Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [95]
One does not need extensive imagination to calculate the problems that a “Moorish” Valencia, after three hundred years almost superior to the Christian population of the country and a mass of Moriscos not very inferior to the Christians of Aragon, would have caused for Spain in [the] turmoil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … The nation avoided grave dangers … that the Morisco majorities would have posed for our historical life and would continue to pose today [1962] for our future.48
Here is the old language of demographic challenge, as voiced by Cervantes’s dog, Archbishop Ribera, and many others at the time of the expulsion. But Sanchez-Albornóz wrote from a perspective not of a distant threat from 300 years in the past, but of a more recent danger. The fear of the Islamic threat remained a strong connection between the past into the present. All the old terrors could be reinvigorated. Thus, military disaster in Morocco in 1922, when a Spanish general lost 12,000 men—killed and mutilated by Berber tribesmen at the battle of Anual—unlocked a torrent of fear and hatred. So too did the rebel General Francisco Franco when he brought the Army of Africa with its “Moorish” contingents to Spain in 1936. He provided the legitimate Republican government with a potent rallying point. Franco had brought the “Moors” back to Spain and, with them, barbarism. Thus, although 900 years of Islam ended with the expulsion of the Moriscos, their spectral presence remained from that point forward into the twentieth century.
HATRED AND FEAR WERE EVER PRESENT IN IBERIAN AS IN ALL SOCIETIES. But in Spain they focused over several centuries on the division between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Nor was this a theoretical abstraction as it was in the rest of Christian Europe. Christianity and Islam were interwoven in the landscape. The two faiths lived side by side, not in amity but in a kind of equilibrium. That changed over less than a century, as the balance was altered, as Judaism and Islam were officially abolished, and a new unitary Christian culture was created. In later centuries this would be described as social engineering, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was articulated within a religious argument. Jews, conversos, Muslims, and Moriscos were enemies of Christ, and gradually the Moriscos came to be seen as the most directly threatening. Soon they began to attract the kind of visceral insult that for centuries had been directed at the Jews. This abuse, which developed from the 1570s, had a single end in view: to categorize them all as crypto-Muslims. They were the perpetual enemy within. They were the rampant “weeds” that were choking the state. Thus, the street language of loathing and disgust percolated upward into learned treatises written by scholars and clerics.
These educated men often wrote in the vernacular, Castilian, which made what they published directly accessible to a wide audience within the Spanish lands. But it also allowed them a wider public still. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Castilian was the language of the greatest power in Europe. Books published in Spanish could be read by the educated in much of Europe. Thus polemic written in Spain, whether in Castilian or Latin, had a resonance and influence far beyond the Pyrenees. By this time we should cease seeing Spain as an isolated southern outcrop of Europe but, rather, in terms of ideas and attitudes, as a nodal point. Spain disseminated ideologies that purported to have a universal application but that were often rooted in the particular preoccupations of Iberia.