988) (Madrid: Al-Fadila, 1990), 193–201, and idem, “El interés literario en los escritos aljamiado-moriscos,” Actas del coloquio internacional sobre literatura aljamiada y morisca, ed. Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes and Emilio García Gómez (Madrid: Gredos, 1978), 189–210. The full title of Luna’s work is much longer and helps to provide a sense of its literary complexity: A True History of King Roderick, in which is Discussed the Principal Cause of the Loss of Spain and its Conquest by Moh· ammed al-Na¯·sr, Former King of Africa and the Arabias and the Life of Yaqu¯b al-Mans· u¯r, Composed by the Wise Captain Abu¯ al-Qa¯sim T· arı¯f ibn T· a¯riq, of Arab Origin, Newly Translated from the Arabic by Miguel de Luna, Resident of Granada, Translator for Don Felipe Our King (Historia verdadera del rey Don Rodrigo, en la cual se trata de la causa principal de la pérdida

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For modern readers, the Memorandum is of interest from a wide range of perspectives, although it is, in traditional literary terms, a simple piece of writing: a letter written by a Granadan Morisco to the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada to complain of recently proclaimed laws that call for the almost immediate cultural and linguistic assimilation of Granada’s large community (approximately 150,000 persons, according to Núñez Muley) of Christian converts from Islam. Núñez Muley’s prose style is for the most part unadorned and loosely organized, and it is fair to say that the Memorandum was not intended for wide public distribution. As for Núñez Muley himself, it is clear from the Memorandum that while he is a highly intelligent man with a significant amount of knowledge about and authority within his own community, he is not the skilled writer that other Granadan Moriscos such as Luna or Castillo were. Looked at beyond these more traditional, literary concerns of form and style, Núñez Muley’s Memorandum provides modern readers, as I have suggested above, with a fascinating and discursively complex example of the strategies of appeasement and resistance employed by those who found themselves targeted by a constellation of ostensibly Christian kingdoms (led by Castile) intent on fashioning themselves into a culturally homogeneous nation-state and world empire. Like the popular Castilian picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes (Lazarillo of Tormes), first published in 1554, the Memorandum compels its reader to question the very foundations of the dominant social order and the project of empire. Unlike Lazarillo, however, the Memorandum does this in a very direct way. That is, while Lazarillo employs a series of de España y la conquista que de ella hizo Miramamolín Almanzor, rey que fue de Africa y de las Arabias, y vida del rey Yacob Almanzor, compuesta por el sabio alcayde Albucasim Tarif abentarique, de nación árabe, nuevamente traducida de la lengua arabiga por Miguel de Luna, vecino de Granada, intérprete del rey Don Felipe nuestro señor). Framed both as a “true history” and the translation of a text originally written in Arabic, Luna’s A True History is actually neither of these; rather, it is a highly subjective and largely fictional account of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula written by Luna himself and published in two volumes (1592, 1600). For more on this work, see Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “La voluntad de leyenda de Miguel de Luna,” in El problema morisco (desde otras laderas) (Madrid: Libertarias), 45–97.



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tropes and fictional encounters to lead its reader to certain conclusions, the Memorandum lays everything out quite literally, and without mincing many words. It can fairly be said that Núñez Muley speaks a very specific kind of truth in his Memorandum, a truth that, once again, frames the New Christians of Granada as the “natives” (naturales) of a formerly independent Muslim kingdom with certain rights and freedoms that correspond to such a status. At the same time, Núñez Muley effectively works, ironically enough, to marginalize the Old Christian authorities as a group of recently arrived, and in a very real sense, “foreign” administrators with little understanding of the places and peoples that they have been charged with governing. The notion of “native” versus “outsider” brought up by Núñez Muley throughout the Memorandum provides a powerful and explicit reference point from which we might compare the discursive strategies of resistance, collaboration, negotiation, and survival employed by minorities within the Iberian Peninsula during the early modern period to those utilized by natives of the overseas territories that had then been only recently colonized by Spain and Portugal. Looked at from this broader perspective, the Memorandum places into relief the fact that even within Europe itself there have always been enormous territorial interstices and internal peripheries that serve to problematize the colonial project even as they recreate it on a smaller, internal scale, as if they were part of some larger fractal scheme of hegemony and transculturation. The challenge, of course, is to understand the shared mechanics of these colonies while not leveling out the contextualized features that differentiate them. Mary Louise Pratt, in work that runs parallel to that of Robinson and Said, has dealt directly with the issues of colonial representation and transculturation in the context of European imperial expansion during the sixteenth century. Her argument regarding the ways in which European nations such as Spain, as well as their “modes of representation,” were in large part forged through contact with the colonial periphery intersects in suggestive ways with central features of the Memorandum:

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The fruits of empire, we know, were pervasive in shaping European domestic society, culture, and history. How have Europe’s constructions of subordinated others been shaped by those others, by the constructions of themselves and their habitats that they presented to the Europeans? Borders and all, the entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out. Can this be said of its modes of representation? While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery (in the emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development, for example), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis—beginning, perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself.37

Pratt’s question regarding the influence that non-European modes of representation might have within the European metropole is a purely rhetorical one, and the rest of her study is dedicated to unpacking the affirmative answer that she provides for it. And while she is concerned primarily with a specific textual genre (travel literature from the Americas), it is difficult not to wonder whether this “outside-in” process also occurred within the Iberian Peninsula itself during a period when New Christians who had formerly been Jews and Muslims unmistakably formed a kind of “colonized other” within Europe itself.38 And in the case of the former Kingdom of Granada, which was still very much a foreign, if not entirely unfamiliar, territory to Castilians just after 1492, it is in fact possible to speak in very direct and literal terms of such colonial processes. What happens when we hold the Memorandum, as a work produced by a colonized subject within Spain’s (i.e., Castile’s) burgeoning empire, up to other forms of official correspondence

37. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 38. A project very similar to this has in fact been at the center of a wide body of critical work inspired by the historical theories of Américo Castro.



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produced by “subordinated others” writing from Spain and Portugal’s overseas colonies? The short answer is that we find many illuminative points in common. A comparison of, for example, the rhetorical techniques of Yucatec Maya elites in their early letters to the Spanish Crown or the openly subjective reports given to Portuguese royal officials by their Moroccan colonial agents during the first half of the sixteenth century with the Memorandum, allows a deeper understanding of the precise discursive strategies employed across cultural contexts by minority writers in their dealings with Imperial Spain and Portugal.39 An analysis of official letters produced by Yucatec Maya elites and sent to royal officials in Madrid during the sixteenth century illustrates how these texts in the end “reflect a process of local innovation, blending Maya and Spanish discourse forms into novel types.”40 What results from such innovation and blending, according to Hanks, is a hybrid generic form that is ultimately inseparable from the socially and historically embedded activities in which it is produced and employed. Hanks describes this hybrid genre as “Official Maya discourse” and maintains that it works to make its Spanish readers (i.e., royal officials) confident that Maya elites honestly respected colonial authority and ideologies while simultaneously making these same Spanish readers painfully aware of the locally regimented authority that the indigenous authors/assignees brought to these texts: Official Maya discourse displays a strong orientation toward Spanish ideology and institutional structures, but it would be wrong to conclude from this that the Maya were “already

39. On Spain and the Maya, see William F. Hanks, “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 4 (1987): 668–692; on Portugal and Morocco, Vincent J. Cornell, “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco: Portuguese Dukkala and the Sadid Sus, 1450–1557,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 4 (1990): 379–418; Durval Pires de Lima, História da dominação portuguesa em Çafim, 1506–1542 (Lisbon: Lucas, 1930); David Lopes, Textos em aljamia portuguesa (Lisbon: Nacional, 1897); and Matthew T. Racine, “Service and Honor in Sixteenth˛ Century Portuguese North Africa: Yahyá-u-Ta fuft and Portuguese Noble Culture,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 32, no. 1 (2001): 67–90. 40. Hanks, “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice,” 668.

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converted” and simply following the rules laid down by the conquerors. Rather, the display of hispanization in these works is at least in part a means of familiarizing them to the, primarily Spanish, addresses. The format, style, and thematic content of the documents all maximize the appearance that their authors honored the values of their conquerors and were themselves honorable. This involved, on the one hand, what Bourdieu called “regulation,” whereby actors strategically make a show of their adherence to moral and ethical values of the group, in order to display their own impeccable character. On the other hand, the discourse is also “officialized,” whereby it presents itself as a bona fide, witnessed document, authorized by specific, entitled actors. Both regularization and officialization are pragmatic processes that link individual works to dominant power structures. Both have a tangible influence on the linguistic forms through which genres are realized.41

Hanks goes on to discuss the implications that official Maya discourse, both as a form of language and as an activity, has for current theories of genre (namely, that Bourdieusian ideas regarding cultural practice provide key insights to understand the workings of genre). These theoretical concerns connect in various ways to an analysis of Núñez Muley’s Memorandum. However, the most direct link between the official Maya discourse that Hanks studies and the Memorandum are the ways in which Núñez Muley, like his contemporaries in colonial Yucatán, makes strategic use of different forms of generic discourse—both at the pragmatic and the semantico-referential levels of signification—to demonstrate his acceptance of his subordinate place within the “order of things” while working hard (and hardly below the surface) to make manifest his own authority. Núñez Muley’s continuous appeals to the authority of his addressee, the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada, reflect the sort of “regularization” to which Hanks refers, while Núñez Muley’s equally persistent citation of legal documents, naming of eyewitnesses to specific 41. Hanks, “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice,” 677–678.



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proceedings, and presentation of himself as a faithful and authoritative eyewitness of past events bears many similarities, at least in broad strokes, to the processes of “officialization” described by Hanks. That Núñez Muley goes a bit farther and seems openly to challenge the authority of local officials and even that of his highranking and none-too-sympathetic addressee (his comments, for example, regarding where the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada might obtain copies of the 1491 capitulations signed by ˛ the Catholic Monarchs and the defeated Granadan king Abu¯ Abd Allah Moh·ammed XII (1460–1527) are nothing if not openly condescending) reflect a level of audacity that probably has as much to do with Núñez Muley’s advanced age as with the hopelessness of the situation about which he complains so bitterly. Another striking example of the connections that exist between Núñez Muley’s text and others produced in the context of Spain’s and Portugal’s nearly simultaneous projects of imperial expansion are the letters sent from Safi, Morocco, to royal ˛ officials in Lisbon by Yah·yá Ta fu¯ft (d. 1518). In 1508, Portuguese king Manuel I (1469–1521) had taken full control of the city and port of Safi, which rests on the Atlantic Coast of Morocco roughly two hundred miles to the south of what is now Casablanca. 42 As Vincent J. Cornell explains, Portuguese administration of Safi and ˛ the broader Dukka¯lat Abdah region of Morocco relied to a certain degree on a series of complex deals and contracts with local leaders: Since Portuguese commercial interests in Dukkala were based on the need to acquire commodities necessary for supplementing their supplies of foodstuffs and maintaining the African gold trade, the administrative policies implemented by the feitores and captains in the towns they occupied were initially designed to secure a regular supply of goods with a minimum of interference. Throughout the latter half of the fifteenth century and extending into the period of direct rule in the first 42. Casablanca was known as Anfa¯ for centuries before the Portuguese took control of it in 1515.

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decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese administrators relied heavily on the services of allied tribal leaders to exploit inland areas economically dependent on the ports of Safi and Azemmour. Occasionally, they went so far as to appoint a local ruler by royal decree when it suited them.43

Such an appointment by royal decree was extended to Yah·yá ˛ Ta fu¯ft by the Portuguese Crown shortly after Portugal took ˛ control of Safi. Yah·yá, a native of the Dukka¯lat Abdah region who came to power through a Portuguese-engineered coup, had formerly been a kind of fortune hunter, and many colonial Portuguese officials made the claim that he continued plying his former trade in a more or less unrestrained way while working for the Crown. According to letters held in the Torre do Tombo Archive ˛ in Lisbon, Yah·yá Ta fu¯ft received from Portugal a yearly salary of roughly 30 ounces of gold in addition to his portion of the booty taken in raids against local tribes. He was also allowed to equip and maintain a private guard of one hundred armed mercenaries and to collect a significant income from bribes of local merchants and others seeking his protection. 44 Continued poor administration, along with steady conflicts with Wat·a¯sı¯d forces from Fez ˛ and the growing power of the Sa dı¯ dynasty in the south, led to a destabilization of the region under Yah·yá’s control, and Portugal ˛ was eventually forced to abandon Safi in 1541. Yah·yá Ta fu¯ft himself was ambushed and murdered in 1518 while on his way to visit a friend whose brother had recently been killed.45 ˛ The image of Yah·yá Ta fu¯ft that emerges from one side of the historical record is that of an opportunistic local big man who may or may not have abused the support he received from the Portuguese Crown in order to enrich himself monetarily and to appropriate for himself almost unchecked power. There is even reason to believe that he sought to place himself above Islamic

43. Cornell, “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco,” 386. 44. Cornell, “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco,” 386; and Lopes, Textos em aljamia portuguesa, 118–137. 45. Joseph Goulven, Safi: au vieux temps des portugais (Lisbon: n.p, 1938), 91–92.



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law in the area that he controlled, having bestowed upon himself the authority “to promulgate a personal qanu¯n, or extra-Islamic body of regulations, that took precedence over all other forms of legality.”46 ˛ The sense that we gain of Yah·yá Ta fu¯ft from his own written correspondence to Portuguese officials and King Manuel I himself, however, is something else altogether. For example, in a letter written in 1516 now contained in Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo Archive, we find Yah·yá asking for the help and support of the newly arrived Portuguese captain-major of Safi, Nuno Mascarenhas, who held the post from that year until 1522: Louvores ao só Deus. Senhor D. Nuno, vosso servo Iáhia Tafufte vos faz a saber que desno dia que vim a esta terra, não vi nenhum prazer nem descanço com cristãos, nem menos com mouros. Os mouros dizem que sou cristão, e os cristãos dizem que sou mouro, e assim estou em balanças sem saber o que hei de fazer de mim, senão o que Deus quiser. . . . [D]eixei meus filhos e mulheres por servir elrei nosso senhor, e eu senhor corro e trabalho por fóra, e o capitão e Nuno Gato e o feitor e outros me destruem de dentro; e assim toto mouro que vem á cidade com proveito a comprar e vender não torna mais pera fóra, dizem logo que é enxovío, e toman-nos per força pera o capitão e pera os seus amigos, e tambem os mouros que vem á cidade 46. Cornell, “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco,”˛387. Among the letters contained in the Torre do Tombo Archive that deal with Yahyá Ta fu¯ft · is a scathing letter composed by a Rabbi Abraão (C. chron. parte III, maço 5, doc. 75). The letter begins: “Depues que este moro foy posto por alcayde, logo determino de fazer entender aos moros que ho mando era seu, e que nom avyão de conocer ao capytam se nom a ele, e logo se començo a chamar rey, e que lhe beijasem todos ha mão e ho pe, e estando o capytam diante lhe beijavam a ele a mão e nom ao capytam, e logo començo a dezir aos moros que ele hera o senhor, e que o capytam se avya de yr, e ele avya de ficar por senhor em çafy”[After this Moroccan was given the post of captain, he made it a point to inform the other Moroccans that the command was his, and that they should recognize no other captain but him. Later he began to refer to himself as king and ordered that everyone was to kiss his hand and foot, and even in front of the [Portuguese] captain they kissed his hand and foot and not those of the [Portuguese] captain. Later he began to say to the Moroccans that he was their lord, and that the [Portuguese] captain must leave, and that he must remain as lord of Safi]. Lopes, Textos em aljamia portuguesa, 86–87.

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com a lenha e palha, e agora lhe fazem treição, matam-nos e deitam-nos nas almotofías e nos poços até federem polas casas, e muitos mouros vendidos pera terras de cristãos, e isto claro e visto sem darem pena a quem por isto merecer. [Praise the one God. My Lord, Dom Nuno, your servant Yah·yá ˛ Ta fu¯ft wishes to inform you that from the day that I arrived in this territory, I have seen no pleasure or rest either among Christians or Muslims. The Muslims say that I am a Christian, and the Christians say that I am a Muslim, and so I am caught in between not knowing what to do with myself except that which God wills . . . I left my children and my wives to serve the king our lord, and while I, My Lord, run about and work outside our borders, the captain (Nuno Fernandes de Ataíde), (the royal auditor) Nuno Gato, the administrator, and others destroy me from within. Any Muslim who comes to the city with the idea of buying or selling something is not allowed to leave, as they say later that he is from Sha¯wı¯ya, and the captain and his friends take them by force. The Muslims that come to the city with wood and straw likewise are betrayed: they kill them and lay them out in graves and dump them in wells until the stench of the bodies reaches the houses; also, many Muslims are sold into slavery in Christian lands. This is done in plain sight without any of the guilty parties receiving punishment.]47

Yah·yá begins his letter by affirming his subordinate role to the incoming Portuguese governor (“My Lord, Dom Nuno, your servant ˛ Yah·yá Ta fu¯ft wishes to inform you”) before going on to describe his loyal service to the Portuguese Crown and the impossible situation in which he finds himself in Safi and beyond. Like the Yucatec Maya letters studied by Hanks and the Memorandum of 47. Lopes, Textos em aljamia portuguesa, ˛ 62–65. Sha¯wı¯ya-Ourdı¯gha is a region of Morocco located just northeast of Dukka¯lat Abdah. During the Portuguese colonization of Safi, Arab tribes from this area (as well as from the Gharb, a region north of Sha¯wı¯ya) mounted stiff resistance.



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Núñez Muley, Yah·yá engages in a verbal process of regulation by which he simultaneously reproduces the relations of power and privilege that make up the established order and attempts to establish his own moral authority within that order. Then, turning the tables on the very officials who had complained to the king of abuses committed by him, Yah·yá accuses Nunes Gato and those working with the former governor of Safi of undermining the proper administration of the city and committing terrible atrocities against the local population. Far from supporting the image of a ruthless profiteer that emerges from other documents from the period, Yah·yá here goes to great lengths to present himself as a loyal and long-suffering servant of the Portuguese Crown, as well as a defender of the rights and safety of the natives. As is the case with Núñez Muley’s text, we find in Yah·yá ˛ Ta fu ¯ft’s letter (which was incidentally transcribed into Portuguese aljamiado after it was translated from Arabic into Portuguese upon its arrival in Lisbon) an intricate blend of accusation and counter-accusation, self-defense, deference to authority, and several earnest attempts to establish the moral authority of a non-Christian author who was, even in his own community, hardly above reproach. 48 While Yah·yá had managed to make enemies of many of Safi’s Portuguese administrators as well as its native Jews and Muslims, Núñez Muley himself represented a specific sector of Granadan Morisco elites who had viewed sincere conversion and collaboration with the Christian conquerors as the surest course for their community—a stance not shared or even trusted by many Moriscos for whom anything but a superficial, public conversion from Islam was not an option. What is perhaps most interesting for modern students of literature and textual culture is that these complex processes of negotiation and reconfiguration are carried out in large part through the mediation of highly generic texts: letters written and sent to royal officials. ˛ 48. For more on the aljamiado transcriptions of Yahyá Ta fu¯ft’s letters, see L. P. Har· vey, “Aljamia portuguesa revisited,” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986): 1–14; and Lopes, Textos em aljamia portuguesa.

