VI
The Moriscos

Until the period just after the conquest of Granada, Valencia's mudéjares continued to practice Islam under the protection of the treaties that had been signed when the kingdom was incorporated into the Aragonese monarchy. These treaties guaranteed full religious and cultural freedom to the conquered population, but, from a legal standpoint, this was mere privilege conceded by the crown and revocable with cause at any time.^[1]

For a considerable period after the forced conversion of Castile's mudéjares in 1502, the political autonomy and legal privileges enjoyed by the Crown of Aragon prevented the Aragonese mudéjares from sharing their fate. At the Cortes of Monzón in 1510, Ferdinand swore that he would make no effort to force their conversion, and Charles V felt obliged to take a similar oath on his accession as king of Aragon in 1518.^[2] Royal legislation to the contrary, however, the mudéjares of the Kingdom of Valencia had always lived in a changing and insecure environment marked by constant pressure from the growing Christian population. This pressure from below had been primarily responsible for driving the mudéjares from the fertile huerta to the dry farming and mountainous regions in the interior of the kingdom where they remained until the expulsion.^[3] The "expulsions" of the fourteenth century also had the effect of removing or greatly reducing the number of mudéjares in the vicinity of the larger towns, which were now controlled by the Old Christians, but this partial segregation of the population of the kingdom did little to reduce the antagonism between the two communities. To the evident differences in religion, dress, and customs

was added the new economic role of the mudéjares as the servile tenant farmers of the hated Valencian noblity.^[4] As a result, the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were punctuated by ugly incidents such as the massacre of Valeneia's Islamic community in 1455.^[5]

The outbreak of the Germanía revolution in spring 1521 sounded the death knell for the existence of Valencia's mudéjares. The defeat of a viceregal army, partially composed of mudéjares, at the battle of Gandía on July 25, 1521, led to the sack and forced conversion of the mudéjar communities of Gandía, Oliva, Játiva, Villalonga, Guadalest, Penáguila, and Polop. Finally, in March 1522, Germanía forces under el Encubierto, the last and most radical of the Germanía leaders, sacked the mudéjar communities of Alberique and Alcocer.^[6]

With the death of Vicent Peris on March 4, 1522, and the surrender of Játiva and Alcira at the beginning of December, the Germanías were defeated, but the partial forced conversion of Valencia's mudéjares during the revolt left the crown and the church in a difficult and ambiguous situation. In Granada and Castile, conversion had been universal, as all Moors who did not wish to convert had been allowed to leave. In Valencia, however, conversion had been partial and hasty so that it was impossible to know for sure which mudéjares had been converted and whether the sacrament itself had been administered properly.^[7] At the same time, the question was raised as to the validity of the conversion itself. It was not so much the forced nature of the conversion that concerned theologians and other contemporary observers but the fact that it had been administered by rebels to a loyal population protected by Charles's oath to permit them to practice Islam without interference.^[8] It should be noted, however, that even though the church had long accepted the indelible nature of baptism, almost regardless of the circumstances under which it was administered, some influential individuals in Spain continued to express their doubts or at least saw the forced conversion of the Valencian mudéjares as a reason for lenient treatment.^[9] For their part, the Moriscos, who had no particular reason to love the faith into which they had been inducted, had returned to their former practices, while the Valencia tribunal, under the leadership of Inquisitor Juan de Churruca, had accepted their conversion as valid and had begun to prosecute backsliders.^[10]

Even though Charles had already asked Pope Clement VII to release him from his oath to allow the mudéjares to freely practice their religion, he accepted Inquisitor-General Manrique's suggestion that the entire situation be considered by a special junta made up of members of the leading royal councils with the addition of some jurists and theologians. To provide the junta with information, Manrique created a commission led by Inquisitor Churruca, and then his successor, Andrés Palacio, to investigate the circumstances under which the Moors were baptized and how they had lived since their baptism took place.^[11]

Given the attitude of Valencia's inquisitors to the conversions, there could be little hope of an impartial investigation, so it is not surprising that the commission's report laid stress on the care with which the officiating priests questioned the converts about their real desires and performed the rites of baptism.^[12] With the report placed before it, the junta deliberated from February 19 to June 1525 and concluded by saying that the Moriscos must remain Christian regardless of their real feelings in the matter.^[13] This verdict simply confirmed the policy that Charles had already decided to follow, and on April 4, he decreed that all the baptized mudéjares should be considered Christians. Immediately thereafter, a commission was established to tour the kingdom to notify the Moriscos of the royal decree and of a thirty-day period of grace during which apostates could return to Christianity without prejudice.^[14]

Having thrown the prestige of royal government behind the forced conversions, it no longer seemed possible to tolerate the continued worship of Islam among the not inconsiderable number of Valencian mudéjares who had escaped the baptismal water of the Germanía. After obtaining a papal brief from Clement VII which relieved him of his oath to respect the Islamic beliefs of his mudéjar subjects, Charles issued an edict on September 13, 1525, which informed the remaining Moors that no one of a different religion could remain in the kingdom except as a slave. This was followed on October 20, 1525, by an edict ordering all the remaining Moors of Valencia to accept baptism or leave Spain before December 8, 1525.^[15] This decision did not receive universal approbation either then or later. On April 3, 1530, Fray Rafael Moner, a Dominican friar and a popular preacher in Valencia, was forced to publicly retract statements critical of the forced conversion.^[16]

Of course, Charles V and his advisers were well aware of the fact that the 70,000 to 80,000 Moriscos created by their policy of forced conversion were Christian in name only and that they could not be expected to meet the demands of their new religion without a period of transition. Even before the decree of expulsion was issued, Charles had written to Germaine de Foix, governor of Valencia, asking her to see to it that the converts were instructed properly in Christianity since he knew that there were few priests where they lived.^[17] This awareness also explains the outcome of a series of negotiations involving representatives of the Valencian Moriscos. In return for the substantial servicio of 40,000 ducats, Charles agreed that the Inquisition was not to exercise jurisdiction over them for a period of forty years and allowed them to conserve their traditional dress and use Arabic for a period of ten years.^[18]

Concern by the royal government and the church over the religious condition of the Moriscos also led to a number of measures designed to make them into genuine converts. For one thing, a network of local rectories was established. To supplement the activity of the rectors who were responsible for the religious instruction and religious practices of their flock, several great inissionary campaigns were undertaken before 1609. The earliest of these began in March 1526 just months after the edict of conversion and involved several missionaries including the bishop of Gaudix, Gaspar Davalos. Later campaigns involved the controversial Arabic-speaking Franciscan Bartolomé de los Angeles (1543), the bishop of Tortosa (1567), and groups of Franciscan and Jesuit preachers (1587).^[19] The last missionary effort, begun at the instigation of the pope in 1606, was only abandoned with the expulsion itself.^[20]

Certain members of Valencia's ecclesiastical hierarchy also interested themselves in the religious education of the Moriscos. In 1566, Archbishop Martin de Ayala published a catechism designed especially for a literate Morisco audience with its Spanish text and Arabic translation on alternate lines.^[21] Archbishop Juan de Ribera, who succeeded Ayala later in the century, had a very ambivalent attitude toward the Moriscos but nevertheless threw himself into frantic missionary activity and republished Ayala's text in 1599.^[22]

