In the years after the expulsion of the Moriscos (baptized Christians of Muslim descent) from Spain (1609-1614), some of the expelled Moriscos ended up back in Spanish territory, captured on North African corsair ships. Captured Moriscos were routinely brought to the Inquisition for trial. Unlike their North African shipmates, who merely faced a life sentence on a galley ship, Moriscos were subject to the Inquisition because they were baptized Christians. The Inquisition charged them with practicing Islam while in North Africa. That they were in North Africa as a result of the Spanish expulsion and that North African officials forced conversion to Islam on Morisco immigrants upon their arrival was no excuse. Moriscos had an ambiguous religious identity, which was highly problematic in both the Christian and Islamic Mediterranean. My paper is based on twenty-nine trial records of expelled Moriscos caught on corsair ships between 1610 and 1631. These sources, from the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, are among the only first-hand accounts we have of the expulsion and of North African corsair ventures in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean. Historians have long claimed that Moriscos made up a significant part of the manpower on North African corsair ships, and though conclusive data is hard to come by, these documents suggest that this may have been true. But the accounts the men gave to the Inquisition call into question the assumption that they were motivated by vengeance and religious fervor, instead demonstrating how many Moriscos made difficult choices in order to survive in a world that was hostile and unwelcoming.

One of the most significant transformations that occurred in sixteenth-century Iberia was the systematic conversion of the conquered Muslims of Granada and Castile in 1501/1502. A hitherto largely unstudied text, the 1501 Granadan poetic appeal (or qaṣīda) to the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II can illustrate the various dimensions at play during the late-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with regards to the Mudéjars and Moriscos in Iberia.. This appeal represents an important ideological watershed and a critical turning point in the history of the Andalusi Muslims as they responded to their transition from Mudéjar (tolerated Muslims) to Morisco (crypto-Muslim) status at the close of the fifteenth century. The 1501 qaṣīda to Bayezid II is a significant historical document because it represents one of the only contemporary reflections of the Iberian Muslims on the end of al-Andalus, the end of toleration for Islam in Castile, and the forcible conversions that occurred between 1499 and 1501 in Granada. As such, this document can help shed light on how contemporary Andalusi Muslims understood—and, more importantly, how they sought to represent—the end of Islam as a publicly practiced and legally-tolerated religion in Castile. Rather than suggesting that the Hispano-Muslims were passive victims of Castilian Reconquista or unwilling agents of Ottoman jihād, the text represents an attempt by a particular faction, the rebels of the Alpujarras, to transform the existing reality from a local Iberian affair into a broader “civilizational” conflict by actively engaging with both of these forces. It was by constructing a narrative of victimization in which not merely Muslims but Islam itself was humiliated and subjugated that these Andalusi Muslims invoked the Ottoman sultan’s obligation as the legitimate imam and caliph, and hence the defender of the faithful, in order to ensure that he would come to their aid that the text exhibits this transformative agency.

In 1492 the Catholic Monarchs (r. 1469-1504) guaranteed the protection of the right to religious observance for the Muslim community of Granada following its conquest. After a dramatic increase in Castilian immigration to the city, along with escalating and oppressive taxation of the conquered population, a revolt was staged in 1499 led by the influential figure Ibrahim ibn Umayya who claimed direct descent from Abd al-Rahman III. The revolt was quickly suppressed and followed by particularly ruthless consequences involving forced conversion to Catholicism or expulsion for the entire Muslim community. Curiously, Ibn Umayya was one of the first to convert, changing his family name to Córdoba y Válor, and was immediately granted titles, land, goods, and political influence within the local Castilian government. The central theme of this paper will investigate the ways in which some Moriscos, following the First Alpujarras Uprising, navigated their own positions within an increasingly anti-Muslim environment. While Ibn Umayya’s story may at first denote a fickle allegiance during times of upheaval, primary sources regarding the family reveal a more complex narrative in which the Córdoba y Válor blurred the lines of religious identity, and for a variety of reasons. It would only be forty years after the death of Ibn Umayya that his great grandson would deny his own inherited position on the Granadan city council, convert to Islam, and lead the Second Alpujarras Uprising as the “King of the Moors.” This was, in part, a reaction to the enforcement of laws designed to eradicate the Arabic language, prohibit traditional customs, and erase the memory of Islamic Al-Andalus – a situation that may ring familiar due to the current state of affairs regarding some Euro-American efforts in “confronting” their Muslim communities.

