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By Root 1247 0

Islam. It was her grandson Charles V who applied the formula of baptism or expulsion to all his Spanish kingdoms. This casuistry was unconvincing, and her emissary Peter Martyr d’ Anghiera, sent to explain the decision to the king of Egypt, found the reality of forced conversion hard to deny. The Muslims of Granada had never expected that the Christians would adhere to the 1492 agreement. But the story of Castilian perfidy became a source of mistrust in the communities of the newly converted. The Muslims resisted conversion both by fighting and by a sullen acceptance of their new status. The savagery of the war in the Alpujarras, and especially the death of the marqués de Córdoba (Alonso de Aguilar), reinforced even further the popular equation between Islam, violence, and latent danger. The Muslim Granadines were thought to be in contact with Barbary pirates, with their clansmen in North Africa, or with the more distant Ottomans. As the converted Jews had a taint in the blood, so the Muslims, transformed en masse into Christians, were seen by nature to be resentful and dangerous. A Morisco in Granada by law might not even possess a pocketknife for eating with that did not have a rounded point, lest he savage a Christian with it.31

WITHIN A FEW YEARS, SPAIN WAS TO ACQUIRE MANY NEW INFIDELS as subjects, in the new territories of America. The recent experience in mass conversion with the Muslims of Granada was carried forward into practice across the Atlantic.32 At home the perception of the Muslim population as being threatening, the enemy within, was fueled by the great struggle with the Ottomans developing in the Mediterranean. The sense of danger was well founded. Ottoman occupation of Aragonese territory in Apulia around Otranto in the Kingdom of Naples in 1480–81 was brief but menacing. The cathedral built by a king of Aragon in 1088 was reduced to rubble and the city sacked as the Ottoman fleet withdrew. The ships sailed home because of the death of Sultan Mehmed II, but it was thought they might return at any time. The Ottomans also feared Spain’s ambitions. Her campaign to “reconquer” North Africa began in 1497 with the capture of the town of Melilla, which remains, like Ceuta, Spanish territory to this day.

The strong clan connections between the Moriscos of Granada and those who had crossed the straits into Islamic territory grew in Castilian eyes into a form of conspiracy. Correspondence with “Barbary” and seeking to flee across the water became offenses punishable by death. Even Father Bartolomé de las Casas, the ardent defender of the infidel Indians in the Americas, believed that Christian war against Muslim infidels was “necessary and praiseworthy to recover Jerusalem, to drive the ‘Moors’ from Spain, and always to fight against Muslims everywhere, the ‘enemies of the faith, usurpers of Christian kingdoms.’ ”33 Elsewhere Las Casas expressed the double motive for fighting Islam: “We have a just war against them, not only when they are actually waging it against us but even when they stop, because we have a very long experience of their intention to harm us; so our war against them cannot be called war but legitimate defence.”34 When Las Casas presents the illegitimacy of persecuting and mistreating the Indios (native inhabitants of the Americas), he does so by contrasting their plight with the legitimacy of a holy war on the infidel Turks and “Moors,” “who pester and maltreat us.” He draws the contrast between American infidels, “who never knew nor were obliged to know that there were Christian people in the world and therefore had never offended them” and “the ‘Moors’ and Turks, persecutors of the Christian name and violent occupiers of the kingdoms of Christianity.”35 It was true, he stated, that there were certain infidels in America who merited harsh treatment, such as the Caribs, who resisted Columbus (and against whom Ferdinand authorized extreme measures).

After they rose and rebelled against us they have caused all the remaining Indians in the island to rebel … They have tried and are trying to