Until the late 1560s, moreover, the crown and even the Inquisition sought to enlist the aid, or at least ensure the neutrality, of

the Morisco elite. In the late 1520s, for example, such men as Hazentala, alcadi of Vail de Chelva, and Abdala Abenamir, an influential citizen of Benaguacil, received substantial sums from the crown for not opposing the conversion effort. The Valencia tribunal also enlisted a certain number of leading Moriscos as familiares, in order, as fiscal Luis Ferrer explained in a letter to the Suprema, "to have them ready to assist us in dangerous parts of the distriet."^[23] The tribunal had these Moriseo familiares until at least 1568, although they were coming under increasing suspicion as relations between the tribunal and the Moriscos worsened.^[24] This group of familiares included members of the Abenamir family of Benaguacil.^[25]

As we shall see, these efforts at genuine conversion and assimilation were tenuous and inadequate, but there is evidence to suggest that they achieved some success and that the prospects of assimilation were not as bleak and hopeless as certain contemporary observers and certain modern historians would have us believe.^[26] The fact is that the Moriscos of Valencia, like their counterparts in Castile, lived in a society dominated by Hispano-Christian culture, language, and religion, and in spite of the doctrine of taqiyya embraced by Islamic theologians, ordinary Moriscos inevitably came to accept a Hispano-Christian frame of reference even if they continued to resist or reject most aspects of Christianity itself. If assimilation ultimately failed, it was as much due to official paranoia about the military threat represented by the Morisco "fifth column" and the massive rejection of the Moriscos by virtually every segment of Christian society as it was to the obduracy of the Moriscos themselves.^[27] As far as the Valencia tribunal was concerned, its basic attitude toward the Moriscos was one of hostility tempered by greed and self-interest. Even though the tribunal had been an early proponent of expulsion, by the end of the sixteenth century, the income it received from Morisco censos, fines, and subsidies and the docility of most of the Moriscos it brought to trial caused it to accept them as a useful "client" group. Unlike Juan de Bibera, the archbishop of Valencia who wrote that he would rather subsist on "bread alone" than tolerate the presence of Morisco heretics among his flock, the Inquisition had become aware that large numbers of Valencia's Moriscos could no longer be considered Moslem in the strict sense.

In spite of the insistence of certain modern historians that the Moriscos preserved the use of some form of Arabic right down to the expulsion, the evidence suggests that large numbers of Moriscos could understand and speak Castilian or Valencian even if they continued to use Arabic among themselves.^[28] This, at least, was the conclusion of the junta of Madrid, which had been called into session by Philip II to consider the Morisco problem. Addressing itself specifically to the question of the language that should be used in giving religious instruction to the Moriscos of Valencia, the members of the junta agreed unanimously that this could be done in Castilian or Valencian and need not be done in Arabic as some had proposed, since "generally all the new converts know, or at least understand them." The same panel commented that Moorish-style dress was no longer being used extensively and that the Morisco men were dressing "in the same style as the natives of the Kingdom of Valencia."^[29] Unlike some other committees that were formed to consider the Moriseo situation, this 1587 junta was unusually well informed and included at least two members with long personal experience of Valencian affairs, Juan de Çúñiga, who had served as inquisitor of Valencia from 1574 to 1579, and Dr. Sapena, the regent of the Council of Aragon and a Valencian judge from a respected old Valencian family.^[30]

Even those Moriscos who came from regions where Arabic was still spoken and understood had lost the ability to understand the literary Arabic in which religious texts were written. An example of this would be the Valencian Morisco who stated that he could read and speak Arabic "but understood very little or nothing of the Koran."^[31] The direct result of the decline of literary Arabic was the emergence of aljamía literature with texts written in Castilian but using Arabic characters. The use of aljamía certainly cannot be considered positive for the preservation of traditional Arabic culture, as many of the aljamía texts presented bastardized or highly abbreviated versions of the Arabic originals.^[32]

The decline of Arabic among the Moriscos did not stop with the emergence of aljamía, however, since many of the religious and polemical works written by Morisco intellectuals for their fellow exiles in North Africa were in Castilian.^[33] The de facto Arabic illiteracy among the refugees was given its clearest recognition by Mohammed Rubio, a cultivated and altruistic refugee from Aragon

who financed the translation of a series of religious and polemical works from the original Arabic into Castilian.^[34] These works were designed for the Morisco refugees of Tunis, where there was a large contingent of Moriscos from Valencia.^[35]

Along with the decline in the use of Arabic among the Moriscos went an inevitable deterioration in the practice of Islam itself. This decay was recognized as early as 1568 by a memorialist who wrote that the Moriscos had long since given up "being Moors openly" and described them as a "peaceable and hapless people."^[36] Under intense pressure from the church and the Inquisition, the Moriscos were forced to abandon certain external signs of Islamic belief such as the obligation to say five daily prayers.^[37] Even more disturbing for the long-term survival of formal Islamic worship among the Valencian Moriscos was the impoverishment and alteration of traditional forms of critically important ceremonies such as those connected with birth, marriage, and burials. In 1583, at the Suprema's request, the tribunal presented a detailed description of the burial rites practiced by local Moriscos and concluded by noting that many of these were not of a traditional Islamic kind but "ceremonies that they have introduced among themselves."^[38]

Analysis of the religious practices of Moriscos brought to trial by the Valencia tribunal further reinforces this impression of a decayed and watered-down version of Islam that was embraced more out of custom or a desire to differentiate oneself from a hostile Old Christian community than because it was a live and vital faith. Fully 81.5 percent of the Moriscos tried were accused of practicing just a few of the most elementary Islamic observances, primarily Ramadan, Guadoc, and the Cala. A late description of their practices drawn up by the Inquisition in 1602 lists only two of these (Ramadan and Cala) among the five "commandments" that supposedly distinguished them from Old Christians. These five items are in marked contrast to the much larger list of main offenses drawn up by the tribunal at an earlier period.^[39] In evidence drawn from the trial records, circumcision appears to have been quite frequent, but ceremonies like ritual baths, common at an earlier period, were entirely forgotten, and only 1.7 percent participated in the ritual washing of the dead. Overt expression of pride in being Moslem was rare: only 1.2 percent declared their desire to "live and die as Moors," and only 1.1 percent were accused of openly

praising Mohammed. Of course, it would be foolish to assert that all of the Moriscos of Valencia were ripe for conversion around the time of the expulsion, but the evidence suggests that large numbers of them were in a phase of religious transition.

Furthermore, in many instances, a Morisco's ignorance of the basic prayers and rituals of Christianity was equaled or exceeded by his ignorance of Islam. Many of the Moriscos who carried Islamic religious writings on their persons or had Islamic religious books in their possession were not only entirely illiterate but had an extremely low level of religious participation and knowledge. Pedro Alamin, who was arrested for carrying a paper containing extracts from the Koran, declared that he had picked up the paper in the road and did not know what it contained since "he cannot read." He had occasionally gone to mass but had never confessed and did not know any of the basic Christian prayers. Apart from having been circumcised, there is no evidence that he had actively participated in any Islamic rite. He was sentenced along with three other men accused of carrying Islamic religious writings as amulets and charms.^[40]

Some Moriscos did experiment with Catholicism and Catholic practices, although such experiments did not always have happy consequences. Marco Lardillo, a young Morisco peasant from Carlet, for example, joined one of the confraternities and flagellated himself one Holy Friday. He was arrested after being heard to curse the "evil sect" that harbored such practices.^[41] It is also significant that 2.8 percent of the Moriscos tried by the tribunal from 1554 professed a strong attachment to Roman Catholicism.