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Another important aspect of the Memorandum is what it tells modern readers about the cultural practices and institutions of Granadan Moriscos. For example, as Garrad has pointed out, the Memorandum provides a unique source of information regarding the use of public baths by Muslims and New Christians in early modern Granada. 49 Núñez Muley goes so far as to provide a list of some of the people who made regular use of the baths due to their dirty occupations and maladies: y los vaños son minas de las zuçiedades y otras munchas cosas, porque a ellos vienen los enfermos en deversos enfermedades y llagas y materias, y los de los ofiçios zuzios, tales como pescador, herrero, y calbonero, y azeytero y carnisero y.espadadores de lino, y desolladores en el rrastro y fuera dél, y trabaxadores en partes zuzias, tales en baziar neçeçias y madres de calles donde se vienen a llegar y rrecoger las dichas zuziedades de cada calle y casas, y otras personas que trabaxan en casas, suçias y estelcoleros y enfinitas cosas tales; y todos éstos se vienen a juntar, en particular quando tienen neçeçidad para limpiar de las tales zuçidades susodichas, y otras neçeçidades. [The baths themselves are pools of filth and other such things, for the sick go to them with their various maladies and sores, as well as those who have dirty occupations such as the fisherman, the blacksmith, the coal supplier, the oil supplier, the butcher, those who mash linen to make thread, the skinners who work in the slaughterhouse and outside of it, workers in dirty places such as those who remove waste from the communal septic tanks and sewers where the filth from each street and house is collected, and others who work in dirty homes and dung heaps, and in an infinite number of other things such as those. All of these people come to the baths, particularly when they have need to clean themselves of the aforementioned forms of filth and relieve themselves.] (fol. 320v; pp. 84–85)

49. Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 217.



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While the public baths of Granada do not emerge from the Memorandum as particularly sanitary places (although there is reason to believe that Núñez Muley may actually be exaggerating this point a bit, as his argument—that no Muslim would think of praying there—depends upon convincing his reader of the foulness of the baths), they do appear to have been central to Granadan social life. And given the fact that Granadan Moriscos were prohibited from bathing or washing in the privacy of their homes—as ritual washing is part of Muslim prayer—the baths were also necessary to ensure the health of the community. Another aspect of the cultural practice of Granadan Moriscos that Núñez Muley mentions is the performance of the zambra at celebrations such as weddings. The zambra is a popular form of music accompanied by singing, percussion, and dance that was developed in the Kingdom of Granada during the period of Nas·rid dominance. From the official Castilian perspective, it became associated with Morisco culture as a whole and, erroneously, with Muslim religious observance.50 Changing this perspective is very much at the center of Núñez Muley’s comments regarding the zambra and its use in unambiguously Christian settings: Demás desto puedo dezir que yo serví al santo Alçobispo por tres años y más por paxe, y fuy con él a una vesita que vesitó a todas las Alpuxarras; y en la villa de Uxíxar posava en una casa en lo más alto de la villa, que se dize Albarba; y hera tan lexos la yglesia, tanto como del Audiençia Real a la plaça de Vibarrambla; y la dicha zanbra le aguardava a la puerta de su posada, y, saliendo para yr a la yglesia, tañían todos sus ystrumentos y zanbras que yban delante dél y toda gente que se hallava, hasta

50. García-Arenal presents information from the Inquisition trial of Luis García, a Morisco from Marquesado de los Vélez (Cuenca). According to inquisitors, on Fridays “as part of a celebration and rite of the aforementioned [Muslim] sect, and together with many other persons of his caste and condition, . . . he went to the house of another Morisco of the aforementioned village and performed and sang the zambra, scattering into the fire straw taken from a basket which they held for effect and singing in their language a song,” Mercedes García-Arenal, Inquisición y moriscos: los procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978), 77–78.

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entrar con él en la yglesia; y quando S. Sa. dezía la misa en persona, estava la zanbra en el coro con los clérigos; y en tienpos que avían de tañer los órganos, porque no los avía, rrespondía la zanbra y estrumentos della. [Beyond this, I can say that I served for just over three years as a page to the holy archbishop, and I accompanied him on a visit that he made to all of the Alpujarras. In the town of Ugíjar he stayed in a house located in the highest part of the city, which is called Albarba, and he was as far from the church as the Royal Audiencia is from the Plaza de Bibrambla. And it was a zambra that waited for him at his door, and a zambra that accompanied him as he left the house to walk to mass, with all of the instruments playing and the people walking ahead of him, and even entering into the church with him. And when His Holiness said mass in person, there was a zambra in the choir with the clerics. At the moments when the organ would normally be played, because they didn’t have one, they responded with the zambra and its instruments.] (fol. 319r–v, pp. 81–82)

At once a strong vote of support for the liberal policies of the former archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera (1428–1507), and a defense of the autochthonous culture of Granada, Núñez Muley’s comments about the performance of the zambra in a mass presided over by the archbishop himself are nothing short of striking. The section of the Memorandum that has proven most contentious for modern readers is the section on slavery. As Mármol and Núñez Muley both make clear, prior to 1567 Granadan Moriscos and Old Christians alike had been allowed to own black African slaves. Also living in the Kingdom of Granada were Muslim slaves captured from North Africa (gacis), and the 1567 decree ordered that these were to leave Granada immediately, whether they had been freed or not. The net effect of the decree of 1567 with respect to the black African slave trade in Granada was to revoke the licenses held by Moriscos to own these slaves, while allowing Old Christians to retain theirs. As Mármol presents it (and



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Núñez Muley confirms this), the individual licenses that permitted Granadan Moriscos to own black slaves were to be immediately cancelled and then reconsidered on a case-by-case basis. It should be pointed out that during the sixteenth century (and beyond) neither the Catholic Church nor the majority of Muslim ima¯ms had a significant problem with the African slave trade. In fact, as Garrad points out, most of the black African slaves in the Kingdom of Granada had been brought there from Guinea by (Christian) Portuguese traders.51 Likewise, the enslavement and ransom of shipwrecked and captured Christians was an established practice within Muslim North Africa, as the capture and ransom of North Africans was in Spain. The problem that the Spanish Crown had with the continuation of slavery, at least insofar as it involved the Moriscos of Granada, was twofold. First, there was the belief that the gacis, even those that had been freed and had converted to Christianity, were de facto Muslims living in the newly Christianized region (now a kingdom in name only) of Granada. Their expulsion, regardless of their actual status, was a matter of course as far as royal and Church officials were concerned. With respect to the presence of black Africans in Granada, the official thinking was that the slaves of Granadan Moriscos would likely end up converting to Islam and thus swell the numbers of potentially rebellious subjects within the kingdom. This is an important point to keep in mind: the problem that royal and Church authorities had with Granadan Morisco ownership of black slaves had little to do with the moral issues that revolve around slavery per se; rather, their concern was the pernicious religious and cultural

51. Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 221. The workings of the slave trade in Granada have been dealt with from a variety of perspectives; see Cornell, “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco”; L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 246–250; and Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión (Granada: Universidad de Granada y Área de Mujer de la Diputación Provincial de Granada, 2000). For a broader treatment of the African slave trade, especially insofar as it involved the Portuguese, see Charles Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); and Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London: Picador, 1997).

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effects that prolonged contact with the Moriscos might have upon the Africans. It follows from this selective line of reasoning that Christian slave-owners would logically facilitate the conversion of their black slaves to Christianity whether they freed them or not. Slave ownership was common and largely accepted in sixteenth-century Spain, but this does not excuse the reprehensible nature of Núñez Muley’s comments regarding black Africans While it is true that the Qur’an, the collected sayings of the Prophet (hadı¯th), and the Bible provide numerous verses and statements that support the institution of slavery, there are also several others that condemn it. Whatever we might conclude, Núñez Muley’s comments regarding the need that Granadan Moriscos had of black slaves, and of the inherently “wretched state” of these people, form one of the most troubling and even ironic sections of the Memorandum. One potentially productive way of approaching the question, of course, is to focus on Núñez Muley’s comments in light of his broader rhetorical goals: by highlighting the shared racism of Old and New Christian elites with regard to black Africans, Núñez Muley effectively forms a common cause—or at least a shared ideological perspective—with his Castilian reader, Pedro de Deza. In this sense, Núñez Muley’s racist comments, while most likely sincere, function also as part of the broader strategy of discursive push-and-pull that he employs throughout the Memorandum. Beyond the specific features of Granadan culture described in the Memorandum and the insights that Núñez Muley’s text offers to students and scholars of European colonialism, there is also a broader, more immediate reading that must be considered. Put succinctly, Núñez Muley’s text places into irresolvable doubt the very premises and theoretical frameworks that present “the Muslim world” and “the West” as separate or even separable entities. The Memorandum also offers a very strong argument for revising our understanding of how we see the Spanish nation-state during its period of formation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We need only think of the performance of zambras in a Catholic mass presided over by the archbishop of Granada or the



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accepted use of Arabic responses in that same mass, or even the mixed presence of Old and New Christians in the public baths and wedding celebrations of the kingdom, to see that any notion of Spain as a resolutely Christian nation that somehow “suffered” an eight-century Muslim occupation until its final liberation by the Catholic Monarchs is untenable if not wholly fictional. We may gain a deeper understanding of where such fictions about the Iberian Peninsula’s medieval past lead us by examining an all-too-contemporary retelling of them. On September 21, 2006, former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar gave what has become a famous speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. For the most part his prepared statements, given in English, were what those in attendance might have expected from the former center-right leader of Spain’s government: he expressed his strong belief in the strength of “Western values,” his concerns regarding the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, and his dismay over the “weakness” demonstrated by European leaders in the context of such threats. Certainly his direct critiques of Spain’s government, directed since early 2004 by the Socialist party and its leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, came as no surprise. What stood out in Aznar’s speech was the sincere effort that he made to defend comments made earlier that month by Pope Benedict XVI regarding the status of Islam in the modern world. The pope, while giving a speech on faith and reason at the University of Regensburg in Germany, had based part of his argument on a late fourteenth-century text in which the then–Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425) makes the following claim: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”52 This and other comments made by Benedict XVI in his speech provoked a large

52. Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” speech given at University of Regensburg, 12 Sept. 2006, available at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/15_09_06_pope.pdf (accessed December 2, 2006).

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number of people, including the leaders of some Muslim nations, to launch a series of protests (Morocco, singled out by Aznar as a “moderate” Muslim nation, went so far as to recall its ambassador from Vatican City) and demand that the pope apologize. Aznar, along with several Western politicians, including U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Swiss Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, offered varying degrees of support for the pope’s statements. Couchepin characterized the Regensburg speech as “interesting, intelligent and necessary,”53 while Rice praised Benedict for his “love of humanity” and made the point that “[w]e all need to understand that offense can sometimes be taken when perhaps we don’t see it.”54 Benedict’s comments, made in the context of a broader theological argument and largely mitigated by a trip to Turkey in which the pope very publicly prayed within Istanbul’s Blue Mosque (even facing the qibla while doing so) and offered no fewer than four carefully worded (if not fully convincing) apologies for any offense that his Regensburg talk might have caused, are not necessarily of central concern here. More important is Aznar’s unqualified support of the pope’s comments in the context of his talk at the Hudson Institute. In fact, Aznar goes much further than the pope in his comments regarding Islam and even offers his own theories regarding its place within Spain’s complex history. During the question-and-answer session after Aznar’s talk, a woman with an obvious interest in historical matters asks Aznar the following question (reproduced here as she posed it): I have a very short question, but a historical one, since Spain was the very first country that was attacked by the militant

53. SwissInfo, “Propos du pape sur l’islam: Pascal Couchepin défend le pape” (2006), available at http://www.swissinfo.org/fre/suisse/agences/index/Propos_du_ pape_sur_l_islam_Pascal_Couchepin_defend_le_pape.html?siteSect=113&sid=7071639 &cKey=1158514297000 (accessed December 2, 2006). 54. Condoleeza Rice, interviewed by Robin Roberts of ABC’s Good Morning America, available at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/72642.htm (accessed December 2, 2006).



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Muslims in the years 700, 800. When they came up from the Maghreb and right into Spain and then they were stopped at the Pyrenees; but then they brought with them big advance over what European culture was: they brought the architecture, they brought the warfare, the shipbuilding, the trading, the international trade, the accounting—they gave Europe the numbers. And they stayed in Spain for almost 700 years. And then they were expulsed by Ferdinand [and] Isabella. [ . . . ] Now, almost 700 years [after the Turks conquered Byzantium], the expanding Islam is coming back and attacking Europe and America and everybody else, but this time they are back to Stone Age. How do people in Spain look at this since Spain was the first country attacked by these people?

Aznar’s response to this question made international news, although the text of his response was almost never cited directly, given, one may assume, the liberties that Aznar takes with the rules of English syntax: Really, I confess that I am supporter of Fernando and Isabella, no? [Laughs] For they are two great kings. A great queen. . . . It’s very interesting, because I thought in this day, no? Because when the, a lot of people in the Muslim world claim to, to the pope to apologize for [his] speech, I never listen any Muslim apologize me to conquer Spain and to maintain his presence in Spain during eight centuries. Never. Because I—well what is the reason? Because, we, the Western, always should be apologize and they never, never should be apologize. It’s absurd, no? But we Spaniards know very well what eight centuries, then in Lepanto battle, this is decisive battle for the, for the Christianity in this moment now. Well, my country’s conscious of this situation, but the problem is not in the population; the problem really is in the leadership. And Europe have a lack of leadership. There is a lot soft leaders, weak leaders, “like” leaders if you prefer, “light” leaders, and I think that this moment is a good moment for a strong leaders, for a strong leadership. But it’s necessary, work and work every day to transmit to the

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populations that the threat exist and everybody is under this threat.55

Aznar’s comments regarding the personal apology that he might be owed by Muslims who had conquered and “maintained a presence” in the Iberian Peninsula for eight centuries brought him a good deal of censure and even ridicule from Spanish intellectuals.56 But his comments were already framed in such a way by the woman who asked him that question that one wonders to what extent the charge of anachronism and historical inaccuracy (e.g., conflating al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks with the eighth-century Umayyad caliphate) falls solely at Aznar’s feet. In fact, given the specific points brought up by Núñez Muley in the Memorandum, it is worth looking more closely at the question to which Aznar responds, given that it reflects a number of common misunderstandings that revolve around the interconnecting histories of Islam and the Iberian Peninsula before and just after 1492. The woman begins her question by stating that “Spain was the very first country that was attacked by the militant Muslims in the years 700, 800.” She finishes by linking contemporary jiha¯dı¯ groups with the expansionist Umayyads of the early eighth century, joining both in the phrase “these people.” It must first be understood that at the beginning of the eighth century ce Spain was in no sense a country, but rather part of a loosely held-together conglomeration of territories governed by another group of foreign invaders, the Visigoths. The Visigoths were a Germanic 55. “Global Threats, Atlantic Structures Conference Opening Reception with former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar,” September 21, 2006, available at http:// www.hudson.org/files/audio­_video/Sept21audio.mp3. 56. Juan Goytisolo was perhaps the most direct in his attacks, offering very sarcastic and biting “congratulations” to Aznar for his “deep historical understanding.” I’ve reproduced here a more or less exact transcription of Aznar’s comments at the Hudson Institute in order to give the reader a sense of their tone and precise content. As is also the case with the question to which Aznar responds, his ideas are very much improvised and do not follow any strict logic—a fact that is obscured by the brief paraphrases of his comments (not translated excerpts) that appeared in the European press.



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tribe from what is now Romania that had invaded the peninsula and taken power by force as Rome’s control there began to wane in the early fifth century ce. It was these same Visigoths that had sacked Rome in 410 ce as they moved west under the leadership of Alaric I (ca. 370–410 ce). Beyond the status of the Visigoths as invaders and occupiers of what had previously been the Roman province of Hispania (although even Rome’s dominion over the various regions of the Iberian Peninsula had never been complete), it should be noted that their regime functioned as a kind of superficial layer of governance placed on top of the existing Hispano-Roman populace. In fact, there is a good deal of evidence, such as the continued use of Latin as an administrative and literary language during the Visigothic period, to suggest that the Visigoths were more altered by their contact with Ibero-Romans than the populace was altered by their new rulers. Another point that goes against the notion that we can justifiably connect the kingdom of the Visigoths with modern Spain in any direct way is the fact that large northern sections of the Iberian Peninsula always remained outside of Visigothic control. It was in fact the movement of a significant number of troops to the northern borders of the kingdom to battle the Basques and the Franks, as well as the inherent weaknesses of the Visigothic regime itself, that opened up the way for Muslim troops to take a good deal of peninsular land very quickly in those first decades of the eighth century. The cruel anti-Semitism of the Visigothic regime after its official switch from Aryanism to Roman Catholicism, as well as the relative tolerance and efficiency of the new Muslim governors, might also lead us to wonder why Spaniards such as Aznar would ever want to frame their national history in such a way as to privilege the relatively modest (but undeniably Christian) contributions of the Visigoths and treat the Umayyads and their successors as unwelcome occupiers that are in some way analogous to contemporary Islamic terrorists such as Osa¯ma bin La¯din or Ayman al-Dhawa¯hirı¯. Even if we push this question to the side, however, it is necessary to understand that “Spain”

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(as in the sovereign nation with a capital in Madrid that forms part of the United Nations General Assembly) did not exist to be attacked in the eighth century. To claim otherwise invites other anachronisms, such as, for example, speaking of the early conquest of California by Spaniards as in some sense an invasion of the United States. If it is anachronistic to speak of Spain or Portugal as “countries” that were invaded by Muslims in the eighth century, it is equally dubious to refer to these invading forces as religiously “militant” in any real sense. Most of the Muslims who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 ce and shortly afterward were Berbers—indigenous North Africans that not long before had fought hard to halt the westward expansion of Arab Muslims— who had only recently converted to Islam for reasons that were as much pragmatic as spiritual. And while it is true that Islam quickly spread throughout the southern Iberian Peninsula after the initial Umayyad victories, this was due to a process of widespread and for the most part unforced conversion on the part of the Christians who had previously lived under Visigothic rule and not the result of any significant influx of Arabs and Berbers into the peninsula. That the Umayyad caliph himself called back to Damascus the governor who had authorized the initial invasion of 711 reveals, if nothing else, the fact that this invasion was fueled as much by calculated, imperial ambitions as religious fervor. The woman’s next comment is somewhat more measured in that she tries to enumerate the many contributions that Iberian Muslims made to Europe. However, she ends with a statement that is as erroneous as it is common among even scholars with a significant understanding of European culture and history: “And they [i.e., the Muslims] stayed in Spain for almost 700 years. And then they were expulsed by Ferdinand [and] Isabella.” This statement is, to makes things perfectly clear, untrue. While it is fair to say that there was a significant Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula from the early eighth century until the conquest of Granada at the end of the fifteenth century (a period of almost eight hundred years), this presence extended for over a century



