Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [93]
There was undoubtedly a political dimension that made fear of the Moriscos appear a reality rather than merely a phantasm. The idea of a conspiracy between the Spanish Jews and conversos and an external enemy (the Jews of Constantinople, the French, or the Protestants) was insubstantial, and although it occasionally surfaced, it had little or no foundation in reality. The Jewish conversos were pursued for sins of the spirit. But the connections between Moriscos and external Muslim enemies were real enough. A contingent of Ottoman soldiers fought with them in the Alpujarras, Morisco pirates raided the coasts, and the crime of “fleeing to Barbary” appears time and again in the records of the Alhambra, the military headquarters in Granada. Inquisitors ordered the “application of the cords,” or sanctioned the slow crushing and fracturing of the leg bones, to extract confessions of the full extent of Morisco intransigence. They learned that Moriscos, many of whom were peddlers or carriers, crisscrossed Spain, carrying with them news and sometimes Muslim books. They brought news of Christian defeats in the Mediterranean, which were greeted with joy, while Ottoman defeats such as Lepanto were received with resignation. Small communities, sometimes only a few families in an Old Christian town or village, or a Morisco living in the same house as Christians, learned the whispered prophecies.
In 1569, in the midst of the war for the Alpujarras, the Inquisition in Granada extracted a confession from a Morisco called Zacharias. He told them that his people were sure that they were about to wreak their revenge upon the Christians. “They have learned,” the secretary to the tribunal wrote, “in the books and stories that they will regain this land, and the ‘Moors’ of Barbary will win.” All the Spanish towns in Africa would fall to them, and then the Moriscos believed “a bridge made of copper would appear at the straits of Gibraltar, and they would pass over, and take all Spain as far as Galicia.”38 Many of these prophecies were entirely new, not ancient traditions. The hopes of revenge grew from the recent successes of Islam elsewhere. Moriscos told themselves that “the Turks would march with their armies to Rome and the Christians will not escape except those who turn to the truth of the Prophet; the remainder will be made captive or killed.”39 The Moriscos seemed persistently to most Spaniards to pose a danger to the faith and a danger to the state.40
It has been observed, however, that the point at which the Moriscos were expelled coincided with the lowest level of threat from the Ottomans in the Mediterranean for many years. The expulsion, though, was designed as a cure not for an acute illness but for a chronic disease. Cervantes expressed the popular attitude to the Moriscos when he wrote through one of his canine characters in his novella The Dialogue of the Dogs, “They are the slow fever that kills as certainly as a raging one.”41 While the Moriscos remained in Spain, so the argument went, the nation could never thrive. Better and more rational cases were made against the expulsion on economic grounds, but in a debate that extended over decades, those opposed to removing the Moriscos could not answer an argument that had no basis in facts and figures. For their enemies, the Moriscos were a disease of the body politic, and they had, like some evil humor, to be drained from it by any means necessary. Although the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was present in the minds of all concerned, the situation was not exactly parallel. In 1492, the line had been drawn, approximately, between believing Jews and New Christians of Jewish origin. In effect, the Jews went and the New Christians stayed. In recent years there has been an acrimonious debate as to whether the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was on the basis of race or belief. That question