Scattered evidence of a certain amount of sincere Catholicism among the Moriscos even comes from around the time of the expulsion. The Valencia tribunal itself was forced to write the Suprema for instructions regarding a certain number of Morisco women who had come to the Holy Office voluntarily before the expulsion was announced and who wished to live in a special house established by Archbishop Ribera where they could "carry out their desire to live as Christians."^[42]

In this same document, the tribunal referred to the cases of those Moriscos who might now come forward to declare a sincere desire to convert. Alonso de Medallan, a Morisco from Quesa, was one such individual. After having fought in the brief rebellion that

followed the promulgation of the edict, he came to the tribunal of his own accord "to confess his sins and ask for penance and mercy."^[43]

Even more significant, perhaps, for the potential success of the conversion effort over the long term was the way in which Valencia's Moriscos were beginning to learn basic Christian prayers and rituals under the pressure of indoctrination by village priests. By the early seventeenth century, even among the Moriscos tried by the Holy Office, it was becoming difficult to find those who did not perform basic Christian observances (mass, confession) or recite basic Christian prayers (Our Father) and the articles of faith.^[44]

Paradoxically, even some of the religious doubts raised by Moriscos about Catholicism were more reflective of an Old Christian popular perspective than an Islamic one. In the Koran, the Virgin Mary is spoken of with great respect as the "excellent and devout lady" and the Virgin Birth is fully accepted. As a consequence, whatever their differences with Christians on other points of dogma, Morisco intellectuals fully supported this concept. It was exactly the opposite with the Morisco popular masses who consistently expressed the same doubts about Virgin Birth as their Old Christian counterparts.^[45]

Moriscos and Old Christians also frequently expressed similar attitudes toward indulgences, even using the same seatological language when referring to them. Marco Antonio Font, an Old Christian alguacil, was deprived of his office and exiled after he offered to "wipe his ass" with the indulgences that a Crusade commissioner was selling in his village. At the same auto, Angela Adori, a Morisco living near Cocentaina, was punished for responding "bulls of my asshole" when she was urged to purchase them along with other Moriscos of the village, and Francisco Tartalico termed indulgences "not glory but shit."^[46]

The efforts of an occasional well-meaning missionary or conscientious bishop notwithstanding, the conversion and social integration of the Moriscos depended on a long-term commitment to integration by church and society. Sadly, such a commitment was never made, and by the time Spain's political and religious leaders became aware of the seriousness of the problem in the 1570s and 1580s, prejudice against the Moriscos had become so ingrained that the task had become impossible.

Of all the missed opportunities that punctuated relations between Moriscos and Old Christians in the sixteenth century, perhaps the most significant was the failure to establish an adequate network of parish clergy who could provide religious services and instruction on a day-to-day basis. The need to establish such a network was not even recognized until 1535 when the bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, Antonio Ramirez de Haro, toured the kingdom and set up 120 rectories in the villages with the largest population of Moriscos.^[47]

Almost from the moment of its inception, this system was widely regarded as grossly inadequate and corrupt. For one thing, even though the system had grown somewhat by the 1580s, it was still too small to adequately serve the Morisco population. In the Arch-diocese of Valencia alone, only slightly more than one-half of the Morisco villages had rectories.^[48] The worst problem with the rectories, however, was not the size of the network but the virtual impossibility of recruiting clergy of sufficient quality and commitment to staff those that had been established. Each rector received only 30 Iliures annually, and this amount, which was inadequate to begin with, suffered a serious reduction in purchasing power in the face of rapidly rising prices.

Apart from the enormous difficulty of finding individuals to staff the rectories, the inadequate endowment meant that rectors were compelled to supplement their income by forcing their Morisco parishioners to pay exorbitant fees for religious ceremonies or making them work without wages in their fields.^[49] For other rectors, the only solution to their financial woes was to seek other employment even though this meant a high level of absenteeism. Of course, the Moriscos were constantly complaining about their rectors, denouncing them for their eagerness to levy fines for the slightest transgression while caring little for the salvation of their Morisco flock.^[50]

But some rectors were so corrupt that they were unwilling to enforce even external religious conformity. While making a visitation to the Sagunto district north of the capital, Inquisitor Alonso Jiménez de Reynoso received testimony from an Old Christian living in the predominantly Moriseo village of Gilet indicating that the rector sold local Moriscos licenses permitting them to slaughter animals in accordance with Islamic ritual, permitted Islamic-style

marriage ceremonies, and allowed the Moriscos to work on Corpus Christi and other Catholic holidays.^[51] And some rectors, while not personally corrupt, were so hostile toward their Morisco flock that they did little more than alienate them.^[52]

Recognition of the critical need to reform the Valencian rectories began in the mid-1560s when the junta of Madrid, which met under the leadership of Inquisitor-General Fernando de Valdés, proposed sending commissioners through the kingdom with powers to compel absentee rectors to serve in their posts.^[53] The heart of any genuine reform effort, however, would depend on increasing the income attached to rectories while sparing the Moriscos additional financial burdens. Since the ecclesiastical tithes (diezmos) of most Morisco villages were owned by great ecclesiastical institutions or were in private hands, Philip II's first thought was to tax these revenues since they were originally intended to support local churches. Pius V declined Philip's request to tax Valencia's tithe holders, however, and accurately forecast the years of difficulty that the king and other reformers would have in finding money for the rectories when he commented that the tithe holders' cooperation would be extremely difficult to enlist "even for such pious work."^[54]

Finally, at a junta held in 1573-74 under the leadership of Archbishop Juan de Ribera, he and the other religious leaders of the kingdom agreed to provide funds from the revenues of the church to found new rectories and raise their stipends to 100 Iliures.^[55] The drastic failure of this program demonstrated conclusively that below the level of a few enlightened or conscientious prelates and political leaders, the Valeneian church as a whole was not prepared to commit itself to the conversion effort, especially if that commitment entailed reduced income for canons, benefice holders, or monastic institutions.

In spite of his ambivalence about the Moriscos, Archbishop Ribera attempted to promote the conversion effort by starting a special fund. This money was then invested and the income used to support rectors in the archdiocese, endow a special school for Morisco children, and provide religious instruction. Unfortunately, none of the other institutions or individuals (who were assessed for the new program) was willing to contribute. Instead of following Ribera's example, ecclesiastical institutions and private individuals petitioned for relief from the king, and cathedral chapters and

monastic institutions sent representatives to Rome to protest against any effort to tax their income.^[56]

In spite of Ribera's conscientious support, therefore, it appears that little was accomplished in the way of reforming and restructuring the system of rectories. This was admitted by the count of Chinchón in a debate on the Morisco situation held in the Council of State shortly before the expulsion.^[57] The drastic failure to establish an effective network of rural rectories and the sporadic and perfunctory nature of the religious instruction offered to the Moriscos on a day-to-day basis could not be overcome by the missionary campaigns of a few well-meaning individuals. As a consequence, the process of conversion remained painfully slow, and the majority of Valencia's Moriscos remained outside the Christian camp until the time of the expulsion.

