Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [88]
However, this increased pressure to convert had an unintended consequence. It heightened the sense of Muslim identity among the people of Granada, who developed particular skills in resisting the overwhelming power of the church. Through the half century after the first war in the Alpujarras, we can see two parallel and connected developments. On one side, there was frustration at every level within Old Christian society at the extraordinary intransigence of the Moriscos, most of whom, people held, were Christian in name only. More than that, they were seen to be becoming ever more dangerous. They seemed to be increasing in numbers faster than the Old Christians, and this impression was often true. This increase was put down to their inherent lustfulness. Even their virtues, like industriousness, now had a negative connotation. They worked hard, but only because they were avaricious: gaining money and never spending it except in their own community. In 1602 the archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, reflected what had long been the common view: “Since they are generally covetous and avaricious and love most of all to save money and not to spend it, they have chosen to take on the easiest jobs, shopkeepers, peddlers, pastry cooks, gardeners … they are the sponge that sucks the wealth out of Spain.”14
But more than anything else they were seen to be vicious. Moriscos conspired with the external enemies of Spain, while inside the country more and more of them were retreating beyond the limits of the law, becoming bandits or highway robbers (monfies). At an official level, this frustration appeared in increasingly stringent legislation designed to break down the resistance of the Moriscos, but often, these laws were never put into practice. In Valencia, noble landowners relied on Moriscos to farm their estates and so protected them as far as was possible.
The other line of development took place inside Morisco society. In Granada and in the rest of Spain, the Morisco community had been largely deprived of its natural leaders, who had departed for North Africa. However, a sufficient number of the educated and religious classes remained to sustain the fundamentals of Muslim belief, and the community also began to develop a new elite. Many of these men, like the scholar Alonso de Castillo, were genuine converts to Christianity, but nonetheless they did not lose their sense of connection to their families and origins.15 The Moriscos quickly became adept at occasional and reluctant conformity to Christian belief. When pressed, they would bring their children for baptism, but after the ceremony, returned home and carefully washed away all traces of the infidel’s holy water. Given Christian names, they never used them amongst themselves. If they attended Christian services, they said the wrong words or spoke at inappropriate places in the ceremony, pleading ignorance. Outraged Old Christians referred to this scandalous irreverence and grave offenses against the holy sacrament. Moriscos continued to give the alms ordained in the Qur’an, to say their prayers when possible, and had their children learn to read the holy books. When someone died the relatives bribed the grave diggers not to bury their Morisco dead in the churchyard but in open and unconsecrated ground. They had no truck with Christian authority. The confessors working in the Morisco community in Tortosa found that they completed their work extremely rapidly, because “when confessing them, they never reveal any sins so they find nothing to confess.”16 We can gain a sense of how they resisted from the formal decree issued in Ottoman-ruled Oran in 1563, which legitimated various compromises with