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after 1492 in the form of secret Islamic observance in areas such as Aragon and Valencia.57 And, as Núñez Muley emphatically and repeatedly reminds his reader, the Catholic Monarchs at no point showed much serious interest in plans to expel their Muslim subjects as they had the Jews. Whether this is a question of affinity or merely an example of the Catholic Monarchs’ pragmatism when it came to their new Muslim subjects (in terms of realpolitik, how can one realistically expel several hundred thousand revenueproducing and tax-paying people and their families when the royal treasury is nearly empty from a long series of civil wars and foreign campaigns?) is a question that can be debated. But what cannot be denied is that the social politics of the Catholic Monarchs with regard to Iberian Muslims under their control were relatively laissez-faire, especially in light of the untold suffering that their policies visited upon Iberian Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity after 1492. Of course, when Aznar responds to the woman’s question with what he characterizes as a confession (“Really, I confess that I am supporter of Fernando and Isabella, no? [Laughs] For they are two great kings. A great queen.”), he is referring neither to the intolerant and myopic Catholic Monarchs who expelled the Jews nor to the more pragmatic Catholic Monarchs who to a significant degree left their Muslim subjects alone. Rather, the Catholic Monarchs to whom Aznar refers here are the mythical rulers of a unified and Catholic Spain that formed the ideological backbone of the Francoist dictatorship that ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975, a regime for which Aznar has expressed his support throughout his life.58 It is, in the end, Aznar and his interlocutor’s joint conflation of medieval and contemporary history—a move that inevitably serves to privilege the values and goals of the modern West over those of its “Stone Age” Muslim counterparts—that most clearly echoes the 57. For more on the secret Islamic observance of the Moriscos, see Barletta, Covert Gestures; Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614; and Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de los moriscos: vida y tragedia de una minoría (Madrid: Alianza, 1985). 58. An in-depth analysis of the imagery of the Catholic Monarchs in Francoist Spain can be found in Barbara Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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arguments and policies against which Núñez Muley so tirelessly labors in his Memorandum. Read in light of contemporary concerns over the tremendous misunderstandings that continue to exist between Christians and Muslims—whether in the same neighborhood in Paris, London, Madrid, or Los Angeles, or people who live on different continents—Núñez Muley’s Memorandum offers both a cautionary tale and a potential corrective to the politics of intolerance, ignorance, and xenophobia that run through both Aznar’s speech at the Hudson Institute and his unrehearsed comments during the question-and-answer session that followed it. His final comment in the citation reproduced above is especially chilling: “But it’s necessary, work and work every day to transmit to the populations that the threat exist and everybody is under this threat.” It is important to point out that the “threat” to which Aznar refers is not necessarily al-Qaeda, or even Islamic terrorist groups in general, but rather what he calls “an assertive Islam” that seems to be, in his mind as well as that of the woman who asked him the question regarding Spain’s (and Portugal’s) Islamic past, a direct descendant of T·a¯riq ibn Ziyya¯d and the eighth-century Umayyads who invaded the Iberian Peninsula. To work to correct such errors and misconceptions is a lot to ask of a relatively short letter written by an elderly man on the eve of the Second War in the Alpujarras (1568–1570), but then so many of the issues that Núñez Muley claims to be “well known” (notorios) by his neighbors seem to have been largely ignored by royal and Church officials at the time and relegated nearly to oblivion by popular modern accounts of Spain’s past. The general appeal that Núñez Muley makes in his text is that royal authorities first get their facts straight and adopt if not the more liberal policies of the Catholic Monarchs and former Granadan archbishop Talavera, then at least pragmatic ones that reflect a more sober and informed appraisal of the situation. At the very least, Núñez Muley’s Memorandum provides a striking example of the political and cultural heterogeneity that has been a central feature of European nation-states such as Spain and Portugal from the time that they took their very first, tentative steps.

A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada

m A memorandum for the most illustrious and reverend president of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of this renowned and great city of Granada and of its kingdom,1 regarding the problems about which His Most Reverend Lordship should be informed with respect to the decree that has recently been publicly proclaimed. In order that His Lordship might be informed of the truth, and thus advocate for the natives [naturales] of this kingdom with His Majesty and the high lords of his Royal Council (given that the situation here was presented to His Majesty exclusively through the accounts of prelates and others),2 I will speak to the extent that my humble judgment and memory permit. 1. The Royal Audiencia of Granada, in effect a royal appellate court, was the highest judicial body in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth century, its counterpart in the north being the Royal Audiencia of Valladolid. The president of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of Granada in 1567 was Pedro de Deza Manuel (1520–1600), who in 1578 would be elevated to cardinal by Pope Gregory XIII. Deza was known to be a firm supporter of the hard line taken by Felipe II and others against the Moriscos, and Núñez Muley had to be aware that there was little chance that Deza would be swayed by any of the arguments contained in the Memorandum. 2. The Royal Council to which Núñez Muley refers here is that presided over by Diego de Espinosa (1513–1572). It was this council, with Espinosa leading the way, that arranged to have Deza appointed to the presidency of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of Granada in 1566. The “rrelaçiones de prelados y otras personas” [accounts of prelates and others] are, as Garrad points out, the proposals for Morisco reform that came out of the provincial ecclesiastical council presided over by Granadan archbishop Pedro Guerrero Logroño in 1565. See Kenneth Garrad, “The Original Memorial of Don Francisco Núñez Muley,” Atlante 2 (1954): 204n.1. For more on this provincial council and Guerrero’s zeal for ecclesiastical and social reform, see David Coleman, Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2003), 179–81.

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In the first place, the decree states that when the aforementioned natives of this kingdom converted to our Holy Catholic faith they also agreed to change their style of dress and assimilate fully.3 I do not believe that anyone in this kingdom remembers having agreed to such a pact or agreement, which has actually never existed. In any case, such a pact or agreement has never appeared in written form, nor do I believe it ever will, because the conversion of the natives of this kingdom occurred by force and against the terms of the agreement signed by the Catholic Monarchs [Fernando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile] and King Muley Boabdili, 4 who was ruler of this kingdom, as well as by some of his captains, who signed it with their own names. Both parts of this document consist of more than forty chapters, and they were drawn up and agreed to by all parties at the time that the king and the city’s captains [alcades] handed over the city and its corresponding kingdom.5 What was stipulated in the terms of surrender was that the Granadans would remain Muslims and not be forced to surrender all the items that they had made use of in their mosques, nor their judges, their religious leaders [almotís] and teachers [alfaquís],6 nor the rents they received from lands

3. The phrase that Núñez Muley employs is “asentaron que avían de mudar el ábito y se perdiese la memoria antigua,” which reads literally, “they agreed that they had to change [their] clothing and [that their] ancient memory should be lost.” ¯ ˛ 4. The king of Granada at the time of its conquest by the Catholic Monarchs was Abu Abd Allah Mohammed XII (1460–1527), although Castilian Christians commonly re· ferred to him as “Boabdil.” Núñez Muley’s placement of “Muley” before his name reflects the common Arabic practice of placing the term maulá (lord) before a ruler’s name. 5. The word that Núñez Muley uses for ‘judges’ is alcades (and at times, alcaldes) a Castilianized version of the Arabic al-qadi (judge). At times, however, he also writes · alcaide (“captain”) as alcade, which can cause confusion. In this case, it seems clear that it was the Nas·rid king and his captains who handed over the city to the Catholic Monarchs. The original manuscript of the Capitulations of Granada is currently held in the Archive of the Ayuntamiento de Granada. For an English version of the Capitulations of Granada, see Geoffrey Symcox, Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 62–64. For a longer analysis of the conquest and capitulations of Granada, see Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Castilla y la conquista del Reino de Granada (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1988); and Miguel Garrido Atienza, Las capitulaciones para la entrega de Granada (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1992). 6. As is the case with “‘judges’” (alcades), these terms are Castilianized versions of the Arabic al-muftı¯ (Islamic religious authority), and al-faqı¯h (Islamic religious teacher).



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attached to their mosques.7 It was also stipulated that they would not be forced to become Christians, as well as other things stated in more detail in the aforementioned privilege and its chapters, the original of which came into the hands of Don Pedro Vanegas (now deceased),8 to whom it was brought by one Juan Alarif, the proxy of the Duke of Candia, who had found it among the books of Hernando de Zafra, who had been the secretary of the Catholic Monarchs. Your Most Reverend Lordship can request and consult it, and see copies [traslados] of it that have been and are parts of claims and suits that have been filed in this city and in this Royal Audiencia (the secretaries of the Royal Audiencia will have copies of it), as this is what was agreed to and contracted in this city and its corresponding kingdom. As for what was ordered in the city of Seville by the queen Doña Juana, our Lady,9 may she be glorified: In the city of Seville on June 20, 1511, it was ordered that the tailors and officials who made clothing for the natives of that city cease doing so, and that the tailors even cease cutting cloth so that others might make them clothing, and that within six years’ time all existing articles of native clothing be worn out and discarded. Among other things, it was ordered in this provision that the natives cease slaughtering animals as they had before and begin doing so as is the custom now,10 and that they not take other natives as 7. As Garrad points out, these properties, known as habices, constituted land bequeathed to the mosque by pious members of the community (Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 204n.7). See also María del Carmen Villanueva Rico, Habices de las mezquitas de la ciudad de Granada y sus Alquerías (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura, 1961). 8. The “privilege” (previlegio) to which ˛ Núñez Muley refers here is that agreed to by the Catholic Monarchs and King Abu¯ Abd Allah of Granada at the time of the Christian conquest in late 1491. Pedro Vanegas was born Sı¯dı¯ Yah·yá before converting to Christianity and becoming chief constable (alguazil mayor) of Granada after the Catholic Monarchs took the city. 9. A reference to Juana I (1479–1555), who briefly ruled Castile after the death of her husband, Felipe I, in 1506. She was ultimately deemed mentally ill and unfit to serve as queen, and her father, Fernando II, was forced to serve as regent of Castile until his own death in 1516. After his death, Juana and Felipe’s eldest son, Carlos (1500–1558), ascended to the throne. The 1511 Seville decree to which Núñez Muley refers was in fact ordered by Fernando, who was by then acting as regent. 10. The method for h ala¯l slaughter within Islam, known as dhabı¯h a, is very precise. · · First, the animal must not be of a forbidden variety, such as swine. Second, the one who

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godparents.11 There are other things that I cannot remember, but they are contained and stipulated in the aforementioned provision, which was part of the public record and proclaimed in this city and its corresponding kingdom. At more or less the same time, in 1508, a similar letter and provision were drafted in Burgos, but these were not made public nor proclaimed; it could be that they were and I do not remember, but there is also no one else who remembers any such proclamation. Concerning what the decree states regarding the provision that was supposedly adopted in the city of Valladolid on July 29, 1513, I can state that said provision was never published nor proclaimed; nor do I remember, or know anyone who might remember, if it was ever written down. I say this because in 1513 I served with other high-ranking men [caballeros] from among the natives of this kingdom in negotiations that had been convened with His Highness the Catholic King, may he be glorified. No such provision came to our attention then, and in fact in the same year or afterward, His Highness published a provision, among others, that supported the natives of this kingdom. This provision essentially ordered a certain number of days in jail and a fine for any Old Christian, of any social rank whatsoever, who uncovered the face of a Muslim woman, or removed her outer garment [almalafa], or insulted her while in processions or in the streets, plazas, or other public place. This provision was published and proclaimed in this city and outside of it during the time that either Hernán de Arias

slaughters the animal must be an adult Muslim and possess knowledge regarding the significance of and reasons for dhabı¯h a. During slaughter, the animal is first checked to · make sure that it is in good health; then it is given some water, and its head is turned toward Mecca. Before killing the animal, the slaughterer recites the following prayer: Bismillahi, Allahu Akbar (In the name of God, God is the Most Great). Then, using a knife with an extremely sharp, smooth blade, the slaughterer must, in a single, swift motion, sever the animal’s trachea, esophagus, and major arteries. The spinal cord must not be severed, and all of the animal’s blood must be drained from it. 11. As Garrad points out, the Moriscos were not allowed to take other Moriscos as sponsors for weddings or baptisms, as the Christian authorities feared that they would practice Islamic rites at some point during the proceedings (“The Original Memorial,” 205n.2).



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or Juan de Arias de Saavedra were magistrates of this city. The scribe that copied out the provision was Hernando Díaz de Valdepeñas, former public scribe of the city, and it was the late Don Diego el Garruz and I who had the proceedings proclaimed. There is also what was decreed in 1518 in Valladolid by the Emperor our King, may he be glorified.12 The first year that he came from Flanders to rule in Castile, because the Catholic King had died a year earlier in 1517,13 a small number of nobles from this kingdom went in the company of the Marqués de Mondéjar to kiss the hands of His Royal Majesty and congratulate him on his arrival to rule in these his kingdoms.14 At that time certain agreements were reached, as much to the benefit of His Majesty as to the natives of this kingdom, according to which we were to pay to His Majesty a tax of 21,000 ducats.15 His father, King Felipe,16 had not seen fit to collect the aforementioned 21,000 ducats that had previously been paid by the natives of this kingdom, and these were in fact not collected for two years until the time

12. A reference to Carlos I of Spain (1500–1558), who, as Holy Roman Emperor, was also known as Charles V. The son of Juana I and Felipe I, he was born and raised in the Burgundian Netherlands and only arrived in Spain when he was seventeen years old. 13. Núñez Muley gives the wrong date here for the death of King Fernando. He actually died on June 23, 1516. 14. Núñez Muley is speaking of Luis Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco (1489–1566), the second Marqués de Mondéjar and the grandson of the famous Castilian poet Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458). Luis Hurtado de Mendoza also served as captain-general of Granada from 1515 to 1543. Coleman, Creating Christian Granada, 75. 15. Garrad provides a long note explaining the various taxes (servicios or fardas) that Granadan Moriscos were compelled to pay. The first of these was the farda mayor, which consisted of an ordinary tax (servicio ordinario) of 21,000 ducats per year; a royal palace construction tax (servicio de la obra de la casa real) that amounted to 90,000 ducats and financed the construction of Carlos V’s palace in the Alhambra; and an “extraordinary tax” (servicio extraordinario) that was to be used according to the king’s discretion. The second category of taxes was the farda menor, which financed the patrolling of Spain’s southern coast and was also known as the “sea tax” (farda del mar). Everyone owning land was responsible to pay these taxes, which were assessed annually by the various city and town councils of the kingdom, Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 206n.1. 16. This is a reference to Felipe I, who was married to the Catholic Monarchs’ daughter Juana and served as regent of Castile for two years before his premature death on September 25, 1506.

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of his death.17 Among the things that His Majesty assented to in Valladolid in 1518, at least with respect to those things that benefited the natives of this kingdom, was the suspension of the laws preventing Morisco women from dressing in their traditional manner and the suspension of the laws preventing weavers and tailors from producing Morisco clothing and other cloth items. And it was under these conditions that the tax of 21,000 ducats was authorized to be paid to His Majesty.18 All of this can be found in the books of Commander Francisco de los Cobos, secretary to His Majesty, as well as in the books of Domingo Pérez, who served as principal scribe of the agreement. In Granada there is also a provision and writ that took effect in 1518 that suspends the decree prohibiting the wearing, weaving, and elaboration of Morisco clothing. These documents, along with another provision, are in the power of my nephew Don Hernando Muley, who is the son of the now-deceased Don Álvaro. His grandfather, my late uncle Don Hernando de Fez, had brought them to him.19 These documents were executed by Juan de Castorga, scribe to His Majesty, and they declare the suspension of the decrees regarding dress restrictions for New Christian women.20 As part of this provision, the local magistrates also ordered that the clothing and gold jewelry previously taken from prostitutes [mugeres enamoradas] by this city’s constables be returned to them. In this way will Your Lordship find it ordered in 17. Here it is more or less unclear what is written in the manuscript. Garrad transcribes it as “uvo dos años” (two years earlier); however, in the manuscript the line seems to read “turó dos años” (it lasted two years). “The Original Memorial,” 206. 18. What is implied here is that the Moriscos of Granada essentially bought a reprieve from Charles V. This was neither the first nor the last time that Granadan Moriscos would successfully bribe a royal official or even the king himself. 19. For more on Núñez Muley’s family, see María Jesús Rubiera Mata, “La familia morisca de Muley-Fez, príncipes meriníes e infantes de Granada,” Sharq al-Andalus 13 (1996): 159–167. 20. The term “New Christian” (cristiano nuevo) refers to Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity and their descendants. It is a more general term than “Morisco” (i.e., Muslim converts) and “Converso” (i.e., Jewish converts), and it of course has meaning only in relation to the term “Old Christian” (cristiano viejo), or those with no Jewish or Muslim ancestry.



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the presence of Juan Díaz, public scribe, and by Montalegre, who succeeded Pedro Méndez in the office of Cathedral scribe. In 1532 and 1540, Archbishop Gaspar de Ávalos,21 citing a provision of the Congregation chapter (of 1526),22 called on some of the residents of Güejar Sierra to remove women’s veils and in the process caused a revolt.23 The president of the Royal Audiencia at the time was the Marqués de Mondéjar, and the protesters begged him to get involved due to the issue with the veils, the archbishop’s stationing of police on the roads with orders to burn the packsaddles of those who traveled before mass,24 his use of the police to catch those persons who might be found engaging in Morisco song, music, or leylas (the latter meaning to stay up all night dancing and singing to the aforementioned music), and various other fines and penalties that went to the detriment of the natives. Having seen all this, some of the city leaders submitted a petition to the Marqués, the president, and the regional governor, who was then Hernán de Arias, in the municipal council of Granada. They complained of what the archbishop was doing, and the case was assigned to the aforementioned regional governor along with two council members, one of the latter being Juan 21. Gaspar de Ávalos de la Cueva (1485–1545) was a Hieronymite monk who studied theology at the Universities of Paris and Salamanca. He became Archbishop of Granada in 1529 and was promoted to cardinal in 1544. 22. The term “congregation chapter” (capítulo de la congregación) refers to a meeting held by the representatives of a given ecclesiastical community or congregation to make decisions regarding the community’s spiritual and practical affairs. In this case, Núñez Muley assumes that Archbishop de Ávalos was carrying out the provisions of the 1526 congregation chapter, but as Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 207n.1, points out, he may have been acting on the orders of Carlos V’s wife (and first cousin), Queen Isabel de Avis (1503–1539). Isabel was the daughter of Manuel I of Portugal (1469–1521) and his second wife, María of Aragon and Castile (1482–1517), who, like Carlos V’s own mother, was the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs. 23. Güejar Sierra is a small town approximately ten miles east of Granada. The manuscript reads “Y en el tienpo quel señor Alçobispo Gaspar Dávalos en el año de treynta y dos e cuarenta” [And in the time that Archbishop Gaspar de Ávalos in the year of 32 and 40], which suggests either that there were two separate attempts made by the archbishop to put into effect his wishes or that the original attempt took place in 1532 and the matter was not resolved until 1540. 24. Archbishop de Ávalos was concerned that Moriscos would travel on Sundays in order to avoid going to mass.

