In their policies toward Moriscos, Spanish ecclesiastical authorities framed their debates in terms of essentialized notions of what it meant to be a Morisco. Inquisitors, bishops, missionaries, and local parish priests collected information about the Moriscos residing under their jurisdiction in order to better carry out campaigns to convert and Christianize them. Their visions of Moriscos became polarized, presenting them as either potential converts to Catholicism who needed proper instruction, echoing the program of Tridentine reforms that called for well-trained priests and the creation of institutions to administer to the new Christian population, as well as improve instruction of the old Christian population. Another more sinister vision of Moriscos, one that eventually gave way to expulsion, cast them as unrepentant Muslims whose cultural and religious differences would render them traitors to Spain and prompt them to ally with the Ottoman Turks.
Ecclesiastical authorities carried out similar programs in the far reaches of the Spanish Empire, as they encountered new peoples and attempted to bring them into the folds of the Catholic faith. Beyond official discourses, the reach and impact of these policies on the ground, on both sides of the Atlantic, as applied to Moriscos, Africans, and indigenous peoples, had vastly ranging consequences. Early modern Spaniards grappled with how to incorporate new categories of people into their emerging empire. At the same time, individuals labeled Morisco attempted to wrestle with the images applied to them, in their own attempts to secure status across the Iberian world.
CHAPTER 2
Into the Atlantic
Justifying Title and Establishing Dominion
Upon returning from his first voyage westward across the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus penned a statement to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel as prologue to his Diary of the First Voyage that covered the events of 1492–93. While the original copies of his journals and logbook were lost, his account survives in a copy transcribed by Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the first entry of the diary, Columbus articulated a powerful and enduring association between the conquest of Granada, Christian expansion, and Castilian possession over lands encountered. He wrote, “After Your Highnesses ended the war against the Muslims who ruled in Europe, and having ended that war in the very great city of Granada, where this year [1492] … by force of arms I saw the royal flags of Your Highnesses in the towers of the Alhambra, the fortress of that city, and I saw the Muslim king emerge from the gates of that city and kiss the royal hands of Your Highnesses.” Later that month, “by the information I gave to Your Highnesses of the lands of India and of a Prince called the Great Khan … of how many times he and his predecessors requested that Rome send doctors in our holy faith so that they could be taught it.” When the calls for Christian missionaries went unanswered, “so many peoples were lost, falling into idolatries … and Your Highnesses, like Catholic Christians and princes who love the holy Christian faith, and increase it and are enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies, you thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, on the said voyages to India to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of everything, and the manner which should be had for their conversion to our holy faith.”1 This idea was echoed in the papal bulls granting the Spanish dominion over the Americas and upheld by the official policies of subsequent monarchs and the Council of the Indies.
Associations between conquering lands under Muslim rule and spreading Christianity overseas were also echoed in the papal bulls of donation and resurfaced in subsequent Spanish claims to empire and dominion in the New World. As imperial claims became intimately linked to the evangelization of native communities, it became imperative for the Crown to restrict the movement of peoples and ideas to the Americas to devout Catholics. As definitions of Spanishness became increasingly linked to exclusionary attitudes based on genealogy and religious identity, restrictions on overseas emigration also became more and more connected to emerging notions of “race”—to individuals who could prove their lineages were of “pure” old Christian ancestry.
Like the Portuguese, the Spanish presented a “world on the move.”2 Following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, Portuguese ships in search of African gold and slaves began to make voyages into the southern Atlantic. During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established trading posts and colonies in the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores.3 In competition with the Portuguese, the Castilians also staked their claim to the Canary Islands, raiding and enslaving the native guanche population. With growing competition over access to maritime trade routes, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had to negotiate treaties with Afonso V of Portugal. In 1479 they signed the Treaty of Alcáçovas in which Portugal recognized Castilian sovereignty in the Canary Islands and Castile acknowledged Portuguese claims to the other Atlantic islands and the African coast south of Cape Bojador. Following Columbus’s return from his first voyage to the Caribbean islands, Ferdinand and Isabel became concerned the Portuguese would attempt to claim them under the Treaty of Alcáçovas.4 They immediately appealed to Alexander VI to grant them title to these islands and any subsequent “discoveries,” which the pope conceded in the bulls of donation.5
Spanish authorities’ interest in restricting new Christian presence in the Americas was in many ways shaped by the terms of the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493). In this bull, Alexander VI granted dominion to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel to oversee the conversion of peoples encountered in the new territories, effectively rendering the Spanish Crown’s title to the Americas contingent upon the successful evangelization of indigenous peoples.6 The bull highlighted the role played by Ferdinand and Isabel in the conquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada in 1492. It buttressed their claim to being Catholic monarchs who, because of their actions in Granada, presented themselves as the most suitable rulers in Europe to oversee the expansion of the church in the new territories.7 The language and terms of Inter Caetera infiltrated subsequent legal decisions and debates concerning the legality of Spanish conquest and colonization. Other legal documents and protocols tied to conquest, such as the Requerimiento, attested to the continued importance that spreading Catholicism held for the colonial enterprise.8
For decades to come, jurists and theologians at the Spanish court debated the legality and morality of Spanish dominion and just title to the Americas. Initial juridical arguments drew upon Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval period that recognized the pope’s jurisdiction over lands belonging to non-Christians. Precedents for European claims over non-Christian peoples generally involved lands deemed “vacant” or societies labeled “primitive,” such as the guanches in the Canary Islands. The Spanish Crown needed to establish clearly the legitimacy of its claims to the Americas before an international audience.9 Numerous lawyers, theologians, and royal officials convened in Salamanca to debate the lawfulness of the conquests, their arguments grounded in Castilian legal culture.
Bartolomé de las Casas, whose writings questioned the extent of Spanish dominion and cited horrific abuses of indigenous peoples as its consequence, was not alone in his critiques.10 In 1565, Franciscan friar Alonso de Maldonado also petitioned the king to protect indigenous peoples, claiming the Crown lacked legitimate title to the Americas. At court, Friar Diego de Chaves responded that Maldonado’s propositions would allow other monarchs to assert claims over the Indies and deemed Maldonado’s failure to recognize the papal grant “scandalous and seditious.”11 In 1568, with the encouragement of the Jesuits, Pope Pius V created a commission to examine the Catholic missions in the Spanish Americas.12 Those who participated in the commission submitted a report to Philip II concerning the good treatment and conversion of indigenous peoples. Echoing Tridentine reforms, their report reiterated that the papal donation stipulated true conversion of the Amerindians, and it recommended that well-educated priests carry out this enormous task with the financial support of the encomenderos.13 Encomenderos therefore were responsible for upholding the religious instruction of indigenous peoples under their supervision, and in some cases they became vulnerable