Visions of Deliverance: Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean

By Mayte Green-Mercado

In Visions of Deliverance, Mayte Green-Mercado traces the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts known as joferes through formal and informal networks of merchants, Sufis, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians across the Mediterranean from Constantinople and Venice to Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco cultural and political resistance, reconstructing both productive and oppositional interactions and exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the early modern Mediterranean.

Challenging a historiography that has primarily understood Morisco apocalyptic thought as the expression of a defeated group that was conscious of the loss of their culture and identity, Green-Mercado depicts Moriscos not simply as helpless victims of Christian oppression but as political actors whose use of end-times discourse helped define and construct their society anew. Visions of Deliverance helps us understand the implications of confessionalization, forced conversion, and assimilation in the early modern period and the intellectual and theological networks that shaped politics and identity across the Mediterranean in this era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501741487

Book preview

VISIONS OF DELIVERANCE

MORISCOS AND THE POLITICS OF PROPHECY IN THE EARLY MODERN MEDITERRANEAN

MAYTE GREEN-MERCADO

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

The affairs of Spain were so confused, men were so perplexed, that it seemed like it was a heavenly scourge, and that another destruction and end would come over these kingdoms, worse than it had been in the times of the King Don Rodrigo. They believed in omens; they cast predictions and prognostications threatening great misfortune. Some demons invented who knows what prophecies, which some said were by St. Isidore, archbishop of Seville, others by Fr. Juan de Rocacelsa [John of Rupescissa], and one of Merlin and other wise men, and of St. John Damascene [John of Damascus], and weeping or plaints that St. Isidore cried over Spain. And in all of them [there were] so many bad signs of calamities and destruction for Spain that people were terrified and went about dazed.

Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechos del emperador Carlos V (1604), part 1, book 6, chapter 12

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliterations and Citations

Introduction

1. Christian Visionary or Muslim Prophet?

2. The Return of Muslim Granada

3. Ottoman Rome

4. The Grand Morisco Conspiracy

5. Prophetic Fabrications of a Morisco Informant

6. Prophecy as Diplomacy

Epilogue

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix F

Appendix G

Appendix H

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the years I have amassed debt that will never be repaid. I would like to thank people who have been instrumental in the development of this book. I am grateful to my mentors at The University of Chicago who saw this project come to life when I was a graduate student. Cornell H. Fleischer, Tamar Herzog, Fred Donner, John E. Woods, and the late Farouk Mustafa taught me to think in deep, broad, and connected ways. David Nirenberg supported my work at a crucial moment. His work has served as an inspiration throughout the years, and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with him.

There are friends and colleagues without whose help I would not have been able to complete this book—people who are true scholars in every sense of the word. Ryan Szpiech, a model colleague and mentor, read an initial full draft of the manuscript and gave valuable feedback. My conversations and collaborations with Evrim Binbaş enriched my work in countless ways, from helping me acquire sources to reading every single chapter of this book. I am deeply grateful for his friendship and constant support. My husband Javier Castro-Ibaseta’s sharp and critical feedback on every aspect of my work has made me a better scholar. He saw this project in its very beginning stages, and has been here to its very end. I am grateful to him for reading and rereading and never growing tired of it.

Many colleagues helped me refine many of the ideas in this book. I had the privilege and honor to have been part of the Mediterranean working group and the Islamic Studies Program at the University of Michigan. Numerous friends and colleagues discussed specific aspects of my book. Thanks to Kathryn Babayan, Paroma Chatterjee, Hussein Fancy, Enrique García Santo Tomás, Gottfried Hagen, Michele Hannoosh, Karla Mallette, Devi Mays, and Diane Owen Hughes. Karla Mallete and Michele Hannoosh provided important feedback on my translations from Italian and French. I am grateful to all for making me feel like I was part of a strong intellectual family. Four brilliant scholars and dear friends, María Dolores Morillo, Evelyn Alsultany, Deirdre De la Cruz, and Shobita Parthasarathy, have enriched me intellectually and personally, and continue to be with me in spite of the distance. I am grateful to the WOCAP network at the University of Michigan for the two writing grants that allowed me to spend dedicated time writing this book in the company of Deirdre, Shobita, and Evelyn during two productive and memorable summer writing retreats.

My dear friends and life sisters, Montse Rabadán, Rosa Ramos, Betül Başaran, and Lena Jansen, saw this project from dissertation to book. I am grateful that they are part of my life.

Having recently arrived at Rutgers University, Newark, I cannot be more grateful for the warm welcome I have received by my great colleagues in the Federated History Department, and my colleagues in the Middle East and Islamic Studies Working Group. I would like to thank especially Nükhet Varlık and Leyla Amzi for their friendship, and Gary Farney and Karen Caplan for their support and mentoring over the past two years. I would like to acknowledge and thank Rutgers University’s Research Council subvention grant, which has allowed me to defray significant publication costs related to this book.