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de Trillo and the other Hernán de Álvarez, now both deceased. These three went to speak with the archbishop with the purpose of negotiating with him so that the situation would not escalate.25 They were unable to make any headway with the archbishop, and while I’m not sure if the order was given by the municipal council or in consultation with the president and the auditors (and I don’t remember who finally made the decision), the effect was that it was proclaimed in all of Granada, and under the windows of the archbishop’s house itself, that no one should obey any of the orders given by the archbishop in his proclamation, except insofar as these dealt directly with Church matters. The order also provided specific penalties for those who failed to comply. In this way the archbishop’s plans to force the natives in Güejar Sierra to give up their traditional style of dress were put to a halt, and the penalties and imprisonment ordered for those who were sanctioned for singing and dancing by His Lordship and his diocesan judge were dismissed. These acts and the proclamation can be found among the books of the municipal council and its scribe from the time when Hernán de Arias was regional governor. In all of this His Majesty, the president, and various judges ruled in favor of the natives. At this time and in relation to all of the business described above, the distinguished Licenciate Luzón, a magistrate, went to the archbishop’s house to take someone into custody over this matter. According to what witnesses said, Luzón found the archbishop there and the two exchanged words. The archbishop supposedly said to the judge, “You enter my house to search and make arrests?” Luzón then informed him that he indeed had the power to do so. At some point in their conversation Luzón also asked the archbishop, “Is Your Lordship not aware that a magistrate has the power to hang bishops and archbishops, and that it 25. “para que no llegase a términos de Regolidad” [so that it might not reach terms of Regolidad]. It is not clear what the term Regolidad means here, though Garrad suggests that it means “rigor” (“The Original Memorial,” 207). In any case, what seem to be implied is that the three men went to speak to the archbishop so that the matter might be settled “out of court.”



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has occurred in the past?”26 This exchange took place in the context of the events described above. The congregation chapter that Gaspar de Ávalos used to justify his actions was not published nor proclaimed; the archbishop merely wished to use his own authority to make official what I’ve discussed above, even going so far as to have it proclaimed. And all that occurred in this matter revolved around the natives’ mode of dress, as was the case with the aforementioned provision that was given in Valladolid—which, in effect, was suspended by the decree dealing with manners of dress and clothing that was given in 1518 when we were in the court of His Majesty (Carlos I). While His Majesty was here in the city of Granada, we paid him 90,000 ducats—80,000 for His Majesty and 10,000 in order that His Majesty might gain the support of the many nobles, officials,

26. Luzón is referring to the case of Antonio Osorio de Acuña (1459–1526), the former bishop of Zamora. Osorio de Acuña was imprisoned and later hanged in Simancas for his role in the Comuneros Revolt. As Coleman (Creating Christian Granada, 126) explains, “Luzón may or may not have known that [this reference] carried particular significance to Archbishop Ávalos, whose extended family included many comuneros, above all the rebellion’s leading figure, Juan de Padilla.” For more on this issue, see Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 213, and idem, “The Causes of the Second Rebellion of the Alpujarras, 1568–1571” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1955), 205. On the execution of Antonio Osorio de Acuña, Henry Charles Lea writes the following: It has been sometimes thought that the Inquisition was concerned in the trial and execution of Antonio de Acuña, Bishop of Zamora, but such was not the fact, although the case illustrates the difficulty of holding a bishop accountable for his misdeeds. That turbulent prelate, somewhat absurdly styled a second Luther by Leo X, was an active leader in the Comunidades, who, after the defeat at Villalar, April 21, 1521, fled in disguise but was caught at Villamediana, on the Castilian border. Episcopal immunity rendered him a doubtful prize; Charles V was resolved on his death, but there was considerable doubt as to how he was to be punished. The Inquisition was not brought into play but, after some negotiation, Leo X was induced to issue a commission to Cardinal Adrian and the nuncio to take testimony and forward it for judgement by the pope in consistory. On Adrian’s accession to the papacy he transferred the commission to the Archbishop of Granada and the Bishop of Ciudad-Rodrigo, but gave no authority to employ torture. Then Clement VII, by a brief of March 27, 1524, granted faculties to proceed to extremities, under which the trial went on, but apparently died out when carried to Rome. Wearied with five years’ confinement in the castle of Simancas, Acuña made a fruitless attempt to escape, in which he killed the alcaide, Mendo Noguerol. Charles then sent to Simancas his alcalde de casa y corte, Rodrigo Ronquillo, with instructions to torture Acuña and put him to death—instructions faithfully executed, March 23, 1526. This violation of the immunities

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and persons who were involved in the matter.27 After six years we had paid the entire sum of 90,000 ducats (paying 15,000 each year), and we then agreed to pay 60,000 more—50,000 going directly to His Majesty and the other 10,000 to persons of His Majesty’s choosing and those who succeeded them in their positions. This type of payment is known as the “royal palace construction tax,” and it amounted to (six) yearly payments of 10,000 ducats along with 21,000 ducats of ordinary tax and 5,000 of extraordinary tax.28 With other costs added in, the total yearly payment to His Majesty thus came to 37,500 ducats (the annual payments were definitely less than 38,000 ducats). These payments, agreed to for the reasons I have described above and will continue to describe further on, ensured that the natives could retain their traditional clothing, customs, and footwear as long as these did not conflict with the rules of the Holy Catholic faith. We agreed to pay the tax of 90,000 ducats to His Majesty at the time during which he was residing in the Alhambra of this city for the following reasons: because in 1517 some of our neighbors in this city, especially the officials, merchants, and tailors who wove and cut Morisco clothing for the natives, were compelled to cease doing so. This happened because the six-year period authorized in Seville by His Majesty the Catholic King (may he be glorified), during which time it was permitted to weave and cut Morisco

of the Church caused no little scandal. Charles speedily obtained for himself, from Clement, absolution from the ipso facto excommunication incurred, but that which he had promised to procure for his subordinates was granted with difficulty and only after delay of more than a year, the final ceremony not taking place until September 8, 1527. From History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1906–7), 2: 44–45. 27. Ducats were widely used coins throughout the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period. They uniformly weighed 3.494 grams and were minted of .986 pure gold. Given that the price of gold fluctuated in the sixteenth century as it does today, it is difficult to determine with any precision the real value of the Moriscos’ tax payments at the time that they made them; however, it is clear from Núñez Muley’s statements that these payments were significant and burdensome. 28. The unfinished palace of Carlos V in Granada is located in the Alhambra, just to the east of the Plaza de los Aljibes. It was begun in 1526 by painter and architect Pedro Machuca and largely financed by the taxes—which once again amount to a series of coerced bribes—paid by Granadan Moriscos and described by Núñez Muley.



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clothing, had expired.29 It was for this reason that the aforementioned parties had agreed to pay His Highness 80,000 ducats so as to be allowed to continue producing Morisco clothing. The cease and desist order given in 1511 was not observed because the leaders of this city were not in favor of it. In fact, the old Marqués de Mondéjar, the Conde de Tendilla (may he be glorified), was not even aware of the order.30 The only ones aware of it were those present in the house of Don Miguel de León el Zahardrí, a municipal council member, along with the regional governor, Juan Vázquez Coronado, when it was authorized. The order was not put into effect because it was never approved by the requisite parties. Don Antonio de la Cueva, the regional governor appointed after the aforementioned Juan Vázquez, also attempted to put it into effect, but since neither the Marqués de Mondéjar nor the leaders of this city ever saw it, the order remained without any sort of binding power until in 1518 the aforementioned agreement with His Majesty regarding the continued production of Morisco clothing was reached, according to which we would pay His Majesty the aforementioned yearly tax [servicio] of 21,000 ducats and a total of 90,000 ducats for the time that His Majesty resided in the Alhambra. Although some of the natives complained about having to pay such a large tax to His Majesty beyond the normal 21,000 ducats, the Marqués de Mondéjar and the leaders of this city and beyond agreed that it was right to pay him, given that he was newly arrived to his kingdom and, in any case, there had been a similar agreement in place before, for 80,000 ducats, with the Catholic King (may he be glorified). All of this was established, one thing after the other, due to the issue of dress and clothing, and in this way the ban on said clothing was

29. A reference to the royal decree executed in Seville on June 20, 1511 (see note 9). 30. The Conde de Tendilla to whom Núñez Muley refers is Íñigo López de Mendoza y Quiñones (1440–1515), the second Conde de Tendilla and first Marqués de Mondéjar, who is often referred to as “The Great Tendilla” (El Gran Tendilla). The Catholic Monarchs awarded him the important position of captain-general of Granada in 1492 due to his military leadership during the wars against Muslim Granada. After his death, the position of captain-general was passed on to his son Luis Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco (1489–1566) and then to his grandson Íñigo López de Mendoza y Mendoza (1512–1580).

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suspended many times. As for the present moment, there is no reason that the kingdom should be lost altogether, as all the aforementioned measures were taken in the past regarding the natives’ dress and clothing. Your Lordship, overwhelming harm would be done to the natives by taking away their traditional style of dress, and great injury would also be done to those merchants who have invested their wealth in purchasing cloth for such clothing.31 Given that the issue of clothing and dress has been presented to you in such a summary fashion, it may seem a much smaller matter than it really is. However, looked at in all its particulars and generalities, Your Lordship will see that any arguments in favor of the recent decree simply do not understand its implications. I do not mean thousands, but rather millions in this kingdom who will be harmed by taking away their traditional clothing: it is well known that in this kingdom there are 50,000 native (male) inhabitants, and in each house there are three women (a mother and two daughters), which means that 150,000 individuals would be forced to change their manner of dress, among whom only 4,000 to 5,000 would have the means to do so.32 The others would be forced to sell or pawn items in order to purchase new garments. And what would they sell? They might try to sell or pawn the jewels that they had sewn into their clothing to keep secure for a time of need, but who would want to purchase them given that they would now be worth nothing? And what of the merchants who have their wealth invested in such clothing and other related things? One might ask why existing Morisco clothing might not simply be recut to fashion Castilian-style clothing. In the first place, the former is very short and adorned with cloth that wraps around it,33 and there is really no way to do anything

31. The phrase here, “y de sus ofiçiales que bibían y tenían sus caudales empreados” [and of their officials who lived and had their wealth invested] can also be understood to refer to the servicios that the Moriscos paid to Carlos V. However, given the arguments of the following section, it seems more likely that Núñez Muley is referring to the financial ruin that will be faced by Morisco merchants involved in the cloth trade. 32. Here Núñez Muley may well be confusing “millions” with “hundreds of thousands.” 33. “ellas son cortas y gironadas.”



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with it. It follows then that a vast amount of this clothing will be discarded, and this will greatly diminish royal rents as well as all things related to the taxes paid to the Royal Crown. In years past, others and I have considered the impact that all of this might have. Nevertheless, a congregation was held in the Royal Chapel by His Majesty’s council,34 and this is what provoked it: the visit that Don Gaspar de Ávalos made to the Alpujarras and other places, and the information that he obtained from clerics working for him. His minister on this visit was a priest who was also one of the natives of this city and thus had great knowledge of native practices. He went to the house of the Honorable Licenciate [Luis de] Polanco, who was at the time the senior member of the Royal Council, complaining of the clerics and of the abuses that they committed against the natives of this kingdom. He did this without first consulting with the leaders of the city and those with an understanding of these matters, and it seems that he filed a petition before the council, signed by some native friends of his, formally complaining about the clerics. He did all this thinking that he was doing something good for his native community; however, he in fact committed a grave error, given that the petition came to the attention of the clerics named in the complaint and these eventually obtained legal representation from the head abbot of the Church of San Salvador del Albaicín (who was some member of the del Pardo family), and contradicted the petition. As a result of this, the clerics and the natives found themselves on opposing sides of this case, and His Majesty sent Don Gaspar de Ávalos himself to the Alpujarras and other areas to get information on the daily life of the natives of this kingdom. His principal informants were the very clerics who 34. This is a reference to the Royal Chapel Congregation called by Carlos V and held in Granada in 1526. This meeting of the Royal Chapel Council adopted extraordinarily tough measures against the Moriscos of Granada. Among those who participated in this meeting were Gaspar de Ávalos (then the bishop of Guadix, though he would become archbishop of Granada two years later), Fray García de Loaysa (Carlos V’s confessor), and Fray Pedro de Alva (the incoming archbishop of Granada). For more on this meeting and its significance for the 1567 decree against which Núñez Muley argues in his Memorandum, see Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 209; and L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 107–108.

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had been named in the petition filed by the Morisco priest, and Your Most Reverend Lordship can imagine what sort of information he brought back. In any case, it was based on this report that the Royal Chapel Council offered its judgment, a document that contained many rulings that went to the detriment of the natives of this kingdom and against their privileges and provisions; and it is in reference to this document that some speak of the existence of “provisions and warrants” that support various parts of the new decree. His Majesty realized then that the aforementioned rulings adopted by the Royal Chapel Council at their congregation chapter went to the detriment of his vassals, and so these did not move forward or go into effect at the time, except for two that were necessary. In the first place, His Majesty approved the ruling that ordered that the Holy Office of the Inquisition be established in the city; although before he left this matter His Majesty did great benefit to the natives of this kingdom by sending for Don Alonso Manrique, who at that time was serving as archbishop of Seville and inquisitor-general.35 He then requested from the Holy Father (Pope Clement VII) a general pardon for all of the natives of this kingdom, which the latter granted to His Majesty. At this time His Majesty also ordered that all the preachers were to proclaim from their pulpits the grace that His Holiness (the Pope) had conceded to him as king and patron of this kingdom, given that His Majesty’s ancestors, the Catholic Monarchs, had redeemed it. It was also declared that this pardon would not be extended to three types of person: any religious teacher [alfakí] who taught the precepts of Islam; a surgeon who had resumed performing circumcisions; and I cannot remember the third.36 In this way the pardon was 35. Alonso Manrique de Lara y Solís (ca. 1470–1538) was a former chancellor of the University of Salamanca and professor of Greek at Alcalá de Henares. He became archbishop of Seville in 1523, and was named inquisitor-general and member of the Royal Council by Carlos V in that same year. He was promoted to cardinal in 1531 by Pope Clement VII and died in Seville seven years later from a fall from a horse. 36. Based on his research, Garrad suggests that “the third exception to the general pardon was probably the case of those who had contracted marriage within the forbidden degrees, a practice common among the Moriscos.” “The Original Memorial,” 210n.4.



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put into effect and executed by the inquisitors that were in the city at the time, and they gave out punishments and performed their duties in accordance with the aforementioned pardon. The second resolution had to do with the ruling on clothing and dress that had been declared in the chapter [capítulo] before this one.37 Given that His Majesty realized the harm that this ruling would cause to the natives of this kingdom, he suspended it and further ordered that it not be complied with or carried out. It was around this time that some twenty-plus of us city leaders entered into the royal quarters of the Alhambra, together with the Marqués de Mondéjar (may he be glorified), to kiss His Majesty’s hands for the kindness he had shown us in this matter. At that time, His Majesty ordered the Marqués to write to him and inform him in the future of what might best suit his vassals in this kingdom in this and all other matters that affected them, as it was his desire always to provide them with what they required. The Marqués responded to His Majesty that he would do so “exactly as Your Majesty commands.” All of this and what I have described above was ordered so as to support this kingdom in its desire to maintain its traditional style of dress, which in no way goes against the Holy Catholic faith, and that its people should continue to enjoy their customs and celebrations as they have done for many years up to the present since their conversion, and not pressure or harass them in all ways and manners, such as what is being ordered now in the current decree, based as it is on the reports of prelates and other persons who have informed His Majesty that the aforementioned style of dress and clothing corresponds to that of Muslims. In their reports, the prelates contend that the preservation of the traditional style of dress and footwear of the natives of

37. This section is somewhat confusing. The manuscript reads: “Y el segundo capítulo susodicho hera lo del ávito y traxe declarado en el capítulo antes déste.” This clearly refers to the second of the two provisions established by Carlos V in 1526, but it is not clear whether the “chapter before this one” (el capítulo antes déste) refers to an earlier provision in the document authored in 1526 at the Royal Chapel Congregation Chapter, or if it refers to an earlier congregation chapter that dealt with the issue of Morisco dress, such as that held in 1511 (see notes 9 ad 29).

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this kingdom is tantamount to a continuation of the ceremonies and customs of the Muslims. I can only say, My Lord, that in my modest judgment (which has nonetheless helped me to reach old age) these reports are wholly without merit, because the style of dress, clothing, and footwear of the natives cannot be said to be that of Muslims, nor is it that of Muslims. It can more rightly be said to be clothing that corresponds to a particular kingdom and province. All the kingdoms of Castile, and all the other kingdoms and provinces, have their own styles of dress that is different from the others, and yet they are all Christians. In like manner, the style of dress and clothing of this kingdom is very different from the clothing of the Moroccan and Barbary Muslims, and there are also great differences to be found from one kingdom to another: what they wear in Fez is not worn at all in Tlemcen, and what they wear in Turkey is wholly unlike anything worn by the Moroccans, and yet they are all Muslims. It follows that one cannot establish or state that the clothing of the new converts is that of Muslims. This argument contained in the decree is also rendered invalid by the fact that Christians who live in the holy city of Jerusalem—and that whole kingdom is made up of Christians and men learned in the faith—have been seen in Granada wearing clothing and headdresses similar to what is worn in the Maghreb and resembling in no way what is worn in Castile—and yet they are Christians. They also have no knowledge of the Castilian language, and yet they are Catholic Christians. It follows from what I have just said that Christianity is not found in the clothing or footwear that is now in style, and the same is true of Islam. In fact, we older people remember that in this kingdom the style of dress and clothing used to be dramatically different from the items that are worn now, which are much more Castilian in style—that is, short, lightweight, and inexpensive. Here I am not speaking of dresses that are worn for weddings and celebrations, because those are kept stored for such occasions, and they are passed down for three to four generations so that they might be enjoyed and made use of at those times or so that they might be sold or pawned should the need arise. The everyday clothing that



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these women wear, whether inside or outside of their houses, consists of garments of very low value, such as sheets and shirts [alcándoras], so that a Morisco woman can dress herself for as little as a ducat or a bit more. And many of their neighbors dress in the same way, and at night they sleep in the very same clothing they wore during the day, so as to get the maximum use from it,38 and this is found throughout the Alpujarras and in all of the Axarquía of Málaga. For all that has been stated above, and in light of this most informative and true account (which in no way goes against the Holy Catholic faith), Your Most Reverend Lordship must help us to gain favor with His Majesty. And if Your Lordship has doubts as to the veracity of my report, simply summon some newly converted persons, as well as some Old Christians, that have visited and traveled in all of the aforementioned lands and kingdoms, such as Fez and Turkey and others. May Your Lordship check these claims in order to see if they are true or not, and may he not facilitate such a great loss as will be caused by allowing this decree to take effect. To say that the natives of this kingdom should conform in their style of dress and clothing, in spite of all the aforementioned harm that such a policy would cause, is to assert also that the privileges and freedoms of the natives of this kingdom should also be altered. We have not seen, My Lord, a single New Christian woman39 who wore Castilian-style clothing that was relieved of the burden of the taxes that the natives of this kingdom must pay, nor have the Moriscos that married Old Christian women been relieved of this tax or been allowed to bear arms. We have not seen such a thing; rather, the natives are treated in every way as recent converts. And if they do not conform with the customs of the Old Christians, they are imprisoned because of judicial denunciations and sent to the galleys, and they lose their property (of which the justice officials are happy to make use and take benefit). It is also well known to be true that they are also faced with suits and condemnations that result from bribes to judges 38. “como hazer dellos hardas para su serviçio.” 39. See note 20.

