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CHAPTER EIGHT ~ Rebellion, Retrenchment, and the Road to the Sacromonte, 1564-1600 H aving spent at that point a total of less than five years in Granada, Pedro Guerrero was still a relative newcomer among the city's immigrant community when he returned from his first journey to Trent on January 17, 1553. On his arrival, he received from much of his flock a warm welcome complete with festive reception ceremonies similar to those with which the city customarily observed the entrance and installation of a new prelate. Despite frigid winter temperatures , the community and its archbishop that afternoon together enjoyed among other things a number of outdoor performances of religious dramas on a makeshift stage set up by the cathedral chapter in the city's central Bibarrambla plaza.1 Eleven years later, by contrast, the travel-weary archbishop returned home from his final trip to Trent on May 2, 1564, to a reception characterized at best as lukewarm. On hearing that Guerrero and his entourage were near, the cathedral chapter simply appointed two of its members to ride out to greet him, kiss his hands, and accompany him to the cathedral itself, where a simple, solemn indoor procession of clergymen constituted the entirety of the archbishop's official greeting.2 The Granada to which Guerrero returned in 1564 was indeed a different city than the one that he had first seen eighteen years earlier in 1546, and not simply in terms of cooler relations between the archbishop and his cathedral chapter. Above all, a cluster of oppressive state and ecclesiastical policies on the one hand and growing popular fears and ethnic hostility among both the immigrant and morisco communities on the other gradually upset in the years around 1560 the delicate local peace that had reigned since the suspension of the 1526 Royal Chapel mandates. Internationally, Turkish ascendancy in the Mediterranean sharpened the worries of distant royal advisors and local immigrant residents alike concerning Granada's moriscos as a possible "fifth column" for a direct Ottoman attack on Iberia.3 At the national level, the 1557 discoveries of secret Protestant groups in Seville and Valladolid increased the general religious paranoia of crown, church, and Inquisition officials.4 177 178 .. CREATING CHRISTIAN GRANADA Also in 1557, King Philip II for the first time declared bankruptcy, and among the means he used to augment royal incomes over the next few years were dramatic increases in taxes on the production and sale of Granadan silk, including a jump of more than 60 percent in 1561, followed closely by another of more than 30 percent in 1564. Already suffering declining incomes , the tens of thousands of morisco men and women in the frontier city and archdiocese who depended on this locally critical industry then faced even further deprivation when adverse weather conditions made the 1567 silk harvest the worst since the city'S conquest.s Meanwhile, King Philip had also appointed in 1559 a commission headed by Dr. Santiago-a judge from Valladolid's royal appellate court-to investigate royal land claims in the kingdom of Granada. Royal officials suspected that the crown had been illegally defrauded of much of the old Nasrid royal patrimony. Although this was probably true, the usurpers were most likely corrupt bureaucrats in the local royal administration itself. Those who actually had their land confiscated by Santiago's commission over the next few years, however, were almost entirely rural moriscos who failed to produce for the commissioners adequate documentary title for what was in many cases ancestral family land. Unlike royal bureaucrats, they knew little of Castilian legal procedures , and most lacked sufficient financial resources to mount effective defenses of their claims in the crown's courts.6 By the late 1560S, the position of Granada's moriscos in the dominant society of the conquerors had become nearly untenable, and mutual suspicion increasingly dominated morisco-immigrant relations throughout the former sultanate. The fears of the capital city's Christian immigrant community came to a head in the disturbances of April 1568, when a pervasive rumor of a morisco uprising planned for Easter combined with a accidental ringing of a warning bell in the Alhambra to initiate a near riot. Although local officials reacted quickly to prevent an immigrant mob from ascending into the Albaidn for a preemptive strike, the incident intensified even further the paranoia of their morisco neighbors.7 Like Granada itself, Pedro Guerrero by 1564 had also changed significantly through the course of an already eventful...

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