Quite apart from the inadequacy of the conversion effort, the ability of Islam to survive in the undoubtedly hostile climate of Christian Valencia suggests that its structure had hidden strengths that enabled it to resist the pressures placed on it. One vital element in this structure was the continued existence of dedicated Islamic teachers (alfaquis) who not only offered religious instruction but even acted as judges in private disputes.^[58] Some of these men traveled around the kingdom giving lessons in Islamic rituals in private homes. At the auto de fé that was held on September 5, 1604, Gonzalo Plaçuela was punished for opening his home to two Islamic teachers who taught religious ceremonies to a large number of local Moriscos. The teachers were equipped with several Islamic religious works and required their students to demonstrate the ceremonies that they had been taught so they could be sure that they could perform them properly.

Another factor that made the task of conversion difficult was the nature of the Morisco community itself. In spite of the fact that there were many villages with a mixed Old Christian-Morisco population, the Moriscos remained very close knit, with marriage among first cousins very common. As a result, everyone in the community knew instantly when one individual had cooperated with Christian authority in some obvious way like testifying before the Holy Office. Retribution could be swift and deadly in such cases. In 1605, Antonio Roche, a familiar in Carlet, came before the tribunal to testify concerning the sudden disappearance of Luis

Pastoret, a Morisco of the village who was hated by his Morisco neighbors for having celebrated several Catholic religious festivals with the Old Christians of the village and testifying against them before the Inquisition.^[59]

Until very late in the century, moreover, those Moriscos who wished to maintain an Islamic life-style could count on a very powerful ally—their lords. The most famous ease of complicity between a powerful noble and his Morisco vassals was that of Sancho de Cardona, admiral of Aragon, who was punished by the Valencia tribunal in 1570 for a variety of offenses, including giving the Moriscos of Adzaneta permission to operate a mosque, allowing Moriscos to pass through his territory on their way to North Africa, and encouraging his vassals to resist efforts to convert them.^[60] The duke of Segorbe appears to have followed a very similar policy on his estates in the Vail de Uxó, where he allowed an Islamic school to operate freely. Fray José Cebrian, who testified about his experiences in the Vail de Uxó in 1563, recalled that the duke's Morisco vassals were very happy with their lord and that one of them commented, "Here we have such a wonderful señor; we live as Moors and no one dares to say anything to us."^[61] So confident were the Moriscos in the protection afforded to them by the nobility that Pedro Aman, who escaped from the Inquisition in 1573, wrote to his friends in Onda encouraging them to resist conversion on the grounds that the nobles would soon intervene to stop the Inquisition from persecuting them.^[62]

Of course, with a few exceptions like the admiral, who was also accused of not confessing or taking communion, the nobles were as devout as anyone else in sixteenth-century Valencia.^[63] Their support for the religious practices of their Morisco vassals, therefore, was not based on any enlightened respect for religious freedom but on the pecuniary advantages they derived from it. The Duke of Segorbe, for example, regularly received a portion of the estate of his deceased Moriseo vassals since it was the Islamic custom to set aside part of the estate for the lord.^[64] The Moriscos of Cortes paid their señor a special tax in return for which he allowed them to practice Islamic customs freely and even personally attended their ceremonies and weddings.^[65]

While Morisco obduracy and the support they received from the nobility presented formidable obstacles to the integration of the

Moriscos into Valencian society, it was the political and religious atmosphere of the last half of the sixteenth century that really determined their fate. Such events as the rise of the Huguenot movement in France in the late 1550s and the discovery in 1557-58 of groups of Protestant sympathizers in Seville and Valladolid, the Dutch Revolt of 1566, and the second revolt of the Alpujarras in Granada (1568-1570) dramatically increased the level of mistrust and suspicion directed against any group of apparent nonconformists.^[66] Furthermore, in the perfervid imaginations of the staunchly orthodox and narrow-minded group that came to power during those years, it appeared likely that Spain's growing list of internal and external enemies would not act in isolation but would join forces to oppose her. Since Valencia's Moriscos were a readily identifiable dissident group, it became all too easy for official circles to see the hand of the French Huguenots or the Ottoman Turks behind every rumor of Morisco resistance. Thus, in 1587, the Suprema solemnly warned the tribunal to be on its guard against a rising by Valencia's Moriscos in concert with the Moriscos of Aragon and the Huguenot prince of Béarn merely because a rumor had reached Madrid that the Aragonese Moriscos were purchasing arms and had dealings with the Huguenots. Lacking any direct evidence, the Suprema simply assumed that the Valencian Moriscos were involved in the supposed plot because of their close proximity to and frequent communication with their Aragonese cousins.^[67]

Ordinary Valencians probably thought seldom, if at all, about collusion between the French Huguenots and local Moriscos. They were far more concerned with the corsair attacks that had ravaged and partially depopulated the coast and killed and kidnapped even Christians living far from the sea.^[68] By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, estimates of the number of Christian captives in Algiers alone were as high as 25,000, and the authorities seemed powerless to prevent the raids.^[69]

It was commonly believed that local Moriscos aided and abetted the corsairs. While the fears of Morisco complicity with the corsairs may have been exaggerated, especially as most of them lived far from the coast, they were not entirely unfounded. In October 1583, fifteen Moriscos of Almería were executed for having assisted Algerian corsairs in an attack on Chilches.^[70]

Unquestionably, some Moriscos helped the pirates directly by

furnishing guides or military assistance, but a more important part of this collaboration was that many Valencian Moriscos emigrated to North Africa and later returned as corsairs themselves. Abdella Alcaxet, a native of the village of Bellreguard near Gandía, was captured by a squadron of Spanish galleys patrolling the Valencian coast and brought to the tribunal in September 1576. Under questioning, Alcaxet testified that he had left Spain some twenty years earlier with a group of Moriscos from Oliva and served the king of Algiers in two military campaigns. Later, he turned to piracy and made seven corsair expeditions of his own, seizing several Spanish vessels and either forcing the crews to become galley slaves or selling them in Algiers.^[71] Some renegade Moriscos even returned to attack the villages from which they had fled. In 1595, during an attack on Teulada, the corsairs killed Antonio Vallés and captured his wife and children. In commenting on this raid, the viceroy of Valencia remarked that the raiders could not have gotten so far inland had it not been for the help of two Moriscos of the village, enemies of Vallés who had fled to Algiers some years earlier.^[72]

Official paranoia combined with popular hatred ended by poisoning the atmosphere and shattering the hopes of those few clerics and statesmen who still believed in the possibility of conversion.^[73] In official circles, even at the level of the prestigious Council of State itself, extreme solutions to the Morisco problem were being proposed, including such things as mass enslavement of all males ages 15 to 60 or the eastration of young men over a certain age.^[74]

Rejection of the Moriscos on a popular level can be seen in the proliferation of guild ordinances prohibiting Moriscos from becoming apprentices.^[75] Morisco physicians, like the Jewish or converso physicians of a century earlier, were being charged with poisoning and maiming their Old Christian patients, and there was a growing demand that Moriscos be excluded from medical schools.^[76] This popular hostility resulted in violent attacks on the Moriscos as they streamed toward the ports of embarkation during fall 1609.^[77]

