Divided by blood: Race and religion in early-modern Iberia

Abstract

This article argues that the mass religious conversions that took place in early-modern Iberia from the end of the fourteenth century had enormous consequences, one of which was the increasing racialisation of religion. Jewish and Muslim minorities were forced to receive baptism, and although in principle the Church made no distinction among people who had been baptised, in practice the presence of large numbers of recent converts to Catholicism called this theology into question. In the process, as I will demonstrate in this article, religion was racialised, as many people became convinced that religion (both beliefs and ritual) was biological and was transmitted by blood. To support this argument, the article will focus, as a case study, on the discussion about whether to deny baptism to the children of Moriscos (converted Muslims) in the years preceding the general expulsion from Spain of the Moriscos (1609–11).

Introduction: Christian and Muslim Territories in Medieval Iberia

During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula included political entities or kingdoms governed by Christians in the north and by Muslims in the south, albeit with fluctuating borders. The Muslim territory, named al-Andalus, had been slowly and unevenly reduced in extent throughout the medieval period. The Christian and Muslim territories were both inhabited by minorities of other religions: Muslims and Jews lived in the Christian north, Christians and Jews in the Muslim south. This article focuses on the minorities in the Christian Iberian lands, the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. Iberia was the only area in Western Europe where three religions and cultures (Christian, Jewish and Muslim) coexisted—not on an equal footing, but in the frame of a complex system of privileges, partial legal recognition and special status.

For centuries, this system was characterised by what has been called convivencia, or coexistence, with connotations of mutual interpenetration and creative influence. Mutual friction, rivalry and suspicion that produced circumstantial outbursts of violence were also part of convivencia. At the end of the Middle Ages, because of different social and ideological factors, the idea of universal conversion to Christianity began to predominate in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. From the end of the fourteenth century, the precarious equilibrium was forever altered by a series of violent attacks on Jewish communities and forced conversions, starting in 1391, that reshaped the Iberian social and confessional landscape. ¹ One factor of this change was the Black Death in 1348. The rise of the Mendicant orders also played a role. Franciscans and Dominicans in particular, from their foundation, undertook intense campaigns to convert Jews and Muslims. This evangelisation of religious minorities was often accompanied by an apocalyptic worldview, the belief that the End of Days would bring about the conversion of all Muslims and particularly Jews, inaugurating a time of equality and harmony. It was believed that Christianity was destined to become the universal religion that would unite all humankind. As an almost inevitable result, the notion that other religious minorities could coexist alongside Christians began to be called into question. An unmistakable expression of this attitude can be seen in a saying by the Dominican Vicente Ferrer, who claimed that ‘the neighbour of a Jew will never be a good Christian’. ² His preaching at the beginning of the fifteenth century triggered a wave of violence against Jews, and consequent conversions.

From the fourteenth century onwards, compulsory conversions to Christianity abruptly destroyed the social and religious barriers that in all pre-modern societies allowed the demarcation of separate groups, each with its own place in the hierarchy of persons and corporate entities. ³ In post-1391 Iberia, both forced and voluntary baptisms demolished the barriers and differences that had previously kept Jews apart from Christians, resulting in an immediate perceived loss of privilege by the Christian community. The forced conversions were supposed to produce the unity and homogeneity of the subjects of the Hispanic Crown. Paradoxically, from the moment of these conversions, the key problem of Iberian societies became how to restore the differences that forced baptism had dismantled and how to partially restore the status quo ante. A burning question in Iberia was how to undo the consequences of a violent act of assimilation and homogenisation and restore the barriers that could reestablish the old order among political and social groups. The identification and stigmatisation of the descendants of Jewish converts first, and later of Muslim ones, and the creation of new obstacles to their inclusion in the Christian commonwealth, became the predominant trend.

Mass Conversion and Inclusion of Converts in Christian Society

This brief introduction is enough, I believe, to explain why, in religious and social terms, the Iberian world has become at once exceptional and paradigmatic for historians. It was a laboratory of religious, juridical, social and intellectual experimentation where, from the end of the fourteenth century onwards, waves of mass religious conversions compelled Iberian Christians to reflect on the mechanisms of inclusion in Christian society. This reflection also required defining that society, its language and what we would now call its ‘culture’, producing a debate over whether it was possible to distinguish traditional customs (in language, hygiene, food, dress and festivals) from religious belief, and if difference in both aspects—cultural habits (costumbre) and religion—was a hindrance to loyalty to the Crown. This led to reflections on what ought to count as religion, as belief and conduct became connected with political subjecthood. ⁴ The definition of Iberian Christian society also included the rise, from the end of the Middle Ages, of a new historiography based on and imbued with the genealogies of peoples, which formed yet another ingredient of the construction of categories, identities and hierarchies. One’s lineage and name, which harked back to a mythical ancestor, assumed enormous importance. Ancestry, genealogy and mythical and sacred origins coexisted with debates over the personal merit achieved through one’s deeds and the merit inherited through blood. These questions will form the framework for this article.

The idea of lineage had been a powerful one throughout the Middle Ages among all the religious groups that lived in the Peninsula, and it was an important source of legitimacy for the ruling powers. In the medieval Iberian Peninsula there was an exacerbation of what David Nirenberg has called a ‘genealogical mentality’. ⁵ This exaltation of ancestry was no doubt inflamed by contact among the three religious groups, in a culture ruled by elites that sought to justify their pre-eminence or to define more sharply the boundaries between religions. During the long series of civil wars in fifteenth-century Castile, the supposed Islamophilia or philo-Semitism of the sovereigns was brandished as a weapon of propaganda against them whenever their position was weak. Such accusations served to delegitimise rulers in turbulent times, for instance, during the civil war (1475–79) that preceded the coronation of the so-called Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castile (r.1474–1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (r.1479–1516).