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and similar offenses, and they are in all ways persecuted by the secular and ecclesiastical arms of justice. In order that Your Lordship should be most satisfied and informed about the aforementioned matters having to do with the style of dress, clothing, and footwear of the native women of this kingdom—that is, whether the style of dress, clothing, or footwear of these women is a sign of their support for Islam— Your Lordship should know that all of the men, whether old men, young men, or children, have adopted and wear wholly Castilian clothing. If the natives’ hearts were truly obstinate, then they would no doubt think that changing their style of dress would compromise their religion, as the men are the ones who have to be aware of these issues and not the women, a point that I have learned from old and wise men. And yet the men do not dress now as they used to. From all that I have just pointed out, Your Most Reverend Lordship will certainly be convinced, as it is true, that the natives’ style of clothing and footwear has nothing at all to do with either support for or opposition to Islam. Why did the men change their style of dress? May Your Lordship know that the adult men must replace their clothing and footwear each year, and seeing that the Castilian style of dress is better and more suited to men, and that they lost nothing by ripping up their cloaks [sayos] and capes [capas], they began to wear Castilian clothing as they do today by their own free will and without any complaint whatsoever. This has been the custom here for over forty years. And Your Lordship has told me, during conversations that we have had on this subject, that if the women began to wear Castilian clothing then we might see certain liberties or freedoms for the natives of this kingdom as well as the return of their right to bear arms. To whom should we look to see if this is truly possible if not the men, who walk the streets and continually conduct business among Old Christians and members of their native community? What respect have these men been shown by secular and ecclesiastical law enforcement officials, or by His Majesty and his prelates, when they have worn Castilian clothing and footwear? And what willingness have the prelates shown to speak favorably of these men to His Majesty? For the past 35 to 40 years, the men



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here have worn Castilian-style clothing and footwear with the hope that His Majesty might show them the mercy of granting them certain liberties, relieving them of their tax burden, or giving them permission to carry arms. Well, we have seen nothing like this. With each day that passes we are in worse shape and more mistreated in all respects and by all manners, as much by the secular as by the ecclesiastical arms of justice, a fact that is well known and not in need of further elaboration. One might argue that if His Majesty were to grant the aforementioned liberties the result would be some act of treason. Looked at in light of past events, this argument leaves something to be desired. It was over 67 years ago that the process of conversion to Christianity began in this kingdom, and if any sort of treason has been seen on the part of the natives, it has only been in the case of those individuals who, going through hard times and seeing themselves pressured and desperate, have given in and left for Africa [aliende] or have done things they should not have.40 In general, however, it will not be found that any sort of treason has been committed against the Royal Crown; rather the natives of this kingdom have been obedient in all that the king and his ministers have ordered. Looking at the Albaicín uprising, 41 we can say that those people rose up in support of the signed word of Their Highnesses with respect to the capitulations that were executed. Our oldest men have said that in the Albaicín the Muslims rose up after two or

40. As for those Granadan Moriscos who chose to leave Granada for North Africa, a practice that was commonly undertaken during the winter months when Spanish ships were in harbor, these people normally had their possessions confiscated by the captain-general. Any proceeds generated from the sale of these items was earmarked for strengthening coastal fortifications. Those caught trying to leave for North Africa were often hanged (Garrad, “The Original Memorial,” 212n.2). The mention of those who “have done things they should not have” (hazer cosas non devidas) is a reference to the bandits and outlaws known as monfíes. 41. In 1499 several Muslims from the Albaicín area of Granada rose up against Christian authorities intent on arresting Christians who had converted to Islam (elches) and forcibly baptizing their young children. For more on this uprising and its causes, see Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 31–33. The net result of this uprising was the unilateral invalidation of the capitulations signed in 1492, which were replaced with new ones that were much less tolerant.

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three of them had killed Constable Barrionuevo because he was dragging off a woman to convert her to Christianity against her will. At the time the constables, who were all Old Christians, were going around taking hold of all the women and men they found wearing gaiters [traxe de leges]. 42 Hearing the shouts of the woman—“Help me, for the love of God!”—the constable still refused to let her go and so they killed him. And this was the beginning of the uprising in the Albaicín. In the midst of the uprising, people said to one another, “We have no choice but to rest on the alaha quita, which was a reference to the aforementioned capitulations agreed to by the Catholic Monarchs and King Muley Audari,43 who had been king of this kingdom. For this reason it cannot be said that they rose up against their king, but rather in support of the terms of the capitulations signed by the Catholic Monarchs with the intent that these be honored and executed. From this sprang the uprisings in the Albaicín, Lanjarón, the Andarax, the Alpujarras, Belefique, and Güejar Sierra. This was the cause, given that the authorities had violated the terms of what had been agreed to and signed before the ink was even dry. The natives of this kingdom were put to the test, along with their loyalty to the Royal Crown, during the period of the Comunero revolt.44 Your Lordship will find that people rose up against their king in all of the kingdoms and provinces of Castile and

42. That is, dressed as Muslims. It is worth considering that these Old Christian constables were in fact dragging Morisco women off to rape them. Such “baptisms” were common in the Americas, and while there was a good deal less licit sexual contact between Christians and Muslims in early fifteenth-century Granada (Coleman, Creating Christian Granada, 51–53) than was the case between Spaniards and indigenous men and women in the Americas, this fact does not preclude the implementation of rape as a strategy of violent coercion on the part of local Christian authorities. ˛ 43. Another reference to the Granadan King Abu¯ Abd Allah Moh·ammed XII (1460– 1527). 44. The Comunero revolt (1520–1521) was in essence a popular revolt against the proposed tax and government policies of Carlos V, who was justifiably seen as a foreign king. It is ironic, in fact, given the linguistic sanctions brought up in the Decree of 1567, that Carlos V himself had never learned to speak Spanish fluently. For more on the Comunero revolt, see J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (London: Penguin, 1990), 147–151.



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Andalusia, while in this kingdom there was not one single alteration in the loyal service previously given to His Highness. In fact, when it was necessary for the Marqués de Mondéjar and his brothers, the now deceased Don Antonio and Don Bernardino, 45 to go to Baza and Huéscar to put down the revolts that had sprung up there, they found among their captains three of our nation: Don Hernando de Córdoba, Diego López Aunaxara, and Diego López Hacera. I don’t know of others, but soldiers and men of war from among the natives also accompanied the Marqués de Mondéjar and fought in support of their king and of the Marqués, who was his captain-general. This all is and was at the time very well known, and it shows that the natives of this kingdom, from the time that Granada was won by the Catholic Monarchs, have never once betrayed their king. It follows from the service and loyalty demonstrated by the natives of this kingdom that it would be reasonable and just if they were more favored than those of the other kingdoms and provinces, and their privileges and liberties preserved, and not a single privilege or provision that favored them forfeited. This is all the more true given that those who rose up against and betrayed their king in the aforementioned revolt of the Comuneros, induced as they were by prelates (such that the judge Ronquillo went so far as to hang the bishop of Zamora),46 did not forfeit these. Your Most Reverend Lordship is aware that the prince Don Juan de Granada, brother of the aforementioned King Muley Boabdili, participated in the conflict against the Comuneros, as those who supported His Highness got ahold of him and made him their captain-general. 47 45. Garrad transcribes this passage as “Don Antonio y Don Bartolomé” (“The Original Memorial,” p. XX); however, the manuscript reads “Don Antonio y Don Bernardino” (f. 317v). The reference is to Antonio de Mendoza (ca. 1493–1552) and his younger brother Bernardino de Mendoza (1501–1557). Antonio would eventually become the first Viceroy of Mexico. For more on his activities there, see Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 140. 46. See note 26. ˛ 47. Don Juan de Granada ˛ (d. 1543) was born Nas·r ibn Alı¯, and was the son of Granadan King Abu¯ al-Hassan Alı¯ (d. 1485) and Isabel de Solís who, upon her conversion to ˛ · Islam, took the name Zoraya. Don Juan and Abu¯ Abd Allah Mohammed XII were thus · half-brothers who shared the same father. Juan de Granada and his brother converted

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He defended His Highness to the best of his abilities, and pacified all that he could. What benefits might he and his descendants deserve to receive, in such a case, from the Royal Crown? What? In the end he got much less than he deserved, as is the case with this loyal kingdom and its natives, as evidenced by what has been sent and ordered against them in this decree. Your Lordship knows what I am doing in writing all this; I believe that my intention in saying and declaring it is to serve the Lord our God, the Holy Catholic Church, and His Majesty. From which kingdom in Castile does the Royal Crown gain the most benefit? The answer to this question is well known, based on the silk rent and the one-tenth tax that stems from it, as well as the other taxes [serviçios de la farda] and rents that we produce. For this reason, Your Lordship, given who he is, must not allow that this kingdom be lost and destroyed, for what has been ordered by the aforementioned decree cannot be put into effect or followed; rather, the issue will be resolved only over time, and without pressure or hurry and with good governance and restraint on the part of secular as well as ecclesiastical officers. For what reason would Your Most Reverend Lordship infer that favor and honor would be bestowed upon the natives of this kingdom if they wore the clothing of Old Christians? Your Lordship will find that the Mudéjars dress just like the Old Christians. 48 And in what way do the new converts enjoy any sort of freedom or privilege when their women are made examples of? And what freedom or privilege has been granted that would encourage the natives to consent to such losses and changes such as those that are currently being ordered? This is all well known, and so, for all that has been mentioned above, it is beneficial that His Majesty be informed of this business insofar as it benefits or causes injury to the natives; for His Majesty will surely study the issue and determine what is best for him and his vassals. And this can occur

to Christianity while they were very young, and Juan was eventually made governor of Galicia. 48. The Mudéjars were Muslims who resided in Christian territory.



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only through the favor of Your Most Reverend Lordship, which I hope will favor us as it would a lord charged with this business of the decree. And with this, and for all that I have said above, I conclude that which has to do with style of dress and clothing, in order that there might be a remedy for the great burden that has been placed on the natives of this kingdom. How much benefit can the natives get from their dresses and clothing over two years time, given that these garments are normally passed down, as I have said before, for three to four generations? And what of their silk clothing, which must be torn up and destroyed within a year’s time? Are they to lose in one year what they have had for 20 or 30 or 40 years? Are they to be harassed and subjected to the punishments contained in the aforementioned decree? In order to insult the native women even more, it has been ordered that from the moment the decree is proclaimed these women uncover their faces in public so as to be targets of jokes and ridicule. In the end, all confidence will be lost in informants, constables, and law enforcement officials, as these will take advantage of the punishments allowed by the decree that suit them; and even before this the women will be harassed by the attacks of the constables who lift their veils and force them to go uncovered. Due to all of the aforementioned points, this decree will cause great suffering, aggravation, as well as financial and personal losses. With respect to the third section, which deals with issues related to weddings, celebrations, zambras and the instruments related to them,49 and other things that are contained in the aforementioned decree, I say that the archbishop at that time never proclaimed the provisions mentioned here,50 although their fundamental points were authorized in the [1526] congregation as I have mentioned. 49. The zambra was a type of festive popular music in Muslim Granada that was accompanied by instruments such as the tambourine, as well as singing and dancing. For more, see Antonio Gallego y Burín and Alfonso Gámir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada según el sínodo de Guadix en 1554, introduction by Bernard Vincent (1968; Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1996), 90–98. 50. Núñez Muley means the former Granadan archbishop Gaspar de Ávalos.

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All of the archbishops present at the congregation of 1526, including Don Pedro de Alba,51 agreed to include a prohibition of the zambra and all of the instruments associated with it. This decision was based on false as well as true information, because in truth the zambra and the instruments associated with it are nothing that should be seen as offensive to the Holy Catholic faith nor in any way linked to the rites of the Muslims. Your Lordship should know that in the past any good Muslim would not go near the instruments of the zambra nor take pleasure in it; and if any religious teachers [alfaquís] or judges [alcaldes] were present at a wedding, those in attendance would cease playing the zambra or the instruments associated with it until these men left the wedding or celebration. And when the Muslim king would leave on some voyage with his trumpets [añafiles] and zambra instruments, and arriving at the bridge at the River Darro and needing to pass through the Albaicín, all of the musicians would fall silent until the king passed the entrance to Elvira. This is because in the Albaicín there were judges [alcaldes] and religious teachers [alfaquís] who claimed to be good Muslims who were extended the courtesy of not having the zambra played where they were present. This being the situation, a situation well known by those with memory of it, how can it be claimed that the zambra and its instruments are in some way linked to the faith of the Muslims? They are not; rather, they are linked only to merrymaking and celebrations. Credible information and proof will not be found to contradict this point, for as I have said, the zambra and its instruments are not related to Islam, but rather are customs rooted in our kingdom and province. Your Lordship will find that the zambra and its instruments are wholly unlike the singing and instruments found in Fez, Morocco, Barbary, or Turkey. And if such music were in some way linked to Islam, then it would perforce be the same everywhere, so as to comply with the rules of that religion. This of 51. Pedro Ramírez de Alba (1460–1528) was a monk in the Hieronymite order and served as archbishop of Granada from 1526 to 1528.



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course cannot be shown, nor is it possible to demonstrate it, for the reasons stated above. I recall certain persons and old men who might remember what I am talking about. In the time of Don Hernando de Talavera, the first archbishop that the Catholic Monarchs established in this city,52 there were religious teachers [alfaquís] and religious leaders [muftis] who received salaries from the archbishop in exchange for providing him with information related to Islam and what went against its precepts. Informed in this way by persons who knew a good deal about Islamic jurisprudence and the books that contained it, the archbishop permitted during his tenure that the zambra be performed with all of its instruments, as it was because of the festive celebrations and weddings of the natives that it was performed. The zambra and its corresponding instruments were also used to honor the Holy Sacraments of the Corpus Christi processions,53 each trade guild [maeso] having its own banner. In that time the festival of Corpus Christi was as solemn and much talked of as it is here today, and there was nothing in it that went against the Holy Catholic faith. Beyond this, I can say that I served for just over three years as a page to the holy archbishop, and I accompanied him on a visit that he made to all of the Alpujarras. In the town of Ugíjar he stayed in a house located in the highest part of the city, which 52. Hernando de Talavera (1428–1507) was a Hieronymite monk and personal confessor to Isabel I of Castile until he was named archbishop of Granada in 1492. As archbishop, he undertook a decidedly liberal approach to the conversion of Granada’s Muslims to Christianity, even opposing the establishment of the Inquisition in his see. His authority was eventually superseded by that of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517), who adopted a very hard line against Granada’s Muslims. In my 2005 study of aljamiado Morisco literature, I erroneously refer to Jiménez de Cisneros as the “Granadan Archbishop” (see Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005], xxv), due to his activities in that kingdom at the very end of the fifteenth century. He was in fact archbishop of Toledo (1495–1507) at the time of his direct involvement in Granadan affairs. 53. Corpus Christi (literally, “Body of Christ”) is a Catholic feast occurring in June that celebrates the presence of Christ in the communion host. Characterized by very solemn public processions, the Feast of Corpus Christi was particularly important in Granada during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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is called Albarba, and he was as far from the church as the Royal Audiencia is from the Plaza de Bibrambla.54 And it was a zambra that waited for him at his door, and a zambra that accompanied him as he left the house to walk to mass, with all of the instruments playing and the people walking ahead of him, and even entering into the church with him. And when His Holiness said mass in person, there was a zambra in the choir with the clerics. At the moments when the organ would normally be played, because they didn’t have one, they responded with the zambra and its instruments. And some words of Arabic were even spoken in mass: when the archbishop said, “Dominus bobispon,” people responded with, “Ybara figun.”55 I remember this as if it were yesterday, in the year 1502. And if there is anyone still around who served this archbishop—I doubt that any have remained in this land—he will remember something of what I have just mentioned. The archbishop traveled throughout the Alpujarras and visited its most important towns and places, and in praying for rain during the time of the drought,56 he would go out with his procession and people to pray for it. He went to the Hieronymite monastery of Saint Francis in La Zubia, as he was a Hieronymite himself, and ordered that people from all of the other places go there with their heads uncovered and their crosses to pray for rain. He ordered the New Christians to pray for rain in their own language, as they were accustomed to do so in Arabic. This occurred in the year 1506 or 1507. So then, truthfully informed by the aforementioned authorities regarding the beliefs and practices of the Muslim faith, and of those beliefs and practices that were outside of it, why wouldn’t

54. As Garrad states, the distance between the Audiencia of Granada and the Plaza de Bibrambla is about 700 yards. “The Original Memorial,” 215n.4. 55. The Latin formula should read Dominus vobiscum, “God be with you.” As for the Arabic response, this is most likely [Allah] yaba¯rak f ¯ku ı ¯m, “may God bless you,” Corriente, Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, 48; Gallego Burín and Gámir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada, 98n.18. A less likely possibility is an Andalusi variation of the Mod˛ ern Standard Arabic al- ibrah f ¯ku ı ¯m, “may the order or rule (Verbum?) be in you.” 56. Granada suffered through a terrible drought in 1506–1507.