During the years immediately following the forced conversion of Valencia's Moriscos, and especially during the tenure of Inquisitor-General Alonso de Manrique, the Inquisition's official policy appeared to reflect the attitudes of moderation and limited toloration that were shared by the emperor and leading members of his administration. The inquisitor-general played a leading role in the

series of negotiations carried on from 1525 with twelve representatives of the Valeneian Moriscos which resulted in an agreement containing a rather ambiguous clause granting them for the next forty years the same protection from inquisitorial jurisdiction that had been granted to the Moriscos of Granada at the time of their conversion. The document also promised toleration, for a limited period, of Moorish dress, the use of Arabic, the maintenance of separate cemeteries, and even a subsidy for the now-displaced Islamic priesthood.^[78]

This moderate approach appeared to be shared by at least a few of Valencia's inquisitors even into the late 1560s. In his remarkable report to the Suprema on the results of his visitation to the Segorbe region in 1568, Inquisitor Juan de Rojas freely criticized the absenteeism of so many local rectors and the greed of the nobility who collected the ecclesiastical rents that should have gone to maintain the churches and levied exorbitant dues and tribute on their Morisco vassals. He was particularly incensed at a recently concluded agreement between the bishops of Segorbe and Tortosa to exclude all the Moriscos of their diocese from attending mass on the grounds that they all lived as heretics and were therefore excommunicated. This, of course, was exactly contrary to the policy of conversion and attraction then favored in official circles, and Rojas demanded that the bishop's order be rescinded immediately.^[79]

During the middle years of the sixteenth century, Gregorio de Miranda, who had served on the Valencia tribunal from 1548, played an influential role in the evolution of policy toward the Moriscos. After replacing Antonio Ramírez de Haro, bishop of Segovia, as special commissioner to the Moriscos in 1551, Miranda carried out an extensive visitation to the heavily Morisco areas of the district and became quite popular with Morisco leaders such as the Abenamir family of Benaguacil.^[80] In the late 1550s and early 1560s, Miranda served on several special commissions on the Morisco problem that were established by order of Philip II and was reappointed as special commissioner in 1566.^[81]

Miranda's policy toward the Moriscos is perhaps best outlined in his summary of the deliberations of the 1561 junta, whose conclusions strongly reflected his views as outlined in several other memoranda. He favored a broad attack on Islamic religious ceremonies and the religious leaders who sustained them as well as a campaign

to disarm the Moriscos so as to weaken their resistance. He also favored attracting the Morisco elite by appointing some men of influence as familiares. To carry out a thorough reform of the entire conversion effort, he proposed that a number of special commissioners should be selected to travel through the kingdom. These commissioners would also be empowered to look into abuses ranging from the rampant absenteeism by local rectors to the unauthorized diversion of the revenues of the former mosques into the hands of the nobility which were hampering the conversion effort.^[82]

These ideas, as embodied in the resolutions of the junta of Madrid which met at the end of 1564, might have opened a new and more promising phase in the relations between the Morisco community and the state.^[83] They did lead to the reappointment of Miranda as commissioner and to his selection of a number of Morisco leaders as familiares, including several members of the influential Abenamir family. What is questionable, however, is the degree to which someone like Miranda represented mainstream views within the Inquisition, much less in society as a whole. Of course, the evidence suggests that Miranda himself hoped to profit from his commission by collecting fines and had appointed a special treasurer for them. When he learned of this, Philip II ordered him to desist on the grounds that this would alienate the Moriscos and undermine the entire purpose of the commission.^[84]

Another point of view, which was diametrically opposed to that of Miranda and other moderates, was expressed by Inquisitors Pedro de Çarate, Francisco de Arganda, and Juan de Llano de Valdés in their reply to a memorial that had been submitted to Philip II by Jerónimo Corella of the Council of Aragon. Corella, who was a moderate on the Morisco issue, called for another, more intensive conversion campaign and contended that the relative failure of the conversion effort thus far was the result of a lack of resources rather than the impossibility of the task. Taking a rather broad hint from the Suprema, which had sent them the memorial for their comments on the result of so many years of "using the Moriscos with softness and moderation," the three inquisitors rejected the entire notion of conversion and called for more intense persecution including capital punishment for first offenders.^[85] Even though the moderation with which the Valencia tribunal carried out its judicial responsibilities during the period belied the violent tone of the

memorial, the official position taken by the tribunal on this occasion could only add strength to those demanding a drastic solution to the Morisco problem.

Certainly the tribunals' actions with regard to the Moriscos were more reflective of ambiguity and greed than either the positive attitude and optimism so often expressed by Gregorio de Miranda or the outright hostility of Llano de Valdés. In 1528, Inquisitor-General Manrique modified the (already somewhat ambiguous) provisions of the 1526 agreement to allow the Inquisition a virtually free hand in the persecution of Moriscos on the grounds that they were continuing to practice Islam.^[86] For its part, the Valencia tribunal had largely ignored the 1526 agreement and brought small numbers of Moriscos to trial almost every year from 1526 to 1540.^[87]

Complaints by the Valencian nobility led to a virtual cessation of inquisitorial persecution between 1541 and 1543.^[88] The period 1544-1546 saw the resumption of activity, with 165 eases tried in those years. Pope Paul III's brief of August 2, 1546, however, had the effect of virtually nullifying inquisitorial authority since it allowed confessors to be appointed who would be empowered to absolve Moriscos for crimes against the faith and relieve them and their descendants from all disabilities.^[89] This brief, combined with a provision of the Valencian Cortes of Monzón of 1547 calling for "postponement" of proceedings against the Moriscos, led to a sharp decline in the tribunal's activity.^[90] From 1554 to 1557, for example, only six Moriscos were tried, while at the auto de fé held on March 14, 1557>, the forty-nine Moriscos who appeared were natives of Aragon and Catalonia who had moved to the district and were therefore not covered in the Cortes resolution of 1547.^[91]

Behind the scenes, however, the tribunal was preparing to recover its lost authority by gathering evidence against nobles who encouraged their Morisco vassals to practice Islam and by sending letters to the Suprema describing the Moriscos' Islamic life-style.^[92] In the 1560s, the tribunal unleashed a new wave of persecution. This time, however, its activity was rather more selective: it concentrated its attention on destroying the Morisco community's religious and political leaders. This approach was very much in line with the program of conversion/repression as set forth at the Cortes of 1563-64 and was specifically endorsed by the Suprema in 1565.^[93]

In pursuit of this objective, inquisitors on visitation, like Juan de

Rojas in 1568, carefully drew up lists of leading Moriscos who were to be prosecuted as soon as possible after the conclusion of the most recent period of grace.^[94] Morisco political leaders such as Vicente Cortes, who had come to Valencia as a special representative of the Morisco community, or Alfonso Bastante and Jaime Bolaix, who led the Moriscos of Vail de Uxó in an angry confrontation with the Bishop of Tortosa in May 1568, were also prosecuted.^[95]