Growing social anxieties over conversion and religious loyalties played a crucial role in turning lineage into a promotion of order and hierarchy. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the idea had been firmly established that having purely Christian ancestors was the only guarantee of a person’s loyalty to the faith and to the king.

When, and under what circumstances, did the emphasis on lineage and the genealogical mentality come to be entangled with racism? When and how did the society cross the narrow line that separates them? I understand ‘racism’ as the belief in the biological transmission of culture (culture tied to religious identities). Racism in early-modern Iberia implied the essentialising of culture, the creation of social hierarchies and social exclusion based not on religious affiliation but on religious lineage. ⁶

Can the Terms ‘Racism’ and ‘Race’ Be Used for Early-modern Iberia?

‘Race’ is an exceedingly sensitive term and political issue. There is a historiographical trend that argues that ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are pernicious anachronisms when applied to early-modern Iberia. ⁷ They insist that ‘racism’ can be spoken of only from the nineteenth century, which saw the appearance of a ‘scientific’ theory and a description of human phenotypes. ⁸ In part, this insistence is a reaction to historians that see in Iberia the origins of Modern racism. ⁹ Those who argue against using ‘racism’ for early-modern Iberia have stated that early-modern Spaniards did not use the term raza. ¹⁰ But it is easy to verify that from the end of the Middle Ages, raza is used in Spanish sources regularly connected to Jewish or Muslim origin and equated with stain in early-modern Spain. ¹¹ Many other words in the same semantic field, such as nación, gente, estirpe, generación and casta, were also used without carefully distinguishing between them. ¹² As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has argued, ‘race is located in a densely populated semantic field and a major difficulty lies in distinguishing it from other concepts that have been used to classify populations on an ethnic basis’. ¹³ We need to deepen the historical perspective on the concept of race, as Subrahmanyam suggests. In analysing a series of early-modern Hispanic debates, as I will do here, we will find that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards were worried and confused by the consequences of making changes in ceremonies or articles of faith. In fact, they were adapting theology to their contemporary needs. In doing so, they sometimes expanded the meanings and implications of the terms raza or casta or estirpe, but without settling on theories that were more openly racists. That would come a little later, when new attitudes arose that challenged existing ideas about human nature, but even as early as the sixteenth century, they were using concepts such as cristianos de natura, Christians by their nature. I will return to this later. The fact that there was not a theory of racism does not imply that there were not racist beliefs and practices as I will argue in this article.

Therefore, I am deeply aware that many historians would consider the application of the term ‘racism’ to early-modern Iberia anachronistic and that it puts those who use it at risk of rendering the past a necessary and irrevocable prelude to the present. ¹⁴ I will here try to demonstrate that this use is pertinent and heuristically useful. I will also employ other possible anachronisms in addition to ‘racism’, also because of their heuristic value, for example, ‘assimilation’, which is a concept closely related to that of emancipation. I will linger briefly on this problem—using potentially anachronistic terminology—because it touches on another issue: to what extent can we use a remote past in order to understand a conflictual present? Or the opposite: how can we understand the past from a present point of view without selecting the evidence in favour of our argument? Anachronism seems to be the bête noire for historians. Many of them (especially social historians) argue that using anachronistic terms can reflect the concerns and biases of present-day historians more than the perspectives or experiences of our historical actors. ¹⁵ This is an important epistemological debate. The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has argued brilliantly in favour of the fecundity of anachronism and famously affirmed that ‘Il n’y a d’histoire qu’anachronique’. ¹⁶ It is also pertinent here to concur with historian of science Peter Dear, who has written: ‘Anachronism is a form of advocacy, and usually a suspect form, but advocacy is an integral part of what historians do, whether deliberately or not.’ ¹⁷ In any case, if anachronistic terminology is risky, so is the fact that studies of both the past and present suffer from an almost total disconnection that keeps us from relating history to global processes in contemporary society and at the same time ignore unstudied aspects of the past that painfully relate to the present.

Anachronism, for me, is a kind of translation. It will allow me to render certain beliefs and activities of previous eras more comprehensible to our contemporary audience as historians and for historians themselves. Of course, I am not tracing the origin or invention of complicated problems of today (much less of racism) to the Iberia of six centuries ago. Rather, I use current terminology to open the scholarship of the past up to contemporary debates and sensibilities, in a way that I hope will contribute to a better understanding of both, and keep us on guard as to certain processes in our societies. Anachronism leads to another reflection: it makes us aware that certain terms we use now (racism, assimilation, emancipation, citizenship, ethnic cleansing and messianic nationalism) were created during the birth of the nineteenth-century nation-states and that we use it still to analyse new phenomena in an era of global homogenisation. Or to put it differently: anachronism is there, anyhow.

Cleanness of Blood and the Politics of Exclusion

Converts to Christianity, whether forced or voluntary, received the waters of baptism. What did it mean in early-modern Christian Iberia to be baptised into the Christian community? On what terms did more or less recent converts belong to the Christian community, and what principles of equality or hierarchy animated their inclusion? In principle, at the end of the Middle Ages, baptism granted converts from Judaism a series of opportunities and privileges that had been denied to their parents and grandparents, especially access to official positions, careers in the Church and marriage to members of the nobility. It was in principle a sort of emancipation. The conversions produced a considerable number of matrimonial alliances between the families of nobles and wealthy converted Jews. The fifteenth century saw intense social competition, together with anxiety caused by the fear that Christian society would cease to be the relatively impermeable group that it had been for centuries. Christian society could not, and would not, assimilate such a large group of converts and admit them to the social competition that would result from large-scale conversions. As the fifteenth century advanced, the notion increasingly took hold that the converts formed a homogeneous group which still practiced Judaism in secret, was consumed by avarice and social ambition and was poisoned by hatred towards Christians. In short, Jews constituted a menace against which society had to protect itself. The Inquisition was established to persecute and punish all religious ambiguity in the converted, but in the process it created a new heresy, the one practiced by those who ‘Judaised’ and created a kind of syncretic crypto-religion. Since the thirteenth century, canon law had equated heresy to treason. Further, because the Holy Office disqualified its victims down to the fourth generation, it perpetuated the category of converso, or ‘New Christian’, through the ages. It also helped to create another category, that of the ‘Old Christian’. Those whom the Inquisition found guilty lost their honour and their rights, and neither they nor their descendants could hold any public office. The social and cultural consequences were immense.

