In Memory of Moors: “Maurophilia” and National Identity in Early Modern Spain

JEMCS 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) In Memory of Moors: "Maurophilia" and National Identity in Early Modern Spain Barbara Fuchs For a nation actively engaged in divesting itself of all remnants of Moorish culture, sixteenth-century Spain yields a remark able set of texts that are sympathetic to the Moors. Yet the con nection between these representations and the historical situation is hardly transparent, mediated as it is by literary convention, indirection, and irony. Can the textual traces of medieval con vivencia in sixteenth-century Spanish literature be read as a counter-nationalist discourse? How are sympathetic portraits of Moorish characters harnessed to an alternative vision of the Spanish nation? And how does this vision actually engage the historical situation of the Moriscos, the forcibly converted Moors who remain in Spain after the fall of Granada? Scholars have struggled for some time with the question of how to read the literary fascination with Moors in early modern Spain. Early sympathetic portrayals, such as those in Don Juan Manuel's fourteenth-century collection of tales, El Conde Lucanor, arise quite logically from close contact with Arabic or Mozarabic culture. Popular frontier ballads of the fifteenth century?the romancero viejo?present an idealized vision of the Moor: the genre trades in pathos and nostalgia, and depends on a sympathetic identification with lovelorn Moorish maids ("Yo me era mora Morayma") or dispossessed Moorish kings ("Romance de Aben?mar"). After the fall of Granada in 1492, the cultural and literary fascination with Moorishness becomes, ifanything, more acute. While peasants in Andalucia continue to wear Moorish garb, nobles at the court in Castile participate in elaborate recre 110 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies ations ofMoorish martial games, in fullMoorish regalia.1 Literary representations, meanwhile, become markedly more sophisticat ed, as late sixteenth-century authors rework the romancero viejo? the popular ballads of the preceeding centuries?into more com plex Renaissance versions featuring, for example, Moorish heroes endowed with mottoes and shields from classical mythology. The most significant literary treatment of Moors, however, appears in two texts largely in prose: the anonymous novella El Abencerraje (1561/1562/1565) and Gin?s P?rez de Hita's two-vol ume hybrid, Guerras civiles de Granada (1595, 1619). While the fascination with Moors in ballads and chivalric games might be explained as the culturally innocuous idealization of a defeated enemy, these two texts reveal the issue to be farmore complex. For although critics have often dismissed these texts as examples of "literary maurophilia"?marked by conventionality, formal pre ciosity, and artificiality?the category is a bit of a red herring. As I will argue, these fictions harness the larger fascination with exoticized Moors in a highly self-conscious fashion, to intervene in urgent debates about national identity. The Moorish question is hardly a dead letter in sixteenth-century Spain, as a new nation struggles to reconcile its loud rhetoric of exclusivist and homoge nous Christianity with the presence of large numbers ofMoors on its territory. As Spain considers ever more repressive measures against the Moriscos, questions of their essential difference, their possible acculturation, and their ultimate place within a Spanish polity become paramount. The texts I discuss here throw these issues into relief, not only through their sympathetic portrayal of Moorish characters, but through the deliberate circumstances of their publication. In the two parts of the Guerras civiles de Granada, P?rez de Hita explicitly juxtaposes the bitter struggles of the sixteenth cen tury with his idealized depiction of chivalric Moors. The author follows the huge success of the firstpart (1595) with a very differ ent volume, written soon after the first but significantly unpub lished until 1619.2 Part I, also known as the Historia de los ban dos de los Zegries y Abencerrajes, is a hybrid of romance, histori cal novel, and ballad collection. True to its title, it imagines internecine struggles among several Moorish factions within Granada before their downfall in 1492. Yet the Moors are highly sympathetic and cultured figures, cognates forChristian knights. Part II of the Guerras Civiles is a very different text. It narrates virtually contemporary events that the author experienced first hand: the 1568 uprising of the Moriscos in...