In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER TWO ~ Mudejares and Moriscos Change and Continuity in Granada's "Indigenous" Community j udging by the I563 distribution of his six-million maravedi estate among his heirs, the morisco merchant Alonso Hermes had become by the middle decades of the sixteenth century one of Granada's wealthiest residents. Yet little is known of his family's past. His recent Muslim ancestors certainly had not been members of Nasrid Granada's ruling elite, and his parents and/or grandparents were probably converted to Christianity along with the city's mudejar masses in January or February I500 in the wake of the failed first rebellion. Alonso's wealth, however, had allowed him to arrange particularly advantageous marriages for his children, including that of his son Miguel Hernandez Hermes to the granddaughter of the powerful local morisco leader Diego Luis Abencerraje , who held an influential position as a jurado on Granada's Christian immigrant-majority municipal council. From his connection with the Abencerraje family, Miguel himself eventually fell heir to the jurado office -a post he still held at the time of the outbreak of the second rebellion in December I568. Although his brother Francisco Hermes was among the overwhelming majority of the city's morisco population who were expelled from the city I569-I570, Miguel's position in local government enabled him and his wife and children to remain in Granada, where the family continued in the years after the expulsion to strengthen its position in the local oligarchy. Miguel's granddaughter Isabel, for example, married a prominent "Old Christian" jurist in Granada's royal appellate court, and his descendent Alvaro Hermes even gathered in I6IO enough perjured testimony from "Old Christian" friends to convince crown authorities that the family was in fact not morisco at all, but rather descendants of Milanese merchants , and thus not subject to the I609 order expelling all moriscos from Spain. From fairly humble middle-class Muslim roots, some members of the Hermes family managed in frontier Granada to integrate themselves effectively into long-lasting positions in the ruling elite of the Christian city.1 The story of the Hermes family is emblematic of startling evidence that 32 MUDEJARES AND MORISCOS :: 33 has emerged from a recent wave of research into largely untapped material in Granada's archives-evidence that has raised important questions concerning the traditional historiographical portrayal of the city's moriscos as a unified community whose cohesion was forged and constantly strengthened by the ongoing hostility and persecution of church and state authorities. Their status as a persecuted minority in Christian Spain and the protagonists of two major rebellions against the crown has long made the "native" community of the city of Granada, the nearby Alpujarras mountains, and other surrounding regions of the old Nasrid sultanate a popular subject of study. Contemporary travelers and observers such as Hieronymus Munzer and the Venetian diplomat Andrea Navagero, for example, typically coupled their lavish praises for the city's staggering physical beauty and exotic Muslim architecture with blanket generalizations in which they characterized Granada's "native" population as a uniformly disgruntled and rebellious lot. "They are Christians," Navagero wrote during his I 526 visit, "only by means of force, and are poorly instructed in matters of the faith.... On the inside, either they are more Muslim than before (the conversion ), or they believe in nothing. They are enemies of the Spaniards, who, in truth, do not treat them very well."2 Although similarly critical of royal and ecclesiastical authorities for mismanaging morisco affairs, the classic "eyewitness" histories of the second rebellion by the aristocratic scholar Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the soldier Luis de Marmol Carvajalleft this monolithic image of Granada's recently expelled morisco community largely intact. Marmol Carvajal characterized the morisco masses of his hometown as generally bitter and recalcitrant: "Although with feigned humility they engaged in some good moral customs in their business, communications , and dress, on the inside they despised the yoke of the Christian religion, and in secret they taught and indoctrinated one another in the rites and ceremonies of the Mohammedan sect. This stain was universal among the common folk."3 More recently, Granada's moriscos became the subject of studies by some of the twentieth century's most distinguished historians of Spain, from Henry Charles Lea to Julio Caro Baroja to Antonio Dominguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent.4 Continuing to view morisco history principally through the lens of the second rebellion and consequent expulsions, however , these "modern" accounts did...

Share