Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain

6. Morisco Expression

47 chapter 6 MORISCO EXPRESSION T he century-long history of morisco Spain left behind relatively little in terms of formal creativity. New Christians continued to transmit the decorative and architectural skills inherited from their Muslim past in those areas where mudéjar and late Nasrid styles were still in vogue. Thus many of the ambitious building projects of sixteenthcentury Granada employed morisco masons and other skilled workers. Yet in none of them did New Christians play any but a subordinate role. Architectural treatises such as Diego López de Arenas’s 1633 guide to mudéjar building style showed that Old Christians had successfully absorbed many moro elements. Framing traditional Islamic decorative motifs and construction techniques within mainstream Renaissance structures, builders in Andalusia and elsewhere consolidated a rich hybrid style that would mark vernacular housing and public architecture in the south in particular for centuries to come. In terms of written culture, the moriscos produced few authors of renown . Among the few New Christian writers of note was Miguel de Luna, a physician and royal translator from Granada whose fanciful chronicle (published 1592–1600) of the last Visigoth king, Rodrigo, directly challenged the emerging consensus among official historians that identified personal nobility with racial descent from the Goths. A few other writers were reputed to be moriscos. Among them stood out Ginés Pérez de Hita. 48 Parallel Histories Originally a shoemaker from Murcia, he distinguished himself locally as a poet and as a dramatist who specialized in autos and other short religious plays. He then won broader fame for his chronicles of the Granadan wars, both past and present. These included a lengthy account of the Alpujarras revolt of 1568–70, in which the author himself claimed to have fought as a soldier on the royalist side. But he also wrote a true best-seller, the prose romance—Menéndez Pelayo referred to it as a historical novel—titled The History of the Bands of the Zegríes and the Abencerrages, Moorish Warriors of Granada, and of the Civil Wars which took place there, and the Duels which Moors and Christians Fought outside the City, which saw its first edition in Zaragoza in 1595. As noted above, this book, more commonly referred to as El Abencerraje, marked the beginning of the subgenre known as the “Moorish novel.” It was fashionable not only in Spain but also in France, where it helped consolidate the short sentimental novel as a literary form in the seventeenth century. A third contemporary writer who may have been a morisco New Christian was the Granadan priest and mathematician Luis de la Cueva. In 1603 he brought out his Dialogues of the Notable Things of Granada, a typical piece of local bombast whose strenuous claims on the behalf of his city’s ancient past included the admittedly extravagant assertion that Spanish was an older language than Latin (!). The morisco background of these and other authors, such as the playwright Bartolomé Torres Naharro , has yet to be definitively established. Such difficulties of identification suggest that New Christians generally found themselves at a disadvantage in the sphere of public literature and other forms of learned culture. Another thing altogether was aljamiado literature, which involved transcribing contemporary Spanish using Arabic characters. This highly unusual linguistic register was incontestably written by moriscos, and crypto-Muslim moriscos for good measure. A relatively small number of such texts from the sixteenth century have survived. Some were seized at the time by the Inquisition, while others were later stumbled across in surprising locations, hidden in the flooring or in secret compartments of old buildings. Long the exclusive province of specialists in Arabic literary and linguistic studies, recently aljamía has begun to attract broader attention, as transcriptions and translations have made it increasingly available to the reading public at large. When aljamiado works are put alongside writings in standard Arabic that are known to have circulated in Spain during the same period, Morisco Expression 49 one gets a vivid sense of the sort of textual resources literate moriscos were able to wield. At the heart of this corpus was, predictably enough, religion, but other concerns found expression as well. This writing can be separated into five major thematic subdivisions: First and foremost came the basic texts of formal Islam: the Koran, the authorized collection of oral traditions known as hadith, and commentaries on religious law. Abridgments, anthologies, summaries of...