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  • From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City's Past in Early Modern Spain
  • Katherine Elliot Van Liere
A. Katie Harris . From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City's Past in Early Modern Spain. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xxiv + 256 pp. index. illus. map. bibl. $50. ISBN: 978–0–8018–8523–5.

This engaging monograph traces the aftermath of two curious archaeological discoveries. In 1588 and 1595, two collections of parchments, engraved tablets, bones, and other relics were unearthed just outside the southern Spanish city of Granada, first in a tower (the Torre Turpiana) and then on a hillside (the Sacromonte). The texts, written on lead tablets (plomos), told of Granada's evangelization by Saint James the Apostle and several of his disciples, members of a legendary band of seven apostles supposedly martyred in first-century Iberia. Several peculiarities made these texts suspicious to critical-minded contemporaries: while purporting to date from the first century, they were written in Arabic, a language unknown in Iberia before the eighth century; they described the Virgin Mary and two of the seven apostles as being of Arab descent; and they offered a highly syncretic theology with distinctly Qur'anic elements. By the mid-seventeenth century the texts, if not the relics, were widely recognized as forgeries —even by the papacy, which finally confiscated the plomos and forbade their publication —and they eventually joined the infamous ranks of the false chronicles that confused Spanish historical scholarship and perpetuated bitter polemics well into the eighteenth century.

The story of the plomos and their critical reception has been retold numerous times, typically as part of a critique of the credulity and backwardness of Spanish [End Page 170] Catholicism. But Harris treats the story differently from most of her predecessors. While fully accepting the "patently bogus" nature of the plomos (156), she is less interested in their historical content or their critical reception per se than in why they were forged in the first place, and why they appealed so powerfully and enduringly to the broader population of early modern Granada. On the first point, Harris follows recent Spanish scholarship in identifying the likely forgers as members of Granada's Morisco community, the population of forcibly converted Muslims who, since Granada's reconquest in 1492, had struggled to be accepted in the new Catholic society without entirely renouncing their Muslim heritage. Harris's first chapter deftly summarizes the social history of Granada's Moriscos in the sixteenth century, highlighting the failed Alpujarras rebellion of the 1560s and subsequent forced resettlements and cultural and political marginalization. The syncretic nature of the plomos suggests that their creators were Christian Moriscos trying (valiantly, if implausibly) to create an Arabic lineage for Spanish Catholicism in this hostile cultural climate.

Ironically, the Morisco forgeries succeeded so well because Granada's mainstream Christian population, while largely indifferent to the religious syncretism and cultural Arabism in the plomos, found their historical content useful for their own, entirely different, cultural needs. As the last part of Spain to be reconquered from Muslim rule, Christian Granada suffered an historical inferiority complex. Her church lacked respectable antiquity. The stories recounted (and embellished) in the plomos that linked Granada with Saint James, the seven apostles, and even the Virgin Mary herself, allowed Granada's Christian residents to imagine their city not as a latecomer to Western Christendom but as a central player in the first chapters of the Christian story. Thus Granada's civic and ecclesiastical authorities championed the plomos, even in the face of scholarly and papal skepticism, as both valid historical sources and precious religious relics. In her three central chapters, Harris shows how the plomos were eagerly integrated into civic historiography and ecclesiastical rituals. Granada was depicted in local histories, artwork, maps, and liturgical festivals as both an ancient Christian center and a New Jerusalem, while the Sacromonte became a popular pilgrimage site. This process further effaced the memory of medieval Muslim Granada, even though (in perhaps the greatest irony of all) it may well have been the Sacromonte's earlier role as a Muslim holy site that inspired...

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