But there was still more: in 1449, a few decades before the Spanish Inquisition’s founding, a popular uprising in Toledo marked a turning point in the converso problem. ¹⁸ Provoked by a new tax, the revolt confronted royal and episcopal power, but from the first took on an anti-converso aspect, since some of the tax collectors themselves were conversos. As the rebellion grew stronger, its anti-converso overtones intensified as well. The rebels of Toledo argued that the Crown’s protection of conversos proved that King John II of Castile (r.1405–54) had no right to rule. They claimed to have ample evidence of Judaising among the conversos, which justified killing them and seizing their property. The rebels were not moved only by greed, however; they also questioned the conversos’ place in Christian society. ¹⁹

In June 1449, the rebellious municipal council of Toledo approved a drastic new order, the Sentencia Estatuto de Pedro Sarmiento (Decree of Pedro Sarmiento). This statute stripped all city residents of Jewish origin of their civil rights and their ability to hold public office. The Sentencia denied the transformative power of the grace received at baptism, opening a breach in Christian society that was impossible to heal. Its approval brought immediate opposition from the Crown and the pope, but it was affirmed through popular action and the work of lawyers from the city who wrote scholarly treatises marked by deep anti-converso prejudice. One measure called for by the Sentencia would have dramatic consequences when applied: anyone aspiring to hold public or ecclesiastical office had to prove ‘purity of blood’ (limpieza de sangre). This required presenting written genealogical documentation that the individual had no Jewish or Moorish ancestry, had ‘clean blood’ (sangre limpia) and was a ‘pure Old Christian’ (Cristiano viejo lindo) or a ‘natural-born Christian’ (Cristiano de natura). The new interpretation of this concept (Cristiano de natura) was of immense importance, for it meant that a Christian must possess a Christian nature. The statutes of blood purity explicitly transposed blood from the domains of genealogy and religion into those of politics and social policy. ²⁰

These required proofs were soon adopted by colleges and universities, religious orders, cathedral chapters, municipal councils, mercantile exchanges, of course by the Inquisition, and eventually by every powerful and prestigious institution. While the statutes were controversial, they prevailed and were used from the outset as tools of exclusion based not on religious affiliation, but on religious ancestry. The purity-of-blood statutes explicitly linked one’s genealogy and lineage to the physical body of Christian society, and ancestral stain could not be washed away through baptism. Ultimately, the concept of blood purity transformed cultural and religious differences into differences of nature, even of biology, and these could not be erased no matter how much the individual respected and followed the customs, norms and ritual practices of Christians. It became therefore impossible to achieve the transition to the desired Christian society through religious conversion.

Granada and the Forced Conversion of Muslims

The last phase of Iberian forced conversions began in 1481 with the Granadan War, which ended in 1492 with the conquest of the capital city of the last Muslim political unit in the Peninsula, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. Those years ushered in an extraordinarily cohesive and intensely messianic ideological campaign. ²¹ The Catholic Monarchs had created a unified realm and for which they had grandiose plans. Ferdinand needed to enlist the support of the nobility and the Church for himself and Queen Isabella—since the legitimacy of their ascent to the throne, following a long war of succession, was not universally acknowledged—and for the Granadan War, which required a tremendous economic outlay. For this purpose, the Catholic Monarchs induced the popes to issue various bulls designating the Granada campaign as a crusade. A whole series of messianic prophecies were resurrected and mobilised in support of the war, to glorify it and endow it with a particular meaning. Ferdinand, or perhaps his closest circle of courtesans and ecclesiastics, understood the value of propaganda, and he was highly creative in his use of the prophetic motifs that had circulated widely and actively throughout Iberia since the Middle Ages. These motifs referred to a Universal Emperor who would appear at the end of days, to conquer Jerusalem and unify all of humanity under a single shepherd—a single flock united by a single religion. The Spanish monarchy would lead the way to worldwide unity: that was Ferdinand’s—and later the Habsburgs’—argument, gleaned from prophetic and apocalyptic texts, texts that Christopher Columbus himself used. ²²

Within a general policy of homogenisation and evangelisation resulting from the conquest of Granada, and as part of the dream of universal conversion, the Catholic Monarchs decided that the presence of Jews in their realm prevented the sincere devotion of the New Christians. They therefore decreed in 1492 the expulsion of all the Jews, which could be avoided only through conversion.

