To Live Like a Moor. Olivia Remie Constable

Spain. Then as now, there were many beliefs and practices that were seen as defining characteristics of one religion or the other, especially articles of doctrine and ways of life that were explicitly set forth in holy texts and books of religious law and tradition. But every religion also has other customs and habits, whether local or widespread, that have come to be associated, sometimes very strongly, with that faith tradition, even though they may have little basis among official aspects of belief. Foodways provide a good example of this duality. On the one hand, there are strict and widely recognized religious dietary laws set out for Jews and Muslims regarding kosher and halal butchering practices and the avoidance of pork products. On the other hand, there are many regional food traditions that can also be associated with Jews and Muslims, without being universal, exclusive, or religiously required. Enjoying kebabs, falafel, or hummus might fall into this category today; in late medieval Spain, this was true of eating eggplants and couscous.

      The same is true for traditions of cleanness and purity, where there is a difference between the religious requirements of ritual washing before prayer and the customary and pleasurable cleansing of one’s body in the warm water and steam of a bathhouse. Yet both practices are related in their valuation of hygiene, and they are closely culturally linked to each other.

      Many of the practices that Núñez Muley was called upon to defend fell into this often indefinable and sometimes controversial borderland between religious requirement and customary tradition. Christians in sixteenth-century Spain could catalog a broad set of activities, described as “customs,” “superstitions,” “ceremonies,” and “rites” (costumbres, supersticiones, ceremonias, ritos), that they saw as characteristic of Muslim life, which included and yet went well beyond canonical Islamic requirements. For example, the 1554 Synod of Guadix included a list of supersticiones y ritos practiced by New Christians. All were condemned, both those that were overtly Islamic rituals (such as fasting during Ramadan) and others (such as painting the hands with henna) that were categorized as merely superstitious but not heretical.²

      In preparing the 1567 edict in Granada, Old Christians argued that converted Muslims must abandon all elements of their former life, not only official beliefs but also long-term habits. The chronicler Luis del Mármol Carvajal, a Christian contemporary of Francisco Núñez Muley in Granada, explained their reasoning in that “because the Moriscos have been baptized and are called Christians, and they have had to both be and appear to be Christians, they have left behind the clothing, language, and customs that they once used as Moors.”³

      Similar reasoning and language would continue through the Morisco expulsions in the early seventeenth century. Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza later recalled how Morisco customs (costumbres de los moriscos) had to be reformed, since the local people “appeared to be Christians but were actually Moors” (eran Cristianos aparentes y moros verdaderos), holding to “the rites and ceremonies of their sect” (los ritos y ceremonias de su seta) including foodways, prayers, and music (zambras).⁴

      The 1567 ban on what Old Christians perceived as Islamic customs—especially the prohibition on dress, veils, and shoes—caused consternation within the New Christian community and Núñez Muley was commissioned to draft a rebuttal. Strikingly, his defense rested on economic and cultural arguments, not religious associations. Not only would it be a hardship for New Christian women to have to buy entirely new wardrobes, but he emphasized that these clothing practices were merely elements of local culture and style; they were not based on faith traditions. “Their style of dress, clothing, and footwear,” he states, “cannot be said to be that of Muslims, nor is it that of Muslims. It can more rightly be said to be clothing that corresponds to a particular kingdom and province.” (El ábito y traxe y calçado no se puede dezir de moros, ni que es de moros. Puédese de dizir ques traxe del Reyno y provinçia.)⁵

      All regions have their own particular styles, Núñez Muley argued, and thus Granadan dress was distinct from the fashions elsewhere in Castile, just as clothing in Morocco was different from styles in Turkey. Yet at the same time, dress was not linked to religion, since Christians in Jerusalem dressed just like their Muslim neighbors. Likewise, the practice of female veiling was shared by both Old and New Christians in Granada, where many women from Old Christian families routinely veiled their faces if they wished to walk in the street unrecognized.⁶

      Christianity, he insisted, “is not found in the clothing or footwear that is now in style, and the same is true of Islam,” so that “from all that I have just pointed out, your Most Reverend Lordship will certainly be convinced, as it is true, that the natives’ style of clothing and footwear has nothing at all to do with either support for or opposition to Islam.”⁷

      Núñez Muley was in a very tricky position, and his line of argument was necessarily somewhat disingenuous. Whether or not they were strictly “religious,” many of the practices that he defended were indeed holdovers from the previous century, when Granada was a Muslim city and its citizens were Muslims. The Naṣrid kingdom of Granada had survived for two and a half centuries (from 1232 until 1492) as the final outpost of Muslim-controlled territory in the Iberian Peninsula until its last Muslim ruler surrendered to Fernando and Isabel. But by the time Núñez Muley was drafting his memorandum, Granada had been officially Christian for three-quarters of a century, and its inhabitants were all baptized Christians, whether from Old Christian families (cristianos viejos) or relatively recent converts (cristianos nuevos). At least two generations had passed since the early sixteenth-century edicts requiring conversion or expulsion, so only the very oldest among New Christian citizens, like Núñez Muley himself, had actually been born Muslim. Nevertheless, New Christians in Granada still thought of themselves as “natives” of the city (naturales, in Núñez Muley’s words), as opposed to the Old Christian incomers, and they preserved many of their distinctive local customs, including traditions of bathing, fashion, music, names, and language. But, as Núñez Muley’s argument makes clear, there was nothing to be gained for the Morisco community by linking these practices to Islam, since everybody was now technically Christian. Indeed, in an age in which the Spanish Inquisition was a present and fearful fact of life, it was highly desirable to discourage any linkage with Islam.

      Yet despite Núñez Muley’s protestations in his memorandum, it is reasonable to assume that many New Christians did, in fact, associate these practices with their Muslim heritage and that Old Christians were not incorrect in believing that certain ways of life distinguished the two Christian populations from each other. It is likewise reasonable to posit that neither group, Old or New, was a solid or undifferentiated bloc. Many Moriscos (the ones sometimes called crypto-Muslims in modern scholarship) actively resisted acculturation and conversion, and they preserved traditional ways precisely because they knew them to be Islamic, while other more assimilated New Christians may have held to their customs more from habit and tradition. Even members of the most highly assimilated group, including Francisco Núñez Muley (who himself knew little or no Arabic, and who has sometimes been described as a collaborator because he served under the postconquest administration),⁸ still clearly felt that these older traditions and practices were an important part of Granadan life.

      Within Old Christian society there must also have been a spectrum of opinion about the practices in question, with some people shunning anything that might be perceived to bear a taint of Islam, while others willingly dressed in local clothing styles, ate regional foods, visited bathhouses, and listened to popular music. Even Christian clerics differed in their approaches to these traditions. Shortly after the 1492 conquest, we are told that the first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, incorporated local music (zambras) into Corpus Christi processions and tried to win over Muslim converts by preaching the Gospel and inviting them to dinner so as to inculcate table manners and other Christian customs (costumbres cristianas) by example.⁹ Meanwhile, his more conservative colleague Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros ordered the burning of Arabic books and successfully pursued the forced conversion of the Muslim population of Granada.

      Debates, disputes, disagreements, and indecision about the best strategies for Christian-Muslim relations were nothing new, although there were changes over time and differences according to region. By the early 1500s, Christians and Muslims had lived in the Iberian Peninsula