Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture on an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (review)

In this thoughtful and much-needed history, David Coleman examines the recreation of the former Nasrid capital of Granada as a newly Castilian, newly Christian city on Spain's southern frontier. In the process, he demonstrates the necessarily interrelated nature of Granada's status on the one hand as a newly repopulated city with a long list of institutional challenges, cultural conflicts, and religious innovation, and on the other hand as an incubator of some of the most influential religious figures in Iberia in the sixteenth century.

In his introduction, Coleman establishes three intertwined themes for his book. His first theme, that of seeing Granada as parallel to or a model for imperial expansion, emerges obliquely in his text, usually in the form of comparisons to early colonial Latin America. These quietly comparative notes are suggestive and particularly appropriate in the context of Granada, which shared with the Andes in particular a restive subject population and an agenda of colonization by the Spanish.

Coleman's second theme, that of the changing nature of Old Christian-morisco relations (moriscos were Muslims converted to Christianity and their descendants) from the conquest to the expulsion of the moriscos from Granada in 1570 (moriscos would be expelled from the rest of Spain in 1609) occupies much of the first half of the book. The first two chapters, on Granada as a frontier society and on the Muslim and morisco population, respectively, do an admirable job of demonstrating how both these communities were in significant flux, often in strikingly similar ways. His demographic work in chapter 1 is particularly impressive both for his command of the vast historiography of this city and for his deep research in Granada's many archives. His argument in chapters 2 through 4 points to parallels in Old Christian and morisco experience — that both were immigrant communities, for example, facing in their own ways a lack of centralized authority. Indeed, Coleman's argument itself demonstrates a useful parallelism by insisting that neither the Old Christian nor morisco communities merit the depiction of monolithic unanimity sometimes painted by earlier scholars. Just as there was a range of attitudes on the part of moriscos toward their new faith and new political circumstances, so too was the Old Christian community riven by tensions among various individuals and factions.

This work alone would be sufficient to render Coleman's book useful to scholars of early modern Spain; but I suspect that many will consider his most significant achievement to be his third theme, explored in the second, generally chronological half of the book: namely, his careful reconstruction of the creation of a Christian community in Granada, and the effects of that effort on the Council of Trent and Catholic reform. Although moriscos continue to appear in the narrative, and their presence palpably affects the trajectory of religious life in Granada, in chapter 5 primary attention shifts to the lay confraternities, friars, and clergy out of whose sometimes disparate visions was forged an elaborate web of religious rituals, poor relief, and religious education. This focus continues in chapter 6, where Coleman examines the various reform agendas of Granada's archbishop Gaspar de Avalos (1529–41), St. Juan de Dios, and St. Juan de Avila. Chapters 7 and 8, with their focus on Archbishop Pedro Guerrero (1546–76), the Council of Trent, and the repercussions of Trent in Granada, are the pivot-point of this argument, as Coleman demonstrates that participation in Trent affected Guerrero's administration of his diocese just as his Granadan experience helped form his confrontational attitude at the third Tridentine meeting (1562–63). These chapters also exemplify Coleman's care throughout the book to avoid extreme formulations in favor of more tempered claims, be it the "uniqueness" or "typicality" of Granada, the singular importance of Guerrero, or the increasing clerical...