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His Holiness consent to such things, being the saint that he was? He truly spoke to all people, and made them feel that he knew and understood things well. Can we say that there is a lower race than the black slaves of Guinea? Why are they allowed to sing and dance to their instruments and songs, and in the languages in which they normally sing them? In order to give them pleasure and consolation in terms that they understand. So why must one defend all of the aforementioned with respect to the natives of this kingdom? As I have said, they commit no offense against the Holy Catholic faith; rather, through playing the zambra and its instruments they merely practice the usages of the kingdom and the customs of the province with respect to merrymaking at weddings and other celebrations. And this in no way goes against the Holy Catholic faith. The decree makes the point that the natives of this kingdom shut their doors and do not go to a church for their weddings. What is the problem, given that they announce the weddings in church beforehand? With respect to what is said about the weddings taking place behind closed doors, such a thing will never be found. The doors at weddings are always left wide open, whether one is talking about the weddings of Old Christians or those of our community. The Old Christians and the natives drink and eat together at our weddings, which cannot be said of Castilian weddings. When the wedding is over and it is necessary, for various reasons, to shut the doors for the night, this is done, as is the custom and practice among the Old Christians. As for the fourth section of the decree, which says that we must leave the doors to our homes open on Fridays, Sundays, and festival days, this is as harmful to the public interest as it is to the natives, who are a people that do not engage a great deal in conversation and public interaction. Due to their lack of servants, the presence of thieves, and the fact that their belongings and crops are kept in the open unlocked (and they cannot keep everything they own shut up in their houses), if they leave the doors to their homes open—and these homes lacking locks of any sort—this is a sort of open invitation to thieves and others of little conscience to do great damage.

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The natives do not close their doors in order to offend the Holy Catholic faith, nor may we presume that this is the case. Let us imagine for the sake of argument that some man or woman has the idea to practice Islam; this is, in the first place, utterly impossible. And, in any case, people with this idea would not come together at night to pray, because the faith of the Muslims requires that they pray in solitude, as I have said, and not together as is the case with the converted Jews [confesos]. For this reason, Your Lordship will find that during the time of the Muslims, when any of their religious men wished to present himself as such, he left town to dwell in an isolated hermitage without the company of any man or woman, and this was seen in this kingdom as well as in other Muslim kingdoms. My conclusion is that closing doors or leaving them open will not deter someone with bad intentions from doing what he wishes to do in secret; and if what he does goes against the Holy Catholic faith, then this is what the Inquisitors are for, to punish him as they do. The fifth section of the decree deals with the public baths, the theory being that it is possible to practice Muslim ceremonies and rites in them. This theory cannot be substantiated in any way, nor does it reflect any sort of sound judgment, for both Old Christian and New Christian men use the baths. In this city, in fact, it is possible to find in some of the baths both Old Christian and New Christian men who work there [bañeros]. In any case, where there is a certain number of people it is impossible to carry out Muslim ceremonies or rites, as these require a degree of solitude and are not carried out in public. Also, these ceremonies and rites require a clean place in which there is not even the suspicion of dirtiness, a fact that I have learned from old and wise men. The baths themselves are pools of filth and other such things, for the sick go to them with their various maladies and sores, as well as those who have dirty occupations such as the fisherman, the blacksmith, the coal supplier, the oil supplier, the butcher, those who mash linen to make thread [espadadores de lino], the skinners who work in and near the slaughterhouse, workers in dirty places such as those who remove waste from the communal septic tanks and sewers [madres] where the filth from each street



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and house is collected, and others who work in dirty homes and dung heaps, and in an infinite number of other things such as those. All of these people come to the baths, particularly when they have need to clean themselves of the aforementioned forms of filth and relieve themselves. In the baths they take buckets or make depressions in the ground and urinate in them, so that even if they wash themselves in the baths with water poured directly from a clean source,57 it is impossible to cleanse the bath of all of the aforementioned things. It follows that no one wishing to practice the ceremonies or rites of the Muslims would even think of doing so in a place where there is such a strong suspicion of dirtiness, even if, because of the presence of so much water, the filth is not visible to the eye. Nor would they do so in such a public place, because, as I have said, such ceremonies and rites require a certain degree of solitude and a clean place, and not in a place so potentially dirty nor manifestly public as the aforementioned baths. The baths themselves were instituted in order to provide a place to cleanse oneself with hot water and a hot environment, for when one sweats the body releases all form of dirtiness and bad humors. And the bath workers wash the patrons by scrubbing them with their fingernails and other instruments made of wool with hard centers that are known as almoçahas [sic].58 They also use their palms and stones from the sea with which they wash the soles of their feet and their heels.

57. There is an ink stain on the manuscript that makes it difficult to determine what exactly might be the source of the clean water in the public baths. Garrad (“The Original Memorial,” 217) suggests that it might be “earthen jars” (tinajas), which is a logical, if not wholly convincing possibility. In the manuscript, the passage reads “anque se lavan en los vaños con el agua que se vierte de las . . . onbres; no se puede limpiar el vaño” [although they wash in the baths with water poured directly from the . . . men; it is not possible to clean the bath.] It is possible that the presence of “men” (onbres) in this passage is the result of a scribal error, but there is no way to tell for certain. FoulchéDelbosc attempts to resolve this passage by rendering it “aunque se lavan en los vaños con el agua que se bierte de labar los onbres” [although they wash in the baths with the water used to wash the men,] although this reading likewise is less than satisfactory, given its tautological character. 58. Núñez Muley refers here to curry combs known as almohazas (from the Arabic h assa, meaning “to curry comb”) that were used to help clean and exfoliate skin in the · baths.

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Another claim regarding the baths is that mortal sins occur there, as much among the Christians as the new converts. I’m speaking here about the women who supposedly go to the baths to meet their lovers and have sex with them. This claim is wholly without merit and cannot be substantiated in any way, for while the women—whether Old Christians or New Christians—are in the baths they are surrounded by many other women and the female bath workers that bathe them, and not a single man enters the bath. This being the situation, I fail to see how it’s possible to claim that men and women meet in the baths to commit such sins. Let us say for the sake of argument that such women—Old and New Christians—get the awful idea to meet their lovers for sex. It would be much easier for them to do so while going on visits, or visiting churches, or attending jubilees and plays where men and women regularly interact with one another; and it also seems a better plan for them simply to reserve a room in an inn [posada de dejamiento] to have sex. I believe that for some of the aforementioned causes the archbishop had ordered Salves to be sung during Lent very early before the prayer in order to prevent some of the aforementioned actions.59 If the public baths are done away with, it follows that no one will bathe at all, neither at home nor outside of it, nor in the rivers or streams.60 What will the sick do or those who have to cleanse themselves of the forms of filth that I have described above? Someone might respond to this question with another one: “How do the Castilians bathe?” One can answer this question by pointing out that the Castilians have the freedom to bathe wherever they like, and so they have no need of public baths. The natives of this kingdom, however, do not in any way enjoy such freedoms, and due to the forms of dirtiness (and the people who work in it) described above, as well as the fact that we have, unlike other 59. The Salve Regina is a solemn Marian antiphon that is traditionally sung on the morning of the first Sunday of Lent. 60. As Garrad points out, the Inquisition of Granada punished Moriscos who washed themselves or took baths in their homes, as it was thought that such personal cleansing was inevitably associated with the practice of Muslim prayer, “The Original Memorial,” 218n.2.



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kingdoms, public waterworks to handle both clean water and sewage, we, unlike Castile, have long had public baths. At the time of the writing of the Gospels there were public baths,61 and yet the Castilians never desired to have any, due to the fact that going to the baths can weaken the limbs and veins of a man in times of war.62 In this kingdom the people are not interested in war, and so there are no significant consequences to such weakening. In fact, for the reasons that I have described above the natives of this kingdom have greater need to bathe than others. Someone might argue that those with the need to bathe might go to the natural spring baths to do so. Such a visit can easily cost a patron three or four ducats, while the public baths cost a mere eight maravedís, and leave a person much cleaner than the natural spring baths do. In any case, only one person out of a hundred can afford to go to the natural spring baths. It is also possible for a person who wishes to bathe at home to request a doctor’s release to do so, as it was discussed with Your Lordship. In order to obtain such a release, one must wait—dirty as he or she is—three or four days to see the doctor and then, after much waiting and having paid the doctor, go to see the parish priest and the purveyor so that they might also sign the doctor’s release. In this way, the process takes roughly seven or eight days and requires one to pay a doctor, a priest, a purveyor, and a notary a total sum of more or less six or seven reales. Once again, only about one in a hundred have such money or know how to initiate the process. Given the difficulties that I have just described, 61. For example, John 5:1–3: “Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.” 62. Covarrubias supports this idea quite directly: “The use of baths diminishes one’s vitality and renders men weak and cowardly.” He then backs this notion up with a folk tale surrounding the death of Alfonso VI’s son Sancho during the conquest of Toledo in 1085. As the story has it, Sancho and his men were easily killed by the Muslims in a battle near the town of Vélez. One of the causes given for their defeat was their use of the public baths, and Alfonso responded by having all of the public baths in Toledo torn down, see Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o española según la impression de 1611, con las adiciones de Benito Remigio Noydens publicados en la de 1674, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1943), 190.

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combined with the great need to bathe among the natives of this kingdom, we will all inevitably be forced to violate the terms of the decree, and then we’ll all find ourselves before the Inquisition answering the following question: “Were you bathing as part of an Islamic ritual or not?” What can result from such a situation if not the great and general loss of persons and income? The beginnings of such personal and material losses, both in this city and beyond its boundaries, have begun to manifest themselves since the day that the aforementioned decree was proclaimed. Issues such as covering or uncovering one’s face have caused great disturbances and suffering, as has the order compelling us to leave our doors open or at least to leave them ajar without latching them, as they do in places where there are lots of breezes. It is well known that there is really no way to leave the doors of this kingdom ajar, given that they lack a device known as a haliba that differs from a latch.63 Because we do not leave our doors open, due to the concerns and risks that I have described above, law officers have fined many people 20, 30, or 40 reales. Some of these people have shut the doors to their homes while they are at mass, and even though they are at mass, they are fined 1 ducat and 15 reales. For singing Morisco songs or for calling someone by his or her Morisco name, by which a person is known according to his or her lineage, they are fined 20 or 30 reales. And this is just the beginning. Who knows what will happen when serious fines and even exile begin to be ordered. As I have already stated, the whole process undermines the trust that one might have in informants and judges, who are anything but disinterested. Your Lordship must know that the judges and officials of this kingdom are thoroughly corrupt; the only place where one finds honesty are the Royal Audiencia, where Your Lordship resides, and the auditors and their officials.64 It follows from this, Your Most Reverend Lordship, that bringing 63. The term khalla¯ba appears in Corriente, Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, 162, as a “shutter-bolt.” 64. As Garrad points out, Deza himself was a less-than-model royal official: in 1575 he was proven to have kidnapped Morisco children and sold them in Ceuta as slaves in exchange for Portuguese art objects. “The Original Memorial,” 219n.1.



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down the natives of this kingdom, one by one and as a group, will not be enough to correct the crimes and offenses that harm it.65 The only fruits of such a course as that presented by the aforementioned decree are those that I have spelled out. And if we follow that course, which consists of much pressuring and punishment, we should expect no good to come of it. Let us return once again to the issue of whether the women of this kingdom who cover their faces do so as part of their supposed adherence to the Muslim faith. We might then ask, why do the majority of Old Christian women cover their faces? They do so in order that people not recognize them at times when they do not wish to be recognized, and New Christian women do so for the same reason, and so that men might not fall into the mortal sin of seeing the beautiful face of a woman they admire and pursuing her, by licit or illicit means, in order to marry her. That a woman covers her face is nothing but a matter of modesty meant to prevent these events from occurring. Turning to the Sacred Scripture, one cannot deny that if Bathsheba had not been bathing herself, David would not have sinned—and he was a prophet.66 I learned 65. The manuscript reads: “E por esto V. Sa. Reverendisima no sera bastante para rremediar ny poner rremedio a los agravios y destruymientos que se destruyen los naturales deste rreyno” (ff. 322v–323r). Garrad inserts the connective “with” (con) between “destruymientos” and “que se destruyen” so that the passage reads, “And for this reason, Your Most Reverend Lordship will not be enough to remedy, nor mitigate, the offenses and crimes [with] which the natives of this kingdom are being brought down” (“The Original Memorial,” 219). This reading does not fit the argument of the rest of the section (namely, that punishing the Moriscos will yield no benefit to the Crown). Rather than adding the connective “with,” it seems to make more sense to convert the present passive indicative verb “se destruyen” into the subjunctive “se destruyan.” In this way, the passage reads literally. “E por esto, V. Sa. Reverendísima, no será bastante para rremediar ny poner rremedio a los agravios y destruymientos que se destruyan los naturales deste rreyno” [And for this reason, Your Most Reverend Lordship, it will not be enough to remedy, nor mitigate, the offenses and crimes [that I just mentioned] that the natives of this kingdom should be brought down]. 66. In 2 Samuel 11:2–5 the story of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, is recounted: “One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, ‘Isn’t this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?’ Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (She had purified herself from her uncleanness.) Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, ‘I am pregnant.’”

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of this example during a conversation that took place between Your Lordship, Don Gaspar de Ávalos (before he was made archbishop),67 and other noblemen of our nation. This being the case, and there being no offense to the Holy Catholic faith, by what logic or form of justice are the natives of this kingdom punished, harassed, and abused by having to cover or uncover themselves? With respect to Morisco surnames: how are we supposed to know one another if we only make use of Castilian surnames?68 The people will know nothing of the person with whom they are speaking, from whom they are purchasing, and with whom they are marrying, given that they have no knowledge of his or her lineage. What benefit is derived from erasing from our memories our traditional clothing, our surnames, and all the rest that I have mentioned above? Does it not seem to Your Lordship that in retaining all of these things one does great honor to the Monarchs who won this kingdom? For in this way it remains manifest to everyone the diverse peoples that they conquered. This was the intention of the Catholic Monarchs and past archbishops in supporting this kingdom as they did. And this was the intention that the Catholic Kings had in preserving the contents of the royal archives of the Alhambra, among others, in the same form as during the time of the Muslim kings: so that they might make manifest and clear to all what Their Highnesses had won. There likewise remained other records from the time of the Muslim kings in cities such as Seville 67. Before being elected archbishop in 1529, Gaspar de Ávalos served as bishop of Guadix y Baza (appointed in 1524), and as commissary general of the Inquisition in Valencia (appointed in 1525). Throughout his career, he was a close ally of Carlos V. 68. Núñez Muley is referring to the common practice among Arab Muslims to name people according to their lineage, profession, and/or place of origin. There are, generally speaking, four patterns to these names: 1) kunya, or a reference to the person’s firstborn ˛ ˛ child, as in “Abu¯ Alı¯ Mohammed” (Mohammed, the father of Alı¯); 2) nasab, or a refer· · ˛ ence to the person’s direct lineage, as in “Mohammed ibn Alı¯ ibn Jamı¯l” (Mohammed, ˛ · · the son of Alı¯, the son of Jamı¯l); 3) laqab, or a description of the person based, for example, on his or her profession, such as “Mohammed al-Ka¯tib” (Mohammed the · · Scribe); and 4) nisba, or reference to the person’s place of origin, as in “Mohammed al· Fa¯sı¯” (Mohammed from Fez). In sixteenth-century Granada as today, it was common for · ˛ these types of surnames to be used in combination, such as: “Abu¯ Alı¯ Mohammed ibn ˛ · Jamı¯l ibn Mohammed al-Fa¯sı¯” (Mohammed the father of Alı¯, the son of Jamı¯l, the son · · of Mohammed from Fez). ·



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and Cordova, and they too were preserved and maintained in order to remind all future kings of the identity of those from whom the cities had been won. And this cannot be denied or explained away. The military conquest of this kingdom cost the Catholic Monarchs untold amounts in terms of money, people, and materials, and Their Highnesses were likewise forced to expend untold millions in gold in conquering and carrying out the various wars with the Muslims of this kingdom. Since this kingdom cost Their Highnesses so dearly, it seems right that they should wish to examine and reexamine what they spent and what it cost them, and it also seems logical not to risk losing in so little time everything that they won by carrying out what is stipulated in the aforementioned decree, because in no way can the natives of this kingdom comply with it. The decree also orders that former Maghrebi slaves [gazíes e alárabes] be forced to leave the kingdom due to the supposedly undesirable consequences of their interactions with the natives.69 This has also been ordered at various times in the past; however, it was never put into effect, complied with, or otherwise executed. It would have been a very just thing if such an order had been given and executed the first time it was proposed; however, since it was never complied with nor put into effect in the past, the situation has become a very thorny one for His Majesty. This is so because the majority of the aforementioned former slaves are now practically natives themselves, with wives and married children, and even grandchildren that were born here. This situation has been well known in this kingdom ever since the natives expended seemingly infinite sums of money in rescuing these slaves from captivity, as their masters used them as speculative commodities.70 These slaves were obtained by their masters for 69. According to Julio Caro Baroja, the gacis were “Muslims from Africa, freed slaves or captives that had established themselves in the Southern mountains and intermarried with the natives after the Christian conquest of Granada,” Los moriscos del Reino de Granada (1957; Madrid: Istmo, 2000), 91–92. With respect to the aláraves, Garrad suggests that these might have been “North African Arabs who crossed over to Granada in times of famine and were sold into slavery by the Granadan coastguards,” “The Original Memorial,” 220n.3. 70. “sus amos lo tenían por granxería.”

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nothing or bought for very small sums from soldiers and sailors who themselves obtained them for nearly nothing; however, the charge for rescuing these slaves was normally quite steep.71 As a result, the natives of this kingdom were greatly set back by the rescue of these slaves and caused many discomforts by their presence here. This problem could quickly be solved by His Majesty if he simply ordered that no Maghrebi slave be sold or rescued in this kingdom and that anyone who obtains or captures them take them to Castile to be sold. There they would be rescued or sold, and they would not be used to make steep profits as has been the case until now. His Majesty can resolve this situation immediately by ordering that all of the Maghrebi slaves or anyone from North Africa that have been freed or rescued and who are not married, elderly, or integrated into the native community, leave the kingdom at once. His Majesty could impose serious fines, except in the case of the women, who have little or nothing. And then from this moment on, no Old Christian, no matter what his rank or station may be, nor anyone from the other communities, would be able to sell or rescue any Maghrebi slave or other North African in this kingdom unless he wished to pay serious fines. As for those slaves who are taken in the future, they can be sent to Castile. It would be exceedingly just of His Majesty to make these changes, as it would be just of Your Lordship to help them to become instituted. I say this because many times have I discussed this matter with the inquisitors here, and they are of the same opinion as I am, as Your Lordship will discover if you speak with them. With respect to what the decree says about the blacks that have served some of the native Moriscos of this kingdom, what harm has been done to the Holy Catholic faith by the fact that some of the natives of this kingdom have black men or women as slaves?72 71. “Rescuing” a slave essentially involved paying for his or her freedom. In many ways, the process functioned as an officially sanctioned form of kidnapping and ransom. 72. Garrad rightly suggests that by the sixteenth century these West African slaves were likely brought to the peninsula by Portuguese traders ( “The Original Memorial,” 221n.1). It should be pointed out, however, that a vibrant slave trade—involving Slavs, Europeans, and sub-Saharan Africans—had existed within Muslim Iberia as well. For



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Have these slaves become Muslims because of the influence of their owners, and do they, or their masters, have any knowledge of the Muslim faith? Don’t these blacks deserve their wretched state? Must everyone be seen as equals? Let them bring the water pitcher on their backs, or carry burdens, or handle the plow, for the natives do not serve each other for periods longer than a few days at a time, and not on a continual basis within their homes. What sin has provoked the royal order that the natives of this kingdom should not be allowed to have black slaves, given the formers’ aforementioned needs? Some have said that the number of natives and blacks continues to grow so as to provide support for a future act of treason. Some have even said in the past that there were in the kingdom of Granada some 20,000 black slaves in the possession of the natives; however, this number never was any higher than 400, and at the present there are no more than 100. And in order that Your Lordship may be informed of the conflicts that exist between the clerics and the natives, beyond what I have stated above, during the congregation meeting in the Royal Chapel it was the clerics who served as witnesses against the natives in this matter regarding the black slaves. Likewise it was these men who served as witnesses in the decision regarding who should be allowed to own black slaves, and afterward, looking after their own interests, it was these same men who approved the ownership rights of those who currently have them. In light of, Your Most Reverend Lordship, the undue influence that the prelates’ account has had in this case, Your Lordship must help us to gain the favor of His Majesty so that the natives of this kingdom might be allowed to own black slaves that serve them as they do the Old Christians. As for those who were freed and have since married, may they not be included in the decree. We now turn to the section of the decree that speaks of the Arabic language. There are within it many problems that should more on slavery in early modern Granada, see Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión (Granada: Universidad de Granada y Área de Mujer de la Diputación Provincial de Granada, 2000); and Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada [1600], II: 9, par. 1, at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/FichaObra.html?portal=0&Ref=5286.