I want to express my appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. The ideas presented in chapter 3 have benefitted from discussions in the University Seminar on Ottoman and Turkish Studies.

Colleagues in the US and abroad have also been instrumental in the development of my project. Claire Gilbert, Daniel Hershenzon, and Danny Wasserman read early drafts of chapters. I thank them for their feedback and for their friendship. Special thanks go to Maribel Fierro, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Rafael Benítez Sánchez Blanco, and Bernard Vincent for their guidance, encouragement, and assistance in locating sources. I would like to thank especially Mercedes García-Arenal for being an anchor in Spain when I first started thinking about this project, and for her support throughout the years.

I am grateful for the opportunity to share my work recently at the Mediterranean Seminar, Spain North Africa Project, University of Michigan, The University of Chicago, Duke University, University of North Carolina, University of Minnesota, Columbia University, University of Western Ontario, Georgetown University in Qatar. Parts of chapter six appeared in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. I want to thank the editors for allowing me to use the same material in this book. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers assigned by Cornell University Press for their generous and thorough feedback, which was crucial as I revised the manuscript.

I thank my sister, Sylmarie Green, for being there even when I was too busy to chat, and for loving me in spite of my absence. My in-laws Maricarmen Ibaseta and José Antonio Castro have provided support, love, and many cozy spaces to write in Spain. I dedicate this book to the two Sylvias in my life, my daughter, and my mother, Sylvia Mercado Martín, who would have been very proud.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS AND CITATIONS

For Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, I have followed the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies guidelines. Aljamiado texts have been transcribed following the Colección de Literatura Española Aljamiada y Morisca (CLEAM). All transcriptions and translations of Spanish, Italian, and French sources have followed the original texts and have not been modernized. Throughout the book, Julian and Gregorian dates have been used. Dates in the Islamic lunar calendar (Hijrī qamarī) have not been provided. For all translations of the Qurʾān I have used The Qur’ān. Translated by Alan Jones. Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007.

Iberian Peninsula in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

Morisco towns in the Kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia.

The early modern Mediterranean.

Introduction

On June 13, 1601, at 11:00 a.m., the bell of the chapel of St. Nicolas of Bari in the small town of Velilla del Ebro near Zaragoza, Aragon, spontaneously began to toll. The following day, a large crowd gathered as the bell continued ringing. On the third day it mysteriously stopped. Then, as if announcing a prodigious event, the tocsin resumed for another week before falling silent.¹ This was no ordinary bell, as the residents of the town were well aware. It was said to have tolled in 711, warning about conquest and, soon after, Muslim troops overran the Iberian Peninsula.

News of the Bell of Velilla spread quickly. People came from Zaragoza and even from Barcelona to witness the miracle. It was captured in news pamphlets, commented on in correspondence, and discussed at length in many chronicles. Narrating the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, several chronicles counted the tolling of the bell as one of many other omens and supernatural phenomena that predicted the Moriscos’ banishment from Iberian Christian lands.² Some were convinced that the bell had announced the secret agreements that the Moriscos were plotting with the Turks for the ruination of Spain and the destruction of our sacred religion, which led to their expulsion.³ The Moriscos, for their part, went to the town of Velilla to bear witness to the tolling bell with great excitement, saying that it signaled the end of Christianity in Spain, and that the Peninsula would once again be in Muslim hands.⁴ The bell tolled again in 1610, just as the Moriscos were being forced to leave their homeland.

Belief in omens, prodigies, and prognostications was widespread in the early modern Mediterranean.⁵ In the Iberian Peninsula, many interpreted every major historical event in a providentialist and apocalyptic light. This book’s epigraph captures some of the ways in which Spaniards understood apocalyptic phenomena. Its author, Prudencio de Sandoval, was reflecting on the popular sentiment during the uprising of the citizens of Castile in 1520–21 known as the comunero movement, as a reaction to the arrival of their new king, Charles V. The prophecies predicted destruction at the hands of the new king, whose calamitous takeover could only be compared to the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula in the times of king Don Rodrigo, in 711. Sandoval cited the circulation of prophecies by St. Isidore of Seville, John of Rupescissa (Juan de Rocacelsa or Jean de Roquetaillade), Merlin, and John of Damascus to warn against paying attention to such things. He further identified this kind of worldview as the beliefs of ignorants. Yet the reality was, as is evident with the example of the Bell of Velilla, that in Sandoval’s own time people read historical events through heavenly signs as intensely as they had centuries earlier, and that hopes for political and social change were often supported by apocalyptic prognostications.