In 1492—the year that Granada was conquered, the Jews expelled and the New World and its non-Christian populations ‘discovered’—this messianic dream was felt as an almost palpable reality. Though the Catholic Monarchs signed a treaty with the Nasrids, allowing any Muslims who wished to remain in the kingdom to continue to practice Islam, within a few years of the conquest, conversion and evangelisation campaigns had begun, culminating in the forced conversion of Granada’s Muslims between 1499 and 1502. ²³ While the obligatory conversion of all Muslims in the territories of the Crown of Castile was decreed in 1502, Islam would continue to be permitted in Aragon and Valencia for another quarter century. It was the Agermanats, a group of rebels opposed to Charles V (r.1517–56) and to the Valencian nobility and united by their millenarian zeal, who violently imposed baptism on Valencia’s Muslims. ²⁴ Once the rebellion had been quelled, a debate ensued as to whether the Muslims who had been forcibly converted might revert to Islam after having received baptism. It was decided that they could not, and this decision was sealed with the decree of obligatory conversion of Muslims to Christianity that was promulgated in 1526 and affected all territories belonging to the Crown of Aragon. ²⁵

From this moment on, those now called Moriscos or ‘New Christians of Moorish origin’ (cristianos nuevos de moro) became the objects of the same hermeneutics of suspicion as the conversos: the well-known accusations of practicing Islam in secret, conspiring against Christians and endangering the kingdom. It was also feared that they had too many children and would soon become a majority, since they were barred from military service and from positions in the Church. Throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, decrees were issued that forbade the speaking and writing of Arabic or possession of books and documents in that language; also forbidden were the Moriscos’ traditional dress, hairstyles, food and music. They could not wear silk or velvet, and, of course, could not bear arms or have domestic slaves. These measures were intended to not only erase all differences but also prevent any sign of social distinction in the converts. The Moriscos argued that their clothing and language were merely customs, even regional variations, rather than rites and ceremonies with religious meaning. Nuñez Muley, a Morisco noble from Granada, best expressed this view in a petition (memorial) sent to the Granadan Chancery in 1566. His main argument was that Iberia, like Christendom in general, was essentially diverse, made up of different nations and kingdoms, and that the Moriscos were yet another of these nations. They dressed differently and spoke another language, but this was nothing unusual in Iberia. Moriscos, he claimed, were Spaniards and Christians in a different guise, as were Galicians, Catalans and Valencians, also speakers of other languages. The Moriscos should be integrated on their own terms and their distinctiveness respected within a monarchy founded upon the acceptance of diversity. ²⁶ Needless to say, this petition fell on deaf ears. The measures decreed by Philip II (r.1556–68) were implemented in 1567 and proved to be one of the chief causes of a great Morisco rebellion known as the War of the Alpujarras. It was marked on both sides by great savagery and ended any possibility of achieving peaceful coexistence.

Between 1609 and 1614, after a general census of the Moriscos, they were required to board ships and leave all the territories of the Crown under dire conditions. ²⁷ It was the final solution to a problem that had been confronted, at the start of the previous century, in a very different way, as I shall explain.

Messianic Optimism and Mixed Marriages

Beginning with the decree of forced conversion in 1502, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of the kingdom of Castile set in motion a battery of measures of assimilation in a climate of intense messianic optimism. The Crown and the Church began a campaign of mission and evangelisation. Everyone knew the limits of coercion in matters of faith, but they believed that in approximately three generations the converts would become good, sincere Christians.

Other means of integration were also attempted, in addition to those meant to erase the memory of Spain’s Muslim past and change the customs and appearance of the new converts. Mixed marriages were encouraged between Christian settlers in Granada who had immigrated from Castile and the newly converted. This preference for mixed marriages was accompanied by a series of legal rules meant to prevent endogamy among Moriscos, including cousin marriage, which for Catholics involved too close a degree of consanguinity. ²⁸

Needless to say, in the context of the growing importance of genealogy, proposals about mixed marriages met resistance from both Christians and Muslims, yet theologians and jurists continued to insist on their necessity throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1526, the ruling body of the Granadan Royal Chapel had even suggested forbidding converts to marry one another. The Crown then urged Archbishop Pedro de Alba of Granada to offer privileges and tax relief to converted men who married Old Christian women and vice versa, an initiative approved by Pope Paul III (1534–49). Another measure meant to encourage mixed marriages prohibited Old and New Christians from living in separate neighbourhoods. This rule, which was also imposed in Valencia, was considered essential to integrating and assimilating the converts into Christian society. ²⁹

I have already explained how many obstacles stood in the way of mixed marriages, beginning with the purity-of-blood statutes. Although in theory these were applied chiefly to converts from Judaism, they formed part of the general outlook of the Old Christian majority. Nonetheless, recent research on converts in Granada has shown a more general application than was previously thought. ³⁰ In these early times there were also memorialists who started to advocate speeding up the conversion process by separating children of New Christians from their parents and requiring them, when they grew older, to marry Old Christians. The Dominican friar, Diego Ordóñez, advocated taking ‘all the Morisco children from their mothers, so that they do not learn the Moorish language but the Castilian one … as their parents die, the perverse language will too, and with it the Mahometan sect. And the ones who are born from that generation will all become Old Christians’. ³¹ Diego Ordóñez, and many others, assumed that if young children could be removed from their homes, they could avoid indoctrination in Islam. They also equated the use of the Arabic language with religion. The authorities’ wish to promote mixed marriages would continue up to the Morisco rebellion of the War of the Alpujarras (1568–70), a drastic rupture that confronted the authorities with the failure of their policy of evangelisation and assimilation. We can trace the extent of the phenomenon of mixed marriages precisely through petitions by Granadan Moriscos who were deported to Castile after that war. ³²

Thus, the attempts at integration continued up to the War of the Alpujarras, but ended there. The trend of mixed marriages and separating small children from their parents shows that discrimination based on blood was not yet firmly established, at least in the case of Muslims. But the war brought with it fear and hate, and a feeling of risk, and profound enmity, all of which became permanent. After 1571 and the rebellion in the Alpujarras mountains in Granada, fear of the Moriscos assumed a looming presence in Old Christian society, together with the conviction that the forced conversion of the Muslims had ultimately failed. They were accused of being traitors to the king and still Muslims in secret, and therefore apostates, and of plotting with the Ottomans and Morocco against Spain.

