Navigating Identities: The Case of A Morisco Slave in Seventeenth-Century New Spain

In 1660 Cristóbal de la Cruz presented himself before the commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Veracruz, Mexico, claiming to be afflicted by doubts about the Catholic faith. Born in Algiers and captured at the age of nine or ten by a Spanish galley force, he was taken to Spain, where he was quickly sold into slavery and baptized. Thirty years later, De la Cruz denounced himself to the Mexican inquisitorial tribunal and proceeded to recount to the inquisitors a detailed and fascinating story of his life as he crossed Iberian and Mediterranean landscapes: escaping from his masters and being re-enslaved, encountering Muslims and renouncing Christianity, denouncing his guilt remorsefully before the Inquisitions of Barcelona and Seville, and moving between belief in Catholicism and Islam. His case provides important insights into the relationship between religious identity and the regulatory efforts of powerful institutions in the early modern Spanish world.¹

De la Cruz’s case fits into the broad context of negotiating enslavement and religious identity in a multi-confessional environment in which Spanish authorities sought to enforce restrictions on religious beliefs and practices in the ongoing attempt to create a unified Catholic nation. His case sheds light on the complex and sometimes ambivalent position of individuals who attempted to navigate the oppressive structures of the Inquisition, which continued to pursue matters of religious orthodoxy even years after the Moriscos were expelled from Spain in 1609–1614. The doubts that De la Cruz expressed during his trials reflect similar preoccupations of other individuals who were positioned between belief systems that were conceived of as mutually exclusive.

Many of the experiences that De la Cruz related in his testimony take place in the context of the contested encounters between Muslims and Christians in the western Mediterranean during the seventeenth century. Molly Greene has argued that the clear distinctions that historians have drawn between Christian and Muslim and between foreign and local are not particularly useful in considering the complexity of shifting commercial relationships in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean.² Greene argues that the increased participation of northern states in Mediterranean trade networks added a new dynamic to commercial relations between Christians and Muslims, and produced “ambivalence over which type of community—national or religious—mattered most in the Mediterranean world.”³ She shows how this ambivalence played out in the case of Christian and Muslim corsairs by highlighting the role of religious identity in corsairing practice. As a result of the legitimacy of the practice of enslaving members of other religious communities and the prohibitions against enslaving members of one’s own, in accordance with the principles of just war, “the ability to establish the identity of a merchant, a ship, its cargo, or its crew, was vital.”⁴ Because there existed a number of legal structures across the Mediterranean to which individuals could bring grievances that hinged on their religious identity, “the absence of an enforcing state added to the general confusion, as it allowed for a considerable amount of opportunism in deciding on the identity of people and things.”⁵ The Spanish Inquisition became one of numerous sites at which religious identity could be contested perilously.

During the seventeenth century, religious identity continued to influence legal status and inter-confessional relationships in the Spanish world. For renegades in the Mediterranean who wished to return to their communities in Spain after living under Ottoman rule, the Inquisition became the required point of passage. This powerful institution promoted self-denunciation in order to achieve reconciliation with the Church and reinsertion into Catholic society. To encourage renegades to return to Catholicism, inquisitorial tribunals in both Spain and Spanish America issued a number of edicts of faith. During the ensuing periods of grace, individuals could denounce themselves and be absolved with only minor sentences.⁶ It was perhaps in response to one of these edicts of faith that De la Cruz denounced himself before the Inquisition in New Spain.

During his trial, De la Cruz described the encounter that prompted him to present himself before the...