On July 1, 1567, after a consultation with the Suprema, the Valencia tribunal issued an order to arrest Cosine, Juan, and Hernando Abenamir, probably the most important and widely respected members of the Morisco political elite. In spite of Gregorio de Miranda's campaign to win over the Abenamirs, a campaign that resulted in making Cosme Abenamir a familiar, his colleagues on the tribunal had been gathering evidence against the family since March 1556. Testimony in the case reveals Cosme's religious position as somewhat ambiguous. In spite of being a strong and vocal defender of Islam, even asserting that it was superior to Catholicism in a conversation with Gaspar Coscolla, an Old Christian merchant living in Benaguacil, Cosme testified that he had been married according to the rites of the church and recited the Our Father and Ave Maria during his first interrogation. On this occasion, Cosme was able to purchase a pardon from Inquisitor-General Diego de Espinosa for the substantial sum of 7,000 ducats, and he and his brothers were allowed to return to their homes. But their cases were only suspended, and even the Inquisitor-General's pardon could not save Cosme from being rearrested in December 1577.^[96]

At the auto de fé of 1568, it was the turn of Islamic religious teachers. After Valencia's inquisitors angrily rejected a suggestion from the Suprema that it might be wiser to read out the alfaquis' sentences at a private ceremony to avoid offending the Moriscos, ten leading alfaquis appeared among the forty-nine Moriscos sentenced at the auto.^[97]

The inability of the Inquisition to support its campaign against the Moriscos by confiscating their property would sooner or later have forced a halt in this intense activity given the tribunal's extreme financial penury during the middle years of the century. Confiscation of Morisco property, however, had been prohibited by a royal order issued at the Cortes of Monzón of 1533 which provided that the property of a Morisco condemned for heresy should

pass to his Catholic heirs and protected any rights that his señor had in the property. At the auto de fé of July 7, 1566, the tribunal simply ignored this law and proceeded to confiscate and sell the property of the Moriscos who were reconciled. This brought an instant protest from the estates of the kingdom, which sent two ambassadors to court.^[98] Assured of the Suprema's full support for its actions, the tribunal did the same thing with the property of those reconciled at the auto of 1568. Realizing that new protests would be entirely unavailing unless the tribunal was granted some form of financial compensation, the Cortes this time offered to provide a subsidy of 1,000 Valencian lliures.^[99] Even though this offer was rejected, it did lead to a complex series of negotiations among the viceroy, representatives of the Morisco community, and the tribunal, which resulted in the agreement of October 12, 1571. This agreement, which was accepted with a great show of reluctance by the tribunal, meant that the Moriscos agreed to tax themselves to support the Inquisition. In return for this subsidy, which amounted to 2,500 lliures annually, the tribunal agreed not to confiscate Morisco property in the villages included under the agreement and to limit its fines to a maximum of 10 ducats. These fines were to be expended only on supporting or embellishing the rectory in the Morisco victim's home village or to pay the costs of feeding poor prisoners. During the negotiations for this agreement, the tribunal had also committed itself to restoring the property that it had seized illegally. Once the agreement was concluded, however, the tribunal ignored its ameliorating clauses. The property that had been confiscated and sold was never returned to its owners, and the 10 ducat fines that were routinely levied after 1571 were simply incorporated into the tribunal's regular income instead of being used for pious works or the relief of poor prisoners.^[100]

During the 1570s and early 1580s, the paranoia that was beginning to grip government circles spread to the Valencia tribunal, making it supersensitive to any rumors of collusion between local Moriscos and Spain's internal or external enemies. The second revolt of the Alpujarras (1568-1570) stirred fears of a simultaneous rising by the Moriscos of Aragon and Valencia, while the arrival of Moriscos from Granada after their defeat was regarded as highly dangerous by all of the crown's representatives in the kingdom.^[101]

In 1578, several Moriscos were accused of having received in

their homes two emissaries of the king of Algiers, who had arrived with letters for the Moriscos of Aragon and Valencia.^[102] The obsession with Morisco conspiracies, however, left the tribunal vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous individuals who were well aware that to denounce someone for being in contact with Turks or North Africans or French Huguenots virtually guaranteed his arrest regardless of how flimsy the evidence really was. In 1581, the tribunal's watchfulness appeared to have paid off in a big way with the discovery of a plot involving leading Moriscos from Valencia and Aragon. This seemed to be nothing less than the long-awaited grand conspiracy involving a rising by the Aragonese and Valencia Moriscos in concert with all of Spain's enemies, and for several years thereafter, the tribunal was busily engaged in arresting and trying the plotters. In this instance, zeal seems to have been stronger than discretion, and it was not until 1584, when the tribunal received testimony from Lorenzo Polo, then at the peak of his career as an informer (see below) to the effect that the so-called plot was a complete fabrication that prosecution was halted. Since Polo's testimony had proven to be so reliable in the past and since it was supported by no less than twenty-four other witnesses, Gil Pérez and Alonso Conejo, the chief "discoverers" of the alleged plot, were arrested and convicted of perjury.^[103]

During the first half of the 1570s, the Valencia tribunal increased only slightly the level of anti-Morisco activity that had been attained during the 1560s. But by the last half of the decade, the figures reveal a rising trend of activity that was to continue right through the mid-1590s.^[104] In part, of course, this increased activity reflects national political trends and the tendency to regard any Moriscos, no matter how assimilated, as a potential danger to Spanish security.

As far as the Valencia tribunal was concerned, this national trend was greatly reinforced by the spectacular revelations of Lorenzo Polo. Polo was the scion of one of the wealthiest and most distinguished Morisco families in Teruel. His family, along with several interrelated Morisco families living on the same two streets of the city, had converted to Roman Catholicism voluntarily in 1501 and were well known for an ostentatious display of Catholic orthodoxy. They were so well accepted as Christians that they had been able to intermarry freely with Old Christians, enter the priesthood, join confraternities, and carry arms—even in coastal districts, at a time

when Moriscos who carried arms openly were regarded with great suspicion and subject to arrest. In 1575, when the Moriscos of Aragon were disarmed, Polo's father and other leading members of these families successfully petitioned the crown for the restoration of their weapons on the grounds that they should be considered Old Christians.^[105] This secure and comfortable world came to a sudden and shattering end on May 2, 1578, the day that Polo walked into the headquarters of the Inquisition and laid a series of amazing allegations before the startled inquisitors. According to him, he and his entire family as well as all the other families living in that part of the city were secret Mohammedans and had been so ever since their voluntary conversion many years before. During the next several years, up to the mid-1580s, Polo and certain other members of Teruel's Morisco community testified against their erstwhile friends, and the tribunal was able to shatter what was arguably the most tight-knit group of Islamicizing Moriscos in the kingdom.^[106]

For the inquisitors of the Valencia tribunal, the revelation that the same Morisco families that Inquisitor Juan de Rojas had once lauded for their "good and Christian lives" were secretly practicing Islam must have been profoundly shocking. During the early 1580s, the tone of inquisitors' letters about the Morisco situation becomes harsher, less compromising, and less hopeful about the possibility of conversion. It was in 1581, as dozens of Teruel's Moriscos were being brought to trial, that Valencia's Inquisitor Alonso de Reinoso first suggested the idea of expulsion in a letter to the Suprema.^[107] The external conformity and inner apostasy of the Moriscos of Teruel also figured in the violently anti-Morisco tract written by Martín de Salvatierra in 1587. Salvatierra, who had been inquisitor of Valencia in the early 1570s, singled out the "wickedness and ill-will" demonstrated by the Teruel Moriscos as a way of showing the futility of any further conversion efforts and justifying such extreme measures as castration of young males and expulsion.^[108]

