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3. Images and Realities
- Louisiana State University Press
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26 chapter 3 IMAGES AND REALITIES S everal basic attitudes dominated Old Christian views of recent Muslim converts. Foremost among these was fear. Catholic Spain perceived various sources of threat in the moriscos. Above all, they were seen as potential allies of their Muslim brethren in North Africa and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Nor were these fears of “conspiracy and a pact for evil among them” misplaced.1 The strategic danger of the moriscos was not a fantasy. During the prolonged war with the Barbary pirates—one of the more protracted if least acknowledged conflicts in early modern Europe—moriscos often lent covert aid to their coreligionists. This was particularly true of the coastal areas and islands in the south and east, whose inhabitants had long traded in contraband as part of an intense traffic in goods and persons between the northern and southern coasts. Old Christians in these areas suffered constant fear of surprise attacks and kidnappings , at times of entire villages. Yet one cannot understand the depths of this very real fear if it is separated from another sentiment, that of contempt. Most Old Christians despised the moriscos. While resenting the Jews as rich, they looked down on the moriscos as poor and lacking in honor, thanks in large measure to their practice of demeaning trades. They also considered New Christians social deceivers, not to be trusted. Thus it was widely believed that while on the outside they feigned poverty, secretly they were quite rich, thanks Images and Realities 27 to their greed, frugality, and penchant for large families. The latter derived in turn from a combination of animal sexuality, their marrying off their daughters young, their refusal to commit any of their members to clerical celibacy, and their lack of public service as soldiers or as emigrants to the New World. This combination of suspicion and rejection was neatly summed up by the following diatribe from a sermon published in 1532 by the reforming cleric Bernardo Pérez de Chinchón, who equated the moriscos with the Turks as “people without faith, without law, proud, barbarous, lustful, bestial, thieves, murderers, cruel, poorly dressed, lacking in the propriety and the good order of honest living, and without fear of God.”2 These and other complaints represented the usual mixture of fantasy and seeming fact that drew on different sorts of resentment lodged at various social levels. Much of the common image of the moriscos was articulated as charges by unskilled workers and others among the lower classes against their direct economic competitors. Landowners paid morisco agricultural laborers substantially less than they paid Old Christians. Similarly, they preferred to take on moriscos as tenants because they knew they could charge them more in exchange for protection. Much anti-morisco sentiment was nurtured by the obvious fact that the New Christians’ acceptance of lower wages or higher leases undercut the rural labor market as a whole. The direct self-interest that motivated much of the contemporary criticism of the moriscos was blatant enough to make its way on occasion into the documentary record. Thus in 1633 one Diego Díaz, an innkeeper from the town of Belmonte in La Mancha, was accused of being a secret Muslim by a former servant and a couple who owned a nearby inn. When Díaz pointed out the latter fact the inquisitors released him, noting “that their being enemies is credible because these others have an inn nearby, and among poor people such situations give rise to envy and plots to have the other thrown out of town.”3 While economic rivalry played an important role in fanning Old Christian hostility against this minority, the prime mover was the former’s unwillingness to accept the latter’s sense of cultural difference. Or to be more precise, Old Christians suspected that the cultural differences separating them from the moriscos harbored something more sinister: religious heterodoxy . The moriscos may have been scorned as disloyal competitors, but the fundamental cause of their rejection was their refusal—or lack of [54.145.183.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:45 GMT) 28 Parallel Histories opportunity?—fully to assimilate. This led Old Christians to see them as spiritual hypocrites as well as social enemies. And logically enough, one might think, given that most of them had been baptized under pressure if not by force. But how they became Christians was far less under dispute than the question of how Christian they became. In the eyes of the...