Abstract
Matthew Carr, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492–1614, Hurst & Company: London, 2009; vii + 383 pp.; 9781849040273, £20.00 (hbk)
In Blood and Faith, Matthew Carr tells the dramatic story of the historic confrontation between Christendom and Islam played out on Spanish soil between 1492 and 1614. The book begins with the conquest of the Moslem kingdom of Granada, marking the end of the 700-year Christian Reconquest to wrest Spain from Moorish rule. At first it seemed that the old spirit of coexistence (convivencia) might survive through the conciliatory approach adopted by Archbishop Talavera of Granada (1493–1507), but this was soon replaced by a programme of forced baptisms and cultural repression. The programme failed to assimilate the minority faith who remained nominal Christians only and led to an uneasy period of compromise in the southern kingdom: as long as the Granadine moriscos paid their taxes, the Crown and Inquisition were prepared to turn a blind eye to their religious intransigence. A similar situation prevailed in the eastern provinces of Aragon and Valencia, where converted Moors’ continued adherence to their Islamic traditions was quietly tolerated in return for their value to their overlords and economic contribution to society as skilled labourers, artisans and craftsmen. Unlike their Jewish counterparts, they were regarded as simple folk who, with time and vigilance, would eventually abandon their old ways.
However, from the mid-sixteenth century, Carr relates how increasingly more coercive measures were taken against the morisco community in the wake of Turkish advances in the western Mediterranean and the threat of incursions along Spain’s southern coast, together with the hardening of the Catholic Church’s response to dissenting elements within its ranks following the Council of Trent. The persecutions that ensued provoked a violent revolt in the Alpujarras mountains outside Granada in 1568 and the forced dispersal of 80,000 seditious moriscos into the Christian heartland of Castile. But here, as in the eastern kingdoms, no serious attempt was made to properly instruct the morisco community in the ways of the faith. Hence, they remained on the margins of society, with a mounting reputation for being obstinate, incorrigible enemies of Catholicism. In the 1580s the idea of banishing all moriscos from Spain began to be mooted in ecclesiastical and political circles. However, right up to the final decision being taken in April 1619, opinion was divided between those who sought a rational solution to the problem, such as the royal confessor and Inquisitor General, and those, like Archbishop Ribera of Valencia (1568–1611), for whom expulsion was the only option. The old crusading militancy of the Spanish Church was rekindled to present the expulsion of some 300,000 moriscos as a moral victory for the Catholic monarchy whose own prestige was elevated by purging Spain of its oldest enemy. Even so, doubts lingered in the highest circles over the necessity and legitimacy of the action taken which continued to haunt Spain for generations to come. For all Spain’s modern credentials as a pluralist society and the official recognition of Spanish Islam in 1992, no formal apology has been granted to the descendants of those expelled, as in the case of the Jews. Carr sees this as indicative of Spain remaining uneasy about its Muslim past.
In the final chapter, Carr invites the reader to reflect on the fate of morisco Spain as a warning against fanaticism and prejudice that continues to fuel clashes between cultures and civilizations in our present times. This interpretation to some extent dictates the tone and course of the narrative, which otherwise is eloquently written and carefully researched. To balance the equation, the intolerance exercised against religious and racial minorities by the Habsburg monarchy in the early modern period needs to be placed in the wider context of the political imperatives that gave rise to it in the first instance and which was linked to Spain’s Christianizing mission, forcing it to divest itself of its multicultural heritage. Thus, while such an act of discrimination seems abhorrent from a twenty-first-century perspective, the time and circumstances under which it occurred also need to be fully taken into account before it is too readily categorized as ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘an act of terrorism’. These observations apart, Blood and Faith is an important new study that synthesizes much important scholarship on the moriscos, until now inaccessible to an English readership, and makes us aware of historical precedents to current ideological and cultural conflicts.