The Limits of the Transformative Power of Baptism

This section focuses on the issue of baptism and the question of how, between the War of the Alpujarras (1568–70) and the decrees of general expulsion (1609–14), a significant number of jurists and theologians came to doubt the effectiveness of baptism for Muslims and to argue that Morisco children should not be baptised. ³³ This last point was hotly debated at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the years leading up to the expulsion and is connected to the intense and painful discussion surrounding whether Morisco children under the age of 10 should be expelled or forcibly separated from their parents (as had been argued before) and kept in Spain. I will argue that the cumulative experience of the failure of baptism to bring about true conversion led to scepticism about the power of baptism as a sacrament, leaving blood as the only possible marker of the community of true believers. Therefore, the disappearance of the belief in the transformative power of baptism can be linked to emerging concepts of biological kinship and even of race.

In early-modern Iberia, as well as elsewhere in Europe, contentious debates emerged regarding the inclusive force and legal consequences of baptism. Baptism, and especially the baptism of children, became central to Christianity during the sixteenth century and was a major pillar of the Tridentine Catholic Reformation. Baptism had always provided a structure for distinguishing between the Christian and the infidel: it was the marker that defined inclusion in the Christian community. But in the context of the Catholic theological Reformation of early-modern Europe, and the process that has been termed by historians as ‘Confessionalisation’, baptism evolved to allow for new ways of constructing this partition, as Christianity was being divided between Catholicism and Protestantism. ³⁴ During the sixteenth century, the question of how to interpret and administer baptism became crucial to certain extremely important issues affecting the composition of Europe, and even came to bear on certain modes of European expansion. On the other hand, the baptismal waters were not, at the end of the Middle Ages, the only factor that defined inclusion in the Catholic Church. Blood was also a theological construct that shaped the Christian conception of community. The Passion of Christ and the presence of his blood in the celebration of the Eucharist gave blood a theological significance, and during the Middle Ages, it increasingly became an object of veneration through both religious practice and works of art. This veneration was still more explicit and intense at the beginning of the modern period. In this period, ‘blood’ is a word that exchanges allegorical for literal meaning. ³⁵

The sacrament of baptism was seen as fundamental for salvation. ³⁶ Baptism is the sacrament that not only purifies from original sin but also makes the neophyte a new creature, an adopted child of God who by its virtue becomes a partaker of the divine nature, a member of the body of the Church. And therefore baptism, as defined by the Council of Trent, ³⁷ transforms irretrievably the person who receives it. Baptism raised not only theological and canonistic problems but also burning social and legal dilemmas.

In Valencia, which alongside Granada was the area of Spain with the largest Morisco population, forced conversion was brought about in 1521 by baptising Muslims, carried out in violence and terror by the Agermanat rebels. Once the rebellion had been quelled, the baptised Muslims started practicing Islam once again, with the approval of their lords and to the great dismay of the Inquisition, which took up the matter with the Council of State and the king. In mid-1525, Charles V himself attended the final session of a conference held in Madrid to debate the validity of these baptisms. ³⁸ The Madrid conference concluded that the baptisms were indeed valid: the violence had been conditional rather than absolute, and the sacrament of baptism granted a grace that could not be retracted. The baptised Muslims now formed part of the Church, and for them to return to Islam would amount to apostasy. In early 1526 Charles V decreed the obligatory conversion of all Muslims in the Crown of Aragon. Evangelisation and indoctrination campaigns were immediately launched. ³⁹

Flagrant Heretics

About 40 years later, in 1568, Juan de Ribera, an eminent theologian who had concentrated his efforts on the struggle against Protestantism, was named archbishop of Valencia. Ribera was initially an active proponent of preaching to the Moriscos, but he grew deeply disillusioned in the face of what he saw as the failure of his own missionary campaigns and all the previous ones. More than three generations had passed since the forced conversions, and he saw next to no progress: Moriscos continued to live as Muslims. Eventually, Ribera became the foremost proponent of expelling the Moriscos, through an intense campaign directed at the king in the form of a series of reports. Through Ribera’s repeated memorials and efforts by other prominent figures, in particular the viceroy of Valencia, Philip III (r.1598–1621) decided to convene a conference of prelates in Valencia starting on 22 November 1608 that would study and analyse the situation. The conference was organised around four points for debate proposed by Archbishop Ribera: first, whether the Moriscos should be deemed ‘flagrant heretics and apostates’ (notorios herejes y apóstatas); second, whether Morisco children could be left in their parents’ care after baptism ⁴⁰ ; third, whether the pope could be asked for permission to let the Moriscos voice their doubts about the faith without running afoul of the Inquisition; and fourth, whether the prelates could force them to attend mass and fulfil the sacraments, given the fact that doing so led to serious acts of sacrilege. Of these four points, the first was the most important, as it determined the responses to the other three. According to Ribera’s report, everyone but the theologian and jurist Antonio Sobrino, a Franciscan who was close to Philip III, agreed that the Moriscos should be considered flagrant heretics. Sobrino disagreed with the account that Ribera had sent to the king. But for Ribera, the conviction that every last Morisco was a heretic and an apostate ultimately outweighed all other considerations; as far as religion was concerned, he considered the Moriscos to be a lost cause. Ribera’s main concern now was that sacrilege and blasphemy had become so prevalent that they put Spain itself at risk of divine punishment. ⁴¹ This was a society that severely persecuted blasphemy and was obsessed by it and was now further obsessed with purity, contamination and danger.