In the early modern period, conversionary institutions were established in Rome, Paris, and London for drawing the Muslims and the ‘oriental’ Christians of the Ottoman Empire to the Catholic and the Protestant churches. In the past quarter of a century, large numbers of studies have focused on the efforts and methods of the missionaries, without examining the resistance that was expressed by Muslims and eastern Christians. Furthermore, the emphasis has been nearly exclusively on European sources. This paper (part of a book project on “Religious Conversion in the Euro-Arab Mediterranean, 1517-1798”) focuses on Arabic manuscripts, written by two Arabic speakers, a Muslim captive and an Orthodox priest, that describe resistance to conversion. They are first-hand accounts that show the strategies that were adopted in confronting Catholic missionary effort. The first set of manuscripts is preserved at the Franciscan Library in Valletta and consists of writings by a North African Muslim captive in the early seventeenth century. He was given the task of transcribing Arabic Christian material but then subverted the content by adding his own critical comments. The second set is at the Bibliothèque Orientale in Beirut’s Jesuit University and consists of letters by an eighteenth-century priest from the patriarchate of Antioch in Syria describing the French-backed Catholic missionaries’ disruptive attempts to win over his congregation. These manuscripts are unique in that they show resistance to conversion, couched in expressions of fear and anxiety, not in the translated language/s of the missionaries, but in the native Arabic idiom.

Sicily carried both strategic and religious weight for Carlos V. As the Mediterranean frontier of his realm, Sicily faced constant harassment from North African-based corsairs to the south and the threat of Ottoman attack from the east. Its strategic importance is demonstrated by the fact that Carlos was the first (and only) Spanish monarch to visit Palermo in person in order to win the loyalty of its subjects. But, as a crossroads where heretics, Mohammedans, renegades, and converted Jews met, the buttressing of Sicily as a fortress of the faith was no less important. This paper examines the interaction of strategic and religious goals in determining royal policy toward inquisitorial activity in Sicily during Carlos’s reign, which shifted according to political needs. When in need of local support, which showed strong opposition to the Inquisition, he suspended Inquisition activities. Active among the Sicilian converso community from 1500 until the 1550s, between 1522 and 1540, the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily trained its sights on New Christian communities hitherto untouched by the Holy Office. The contemporary viewpoint is reflected in a treatise on heresy by Arnaldo Albertini, the inquisitor of Sicily in the 1530s, which stresses Judaizing. Although second- and third-generation converts, the New Christians investigated and condemned in this period were but partially integrated into the surrounding society, with few marrying into the Old Christian population. Still identified as neofiti or vactiati (baptized), they suffered no legal discrimination. On the contrary, local enmity toward the Inquisition seemed to work in their favor. In 1522 the Sicilian parliament petitioned the emperor to abolish the Inquisition, claiming that most of the converts had fled and that the rest had already been investigated. Local attitudes are manifested by an incident in which the Catanian townspeople chased away the treasurer of the Holy Inquisition for arresting certain vactiati. As documented in a sixteenth-century chronicle, the townspeople cried “away with the treasurer,” not “the vactiati.” With its complex, often contradictory interface between the persistence of convert identity, inquisitorial activity, local reactions, and royal policies, Sicily can serve as a test case for the religious and geo-political constraints that impacted Carlos V’s Mediterranean policies. This research is based on conteporary primary sources: the account books of the Sicilian Inquisition, a Catanian chronicle (Cronaca siciliana del secolo XVI, eds.V. Epifanio and A. Gulli (Palermo 1902)), Arnaldo Albertini’s, Tractatus de agnoscendis assertionibus catholicis et haereticis, (Palermo 1553).