Muslims, Moriscos, Christians, and Amerindians: Conflictual Encounters and Exchange in the Early-Modern Habsburg Empire
Panel 209, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 10:30 am
Panel Description
Since Braudel introduced the notion of the Mediterranean, both as a geographical unity, and as a space that produced a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Muslim and Christian), scholars have characterized inter-confessional relations in the Habsburg Empire almost exclusively in conflictual terms. From this perspective, Braudel's argument was taken up by his critic Andrew Hess, who argued that in the sixteenth century the Iberian-North African frontier divided the Mediterranean into two well-defined cultural spheres. Similarly, histories focusing on the New World colonizing experiment have stressed how the conquest produced a conflict that took place within shifting frontiers. The origins of that view can be found in the early-modern period: at the institutional level, royal and religious bureaucracies articulated the interactions with ‘the Other’ within the paradigm of Crusades. The discourse of conflict generated as part of an imperial project has since then shaped our view of inter-confessional relations in the period. This panel seeks to reconsider the ways in which conflicts in the Habsburg’s Mediterranean and Atlantic were played out. It will do so by examining the practices of the actors rather than the discourses of the institutions with which they interacted. By focusing on inter-confessional encounters that involved different modes of power/violence between Christians, Muslims, Moriscos and Amerindians in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mediterranean and Atlantic spaces, the papers presented in this panel will argue that even extreme situations of conflict can produce different modalities of negotiation, exchanges and instances of métissage. As the papers will show, the strategies devised by the different actors who were caught in conflictual situations in Spain, North Africa, and the Americas seem to undermine Spanish Imperial authority. Rather than considering such conflict zones in a comparative way, the papers explore the connected nature of both spheres of influence of the Habsburg Empire. What happened, for example, when the conflict between Christians and North Africans that normally took place in the Iberian Peninsula and later in the Mediterranean was transplanted to the Atlantic?
While one paper focuses on the tactics employed by Moriscos to ransom their coreligionists who had been taken captive in Spanish soil, another paper explores the ransom procedures that bound together North-African Muslim and Spanish Christian families across the Mediterranean. Finally, this apparent Muslim-Christian conflict re-emerged in the Atlantic context with the appearance of several Moriscos and North Africans before the Mexican inquisition. Here we find similar inter-confessional ties being forged.
Disciplines
History
Participants
Dr. Marya Teresa Green Mercado
-- Organizer, Presenter
In 1568, some Moriscos of Granada staged a rebellion that kept the Monarchy busy for over two years. Among the reasons invoked by the Moriscos to rebel was their repudiation of a royal decree (known as the Pragmática of 1567) that banned all expressions of Morisco identity, such as the use of the Arabic language (spoken or written), traditional baths, Morisco dress, among others. The Pragmática also forbade any member of the Morisco community from carrying arms, and from possessing slaves. Throughout the rebellion, thousands of men, women and children were taken captives as war booty. After the rebellion was contained, all the Moriscos of the Granada were expelled from the Kingdom, and dispersed throughout Castile, while a few ended up in Valencia and Aragon.
In the years following the War, an unexpected ransoming phenomenon occurred in the Morisco community: 1) Many exiled Granadan Moriscos attempted to rescue their enslaved kin. 2) Not only did the Granadan Moriscos attempt to rescue their own relatives, but Moriscos from different parts of the Peninsula also participated in ransoming Granadan captives. By examining several notarial and inquisition sources, this paper will attempt to reconstruct the ransoming activities of the Moriscos in order to illustrate the different intra-communal networks that were created among the Moriscos of the different kingdoms of the Spanish Monarchy. It will attempt to answer the following questions: Who organized the ransoms? Was it an individual task or a collective enterprise? How were the ransoms carried out? What was the reaction of the Christian authorities to these Morisco ransoming activities? This paper will argue that some Morisco intermediaries used ransoming in order to assert their position both socially and economically within their community. Another strategy was the collection of funds that were destined to ransome Morisco captives, as we see in the case of the aljama (Muslim quarter) of Valencia. This became a way of fulfilling a religious duty of freeing all Muslims captives. At a time when any expression of Muslimness was not only forbidden, but persecuted by the Christian authorities, ransoming became an outlet for the Moriscos to assert their Muslim identity both at the individual and collective level, reinforcing communal ties and creating new communitites.