Morisco Children: Should They Be Baptised?

During the deliberations at the 1608–09 conference, there was one faction, which included Ribera himself, that proposed softening several measures of religious coercion and freeing the Moriscos from the obligation to attend mass and receive the sacraments. Their goal was to ease the pressure that had led many Moriscos to commit blasphemy and adopt a position of animosity towards Christianity. This proposal was combined with a call for Morisco children either to be raised separately from their parents or else not to be baptised unless their death was imminent—a highly controversial proposal in light of the canons of the Council of Trent. This, for example, was the opinion of the friar Jaime Bleda:

May those born from this day forth not be baptised, or may their parents be relieved of the obligation to have them baptised, for as the parents are clear apostates, surely their children will follow in their footsteps, causing great damage to the faith and to the sacrament of baptism by giving it to those who will so obviously apostatise. ⁴²

The argument was that since it was evident that such children would act like or be corrupted by their parents, to baptise them would be an insult to the sacrament. Sobrino continues to believe that not all Moriscos are heretics and that preaching is not futile, even though he agrees with Ribera that coercion has yet to yield positive results. Therefore, Antonio Sobrino proposed that

we try lifting the coercive hand with which the Inquisition and the people push them to live as Christians … and to baptise their children only if they wish to baptise them, with the understanding that they will have to give them up to be raised among Old Christians. It is believed that in this way more would convert, and it would put an end to all the blasphemy and sacrilege that is committed when they are forced to perform the Christian rites outwardly. ⁴³

Sobrino continued his argument in a letter to Luis Carillo, the viceroy of Valencia, informing him of the commission’s debates:

As to whether the children of these Moriscos can be baptised while leaving them in the care of their parents, the priors of the order of Preachers (Predicadores) and of San Miguel de los Reyes voted yes. All the rest were of the opinion that to baptise them amounted to sacrilege, saying that this was the common doctrine and that no author had ever said otherwise.… And I grew angry, saying that it was insulting to say that in Spain the children of people who have been baptised should not in turn be baptised as well, since, as Maestro Suárez has said, they should only not be baptised in the absence of Church doctrine and of the coercive power of a Catholic prince. ⁴⁴

He continued to insist on this argument, mentioning that to refrain from baptising children whose parents have themselves been baptised runs counter to the canons of the Council of Trent:

They will say it is a legitimate obstacle, since if they grow up with their Moorish parents they will apostatise. My response is that this would be true if these Moriscos were Moors from Barbary who were not baptised, and were not subject to the Church and our Catholic King. Suffice it to say that according to the canons of the Council of Trent, the children of all those who have been baptised must in turn be baptised, and whoever denies this, anathema sit [excommunication]. ⁴⁵

These words mark the lines of an intense debate over whether Morisco children should be baptised. As early as 1579, the Dominican friar Luis Beltrán had argued against baptising Morisco children unless they were in mortal danger. It was better, Beltrán argued, for them to remain Muslims than to become heretics and apostates. It was not an argument limited to theologian or courtier circles. The idea also percolated to other circles of the population. As an example, Juan Lopez, cristiano viejo and wool carder from El Toboso (La Mancha, Spain), sustained during his Inquisition trial that ‘the children of the Moriscos, even if they have received baptism, do not go to limbo or paradise when they die because they are Muslims by nación’. ⁴⁶ Nación points to the ethnic group into which a person is born. Limbo, as defined in 1542 by the Dominican Ambrogio Catarino Politi, occupies in Catholicism a ‘fourth place’ alongside heaven, purgatory and hell and thus plays an important role in the theological discussions of the hereafter, affecting mainly children who die at a young age. ⁴⁷

Beltrán’s argument was that unless Morisco children were separated from their parents, they would end up apostatising as a result of the upbringing (crianza) and environment provided by the parents. Those opposed to baptising Morisco children insisted on the importance of religious inculcation for religious identity. However, at least some of them seem to have shifted gradually towards the opinion that these children could not be baptised because they were in fact physically infected, or because their biological ties to their community of origin could not be severed even by separating them from their parents. In other words, some theologians came to believe that Morisco children possessed an unalterable nature that led them to believe in and practice Islam and hate Christianity as they ‘have the infected root within their guts’. ⁴⁸ One leading proponent of this view seems to have been Ribera himself.

From the 1608–09 conference onwards, Ribera was adamant in his claim that it was better not to baptise Morisco children under any circumstances. He even thought that it would cause ‘much less harm to let them go to limbo than to allow the name of God to be blasphemed.’ He claimed that to administer the sacraments to Moriscos was to give ‘sacred things to dogs, and precious stones, meaning the Holy Sacraments containing his precious blood, to swine’. ⁴⁹ ‘Swine’ is puercos in the original, which is equivalent to the term marranos, a derogatory term used for converts from Judaism. As mentioned before, the precious blood of Christ was a marker. The Moriscos’ ‘enemy blood’ was not to be mixed with the sacred blood of transubstantiation, of Jesus Christ, ‘whose precious blood is contained in and transmitted through the sacraments’. Ribera considered Morisco blood to be abominable and a transmitter of faithlessness, hence his fear of the Moriscos in the Crown of Castile, who were able to go completely unnoticed and intermingle with Old Christians. According to Ribera, the Moriscos of Castile should be expelled first of all.

It infinitely behoves the universal good of the Catholic Church to either purge or cleanse not so much the heresies as the people who have perpetuated them in this province, and this can only be achieved by expelling them all from Spain. ⁵⁰

We will encounter these terms—‘purge’ and ‘cleanse’—time and again. Ribera’s statements reflect a widespread anxiety about authenticity. It was almost impossible to tell the Castilian Moriscos apart from the general population, and this made them extremely dangerous. His view seems to have been that the Moriscos’ corruption was transmitted via blood, making it impossible for their children to escape it. Even nurture (crianza) was useless: a child who descended from Muslim parents and was raised by Christians would inevitably revert to being a Muslim. This might explain his fear that the Morisco malignancy would be spread throughout Spain through mixed marriage, which was, as I will explain below, still proposed by some as a solution to the problem.

