To Live Like a Moor. Olivia Remie Constable

conquest of Granada, when King Fernando and Queen Isabel returned to visit that city, they were greeted by the “admirable” scene of a great crowd of people that included (according to their chronicler, Alonso de Santa Cruz) thirty-thousand Muslim women (moras) wearing traditional white veils (almalafas).¹⁵ It must have been a stunning sight and distinctly different, visually, from the kind of crowd that might have greeted their entrance into Burgos, Barcelona, Madrid, or other towns where the Muslim population was very low. The original capitulations of Granada, drawn up late in 1491, had allowed the Muslim inhabitants of the conquered city to remain Muslim and to preserve their distinctive religious and customary ways of life, including clothing, foodways, language, and bathing. This and the other late fifteenth-century treaties that the Catholic Kings negotiated with cities throughout the former Naṣrid kingdom had all assumed, initially, that the newly subject inhabitants would remain Muslim and assume a status very like that of Mudejars living under Christian rule elsewhere in the realms of Castile and Aragon. So there was little surprising or problematic in the fact that the crowds in Granada who gathered to greet the monarchs in 1499 were dressed in the traditional fashions closely associated with their Islamic faith.

      But problems and unpleasant surprises were about to appear, and the process of forced conversion of Muslims in Granada and other parts of the Crown of Castile, undertaken in 1500–1502, would profoundly change longstanding assumptions about visual distinction and identity. After conversion, New Christians were encouraged to abandon the earlier ways that had marked them as Muslim and to look, dress, speak, and act like Old Christians. Hernando de Talavera, appointed as the first archbishop of newly Christian Granada in 1493, was especially attentive to the nuances of dress and deportment, having already written a sumptuary treatise for Christians in 1477, which he revised and published in 1496 after moving to Granada.¹⁶ Talavera sought to “domesticate” his converted flock (para domesticarles) and to teach them Christian ways.¹⁷ Among these, “he made sure that they dressed in Castilian styles [que se vistiessen a lo Castellano], and he gave cloaks, shoes, and hats to poor men, and shawls and skirts [mantos y sayas] to their wives.”¹⁸ Talavera was much more sympathetic to the local population than was his colleague Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who would become infamous for his hard-line attitude toward enforcing conversion and the abandonment of Muslim ways.¹⁹

      Early capitulation treaties, in which Muslim communities in the region of Granada agreed to convert to Christianity, made practical provision for the difficult shift from Muslim to Christian ways of life, including clauses relating to butchers, bathhouses, language, and clothing. Similar documents drawn up with converted communities in Baza, Huéscar, and Vélez Rubio in 1500 and 1501 all promised that New Christians “would not be pressured to buy and wear new clothes until those that they and their wives currently owned had worn out.²⁰ We also find negotiations for a delay nearly three decades later, when Muslims in Valencia (in 1525) and elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon (in 1526) likewise faced forced baptism. New converts in Valencia pleaded to retain their styles of clothing “which are so different from the clothing of Christians, especially as regards female clothing. Because the change of dress and the loss of these articles of clothing would be a great hardship, and no provision had been made to cover the loss, they requested a grace period of forty years before being forced to abandon their clothing.” In reply (in a treaty ratified in 1526 but published in 1528), the king and the Inquisition granted them “a period of ten years in which to use and wear the clothes that they currently had, after which they would have to switch to Christian styles.”²¹

      The grant of ten years may have been based on earlier experiences in Castile, where there seems to have been a decade of uncertainty about the point at which Morisco clothing could be considered to be “worn out” and whether items could be mended and refashioned to prolong their useful life. An ordinance issued by Queen Juana in 1511, addressed to all New Christians in the kingdom of Granada (“men and women, old and young”), ordered not only that they must give up wearing Moorish-style clothing (“ropa de vestir a la manera de los moros”) and dress like Old Christians, but also that “no tailor, for any reason or in any way, shall cut or make any clothing for the newly converted to wear except in the style of Old Christian dress.”²² However, a loophole was immediately found in this ruling, so in 1513 Juana issued another decree noting that for the past two years, Old Christian and Mudejar tailors had claimed that the 1511 law did not apply to them; from here onward, she “ordered that another decree be made that Old Christian and Mudejar tailors not be allowed to make Moorish-style clothing [ropas moriscas].”²³ Juana then went on, in this decree and in another document issued on the same day (July 29, 1513), to prohibit both New Christian and Old Christian women from wearing almalafas or any other form of veil that covered their faces.²⁴ This would be the first in a long series of edicts against the almalafa and female veiling, which will be discussed in more detail in a separate section below.

      The first comprehensive set of postconquest ordinances and restrictions relating to New Christian life was issued in Granada by Charles V in December 1526, and the Inquisition was charged with enforcement of this legislation. Although the original edict’s extant text included no clauses relating to general Morisco clothing, other aspects of their visual identity—female face veiling and the almalafa, painting hands and feet with henna, and wearing ornaments in the shape of a hand inscribed with Arabic letters—were specifically addressed and prohibited.²⁵ Nevertheless, a later account of this edict in Prudencio de Sandoval’s Historia de la vida y hechos del emperador Carlos V (published in 1604) did give equal weight to clothing, recalling the requirement that “they were to put aside and leave off wearing the marlotas [loose open garments with sleeves] that they were accustomed to wear in place of skirts [sayas], and the linen almalafas that they wore in place of shawls [mantos], and all Moriscas and Moriscos were to dress themselves as Christians … and no tailor should dare to fashion clothes, or jeweler to create ornaments, in a Moorish style.”²⁶ The ordinances of 1526 were in any case sufficiently broad-ranging to create a shock wave through the New Christian community in Granada, and a petition was made to the emperor for a grace period to lessen the impact of his decree (not unlike the contemporary plea from New Christians in Valencia). Their appeal met with success, and the edict was put on hold for forty years—in return for a hefty payment to the crown from the New Christian community in Granada.²⁷

      The struggle over clothing was an uphill battle for both sides in the middle of the sixteenth century. Many New Christians steadfastly retained their traditional styles of dress; royal legislation was not necessarily effective, fines and penalties could be ignored, and the Inquisition had promised not to intervene during the grace period negotiated in 1526. Clothing, also, was easily changed, and people who dutifully dressed in Christian fashions for public activities might switch back into their more comfortable and familiar older-style clothing when they returned home. Royal letters sent to the archbishop and Audiencia of Granada in 1530 lamented the backsliding of New Christian women, who had resumed dressing in Moorish clothing (“se han vuelto a poner el [hábito] morisco”) and in so doing “had forgotten Christian doctrine and committed many sins and offenses.”²⁸ Later in the same year Charles’s empress, Isabella of Portugal, wrote directly to the New Christian community in Granada urging that they give up their past beliefs and errors in their ways of life, especially “the clothing and styles that you wore in the time when you were not Christians.” The letter even took on something of a personal tone, underlining Isabella’s concern over the issue: “we charge and entreat you to abandon these garments, and from now on to clothe and to dress yourselves and your children in clothing and styles after the manner that Old Christians wear in this kingdom, because as well as being something very important for the salvation and improvement of your souls, this will also give me much pleasure.”²⁹

      Perhaps some New Christians heeded her request, but a quarter century later, in 1554, the canons of the Synod of Guadix repeated similar accusations that some Moriscos were switching back and forth between the two different styles of clothing as evidence of their bad faith. By the middle of the sixteenth century, concerns about faith and identity had taken on new importance in light of the Reformation. Martín Pérez de Ayala, bishop of Guadix and convener of the synod in 1554, was also a participant at the