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perate ‹ght for historical time. That Historia verdadera should be Lozano’s closest source is in itself an interesting fact, since historians have identi‹ed its author, Miguel de Luna, as one of the Morisco “translators” who forged the infamous libros plúmbeos, or “lead books,” of Granada, a collection of “archeological discoveries” that were presented in the late 1500s as documents recorded by early Christians in the ‹rst century. These forgeries were intended to rewrite Christian history by painting a positive image of Islam that could be attributed to the views of the original Christian communities.8 The lead books recently made the Spanish news when the Vatican returned them to Granada in the year 2000. Just a few months earlier, on the ›oor of the Andalusian parliament on November 19, 1999, the parliamentary group of Izquierda Unida—Los Verdes (United Left—The Greens) had presented a motion that included the following exposición de motivos (exposition of motives or facts): “En el último tercio del siglo XVI en Granada seguía vigente la división entre cristianos viejos y cristianos nuevos, es decir, entre moriscos y no moriscos y ya se vislumbraba ‘la solución ‹nal’ a la castellana que a principios del siglo XVII se pondría en marcha en todos los reinos uni‹cados por los Reyes Católicos. Ello [. . .] hizo que, muy posiblemente , un grupo de moriscos cultos granadinos (con la nobilisima causa de conseguir la libertad) utilizasen la imaginación en su lucha contra la intolerancia del nuevo estado basado en la uniformización de la lengua, la religión y las costumbres [. . .] Desde 1595 ‘aparecieron’ veintidós libros plúmbeos que son, según el doctor Miguel José Hagerty, ‘el último testimonio escrito en la lengua árabe de la civilización andalucí’” (Diario Ideal de Granada, June 18, 2000) (In the last third of the sixteenth century, the division between old and new Christians—that is, between Moriscos and non-Moriscos—was still in place, and one could see the Castilian “‹nal solution” in the horizon, which would be set in motion in all the kingdoms uni‹ed under the Catholic Monarchs at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This [. . .] possibly drove a group of cultured Granadinian Moriscos to mobilize their imagination (for Baroque Horrors 152 8. For a detailed examination of the circumstances surrounding the apparition of the lead books in the late sixteenth century and their controversial history, see Juan Sánchez Ocaña, El Sacro Monte de Granada: Imaginación y realidad, published in 2007 by the Ayuntamiento de Granada. Sánchez Ocaña’s book contains an extensive appendix, including a series of compelling images and newspaper clippings, and also a useful bibliographical section, going back to seventeenth-century descriptions of the libros plúmbeos and subsequent pronouncements on the subject of their authenticity . See also Francisco Márquez-Villanueva, “La voluntad de leyenda de Miguel de Luna,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 30, no. 2 (1981): 359–95. the very noble cause of achieving freedom) in order to ‹ght against the intolerance of the new state, which was founded on a uniform language, religion, and culture [. . .] Twenty-two lead books “appeared” since 1595, which, according to Doctor Miguel José Hagerty, are “the last testimony of the Andalus í civilization written in the Arabic language”). That the libros plúmbeos are being discussed in political circles at the turn of the twenty-‹rst century shows that the ideological wars that inspired them have found fertile ground in our day. If the lead books “translated” by Miguel de Luna and Alonso del Castillo were meant as an intervention in the political and cultural debates on and around the of‹cial status of new Christians in the uni‹ed kingdoms, Historia verdadera is an attempt to penetrate the historiographic circles in which the history of Spain was being (re)written by organic intellectuals. Márquez Villanueva (1981) and Bernabé Pons (2001) have pointed out that Luna’s text is a deliberate statement against the historiographic myths of gothic origins, the so-called mito neogótico that feeds the of‹cial doctrine of Philip II. Miguel de Luna’s strategy involves claiming, once again, the role of the translator of an Arabic original. Thus, Historia verdadera is said to chronicle the fall of the last of the Visigoth monarchs from the unbiased perspective of an Arabic historian by the name of Abulcácim Tárif Abentarique.9 The events that interest...

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