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be removed. And I say, although what I say is based on my humble judgment, that no ill effect can be caused by the continued use of the Arabic language for two reasons. The first and most important reason is that the Arabic language has no direct relation whatsoever to the Muslim faith. This is so because, as I have said above, the Catholic Christians who live in the holy city of Jerusalem and throughout the Christian kingdom of that region speak Arabic and write their evangelical books and laws and all that has to do with Christianity and documents and contracts in that language. A ban on Arabic documents, contracts, and testaments such as that ordered by the aforementioned decree will not be found in this kingdom.73 As I have already spoken above about those Christians who reside in the holy city of Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and because this example is well known, I will now speak of those who live on the not-so-distant island of Malta. Here there are Catholic Christians and nobles, and they likewise speak Arabic and use Arabic to write texts having to do with the Holy Catholic faith and other Christian matters. I also believe that they say mass in Arabic, as is also the case in Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and neither of these groups knows how to read or write in Castilian. If using Arabic were truly something that went against the Holy Catholic faith, then these priests and philosophers in Malta and Jerusalem would not use it, as they are Christians. Let us say that the natives of this kingdom all wished to learn to speak Castilian, or at least those with some understanding of things. Given the incredible difficulties involved in such a process, especially in light of the complexities of Arabic, the issue is largely out of their hands. There is an almost infinite number of people in the villages and places outside the city (and even within it), that speak popular varieties of Arabic that are very different from those spoken elsewhere, and it is nearly impossible for them to change the way they speak, due to years of use and habit. How much more difficult will it be to get these people to learn Castilian, given that even in their own language they have 73. That is, Jerusalem.



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been unable to learn to speak correctly? I guarantee Your Lordship that the majority of those new converts in this kingdom could not learn Castilian if you gave them 20 years, let alone the three stipulated by the aforementioned decree. Many of these people, even if you threaten to chop them up into pieces, will not be able to learn it. And these will inevitably lose their property and be exiled, as the punishment stipulated by the decree reads. God will not be served by this, nor will His Majesty; nor will the natives of this kingdom have any sort of recourse. Considering all of this, which is very well known, how exactly might these people be compelled to learn Castilian in three years time? It is very clear that whoever has ordered it wishes the destruction of this kingdom and its natives. And this is clear from what I have said above and what I will now say. The aforementioned decree orders that all land titles, books, or any other text written in Arabic must be submitted to Your Lordship and to whomever has been appointed to this task. How are people who do not speak or understand Castilian going to be able to comply with this order when it is proclaimed? What procedure exists such that it might be possible for so large a quantity of written materials to be brought together for submission within the time frame allowed by the decree?74 And if it were possible to gather all of these materials, what person or persons would be able to receive them all? Caution! We are now beginning to see the extreme (and well known) damage that is caused by those who wish to see the abolition of all documents, land titles, books, or anything else written in Arabic, as the natives now have an extreme and urgent need for their legal documents and land titles in their legal suits, especially in those related to the commission run by Doctor Santiago, who has not considered—nor will consider—as evidence of ownership anything less than a legal land title.75 Let us say that it is possible to translate 74. According to the Decree of 1567, the Moriscos had thirty days in which to turn in their Arabic documents and texts for inspection, and if they were found to be inoffensive, they would be valid for a period of three years. Mármol Carvajal, Historia, 161. 75. Garrad identifies this “Doctor Santiago” as a judge (oídor) of the Royal Audiencia of Valladolid who was sent to Granada in 1559 to “reclaim Crown lands usurped by

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all of these materials into Castilian. How long would it take to do so, and how many translators would be needed to translate all of the kingdom’s documents? Currently there is only one such translator, and it is thus inevitable that Arabic documents will be lost, and after three years these documents would be worthless, as the decree stipulates. What will be lost in terms of property and records, given that there will be no original documents [ius antigua] by which we might know who owns what? What will the silk brokers [gelizes] do, given that they need to write in Arabic in order to perform their duties and, in any case, know nothing else? While some of them may know Castilian out of necessity, they also need to produce commercial statements in Arabic to serve the people that come to them. In order to sell their silk they also need to provide written statements listing the price, weight, value, and the percentages to which each party is entitled so that they may show the producers how much has been sold and give them itemized receipts in the way that I have described above. The silk agents [almotalifes], in whose houses the customs agents [marchamadores] gather the bundles of silk from each place and party, do not know how to write in Castilian, but only in Arabic. And these men must faithfully record all that the customs agents bring to them, so that there is no fraud with respect to the income derived from the silk trade, nor persons who may commit such fraud, nor discrepancies between the records of one party or another. It is also important that the silk producers are in no way cheated, whether at the time that the silk arrives at the silk markets [alcaycerías] or when the tax collector comes to them asking for their production receipts [alvalaes] and proof of where the silk was sold. In all of this business very strict accounts are kept by the silk brokers,

private individuals and so swell the Royal Treasury. In the years between 1559 and the outbreak of the rebellion he attempted to check up all title deeds and survey land. Usurpers were made to pay a composition fee to the Crown, or the land was confiscated and resold. The proceedings raised great indignation in Granada: almost everyone suffered, including the captain-general. Consequently the Moriscos needed their Arabic title deeds more than ever at that moment, to avoid confiscation at the hands of the painstaking Doctor Santiago,” “The Original Memorial,” 222n.3.



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silk agents, the producers, and the tax collector charged with the income from silk. In all of these accounts, the only things written in Castilian are the records of the tax collector and the customs agent; everything else is written in Arabic. What records will they have in the future if things are to be as described above? How will they be able to trust one another? Let us now move to the central issue. This has to do with the records that the newly converted must have in order to do business with one another. They conduct business not on the basis of any obligation or personal acquaintance; rather, they rely on written accounts and records of who owes what to whom that they keep in their registers. Among tradesmen such as dyers, who must keep records of each skein that is brought to them, whether this be silk, thread, or any other material from which clothing is made, there must be an official record of the color of each item, and it must be recorded on a ticket along with the weight of each skein, and these tickets are tied to each item, and the items are dyed along with the tickets so that record of each item and account not be lost. This is what they have always done, and they know no other way. What recourse will they have once they are forced to cease all of this within a period of three years? And as I have said, the majority of the new converts, although they may wish to learn Castilian, will not be able to do so. In these and similar cases, the net effect will inevitably be great harm and losses. This being so, no good can come of it, nor will it end well. Given that, for the reasons presented above, the use of Arabic in no way goes against the Holy Catholic faith, why should His Majesty permit that there should be so much harmful change, and with no benefit derived from it? These practices have been in use and accepted during the lives of all the archbishops and bishops that this kingdom has had, and there has been no protest on the part of any of them. Has there only now, after sixty years, been found the great number of problems described and declared within the decree? As I have said above, in my humble opinion there is not a single thing to be gained by instituting any of the chapters of the aforementioned decree. Rather, it will cause only tremendous personal and material losses, as have begun to be seen in the places and towns

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outside Granada, where it is an everyday occurrence to hear questions such as, “Are you unveiled?” and “Did you shut your doors?” as well as questions regarding the use of Morisco names. I beg Your Lordship, for the love of God, to inform himself in every way of all the issues contained in this memorandum, and to look with merciful eyes to the natives of this kingdom, as they are loyal servants of His Majesty in all things and in all ways. I also plead that he not pay attention, as I have said above, to the few bad people that are by necessity part of every community; and if in this kingdom there have been or are some of these—such as the bandits [monfíes] and outlaws [desesperados]—it is because of the extent to which they are pressed and because they have no place in which they might be safe and secure. His Majesty was well served, according to some, in making it impossible for these men to seek refuge in seigniorial lands after having committed their crimes. They have no monasteries or churches to turn to, so what are they to do if not join up with others in the same situation and put their lives at risk?76 They see no other option, and they end up bringing great blame down upon themselves and shaming the entire community as if they were rats. The solution to this situation lies principally within the power of His Majesty and those that advise him. That solution consists of letting these men who have committed murder and other crimes return to the seigniorial lands and having the governors with jurisdiction over those lands punish them in some significant way. These governors should also be informed of whoever enters their lands, and they should keep a very close watch on these men so that they might not commit any crime of any sort or by any means, and at regular intervals these men should be summoned so that the governors might be informed about their actions. In this way the enormous harm that is being caused in 76. In early modern Spain, it was common for fugitives and outlaws to “take refuge in the Church” (acogerse a la iglesia), that is, take religious orders in order to place themselves beyond the reach of the secular authorities. As Núñez Muley points out, this nonviolent “escape valve” was not open to Muslims wanted by the authorities, and so there was little choice for these monfíes and desesperados but to continue committing criminal acts once they were denied refuge in seigniorial lands.



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this kingdom will cease; because, in truth, in some areas it is widely known that these offenses are actually being carried out by Old Christians and outlaw soldiers who commit many crimes on the roads and make it look as though Moriscos were the culprits. This has been described in some trials, as when these men approach the moment of their death and confess to crimes that had previously been attributed to the Moriscos. My Lord, I have learned all of this through some experience, interaction, and important business as much with nobles as with archbishops and inquisitors as in the court of Their Highnesses and Their Majesties. And given that I have dared to relate to Your Lordship in this memorandum all that I have been able to learn, may Your Lordship not think, for the love of God, that I did so out of malice, for the points contained in my memorandum are well known and true. My intention has been and is very honest: to serve the Lord our God, His Majesty, and his vassals the natives of this kingdom, as they are my blood and I am obligated by that bond, and I cannot deny them. Your servant kisses the very illustrious and most reverend hands of Your Lordship, Francisco Núñez Muley The most important issue with respect to the writing of Arabic in this kingdom are the tax assessment registers. This is the case as much in this city as in the other cities, villages, and places of this kingdom. It is from these registers that the assessment of the general tax [farda] and the coastal defense tax [farda del mar] are calculated, both in general and in particular terms, and it is not possible to effect any sort of assessment of the aforementioned taxes without them and other records held by the natives. And this assessment absolutely cannot be carried out in any other way. This is all well known and requires no investigation as to its veracity. Let us return to the tax assessment registers that are kept in this city. These have always been written records, as they are today, and one has normally been kept in Arabic and another in Castilian. With these books were calculated the tax burden in this

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city and all of the parishes within it, and from these were generated the bills that stated what each person had to pay, written in Arabic and Castilian. With these bills the tax collectors make their collections, the prosecutors do their prosecuting, and this has been in place since 1502 or 1503, when the natives of this kingdom began to pay taxes to His Majesty, and there has not been a single complaint about it until today. This is the declaration that has been kept in the aforementioned registers or bills so that each person knows what he is required to pay and for what reason. He who is able to communicate with the Old Christian men who keep these registers will go and speak to them; and he who has no knowledge of Castilian will go and speak to the scribe who copied everything down in Arabic. That is how the matter has been handled in all of the kingdom. In what language are municipal scribes to write in these registers if they have no other option and know no other way? Must the king lose his tax income and his vassals along with it? These registers and other written records are kept in order to determine and effect the aforementioned tax payments. And if this requirement of the aforementioned decree should be put into practice, His Majesty will not be paid, and the kingdom will be made blind and will lose its natives. As for the surnames that are listed in the aforementioned books; if we are to cease using Morisco surnames, to whom will they send the tax bill? For we will no longer know one another by our surnames, and everything is written down using them in the aforementioned registers and bills. Look, Your Lordship, at the comparison that I would like to present to you. Let us imagine that His Majesty had decided, along with those members of his council and the prelates that ordered the aforementioned decree, that there should be established a decree requiring all Christians to dress like Moriscos and wear their footwear; to cease celebrating weddings in the Castilian way and instead begin celebrating them as the Moriscos do; to have no other music whatsoever but the Morisco zambra and the instruments that accompany it; to bathe in the Morisco baths and to hire only Morisco bath-workers and no others; to speak no Castilian whatsoever but only Arabic; to cease using any



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Castilian names or surnames; to keep the doors to their homes open at all times. Furthermore, this decree would prohibit women from leaving their faces uncovered in public and require them to cover them as Morisco women do, and it would prohibit Christians from possessing any contracts, registers, or land titles in Castilian—all of these would have to be written in Arabic. Let us suppose all of this and many other items that I will not express here for fear of being too wordy. But allow me to alter one thing that I have just said: may the Christians be required to use not Arabic but Genoese, and may all of their contracts, registers, and land titles be written in Genoese, which is much closer to Castilian than Arabic is. That is, may the aforementioned tax assessments, registers, and records be converted not into Arabic but into Genoese within the time frame established by the decree, or else serious penalties will be assessed. To what extent would the taxes due His Majesty actually be collected under this scenario (one that the natives of this kingdom currently face)? And in all of the other issues regarding accounts, offices, and officials, could the Christians comply given the diverse manners of all the Christians of this kingdom? They would not comply, but rather they would die and suffer under burdens and punishments. That this would be the case is well known, as I say. In the event that such a thing should be ordered, let us recall the commandment of God contained in His Ten Commandments, which says, “You will love God before all things, and your neighbor as yourself.”77 In this way the aforementioned commandment declares that we should wish for our neighbor what we would wish for ourselves, and order upon him nothing that we would not order upon ourselves, because he who is not fit to be a judge of himself should not be a judge of others.

77. This is a reference not to the Ten Commandments but to Mark 12:28–31.

Francisco Núñez Muley, Memorial, opening page. Madrid, BN MS 6176, fol. 311r. Laboratorio Fotográfico, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Francisco Núñez Muley, Memorial, closing page. Madrid, BN MS 6176, fol. 330r. Laboratorio Fotográfico, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

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Appendix Excerpts from Mármol Carvajal’s Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada

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H

ere are reproduced chapters five, six, seven, eight, eleven, and twelve of Mármol’s Historia del [sic] rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Granada, as these touch on issues directly related to the composition and reception of the Memorandum. Why cite Mármol at length? For one reason, these chapters are not available in English and are extensively cited in most studies of the material dealt with by Núñez Muley. Second, the very subjective and situated character of Mármol’s text helps to present and contextualize the viewpoint of many of those Spaniards who favored measures such as those laid out in the decrees of 1567 and, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the wholesale expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. Chapter Five: How His Majesty ordered an assembly to be convened in Madrid to discuss the reformation of the Moriscos and to put into effect the provisions of the assembly of 1526

As the Moriscos had become quite restless and every hour reports arrived from the city of Granada concerning the harm that they were causing by living as Muslims and communicating with Muslims from North Africa, Granadan archbishop Don Pedro Guerrero, while preparing to attend the Council of Trent, decided to deal with this issue, which he ended up handling very well. Pope Paul III had also asked him to relay the request to King Felipe II 103

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that he do something so that these souls not be lost. In a synod that Archbishop Guerrero organized, at which were gathered the bishops of Málaga, Guadix, Almería, and representatives from the archbishopric of Granada, strategies were discussed by which the newly converted might wholly embrace the Christian faith. Upon finding the answer to this question in the execution of the provisions of the [1526] assembly of the Royal Chapel, they informed His Majesty, and he remitted these provisions to his Royal Council, presided over by the learned Don Diego Espinosa, who was also inquisitor-general and bishop of Sigüenza (and later cardinal in the Holy Church of Rome). Having seen all of the written accounts of the archbishop and his prelates, and that the measures taken in the past had inspired nothing but a desire for vengeance on the part of the Moriscos (as it is the custom of the wicked to convert things done in their favor into new sorts of insults and offenses), the Royal Council agreed that before anything they must put into effect these provisions without entertaining any opposing suits or responses. And in order to make this so, His Majesty ordered an assembly [junta] to be held in Madrid in 1566, in which participated the following: President Diego de Espinosa; [Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel], the Duke of Alba; Don Antonio de Toledo, the Prior of San Juan; Don Bernardo de Borea, the vice-chancellor of Aragon; Master [Gregorio] Gallo, bishop of Orihuela; the learned Don Pedro de Deza, from the Council-General of the Inquisition; the learned Menchaca and Doctor Velasco, auditors of the Royal Council and Chamber. All of these learned nobles decided that if the Moriscos had received baptism and were now nominally Christians, then they must in fact be and appear to be so and give up their traditional style of dress, language, and the customs that they had used when they were Muslims. It was also decided that the Moriscos must comply with and carry out the provisions of the assembly that the emperor Don Carlos had ordered convened in 1526. And so they consulted with His Majesty and convinced him of the rightness of their point of view. And in order to avoid any trouble, the provisions were not published until they were sent to the president [of the Royal Audencia] of Granada to be