Morisco Children: Should They Be Expelled with Their Parents?

The debate about whether or not Morisco children should be baptised, and whether baptising them should entail separating them from their parents, was at the heart of another related debate, which concerned the overall fate of these children in the years leading up to the Expulsion. Should the children be expelled too? And if so, after what age? Could they still be considered innocent before they reached four years of age? Seven, ten? It is precisely in this more general debate that we can begin to discern a clear tendency towards considering lineage as an inevitable determining factor in these children’s beliefs.

This debate was a lengthy one and touched on both theological and practical concerns: the danger of the Moriscos rising up and rebelling if their children were taken from them, the difficulty of finding enough wet nurses for the infants were they to remain and so on. Among other consequences, the Iberian debate created friction with Rome, as the pope was not prepared to allow the children to be expelled. Expelling innocent children was difficult for some to stomach, but they justified their resistance to letting them remain through a variety of arguments. One concerned the issue of memory. First, there existed a fear that these children would remember who their parents were and what had been done to them and that the Christian society would be fractured by hatred. Memory, or rather the existence of different memories, was, in the opinion of people like Pedro de Valencia and Agustín Salucio, something to be eliminated for the sake of harmony within the Catholic realm. Second, there existed a fear that children might remember the Islamic rituals and be susceptible to contamination by Muslim slaves in Spain or even be inclined to apostatise by their very blood. In the discussion about how to nurse the infants taken from their parents, a discourse developed around the idea that ‘they have been nursed with their parents’ bad milk’. ⁵¹ This opinion was held even by people like Antonio Sobrino, although he believed that bad milk could be combated with good milk, that is, Christian education:

I do not know who could fear any danger from those raised on our milk … those who are to raise these children, and everyone else, must be urged not to treat them as Moriscos or remind them of their origins, but to treat them like their own children, and this, together with proper doctrine and teaching, will make them completely forget their nature and be regarded as Old Christians. ⁵²

Pedro Fernández de Navarrete, a writer who promoted economic and social reforms to improve the Hispanic Monarchy, pinpointed as Spain’s greatest problem the fact that conversos, of both Jewish and Muslim origin, had always been treated as ‘separate members’ and ‘given the name of strangers’. ⁵³ Instead, Navarrete advocated that the Hispanic Monarchy should be like the Roman Empire, where laws had ‘permitted marriages between nobles and plebeians, so that this bond of all dissension should cease’. Like Pedro de Fernández de Navarrete, Sobrino insisted on the need for mixed marriages. I will now turn again to the questions of mixed marriages as a solution and to how the scholars who were in favour of this measure, most notably Pedro de Valencia, supported it.

It would therefore be appropriate, not that the Moriscos are equal to the Old Christians regarding the offices and honours of the kingdom, but rather that the Moriscos disappear and only Old Christians remain in the kingdom. That the people of the whole realm have the same name and be of one mind, without division, so that dissension does not arise. ⁵⁴

The humanist Pedro de Valencia, official chronicler of King Philip III, penned the Tratado sobre los moriscos (Treatise on the Moriscos) in 1606, in the midst of the debate over the possible Morisco expulsion. He was against the expulsion and instead advocated dispersing the Moriscos throughout different regions of Spain and mixing them in small numbers within Christian society in general in order to encourage mixed marriages, so that everyone would become an Old Christian, or so that the notion of Old Christian would cease to be relevant: ‘that the people of the whole realm may have the same name and be of one mind, without division, so that dissension does not arise’. This mixing would eradicate the differences between nations and castes and join together in ‘one new body and name of commonwealth’. With this biological mixing ‘the stain (macula) would spread quickly to all and the Old Christians would cease to exist’. And he added, ‘A way should be found to persuade the citizens (ciudadanos) of this commonwealth that all are brothers of one blood and one lineage, and natives of one and the same land, so that they may think of her as a mother and should wish to die and suffer hardships for her.’ As the historian Antonio Feros says, this was nothing less than an explicit call to invent a Spanish nation. ⁵⁵ Valencia also argued that ‘it would be a great gift if all the kingdoms [in Iberia] might be united in one Crown, in one commonwealth, under the same laws, without division nor differences … all should be called Spaniards, as they are, speaking one language, sharing in the enjoyment of the same common goods and comforts’. ⁵⁶ If Valencia advocated what he explicitly named permistión or miscegenation, that is, a deliberate mingling of blood via mixed marriages, he also maintained that this strategy would have to be supported by a lack of discrimination towards all children of mixed marriages (as Sobrino maintained) when it came to awards, privileges or benefices, so that ‘all the republic would be made up of people of one name and purpose, undivided, so that there should be no dissension’. ⁵⁷ Valencia offered the example of the Roman Empire, whose rulers from the first were determined to foment miscegenation. He cited Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Strabo, Josephus and a long list of Roman historians to show that the emperors made sure that the residents of their empire were Roman citizens both in name and in the possession of full rights. ⁵⁸ It was, according to Valencia, the fact of miscegenation that produced the success and triumph of the Roman Empire; Rome conquered because ‘in the most prudent fashion, it had made almost everyone a Roman’. ⁵⁹