In 1523, in Valencia, a rumor spread among Muslims who had been baptized by force in the Germanias uprising of 1521 that their baptisms would be cancelled by the pope, pending a small payment. In 1546, in New Spain, the European encomendero of the Mixtec town of Yanhuitlan in New Spain was accused of claiming to his Native American subjects that he was "bishop and pope in their town," and that he, not the local Dominicans, had the power to sanction indigenous marriages. Twenty years later, in Valencia, the Admiral of Aragon Don Sancho de Cardona was accused of having encouraged his Morisco vassals to attend the Council of Trent so as to speak with the pope about their rights to practice Islam openly. This paper will investigate the ways in which the pope and his authority was evoked on behalf of non-Christian practices in both Spain and the New World. How were the wondrous powers of the pope, the great Bridge Builder linking heaven and earth, viewed (and called upon) in colonial situations by Catholics, Native Americans, and Muslims? What do such commentaries reveal about the perceived connections between Christianity and non-Christian beliefs in the early modern transatlantic world?
In his Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel has described privateering, a paradigmatic form of Mediterranean conflict and exchange, as “…an ancient form of piracy native to the Mediterranean, with its own familiar customs, agreements and negotiation. While robbers and robbed were not actually accomplices before the event, like the popular figures of the Commedia dell’ Arte, they were well used to methods of bargaining and reaching terms…” The complicity formed between North African Muslim and Spanish Christian families hoping to ransom back their enslaved kin was expressed, in some cases, in unusual trust, an ad-hoc alliance that enabled the ransom of individual captives.
Drawing on administrative, notorial and literary sources, this paper examines procedures that Muslim and Christian captives’ kin employed between 1580 and 1680 in order to liberate their dear ones from captivity in the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Maghrib. Many Maghribi wives and fathers bought Christian captives only in order to exchange them with their enslaved husband and sons. The execution of such exchanges required tight cooperation between families on both sides of the Mediterranean who negotiated their cases against Ottoman and Habsburg royal and religious bureaucracies. By examining these temporary coalitions, the paper explores the hitherto little studied ransom attempts performed by North Africans, and points out how the violent practice of capturing people in the sea lead to unexpected alliances between Christians and Muslims. Finally, it argues that rather than studying captivity and ransom of Muslim and Christian as separate phenomena, we should think of them as forming parts of a single Mediterranean system.
Due to their preoccupation with promoting religious orthodoxy and creating an idealized Catholic community in the New World, Spanish authorities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prohibited Moriscos and North African Muslims from emigrating to the Americas. They were concerned that the presence of Muslims would encourage indigenous peoples to convert to Islam. But these laws restricting travel, like so many others during the period, were not fully enforced. Some Moriscos evaded the restrictions by a variety of means and settled in the forbidden territories, and North African slaves were forcibly transported to Spanish America in the galleys.
Through a critical examination of records from the Mexican Inquisition, my paper explores the tension between everyday negotiations among local peoples, and Spanish authorities’ attempts to sanction practices they associated with Muslims. Spaniards, North Africans and indigenous peoples entered into conversations and exchanged remedies in the towns in New Spain where they resided. Yet fears concerning the presence of Muslims in Spanish America spurred some old Christians to denounce individuals for practices that ranged from learning healing rituals in North Africa to praying in Arabic and invoking Muhammad. I argue that these inquisitorial testimonies against Moriscos and North Africans often invoked the presence of indigenous peoples in strategic ways. Accounts of daily exchanges were reshaped into narratives that undermined Spanish imperial authority in the Americas.
