Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [78]
The heritage of Muslim culture, which had produced the Alhambra and the Great Mosque of Cordoba, was not ignored by Christians, and that respectful attitude determined the initial policy and practice of conversion. Yet Christians still perceived “Moors” as possessing wild and savage qualities as well. This ambiguity existed in the Christian medieval polemics and in the histories of the Reconquest, and sometimes governed the experience of contemporaries as well. The Muslims of Granada, like the guanches, were held to be of an indeterminate and uncertain character. If the “Moors” were savages, then their conversion would be less hedged about with restrictions than that of the Jews. The strategy of conversion would shift in a different direction.
IT IS POSSIBLE TO LOOK AT THE LAST HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY from many distinct perspectives. The artistic and cultural Renaissance, the spread of printing, the loss of Constantinople, the European discovery of the Americas, and Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India have all been taken as touchstones of the age. The previous century has been characterized as “calamitous,” partly due to the consequences of the Black Death, which killed perhaps one-third of the population living between Iceland and India.15 A large set of connections—social, political, religious, economic—have been linked to that one event. Philip Ziegler, in his study of the Black Death, refers to the twentieth-century analogy made between the aftermaths of the Black Death and the First World War. The comparison, he suggests, was that both made “the greatest single contribution to the disintegration of an age.”16 The fifteenth century in Spain saw both disintegration and reintegration, but upon different foundations from those that had prevailed before. Moreover, rather than one single monumental cause, events were increasingly perceived as possessing a multiplicity of origins. Everything was in flux and subject to change. Laws were written and never enforced, or enforced for only brief periods. Dynasties changed, with kings, bastards, pretenders all vying for power. I am also thinking here of France and England, powerful, rich, and hitherto stable states. But in a culture dominated by its inner frontiers and boundaries like the Iberian peninsula, we should expect few certainties or set patterns during the fifteenth century and beyond.
Formerly settled social categories in Spain were becoming fissile, and this is evident in the language of the time. “Christian” divided into “Old Christian” and “New Christian.” Jews bifurcated into “Jews” and what Christians more and more referred to insultingly as marranos, or as crypto-Jews. Muslims were called “Moors,” Moros, which could sometimes be admiring, but more often contained a sense of contempt, or they were called Mudéjares, which was a category of subjugation. Then they were transmogrified through conversion to Christianity into Moriscos, “little Moors,” a contemptuous and derogatory term, if sometimes tinged with a sense of pity.17 But sometimes not: the “true” author of Don Quixote, Cid Hamet Benengeli, whom we met in chapter 1, was a cultivated and learned figure. We should be as uneasy using the insulting word Morisco, for the same reason that marrano is not a word to be uttered lightly.18 It was resented and never used by these “New Christians” themselves. It was freshly minted to convey a new attitude toward a subject people who had been stripped of their old religion by decree and given a perfunctory baptism. When the “Morisco” Nuñez de Muley wrote to protest about their treatment in Granada, he called them the naturales, the people of the land.