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chapter one Two Flocks, One Shepherd Christians and Muslims in Valencia In March 1569 Juan de Ribera traveled eastward across Spain and took possession of the archdiocese of Valencia. In this new post he discovered a deeply divided flock, with Old Christians and moriscos separated by economic status, language, race, and religion. Ever since the Islamic conquest of Valencia more than eight centuries earlier , Christians and Muslims had engaged in a struggle for control of the region’s abundant resources of water and land. The Christian Reconquest of the thirteenth century shifted the balance of power but did not end coexistence in Valencia, for many Muslims chose to remain as Mudejars, vassals to the new Catholic king. This situation persisted through the crisis of the fourteenth century and the prosperity of the fifteenth, until a changing political climate saw the forced baptism of all Spanish Muslims in the 1520s under Charles V. The nominal unity of sixteenth-century Valencia, however, belied the continuance of Islamic practice among “new converts ” (as the moriscos were known), and this disparity contributed to increased suspicion of moriscos in connection with the rising Turkish menace in the Mediterranean . An examination of Old Christian and morisco religious practices at the time of Ribera’s arrival reveals the incongruity of his two flocks: whereas Old Christians embraced the pageantry and spectacle of the Corpus Christi procession, the ceremony that provided the standard for urban rituals, moriscos withdrew to their homes on Friday evenings to observe Muslim rites to the greatest extent possible in this hostile world. According to the Gospel of John, the good shepherd brings all his sheep into one fold, just as Jesus exhorted his followers to reach out to the Gentiles among them: “I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:14–16). In his efforts to draw the Valencian people to heed his voice, Ribera encountered resistance from both halves of his congregation. The seeming harmony and majesty of the 1569 Corpus Christi festival masked deep-seated tensions within the Valencian capital, where the confraternities and local officials who organized and enacted the rituals were not accustomed to following the lead of the archbishop or other royal appointees. By the same token, the third of the kingdom’s residents excluded from the Corpus Christi celebrations also defined their spiritual world in opposition to official religion. The moriscos who conducted Islamic ceremonies in that same summer weekend owed nothing at all to the institutional Church, drawing inspiration rather from the beliefs of their Mudejar ancestors. islamic valencia and the transfer to christian rule Islamic Valencia, established with the Muslim conquest of Visigothic Spain in 711–18, occupied a prominent position within the shifting world of Al-Andalus, or Muslim Iberia. The region prospered in the centuries after the conquest, as Muslim agriculturalists introduced new systems of irrigation to create arable lands beyond the reach of previous Roman canals.1 These advances made possible a medieval Green Revolution, in which Muslims introduced rice, sugar, cotton, fruits, and vegetables to the varied microclimates of Valencia, establishing the area as an important center for trade.2 The succession of medieval warlords and immigrants from the Maghreb who reigned over this region, however, ultimately failed to halt the Christian Reconquest. The process of recapturing Valencia from the infidel unfolded in a much less clear-cut and heroic manner than later chronicles might suggest. The frontier between Christians and Muslims in Valencia became blurred over time as Christians adopted the religion of their conquerors, in some cases rising to prominence in a society dominated by Arabs and Berbers.3 In the midst of this multiethnic but overwhelmingly Muslim population, small communities of Christian merchants and immigrants known as mozárabes continued to practice their faith on the fringes of society. When the conqueror Rodrigo Díaz, better known to posterity as El Cid, took the city of Valencia temporarily in 1094, he encountered a group of Christians headed by a Mozarabic bishop.4 James I of Aragon (r. 1213–76) definitively instituted Christian rule in Valencia on 9 October 1238, when he led his Aragonese and Catalan...

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