Visions of Deliverance analyzes the efflorescence of apocalyptic beliefs and practices among Moriscos. The last Spanish Muslims to be forcibly converted to Catholicism in sixteenth-century Spain, Moriscos and their descendants were also referred to as New Christians (as opposed to Old Christians, whose lineage was not tainted with any Jewish or Muslim blood). As this book will show, Moriscos were not impervious to the apocalyptic excitement of their Old Christian counterparts; they read the same prophecies of St. Isidore of Seville and John of Rupescissa (among other texts) with a similarly voracious appetite. Paying attention to the diffusion of Morisco apocalyptic texts in the Iberian Peninsula and across the broader Mediterranean sheds light not only on the conditions for the surge in apocalyptic prophecies and the processes of their production, reception, and transmission among Moriscos, but also on their social and political effects. As in the case of the comuneros described by Sandoval, prophecies served as a catalyzer for Morisco resistance to Christian monarchical power. This book maps out the ways in which this apocalyptic phenomenon transformed Morisco political culture and practice, and put Moriscos in contact with such powerful Mediterranean actors as the Ottomans, the French monarch Henry IV and the Saʿdī sultans of Morocco. Grounded in early modern Islamic, Spanish, and Mediterranean history, Visions of Deliverance offers multiple examples of the ways nonimperial actors such as the Moriscos were able to fully participate in the intellectual and political life of the early modern Mediterranean. In brief, this book contributes to a shift in our notions of sovereignty, domination, power, and alterity by exploring the agency of a social and political group that has long been relegated to the fringes of historical analysis in the fields of early modern history, Spanish culture, and Islamic studies.

Morisco Prognostications in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Jofores and Aljamiado Literature

During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, apocalyptic prophecies known as jofores circulated in the Muslim and crypto-Muslim Morisco communities of the Iberian Peninsula.⁶ Moriscos drew from the rich trove of Islamic literature grouped under the generic term jafr, which included collections of oracles about the future. Jafr was originally associated with the belief that the descendants of Fāṭima, the Prophet Muḥammad’s daughter, had inherited a privileged prophetic knowledge—the ability to predict the future. This knowledge was believed to have been inscribed in a leather-bound book in which all past, present, and future events were written. Access to this text was reserved exclusively for sayyids, or descendants of Muḥammad (through the line of Fāṭima and her husband ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law). Historically, jafr also came to be associated with divinatory and astrological techniques, the cornerstone of divinatory arts cultivated by saints and mystics, which included ʿilm al-ḥurūf (or science of letters).⁷ Yet the most important aspects of jafr concern apocalypticism and the revelation of God at the End Times. This genre, as Toufiq Fahd has noted, was well developed under the Umayyads and further expanded under the ʿAbbāsids in the form of books of oracles, kutub al-ḥidthān. In the Islamic world, jafr literature continued to have currency well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in both eastern and western Islamic lands.⁸

Muslim apocalyptic literature emerged mainly as part of the ḥadīth corpus (sayings, actions, and tacit approvals of the Muḥammad) in the form of prognosticative pronouncements attributed to the Prophet. These narratives usually relate to specific historical moments of specific Muslim groups.⁹ They are written in either verse or prose and address events that will occur in the Muslim umma (community of believers) at the End Times. Moriscos also drew from well-known medieval Christian sources, which they reinterpreted and adapted to their communities’ concerns.

Many Morisco jofores, especially those circulating in Aragon and Castile during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were written in Aljamiado,¹⁰ a writing system that employs Arabic script to represent Romance languages, in this case Castilian and Aragonese.¹¹ Many of these Aljamiado texts are translations of Arabic originals. A small number of prophetic texts written in Arabic still survive; these circulated in the Kingdoms of Valencia and Granada, where Arabic language and culture persisted into the sixteenth century.¹² The Aljamiado phenomenon flourished among the Aragonese and Castilian Morisco communities, whose ability to read, write, and speak Arabic had progressively eroded through the process of acculturation resulting from centuries of living under Christian rule. Scholars generally concur that crypto-Muslims increasingly turned to Aljamiado as a medium of written communication in order to express their Islamic distinctiveness at a moment when they felt that their identity was under threat.¹³ Arabic, the language of revelation, had the same sacred nature for the Moriscos that it did for other Muslims. It was this perceived sacrality that likely prompted Moriscos to use Arabic script to write Iberian languages, despite the danger that the possession of papers written in this language posed if found by the inquisitorial authorities. More than two hundred Aljamiado manuscripts have survived, most of which were found inside false walls or in between floorboards of houses owned by Moriscos, most probably to hide them from Christian authorities. The records of the Inquisition make reference to books and other written materials confiscated by their agents as evidence of heresy.¹⁴ The Aljamiado manuscripts include the most varied collections of texts, ranging from Qurʾāns or extracts of the sacred text, to collections of ḥadīths, sīra literature (writings on the life of the Prophet), qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (stories about prophets), legal texts, poetry, popular stories, magical recipes, and apocalyptic prophecies.