In the same vein, Agustín Salucio, author of a famous treatise in favour of abolishing the purity-of-blood statutes, argued that ‘surely mixed marriages are a great remedy for religion’ and that all must become Old Christians. ⁶⁰ In this he differed from Valencia, who preferred that Old Christians disappear. But like Valencia, Salucio also maintained that such mixed marriages would be possible only if the shame and dishonour attached to the descendants of converts was erased and if blood was eliminated as a marker of community and kinship. Sobrino held a very similar view: for the children of Moriscos to attain the status of Old Christians, ‘may it be ordered that the boys marry Old Christian girls and the girls marry Old Christian boys, and may they and their children be given the corresponding immunity’. ⁶¹

Although those who favoured intermarriage believed in nurture over nature, they nonetheless wanted a homogeneous Christian society as much as Ribera and the defenders of expulsion did. The proposal by Nuñez Muley alluded to earlier in this article, that Christian society could be diverse, was no longer contemplated, though later on, different Moriscos argued in defence of this option, alluding to the example of the Ottoman Empire. This was something that was used as an argument against them by apologists of the Expulsion: according to Damián Fonseca, ‘the Moriscos greatly desired and sought freedom of conscience, and to be allowed to live according to their customs, just as, in his states, the Turk allows the Christians to live according to their Religion, as with some other Princes who in their lands, allow each person to follow whatever creed they wish’. ⁶²

The debate we have been considering pitted the children’s innocence and the loss of their souls against the contamination of Christian society in both the short and long terms if they were to remain. Ribera himself held that if the children were to stay, ‘the Kingdom would quickly become just as full of Moriscos as before’, given their high birth rates. ⁶³ Similarly, the Inquisitor of Valencia, Ximénez de Reinoso, had written in 1582 that ‘It infinitely behoves the universal good of the Catholic Church to either purge or cleanse [emphasis mine] not so much the heresies as the people who have perpetuated them and still perpetuate them in this province, and this can only be achieved by expelling them all from Spain … a nation that has never produced a heresy nor bred a single heretic except for Priscian’. ⁶⁴ Heretics, apostates, Jews and Muslims are wild beasts that must be expelled and kept away from the community of Christians. ⁶⁵

Ximénez de Reinoso maintained that pure and clean Spaniards are incapable of heresy, and therefore, people who have perpetrated heresy are not Spaniards and must be expelled. The opinions of Juan de Ribera and those who thought like him represent an acknowledgement of the forced conversions’ outright failure, particularly with regard to the Moriscos but also, more generally, with regard to the enterprise of total conversion that had begun a century earlier in the messianic spirit invoked at the beginning of this article, which was linked to a desire to reform the Church. By the end of the sixteenth century, the desire for reform had been channelled through the Council of Trent into a different spirit completely unrelated to messianic optimism or Paulinism.

Contrary to what we might expect, it was not the hardliners those who wanted to separate the children from their parents, but rather those who did not believe in the physiological transmission of religion or in a community based on blood. It was precisely those who believed in assimilation and opposed the expulsion who thought that by separating the children from their parents they could be fully integrated into Christian society. They believed that not all Moriscos were heretics and that, in any case, their children were innocent. But in the end, after a great deal of debate and vacillation, it was decided that the children, too, would be expelled.

Blood as a Vehicle of Heresy

If the faithful constitute a permeable and changeable body, then the purity of the original body and those who are allowed to join it is always suspect. For Juan de Ribera, the theological understanding of blood and milk was no longer exclusively spiritual nor allegorical; rather, the physical substances were seen as vehicles of heretical doctrines that were impossible to erase; people’s bodies affected their creeds, and non-Christian blood was not to be mixed with Eucharistic blood.

But more importantly, the statements made by Ribera and those who thought like him also convey a lack of belief in the grace bestowed by the sacrament of baptism and thus reveal scepticism about the possibility of transmitting true faith to others. They doubted the ability of baptism to overcome the barriers that went along with the defect that was (as they thought) implicit in their raza.

This implies doubt about the ability of baptism to transform people, practically denying its sacramental quality. The moment the sacrament ceased to be viewed as transformative, ethnicity began to be regarded as transmitting true or false faith. The proposal to leave Morisco children unbaptised—except in the case of those who were at death’s door—was so radical as to be nearly heterodox in the context of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Baptism could not transform people, since they were subject to and conditioned by their lineage; faith was either inherited or not.

Conclusion

To conclude and return to the beginning of this article, even if early-modern Spaniards did not formulate a racist theory, it is clear that the belief in the biological transmission of religion became dominant, to the point of transforming religion, theological religion, to adapt it to this belief. On the other hand, I have argued that the use of certain anachronisms provokes a reflection on how we use those terms and helps us to better analyse what could be at first sight an obscure theological discussion. The theologians and scholars of these remote times were confronting problems of multiculturalism in their societies and grappling with different dilemmas of diversity versus homogenisation. Messianic proto-nationalism appears as an important factor in the predominance of homogeneity. Pressing problems of assimilation, integration and social exclusion are nowadays being experienced in Europe and elsewhere. Essentialised culture is in general identified with ‘race’, or rather, the term ‘culture’ may be employed as a less ideologically charged alternative to ‘race’. ⁶⁶ As for the case study analysed here, the question of children separated from their parents, some of the ‘solutions’ proposed by early-modern agents resonate with more recent cases such as the native children isolated from their parents in institutions in colonial Canada. ⁶⁷

That is also why, as I proposed in the beginning, the study of early-modern Iberia resonates with us present-day historians and shows how we can profit from knowing in depth their multi-religious relations even if it sometimes becomes uncomfortable because it is too close to home. In establishing connections and using terms that do not belong to the period, we can better perceive the efforts and the devices used, at such an early date, to foster the development of a centralised, monarchical proto-nation state in imperial times.