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put into effect. What follows here are the provisions themselves and the arguments raised by the Moriscos, so that there might not remain anything that the reader might desire. Chapter Six: In which are found the provisions that were adopted in the assembly in the city of Madrid regarding the reform of the Moriscos It was first ordered that within three years after the publication of these rulings that the Moriscos must learn to speak Castilian, and from then on no one would be allowed to speak, read, or write in Arabic, not even in secret. It was also ordered that all future contracts and documents written in Arabic would be considered null and void, and that they would have no force or effect in legal proceedings; that all books written in Arabic, regardless of their subject matter or contents, must be brought before the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada within 30 days so that they might be inspected and examined, and those that contained nothing objectionable would be returned to their owners and remain valid for the prescribed three-year period and no more. With respect to this order that all the Moriscos learn Castilian, it was entrusted to the president and the archbishop of Granada, who, being practical people with ample experience, were expected to take care of the matter as they saw fit, in order to serve God best and benefit the Moriscos [aquellas gentes]. With respect to clothing, it was ordered that the Moriscos not make any new dresses [marlotas], veiled gowns [almalafas], hose [calzas], or any other sort of dress such as those that they wore during the Muslim period [en tiempo de moros]; and that all the clothing that they produced in the future be like that worn by Christians. And in order that they not lose all at once the Morisco dresses that were already made, they were given license to wear those made of silk or those with silk embroidery for a period of one year and those made of regular cloth for two years; and once this time period had passed they would not be permitted for any reason to wear either their silk or regular cloth clothing. And during those two years, all women who continued to wear their

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Morisco dresses were required to leave their faces uncovered wherever they went, as it was understood that by not prohibiting the custom that they had of walking around in public with their faces covered, they would give up their traditional veiled gowns and sheets and they would instead cover their faces with blankets and hats, as had been done in the Kingdom of Aragon when they announced a prohibition on Morisco clothing there. With respect to weddings, it was ordered that in the wedding ceremonies, vigils, and celebrations in which they participated that they not engage in any of the rites, ceremonies, parties, and celebrations that they had used during the Muslim period; rather, everything must be done in strict conformity with the usages and customs of the Holy Mother Church and in the way that faithful Christians did; and that on the day of the weddings and vigils that they keep the doors to their homes open, and that they should keep them open on Friday afternoons and all festival days; and that they not engage in zambras, nor leilas with musical instruments, nor Morisco singing of any form, even if in these songs they said nothing against the Christian faith or anything that might be suspected of such. With respect to their names, it was ordered that they not take, have, nor use Muslim names nor surnames, and that those who already had them must give them up, and that the women not decorate their skin or hair with henna. With respect to the baths, it was ordered that at no time should they use the public baths, and that those that already existed must be torn down; and that no one, regardless of his state or condition, would be allowed to use manmade baths, nor would they be allowed to bathe in these in their homes or outside of their homes. With respect to the gacis, it was ordered that they be freed, and that those who had been freed or might subsequently be freed not be allowed to reside in the kingdom of Granada, and within six months of being freed they must leave the kingdom, and that the Moriscos not be allowed to own gaci slaves, even if they had licenses permitting them to do so. With respect to the black slaves, it was ordered that all the Moriscos that had licenses to own them must present these to the president of the Royal Audiencia



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of Granada, who would determine whether these slave-owners could be allowed to keep their slaves without causing any sort of public risk or danger, and he would keep His Majesty informed of all of this; and in the interim all licenses currently held by Moriscos would be suspended, and the president would rule on each case as he saw fit. This was the resolution that was taken in that assembly, although some thought that not all of the chapters should be put into effect all at once, given that the Moriscos were so attached to their customs, and that they would not feel the loss of these as acutely if they were deprived of them little by little. But President Diego de Espinosa, aware of the warnings that arrived every day from Granada, and bracing himself with the force of the faith and the power of so Catholic a prince, advised His Majesty that they should all be put into effect at once. Chapter Seven: How His Majesty appointed the learned Pedro de Deza as President of the Royal Audiencia of Granada and had the provisions sent to him Later His Majesty appointed as president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada the learned Don Pedro de Deza, native of Toro, auditor-general of the Inquisition (now a cardinal in the Holy Church of Rome) and one of those in attendance at the assembly in the city of Madrid, as I have said. Deza received his appointment in the city of Madrid on May 4, 1566, and by the 25th of that month he was in Granada, where on that same day he assembled his cabinet and took possession of the presidency. Later, President Diego de Espinosa sent to him the aforementioned provisions in the form of a decree, so that with the agreement of his cabinet—as it was communicated to him by the archbishop of that city—he might have them published and proceed to put them into effect regardless of whatever contradictions might be raised by the Moriscos, providing first some means by which without much pressure they might be complied with. His Majesty also ordered President Diego de Espinosa to tell Don Íñigo López de Mendoza, who had become the Marqués de Mondéjar upon the

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death of his father, Don Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, to leave the court in Madrid and go to Granada to be present at the publication of the provisions, in order to offer encouragement through his presence. When the provisions arrived in Granada, President [Deza] had them printed secretly so that copies could be sent all at once to all parts of the kingdom, as it had been agreed upon that they should be proclaimed on January 1 of the following year, that date corresponding to a festival that is celebrated with great solemnity commemorating the day in which the Catholic Monarchs won the city. While this was being done, and wishing that the Moriscos, who had already received some news of the provisions and had discussed them, might somehow consent to the provisions, President Deza called for Alonso de Orozco, a canon of the collegial Church of San Salvador del Albaicín, who was a friend and who dealt often with the Moriscos due to his many years of service to them in the Alpujarras and his good knowledge of Arabic. Deza obliged Orozco to gather all of the Moriscos’ leaders in the church and in a friendly way tell them how he had come to learn that His Majesty, tired of hearing the complaints that regularly reached him regarding the new converts in that kingdom (that they were Muslims and acted like Muslims and that the things that most kept them from truly being Christians was their style of dress, the Morisco language, and their customs and ceremonies that they had retained from the Muslim period), had resolved to order that they abandon everything. This being the situation, [he was to tell them] it would be a very wise thing for them first to convince the members of their community to agree to request these changes of their own free will so that the order might be more lenient in its execution, given that it came as a response to a request from the Moriscos themselves. They were also told not to mention all of the difficulties that they saw in the provisions dealing with clothing and Arabic and ask that all of the women be married and girls be dressed according to the customs of the Christians. They were also to request a ban on the production of new articles of Morisco clothing and agree that all existing articles be worn out and not replaced, and in this way they would gradually give up that style of dress, the retention of



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which seemed to say that they truly did hate being Christians, as it was dishonest and did not look right that Christians should go around dressed like Muslims. They should also request that their children be required to learn to speak Castilian, and that there be established schools to teach them to read, and that the same be done for adults; as for the elderly it was recommended that they dissemble, as there was nothing that could be done for them. With respect to Arabic books, they themselves should give them up in light of the fact that, as they were now Christians, such books were of no use to them and very upsetting for their minds [escandolosos a las consciencias]. They should resolve to give up their weddings and other celebrations and festivals that they normally held in the Morisco style due to the famously bad example that it set and the damage that was done to their estates by such wasteful expenditures, and because of the scandals and improprieties that were committed during these events. All of this was to be handled by the Moriscos themselves without it having to be ordered of them, and above all that which had to do with the public baths, which had been proven to be a horrendous vice from which resulted many sins that offended God and an immoral custom for their wives and daughters. They were made to understand that by doing all of this voluntarily, and seeing that they carried themselves as did the Christians of other kingdoms, they would be honored, favored, and respected, and His Majesty would treat them as he did his other vassals, and in the future their children and grandchildren would be granted great titles and government offices, as was the case with the nobles and virtuous men of the kingdom. President [Deza] ordered the canon Alonso de Orozco to say these and many other things to the leaders of the Albaicín, which he did when he gathered them together in the Church of San Salvador. But they responded that they had no interest in any such business, as they were convinced that they would be stoned by the members of their community if they proposed any of what Orozco suggested. Seeing the curtness with which they had responded, it occurred to the canon that those assembled did not believe what he was saying to them regarding the will of His Majesty because he

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had not given them the name of a specific source for this information. That same day the canon went to see President Deza, and informing him of all that had transpired, he asked his permission to give Deza’s name as a source, which was granted. Two days later, the canon once again assembled the Moriscos in the same church and declared to them that what he had told them had been ordered by the president of the Royal Audiencia of Granada, and that he had been ordered to tell them that His Majesty wished to put into effect the provisions of the assembly of 1526, and that it would go better for them if they requested such measures themselves, and that His Majesty would favor them by instituting the changes in ways that took their comfort into consideration. But once again they refused to acquiesce, and they even refused when the canon begged some of them to come with him to speak with the president. Chapter Eight: How the provisions of the new decree were proclaimed, and how the Moriscos reacted Having finished printing the new decree, President Pedro de Deza, with the agreement of his cabinet, ordered that it be proclaimed in the city of Granada and in the other cities of the kingdom on January 1, in the year of Our Lord 1567. On this day were gathered all of the judges from the Royal Chancery Court and the magistrate with all of the constables of the city, and with the great solemn accompaniment of drums [atabales], trumpets [trompetas], trombones [sacabuches], minstrels [ministriles], and oboes [dulzainas], they proclaimed them in the plazas and public places of the city and in the Albaicín. Afterward it was ordered that all of the constables should have the public baths torn down, which was done, starting first with those of His Majesty so that the owners of the others might not become angry. What can we say of the reaction of the Moriscos upon hearing these provisions proclaimed in the Bib al-Bonut Plaza, except that upon learning of them they were so visibly upset that no one of good judgment could help but be made aware of their ire [dañadas voluntades]? Such was the anger that they manifested that some even began to threaten one



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another. They said that His Majesty had been poorly advised, and that the decree would cause the destruction of the kingdom. And wishing to show their force in a peaceful manner before taking up arms with rustic ferocity, they began to hold public and secret meetings, which on one hand provided the young men with topics for discussion based on the example of their seniors, to whom this new yoke was no less odious than death itself; and on the other, it was decided that the leaders of the community should resist the fury that they felt and deal with the present adversity with feigned humility, relying on moral prudence to request a suspension. And to this effect they named people who might inform His Majesty and the members of his council. Chapter Eleven: How the president responded to the Moriscos, how he informed His Majesty of it, and some other things that were seen fit to be instituted Upon hearing Francisco Núñez Muley’s argument, the president responded to him that he would do everything in his power to ensure that the vassals of His Majesty would not be harassed. He also said that if any of the constables abused them or wrongly took money from them that they should inform him of it, and he would remedy the situation and rigorously punish the guilty parties. He stated that what His Majesty wanted from them was that they be good Christians and in all ways similar to the other Christians, his vassals. If they did so then they would have reason to request favors of His Majesty and he would have cause to grant them. But they should accept it as a certainty that the new decree would not be revoked, as it was so holy and just and had been elaborated with such deliberation and agreement. If there was some aspect of the decree that they found offensive, then they should tell him and he would gladly attempt to address it. If it so happened that he could do nothing himself, he would send someone to consult with His Majesty so that he might very quickly procure some remedy. Beyond this, they should not waste their energies and resources, nor should they request a court hearing over it, because the arguments that they had to give

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had all been heard before, and these were not enough to justify the revocation of the decree. With respect to the provision regarding the [Arabic] language, the archbishop of Granada and he would be responsible for executing it in the way that best suited them, and they would not fail to do so. With respect to the provision regarding [traditional] dress, the remedy was right at hand: they were to unstitch their Morisco clothing and resew it into shorter skirts and cloaks of the Castilian style. In this way not as much would be lost as they claimed, as the tailors and officials who made dresses and jewels in the Morisco style could also do so in the Castilian style, and the merchants and wholesalers would have the same business that they had enjoyed previously. Regarding the argument that there would be no official oversight and that the royal inspectors would punish them in some way because of this, he answered that of course he would give them license to cut and elaborate such clothing even if they were not examined. And as for the poor women, it would be requested of His Majesty that as an act of charity he send them skirts and cloaks [sayas y mantos], and once they began dressing as Christian women the problems with the constables would cease. He concluded by saying that His Majesty was more concerned with [the Moriscos’] faith than with the taxes they paid him, and that saving one soul was worth more to him than all the revenue that the newly converted Moriscos could provide him. His intention was that they be good Christians; and not only that they be so, but that they appear so as well. This meant having their wives and daughters dress as did the Queen, our lady, and that he would never favor them in any way if it meant that their women would continue to go around dressed as Muslims. With these and many other arguments the president dismissed this Morisco that day. Upon being informed that the Moriscos wished to send Jorge de Baeza to the court that day to make a counter-argument in the name of the kingdom, he had him summoned and ordered him that by no means should he initiate such a business, because His Majesty would not like it at all. If they wished for something, then they should ask for it in a petition,



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and it would be granted to the extent that this was possible. With respect to the rest, he would consult with His Majesty. Later on, he had it proclaimed throughout the city that all of the tailors and officials who wished to refashion Morisco clothing into garments of the Castilian style should do so freely, although they were not examined by the inspectors, and that they should not be fined or punished for doing so. And those that wished to be examined would be without having to pay any fees. It was also proclaimed that the weavers of cloaks [almalafas], head cloths [almaizares], and curtains (and other Morisco things) must finish up within a certain time all the projects that they had begun, and from that time forward must not make anything new except those items permitted by the decree. There were many Moriscos who rented shops to carry out their business, and many of these had invested their money in quantities of Morisco clothing and other items. Given that they had to cease selling these items and would be generating no income, they would not be able to pay their rent. The president thus summoned the owners of these shops and begged them to take them back and release the Moriscos from their lease contracts, which they promised to do. The president ordered that all the accounts that the Moriscos had in Arabic be terminated within a year, because from that time forward, according to the stipulations of the decree, they were not to read or write anymore in that language, only in Castilian. He ordered the constables to give women caught wearing Morisco clothing two or three warnings before taking them to jail; and those that they caught were to be released without fines. He made it clear that during the first year he would not allow any punishment to be carried out that came to his notice. And because the constables often went too far in the execution of their duties, he appointed people that would do the job with less rigor, and he ordered them to respect and show courtesy to the Morisco women that they found dressed in the Castilian style. In a letter to His Majesty dated February 27, the president informed him of all that had taken place with the Moriscos, and of the state that their businesses were in, and of what he felt should

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be instituted in order to mitigate their difficulties. He informed His Majesty of what thieves and pirates were doing in the kingdom, confirming that this situation stood as the greatest threat to the kingdom’s peace and security, especially in those places near the coasts where ships from Barbary appeared. He made it clear to His Majesty that with the aid and support that the Moriscos gave these thieves and pirates, they were able to cause great harm. In this matter he consulted many sources in each city and ended up suggesting a remedy based more on legal means than on force: he requested that the matter be handed over to the magistrates of the Royal Audiencia, and that the captain-general, whose jurisdiction extended only to the presidios on the coast, not interfere. He also learned that the Moriscos of the Albaicín had reported that many Morisco outsiders were moving into their community and causing disturbances, and they made it known that they would be willing to pay for people to patrol the streets at night, as much to provide security for their persons and homes as to ensure that the criminals be caught and punished. Once the Royal Council had seen all of this and informed the king of the situation, His Majesty informed President Pedro de Deza, in a letter dated March 30, that he approved of the answer that Deza had given to the Moriscos who had come to speak to him. With respect to what Deza had said about the poor women, who had not the means to dress as Christians, His Majesty agreed to grant them funds from the proceeds the Crown had earned from the recent sale of the royal bathhouses in the Albaicín. With this money they should buy themselves cloth with which to dress themselves, to which end tailors would be provided free of charge to make them clothes such as those worn by Christians, as was in fact done. With respect to the security of the coast, His Majesty had already sent a sufficient number of galleys to guard it, and so he would provide soldiers who, with the assistance of the captain-general would guard it, and with this the harm caused by thieves and pirates would cease. His Majesty also made it clear that he would do what he thought was best to ensure that the problem was resolved. With respect to the issue of the city, it seemed to him necessary to do nothing more than have



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the magistrates and the constables concentrate on patrolling the streets at night, dividing up among themselves the shifts and barracks in such a way that all places would be patrolled throughout the night, and that if necessary the number of constables and others who patrolled with them would be increased. Given that such patrols seemed most needed in the Albaicín, they would assign two constables, accompanied by more people than in the case of the other patrols, to patrol that area, and the Moriscos would help to defray the cost of such patrols as they had promised to do. And with this, there being no cause to fear any other movement or alteration, the situation of the night patrols would be well taken care of without making any further provisions or incurring any other costs. And with regard to the unknown Moriscos that they claimed were moving into the Albaicín, the Audiencia should deal with this issue as it saw fit and send an account of its actions to the Royal Council. Chapter Twelve: How the Marqués de Mondéjar informed His Majesty with respect to the sections of the decree that had been ordered to be executed The Marqués de Mondéjar was at the Royal Court for a few days following his conversation with the president of the Royal Council, Don Diego de Espinosa. He was there trying to find a way to suspend the effect of the sections of the decree that so aggrieved the Moriscos of the Kingdom of Granada. In his accounts he complained that very specific resolutions had been adopted with respect to extremely serious matters without even consulting him. It had always been the custom to consult with captains-general in the kingdom, due as much to the great faith that the Crown had in them as to the experience that they possessed in such matters. And while he stopped short of contradicting the provisions of the decree, he presented the drawbacks that came with their execution, pointing out that in order for the decree to have its desired effect it would be best to deal with these issues very quickly. This was so given the undesirable results that could come from any delay. He pointed out the ills that would befall the kingdom, and

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the irreparable damage that would be done, if the Moriscos were to rebel, given that the Turks, with ships and men, were in the waters of Barbary, and the journey being so short from their coast to ours that they could cross in a short amount of time and arrive at Spanish ports where there was an immense number of internal enemies, all Moriscos, that were undependable people, friendly to change, suspect in their faith and in the loyalty that as good vassals they owed to His Majesty as king and natural lord. In light of this, there was good cause to expect and fear from them some sort of change of demeanor, especially given the current situation. He went on to say that although the zeal of the persons through whose intervention and counsel the provisions of the decree had been adopted was saintly and well intentioned, the matters of that kingdom were not in such a state that, to his thinking, changes should be introduced until they knew to what extent they could trust the loyalty of the Moriscos. And if His Majesty resolutely ordered that the provisions of the decree be executed, it would be good if he at least provided the Marqués de Mondéjar with a group of men to contain the Moriscos so that they not become agitated, as he feared that they would, feeling that yoke with such terrible severity. Without this measure in place, he argued, his departure to that kingdom would come to little effect, given that he had so few men and a general lack of the resources that he needed. To these and many other arguments presented by the Marqués de Mondéjar, Don Diego de Espinosa responded to him that the will of His Majesty was that he go to the Kingdom of Granada where his presence would be very important, as always, to deal with all of the difficulties that lay before them. Truly, the decision had been made from above to uproot Morisco culture [la nación morisca] from that land. He related to the other members of the Royal Council what the Marqués de Mondéjar had said, and although he added other warnings and suspicions, they were doubtful about specifics and, after much debate, they judged that it was necessary to provide a quick remedy. They were confident that the provisions already made to the constables and the captain-general’s men were sufficient, given that the Moriscos were



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low people, unarmed, lacking industry and forts, and not assured of any sort of support. And for these reasons the requests of the Marqués de Mondéjar were not granted except that he was ordered to go to Granada with an increased force of only 300 extra soldiers, which he was to station at places along the coast as he saw fit, and that he was to visit the coast and reside there during certain periods of the year.

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