Volume 3 / Book 8 — CHAPTER II. MORISCOS.[867] (continued 3)

The time came at last for the Moriscos of Murcia and the Val de Ricote to share the fate of their brethren. Influence had been exercised to procure the suspension of the edict of December 9, 1609, and of a subsequent one of October 8, 1611, but, after the work was completed elsewhere, the Duke of Lerma and the royal confessor, Fray Aliaga, sent investigators who of course reported them to be Christians only in name. Lerma insisted, Philip yielded, and a cédula of October 6, 1613, ordered Salazar to enforce the edicts. He was hurried from Madrid, November 20th, with instructions to lose no time and, in January 1614, some fifteen thousand were deported, although many old people and invalids were allowed to remain. Many women married Old Christians in order to obtain exemption, and numerous husbands and wives of honorable birth entered religion, to the great enrichment of the monasteries, for which the bishops and the superiors of the Orders cheerfully granted licence. Early in February, Salazar returned to Madrid with his work accomplished, although some had escaped to Valencia and had returned on being driven out from there. In 1615 Salazar reported that he had sent his assistant Manrique to Murcia to complete the expulsion, but there were still some Moriscos in Tarragona and the Balearic Isles, and he knew of others in Sardinia and the Canaries.[1089]

EXPULSION

For some years yet the effort was continued to discover and eject those who were concealed among the Old Christians—an effort complicated by the numbers who persisted in returning after experiencing the inhospitable reception accorded to them in Africa. They offered themselves as slaves to those who would receive them, and in this manner many succeeded in remaining. To prevent this, royal orders were repeatedly issued, but they were ineffective, and the Royal Council at length grew tired of reiterating them, so that Bleda, writing in 1618, deplores the fact that he would die without seeing his land purified of this evil seed. Total purification, in fact, was impossible. We are told that, in Valencia, La Mancha, and Granada, there are still communities which in dress, customs and tendencies may be regarded as Moriscos with scarce any trace of Christianity, and Padre Boronat ascribes to this element the growth of modern scepticism and the mingled fanaticism and superstition which afflict certain portions of Spain.[1090]

However this may be, in so far as the Inquisition was concerned, the expulsion was a success. In such of its records as I have been able to examine, the cosas de Moros virtually disappeared, the exceptions being scarce more than enough to show that vigilance was unrelaxed. For awhile, it is true, there were Morisco slaves to be looked after. A letter of March 14, 1616, from the commissioner at Denia, asks for instructions concerning some baptized Morisco slaves, who had plotted to escape to Barbary, which shows how carefully they were watched.[1091] Then the exiles who chanced to be captured in Moorish corsairs, or who were brought to Spain as slaves, or who were in the royal galleys, were subject to prosecution as apostates because they had been baptized, until, in 1629, the Suprema mercifully decreed that they should not be molested unless they gave occasion for scandal.[1092] The scattering cases of Mahometanism, which figure in the autos de fe subsequent to the expulsion, are mostly of Christian renegades, captured at sea, or of Moorish slaves taken in the perpetual warfare of the Mediterranean, who were baptized under legislation of 1626, repeated in 1638 and 1712.[1093] Occasionally, however, we hear of a Morisco, such as Gerónimo Buenaventura—probably one of the children detained in 1609 or 1610—condemned to relaxation by the tribunal of Valencia, transferred in 1635 to Valladolid and, in 1638 to Saragossa, to be burnt for pertinacity.[1094]

Yet, in spite of the sleepless vigilance of the Inquisition, there were descendants of the Old Moriscos who managed to preserve an organization for the perpetuation of their faith. In 1727 such a one was discovered in Granada, so numerous that it furnished forty-five reconciled in an auto of May 9, 1728, followed by twenty-eight more in that of October 10. They must have been wealthy, for the confiscations proved so profitable that the Inquisition granted to the chief informer and his heirs a perpetual pension of a hundred ducats.[1095] Probably one of these Granadans, escaped to Jaen, was the Ana del Castillo, condemned in the Córdova auto of March 4, 1731, as a herege Mahometana, to reconciliation, confiscation and irremissible prison.[1096] The latest allusions to these persistent Moriscos occurs in a report, in 1769, by the Inquisition to Carlos III, that it had verified the existence, in Cartagena, of a mosque maintained by New Christians.[1097] Details are lacking but, if there were prosecutions and convictions, they may safely be assumed to be the last endured by Moriscos. In the complete record of the operations of all the tribunals from 1780 to 1820, there is not a single case of a Morisco and the only Mahometans are renegades.[1098]

EXPULSION

Contemporary estimates of the number of exiles vary from three hundred thousand to three millions, and the statistics furnished are too fragmentary to admit of accurate computation.[1099] In modern times Llorente assumes a total of a million, while Janer estimates at the same figure the total Morisco population, of whom a hundred thousand perished or were enslaved, leaving nine hundred thousand exiles. Vicente de la Fuente reduces the number to a hundred and twenty thousand, while Danvila y Collado, after a careful comparison of all official statistics, reaches an estimate of something under five hundred thousand souls, which Padre Boronat accepts.[1100] This is probably somewhat under the mark. The nearest approach to a contemporary official statement is that of Sebastiano Gigli, the Lucchese envoy, August 12, 1610, placing the number at six hundred thousand. This he doubtless procured at head-quarters, for he adds that the ministers assured him that it was much greater than they had foreseen.[1101] Considering how large had been the Mudéjar population and its notorious fecundity, these figures indicate how many had been Christianized and had merged into the general mass. One cannot help concluding that with time and reasonable treatment, there would have been no Morisco question to perplex the statesmen of Spain.

