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’s vision of the New World encounter between the dominant power and speech of Spain and the muted native inhabitants has a strong resonance of the earlier contest with the Muslim “Other.” He suggests that the West had “rehearsed their encounter with the peoples of the New World, acting out in their response to the legendary Wild Man, their mingled attraction and revulsion, longing and hatred.”41 In the eyes of many, the wild man was not some legendary abstraction: many of his characteristics were already attached to the Muslims, descendants of Ishmael. The angel of God had told his mother, Hagar, “Call his name Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man; and every man’s hand shall be against him.”42 Wildness, violence, lack of self-control, and unbridled passion were the fundamental critiques that the Christian world had made of the sons of Ishmael from the earliest days.

CHAPTER SIX

“Vile Weeds”

MALAS HIERBAS

SPAIN UNDER THE SUCCESSORS TO THE CATHOLIC KINGS—FIRST their grandson Charles, and then their great-grandson Philip II—had many enemies. There were ancient antagonisms with her neighbors France and the Muslim states of North Africa. Then there were doctrinal enemies, among whom Christian reformers such as Luther and Calvin and the followers of Erasmus appeared the most menacing. Finally, there was the ever-present threat of the Ottoman Empire and, insidiously, the internal danger of the “New Christians”—former Jews and the once-Muslim Moriscos. Las Casas, writing in Spain in the latter years of his life, could see at first hand what Old Christians feared as the invisible taint of Judaism and the threat posed by the Moriscos who stubbornly refused to become like other Christians. The conviction that neither group had converted sincerely to Christianity was widespread. Both were believed to threaten the faith of Christians and thus ultimately the security of Spain. Yet it was the Moriscos who were eventually considered too dangerous to live on the soil of Spain and who, regardless of whether they were sincerely Christian or not, were expelled between 1608 and 1614. Las Casas died in the convent of Atocha in Madrid in 1566, so he did not live to see the outcome of “perpetual hatred and rancour” in the second revolt of the Alpujarras that began just before Christmas 1568.

The “hatred and rancour” between Old Christian and Morisco was reciprocal. As the Spanish state pressed ever harder on its convert minority, the capacity and will of the Moriscos to resist hardened and grew. The two terrible wars between Christians and Moriscos (in 1499–1501 and 1568–70) were avoidable; contemporaries also saw them as pointless and unnecessary. Both stemmed from victors’ justice, not only from the ten-year war for Granada but from the centuries-old desire within Castile to right the wrongs inflicted upon its legendary Visigothic ancestors. The myths that mobilized Castilian society during hundreds of years of Islamic power had also inculcated a spirit of revenge. Ferdinand and Isabella both desired the ancient goal of a pure Spain, but their political sense told them that it should be achieved by gradual rather than radical means. But as we have seen, they found the lure of a sudden, decisive, and dramatic gesture irresistible. First came the solution to the “problem” of the Jews, offering them exile or adherence to the cross. Next came mass conversion in Granada, which took place under the eyes of Isabella. Finally the royal writ applied the conversion formula to all the Muslims of Castile in the wake of the first war of the Alpujarras.

Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted in Christendom since the mass conversion of the Balkan Slavs and of the Baltic tribes centuries before. In Spain, conversion of the Jews and the Muslims was a state enterprise, pushed forward by the Catholic Kings and their successors for the glory of God and of Spain. The Spanish church and the Spanish Inquisition were largely instruments of the state. Neither Charles V