In what seems almost to have been a reaction to the sharp increase in corsair activity against the Valencia coast after the Hispano-Turkish truce of 1580 (raids on Calpe and Chilches in 1583 and Altea, Polop, Moraira, and Callosa in 1584) and the Teruel affair, the Valencia tribunal greatly intensified its persecution of Moriscos.^[109] Between 1585 and 1595, the tribunal punished a total of 1,063—more than in any comparable period either before or

since. There was a drop almost to the level of the late 1570s in the period 1595-1599 (162 cases) and then a resumption of a level of activity similar to that of the mid-1580s through the period of the expulsion and beyond.^[110]

On a national level, the controversy over the ultimate fate of the Moriscos continued, but by the first years of the seventeenth century, the idea of expulsion was gaining more and more adherents. At a meeting of the Council of State on January 30, 1608, a majority of the members spoke as though the decision to expel the Moriscos of Valencia had already been taken, and even those members who seemed to oppose it could offer but feeble resistance.^[111]

At the Council of State session of April 4, 1609, the expulsion of Valencia's Moriscos was finally approved in light of the fact that the success of truce negotiations between Spain and the United Provinces had removed concern about foreign military interference and freed Spanish resources for the operation.^[112] The decree of expulsion itself faithfully reflects the views of hardliners like Juan de Ribera or the mayordomo, Gómez Davila, with its acceptance of the collective responsibility of the Moriscos for plotting with Spain's enemies and the complete failure of conversion.^[113] In making a special point of the need to "placate" God who had been so grievously offended by the Moriscos, moreover, the royal decree seems to reflect the fears of divine punishment of Spain for tolerating known heretics which was so often expressed in letters and memorials around the turn of the century.^[114]

As far as the Valencia tribunal itself was concerned, the decree of expulsion seemed to come as something of a shock. Even though three of its inquisitors had been among the earliest proponents of expulsion, later memorials from the tribunal or those closely associated with it had emphasized the need to force genuine conversion. In a letter written to the king in 1583, Valencia's inquisitors boasted that they had eliminated at least one major obstacle to the conversion effort by executing or imprisoning all the leading Islamic religious teachers.^[115] In spite of its outward show of dissatisfaction with the Moriscos, the tribunal was profiting from the Morisco presence both through the subsidy provided in the Concordia of 1571 and from the 10 ducat fines that it routinely levied and pocketed. The tribunal's willingness to accept and profit from the Moriscos is clearly demonstrated by the fact that, like many Valencian nobles

and ecclesiastical institutions, it made loans to Morisco villages, one as late as June 20, 1609, two and one-half months after the Council of State had decided on the expulsion.^[116] Such loans actually helped Moriscos to expand into primarily Old Christian districts.^[117]

The tribunal's attitude was further demonstrated by Inquisitor licentiate Bartolomé Sánchez during the deliberations of the ecclesiastical junta that was organized to consider the Morisco problem in November 1608. As reported by Fray Antonio Sobrino, a calificador who strongly supported renewed conversion efforts, Sánchez voted with the majority in rejecting the idea that the Moriscos were all incurable heretics and in favoring their inclusion—whether forced or voluntary—in the rites of the church.^[118] But what probably shows the tribunal's acceptance of the Morisco presence more than anything else was the June 1606 memorial that was sent to the Suprema by Nicolás del Río, one of the tribunal's secretaries. This memorial, which could not have been sent without the explicit approval of the inquisitors, called for a dramatic increase in the arrest and trial of Moriscos, including those six hundred individuals already noted in the Inquisition's files with only one witness against them who were therefore not normally subject to persecution. These additional prisoners, and others brought in through the modification or suspension of other procedural safeguards, would then be heavily fined to provide funds for a new prison specially designed for Moriscos. Not only would this prison be more commodious than the old one but it would be equipped with a large chapel presided over by a well-trained chaplain who would provide them with religious instruction. Del Río's conception of this prison was that it should lead to the rehabilitation and not merely the punishment of its inmates. Instructed by the chaplain, watched over by a staff of warders, those prisoners who demonstrated proficiency in their religious observances could hope for a reduction in their sentences and eventual freedom.^[119]

For its part, the Suprema received this suggestion favorably. In response to proposals made by the tribunal, it began commuting the sentences of a number of wealthy Moriscos then serving in the galleys in return for a substantial money payment. By January 30, 1609, three months before the Council of State resolution, construction of the new model prison was well under way, and the Suprema was in the process of selling more commutations so that it could be

completed.^[120] Del Río's proposal and the fact that the Valencia tribunal had dropped its earlier insistence on expulsion indicate a significant and growing division among the Moriscos of the district during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Insight into this split may be gleaned from comparing data about the particulars of trials with information about sentencing. Broadly speaking, this evidence reveals that the Moriscos brought to trial by the tribunal fell into two main groups. The first, and largest, comprising 52.2 percent of the accused in the sample, were those who demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the Holy Office either by coming in to denounce themselves voluntarily or by confessing at one of the early hearings during the trial. Their cooperation was rewarded with relatively light punishment. Fully 72.9 percent of this group received sentences of reconciliation accompanied by fines (11%) or, more frequently, religious instruction (25.9%).^[121] By the 1580s, it appears that many Moriscos had come to accept the Holy Office as a relatively benign institution where they could confess their sins and expect to receive lenient treatment. For its part, the tribunal relied on the Moriscos for a good part of its revenues while coming to accept them as a not entirely irredeemable group whose practice of Islam was gradually fading.

In marked contrast to this cooperative or docile group were the "resisters," persons against whom there was substantial evidence but who refused to admit anything. It was against this group, comprising about 40 percent of the accused, that the tribunal turned the full force of its persecution and laid down its heaviest sentences. Of these negativos, 23 percent were sentenced to galley service, 17 of them to eight years to life, while 7 were relaxed. The existence of this sharp dichotomy among the Moriscos tried by the Valencia tribunal reveals that the Moriscos were no longer a monolithic group, while the tribunal's pedagogy of punishment could not have failed to further isolate the large but vulnerable group of die-hards.

For the first few years after the expulsion, the tribunal maintained the intensity of its anti-Morisco activity, punishing no less than 258 Moriscos between 1610 and 1614.^[122] This activity was sustained by the fact that not all the Moriscos had actually left Valencia, while others returned either as pirates or because they found living conditions in North Africa intolerable.

In the first place, there were those Moriscos who resisted the expulsion order. In October 1610, two widely separate rebellions broke out, one in the Muela de Cortes valley region in the hills above the Júcar and the other in the coastal region around Guadalest. In the course of these risings, the Moriscos murdered priests and destroyed or desecrated churches, thus making themselves liable to inquisitorial persecution.^[123] In addition to this group of rebels, several thousand Morisco children had remained behind after their parents had left.^[124] Since many of these children had been taken into the homes of Valencian Old Christians, the government allowed them to remain in the kingdom, even though it made strenuous efforts to locate and count them. The tribunal, for its part, was kept busy hearing the confessions of these poor creatures who were brought to the Holy Office by their new masters.