The fate of the exiles parallelled that of the Jews in 1492, and indeed was even worse, for they were banished more precipitately, and were absolutely forbidden to return even as Christians. They were thrust into the new and strange life before them under most unpromising conditions, intensified by the inhumanity of their reception in the homes which they sought. The transit to Africa in the royal ships was doubtless safe enough, but the masters of the vessels chartered by them had no scruple in robbing and murdering them, despite the regulations adopted for their safety. Many who sailed were never accounted for as arriving. It was not that the Spanish authorities were indifferent. Fonseca relates that in Barcelona, on December 12, 1609, he witnessed the execution of the captain and crew of a barque which had sailed with seventy Moriscos. Falling in with a Neapolitan felucca, the united crews conspired to kill the passengers and divide the booty, amounting to three thousand ducats. Under promise of pardon a dissatisfied sailor revealed the crime, when not only were the Spaniards punished but the Viceroy wrote to Naples with details that enabled the authorities there to seize and execute the crew of the felucca.[1102]

In France, la Force no doubt did what he could to minimize the sufferings of the outcasts, but their hardships were such as to call forth energetic remonstrances from Ambassador Salignac and from Ahmed I himself. Cardinal Richelieu tells us that some of the officials commissioned to superintend their passage were guilty of much thievery and even permitted murder, but they were punished with such severity that the outrages ceased.[1103] France, however, was only a place of transit. Some who passed through sought refuge in Italy, where their reception was not hospitable. In 1610 and 1611 the Holy See refused to allow those arriving at Civita Vecchia to remain but, in 1612, some seventy, who reached Recanati and asked to be allowed to live as Christians, were permitted to settle at a distance from the coast, broken up into small parties and under close surveillance.[1104]

Barbary, however, was the destination of the vast majority of the exiles, whether direct from Spain or by way of France, and their reception by their fellow religionists was terrible. They were landed at Oran, whence they had to make their way to the Moorish states; they had the reputation of bringing money with them and, after the first embarkation had been safely convoyed by paying heavily for a guard, they were plundered and slain without mercy, and their women were taken from them. Even before the year 1609 was out, the Count of Aguilar, Governor-general of Oran, wrote that, through fear of the Arabs, many were remaining and were starving; twenty of their principal men had come to him, professing to be Christians, for they had not known what to believe until they had seen the abominations of the Moors, and now they desired to remain and die as Christians. In his perplexity, Aguilar threw them into prison and applied for instructions. What were given to him we know not, but there is doubtless truth in the statement of the Comendador de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes of Oran that, what between disease and the atrocities of the Arabs, two-thirds of the exiles had perished. Indeed, the general estimate was that the proportion was at least three-quarters.[1105]

EXPULSION

These horrors are heightened by the fact that, in the vigorous determination to eradicate every vestige of Islam, and in the cruel haste of the process, many who were really Christians were cast upon the tender mercies of the infidel. Discrimination was difficult and doubt was settled adversely. A typical case is furnished in a petition, November 26, 1609, of Gaspar Galip, a priest and vicar of the general hospital of Valencia, in favor of his two brothers-in-law, Francisco Castillo and Vicente de Alcázar. Galip himself was the son of a Morisco father and Old Christian mother; his sisters were Christians and so were their husbands and children, two in each family, the latter being even ignorant that they had Morisco blood. Yet Ribera was pitiless and both families were deported, doubtless to perish among unbelievers.[1106] Escolano tells us that in Tunis some of the Castilians continued to hear mass and to live as Christians, and he prints a letter from a Valencian in Algiers expressing his determination to persevere in the faith.[1107] If remorse were possible to those who believed that they were rendering a service to God, it might have been felt by the prime movers of the expulsion when they learned that in Tetuan, exiled Moriscos, firm in the faith, were lapidated or otherwise put to death, because they resolutely refused to enter the mosques.[1108] These were true martyrs, and the Church might well have canonized them, in place of beatifying their persecutor Ribera.[1109]

Among the arguments advanced in favor of expulsion was that the confiscation of Morisco property would bring permanent relief to the treasury and enable it to discharge the enormous and constantly increasing indebtedness. Undoubtedly the amounts realized from the rapacious seizure of the property of the exiles were large. Already, in October, 1610, the Council of Finance reported that, in Ocana and Madrid, it had mostly been sold, and that two hundred thousand ducats had been paid in.[1110] Whatever was the magnitude of the receipts, they were quickly dissipated to the greedy courtiers who profited by Philip’s reckless prodigality. Sir Francis Cottingham, the English Ambassador, in letters of March 4th and May 16, 1610, reports that commissioners had been sent to the provinces to sell the houses and farms of the exiles, but the king did not propose to lighten the burdens of the state, for he was dividing the proceeds among his favorites in advance with scandalous liberality. To Lerma were assigned two hundred and fifty thousand ducats, to his son, the Duke of Uceda, a hundred thousand, to his daughter, the Countess of Lemos, fifty thousand and to her husband a hundred thousand.[1111] We need not be surprised, therefore, to find Philip, in 1611, when appealing to the Córtes for relief, enumerating, among the reasons for his poverty, the expulsion of the Moriscos, in which he had postponed the interest of the treasury to the service of God and of the state.[1112]

Thus, nine hundred years after the overthrow of the Gothic monarchy, Spain purified her land of the invader by a stroke which Cardinal Richelieu qualified as the boldest and most barbarous in human annals.[1113] The yearning for unity of faith was gratified, and the anxiety as to attack from without was allayed. That the price paid was heavy is seen in the premature decrepitude which overtook the monarchy during the rest of the century. The causes of decadence were many, but not least among them must be reckoned the fierce intolerance which led to the expatriation of the most economically valuable classes of the population.