Disappointing the hopes of those who felt that the expulsion would deprive the North African corsairs of critical assistance and therefore lessen the effectiveness of attacks on Valencia's ravaged coasts, the period 1610-1619 saw a dramatic increase in corsair activity and a sharp upswing in the number of captives seized.^[125] Inevitably, military countermeasures netted a certain number of prisoners, and among these were to be found former Valencian Moriscos who served the corsair captains as soldiers, sailors, and guides.^[126] According to a royal order addressed to the viceroy marquis of Caracena in February 1615, the Holy Office was to have jurisdiction over such persons even though they had been arrested by secular authorities for their crimes.^[127]

A typical ease of this kind was that of Amet Moro. A native of Benillup, Moro had gone to Algiers at the time of the expulsion, where he lived for three years. During that time, he turned corsair and served on several corsair boats engaged in raiding Spanish shipping. He was eventually captured and made a slave in Valencia city. At the outset he pretended, with some success, to be a Moor but was finally brought before the Holy Office after he was captured, along with several other slaves, while trying to escape. In his testimony before the tribunal, he admitted his Valencian birth and baptism but showed clear signs of repentance and a desire to receive instruction in Roman Catholicism. Seemingly unimpressed by this, the tribunal handed down the relatively severe sentence of perpetual imprisonment with the first three years to be spent in

galley service.^[128] The harshness of this and other sentences that the tribunal was handing down in such eases earned it a rebuke from the Suprema in the following year.^[129]

After the mid-1620s, the number of Moriscos tried by the Valencia tribunal begins to decline sharply until, by the 1640s, they came to represent a tiny percentage of its overall activity.^[130] During the eighteenth century, even this very low level of activity had been further reduced, and the Moriscos who had provided the tribunal with 73.2 percent of its victims between 1560 and 1614 only accounted for thirteen eases between 1700 and 1820.^[131]

As A. Domínguez Ortíz and Bernard Vincent have already observed, historical circumstances had deprived the Moriscos of the elaborate social hierarchy so typical of early modern society.^[132] Formation of a Morisco aristocracy, complete with large landed estates and ties of vassalage, was made virtually impossible by the fact that, with some exceptions, the bulk of the old Islamic leadership had fled. Even someone like Cosme de Abenamir, the leader of a widely respected family, was still a vassal of the Duke of Segorbe and was forced to resign his familiar's commission at the duke's command.^[133]

A hierarchy of religious leaders also failed to develop, in part because in Islam itself the priesthood was not a well-defined group and in part because such Islamic priests and religious teachers as there were had to operate in secret.^[134] Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that Islamic religious teachers—the alfaquis and tagarinos that were the subject of so much inquisitorial persecution—came from the very lowest segment of the Morisco population.^[135] A combination of Old Christian hostility and discrimination and social pressure from the Morisco community itself made conditions unfavorable for the development of a new class of Morisco Catholic priests.

Creation of a class of professionals also proved to be quite difficult. The ordinances of professional organizations regularly discriminated against Morisco notaries, while Morisco physicians were viewed with envy and distrust by their Old Christian colleagues and persecuted by the Inquisition.^[136] The biased attitude of Old Christian professional groups rather than any inherent lack of ability, therefore, explains the tiny percentage of professionals (0.4%) among the Moriscos tried by the Holy Office.^[137] This is one of the lowest percentages of professionals of any group tried by the Inquisition.^[138]

Strong Old Christian hostility could not prevent the Moriscos from becoming merchants; Vicente and Juan Baya Mallux, for example, formed a mercantile company in 1571 and prospered trading in silk, wool, sugar, and cattle.^[139] Morisco muleteers also played a critical role in carrying goods from one region to another. So important were the Moriscos to the trade of the important inland town of Cocentaina that the city fathers complained that with the expulsion, "the greater part" of long-distance trade had come to a halt.^[140] But given the paucity of well-established commercial routes in this still rudimentary society, muleteers were often merchants themselves.^[141] Among the Morisco victims of the Holy Office in Valencia, 8.8 percent were merchants, and of these, more than half belonged to that class of petty shopkeepers and itinerant traders who played such an essential role in the Valencian economy.^[142]

Drawing on their tradition of fine woodworking and metalworking, and sustained by the need for self-sufficiency in the isolated villages where most of them lived, the Moriscos frequently engaged in crafts.^[143] This is reflected in the occupational structure of those tried by the Holy Office: some 19.2 percent were artisans, including shoemakers (in spite of the opposition of Valencia's shoemakers' guild), basketmakers, butchers, metalworkers, and stonemasons.

The overwhelming majority of the Moriscos tried by the Valencia tribunal, some 64.9 percent, gained their livelihood from agriculture. Although most of these peasants were quite poor, in many eases farming tiny plots, others were moderately well off.^[144] Recent studies of landholding in several Valencian towns with large Morisco populations have revealed glaring inequalities, with the top 10 percent holding 38 to 50 percent of the land.^[145] Among this small elite were to be found moneylenders and peasants with a variety of interests; for example, Gaspar Mois had holdings that included olive oil mills, olive groves, mulberry trees, and wheat fields.^[146] It was from among this group that the tribunal could hope to make substantial financial gains either through confiscation of their property when they lived in villages not covered by the Concordia of 1571 or, more commonly, by allowing them to buy their way out of galley service or other heavy sentences for substantial sums of money.

In Islam, as in Judaism, many key religious rituals were performed primarily in the home and closely linked to family life. As a

result, in both cases, women formed a relatively high percentage of those tried by the Holy Office.^[147]

The figures on marital status reinforce the impression of the Moriscos of Valencia as a settled and relatively stable population of agricultural workers and peasants. More than 66 percent of the Moriscos whose marital status is stated in the records were married at the time of their arrest, while another 20 percent were widows or widowers. In spite of the mass flight of dozens or even hundreds of Moriscos from certain villages, therefore, their strong family orientation would appear to support Nicolas del Río's view of them as fearing nothing more than being forced to "leave their land and homes." Interestingly, del Río used his perception of the Moriscos' attachment to home and land not as a justification for expulsion but to support his proposal, which was designed to rehabilitate a significantly large number of Morisco offenders.^[148]

Nevertheless, in spite of the obvious economic value of such a stable and productive population and the lack of any real threat of rebellion, social and political pressure for expulsion had become overwhelming by the first years of the seventeenth century. In this case, the proximate cause was not the actual (frequently moderate) outcome of inquisitorial activity but its inevitable social by-products: racism and discrimination. It was the spectacle of so many Moriscos being paraded before the eyes of the Old Christian population at the frequent autos de fé that did so much to artificially maintain the separateness of a community already moving toward assimilation. Of course, inquisitors like Bartolomé Sánchez knew that most of their victims were accused of trifling offenses, but the tribunal had taken an official position on the expulsion issue in the early 1580s, and the inquisitors of the early seventeenth century were neither strong enough nor independent enough to challenge the harsh and uncompromising mood that had taken hold in Spanish ruling circles and ended by sealing the fate of a community that had lived in Spain for hundreds of years. Carried out with brutal efficiency, the expulsion of the Moriscos represents the greatest achievement of Lerma's undistinguished regime. But, like so many of the other accomplishments of the imperial age, its results were deeply disappointing, weakening instead of strengthening the Spanish monarchy, undermining the Valencian economy, and lending further support to the black legend of Spanish intolerance.