Inquisition sources attest to a robust circulation of books among Moriscos at all levels of society. Even illiterate Moriscos strove to own books written in Arabic. As Jacqueline Fournel-Guerin has demonstrated, Inquisition trials in Aragon reveal that despite church censorship, many Moriscos preserved their Islamic religious culture by copying, writing, and selling books, as well as by organizing schools that taught Arabic and the Qurʾān to children and adults alike.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, the Qurʾān is the most represented text in the extant Aljamiado corpus of manuscripts. Merchants and muleteers were crucial for the circulation of books and other material written in Arabic. These itinerant figures went from town to town selling their goods and distributing books among their coreligionists. At times they also served as teachers, scribes, notaries, and alfaquís (religious leaders). Serafín Tapia has pointed out that transporting goods became a characteristic feature of the Castilian Morisco community, especially during the second half of the sixteenth century.¹⁶ These economic-religious networks, as Tapia calls them, connected Moriscos residing in the different territories of the Peninsula, as well as Spanish Moriscos living in exile, especially in North Africa and Ottoman lands. But books were not the only cultural goods that circulated along these commercial roads; muleteers and merchants also carried news about local and international events.

Prophetic Corpus

The textual jofores that constitute the core set of sources studied here most likely traveled along the same routes as the Qurʾāns and other books. I have attempted to collect all prophecies that are extant in written form as individual texts, as well as fragments of apocalyptic prophecies preserved in the trial records of Moriscos who were accused and sentenced for heresy and apostasy by the Inquisition. Several jofores are contained in Ms. 774 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.¹⁷ This manuscript includes four prophetic texts written in Aljamiado: two prophecies attributed to St. Isidore of Seville, a prophecy in the form of an apocalyptic ḥadīth, and a prophecy attributed to a certain ʿAlī ibn Jābir Alferesiyo (al-Fārisī). This last text is also reproduced in a Spanish translation of an Arabic original that was found among some papers in Arabic seized by the Inquisition in 1602.¹⁸ An Arabic version of the text was also appended to a trial record of a Morisco named Francisco Materra, from Gandía, and dates from 1589–90.¹⁹ The Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid houses an additional Aljamiado prognostication, Ms. 5305, by a certain Fr. Juan de Rokasia (John of Rupescissa). This prophecy, which was only recently published, is unmistakably Mudéjar—that is, from the unconverted Iberian Muslim community living under Christian rule before 1501.

The archives of the Inquisition confirm that this prophecy continued to circulate in the Iberian Peninsula well beyond the Mudéjar period and that many Moriscos also placed their hopes on its fulfillment in the 1570s, a period of intense apocalyptic speculation by the Aragonese New Christian community. A supplementary corpus of three prophecies in Arabic was translated by Alonso del Castillo, a Morisco who served as official interpreter of the Inquisition and, in 1570, as royal translator. The apocalyptic prognostications were included in del Castillo’s compilation of all the documents that he translated for the Inquisition and King Philip II (r. 1556–98) until 1575, titled Sumario é recopilación de todo lo romançado por mí el licenciado Alonso del Castillo, romançador del santo oficio desde antes de la guerra del reyno de Granada (Summary and Compilation of Everything Translated by Me, Licenciado Alonso del Castillo, Translator for the Holy Office Since Before the War in the Kingdom of Granada).²⁰ Del Castillo provided these texts to his friend, Luis del Mármol Carvajal, who published an abridged version in his chronicle of the Morisco rebellion in Granada (1568–70), titled Historia del rebelión y castigo de los moriscos de Granada (History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos of Granada, 1600).²¹

Studying Jofores: Content of the Morisco Prognostications

As most Islamic apocalyptic texts, the Morisco jofores aim to present the audience with the different Signs of the Hour (ashrāt al-sāʿa). When composing their apocalyptic messages, Morisco authors drew from a large corpus of eschatological works that had been circulating in the Peninsula since the Middle Ages, which adapted well to their circumstances. Maribel Fierro has argued that Mudéjar and Morisco apocalyptic prophecies are part of an eschatology that goes back to early Islam via the Umayyads of al-Andalus.²² To articulate their apocalyptic discourse, Moriscos turned to this rich corpus but they also based their predictions on Christian sources, casting them in an Islamic light. These texts, as Luce López Baralt has pointed out, are presented as ancient sources that foretell a triumphant future for the Moriscos.²³ Of the corpus of eleven prophecies identified in the previous section, eight are recognizably Islamic, while three are attributed to Christian authors. In these apocalyptic texts Muḥammad is the authority par excellence: four prophecies are attributed to the Prophet of Islam and presented as ḥadīths, albeit with truncated isnāds (chains of transmission that connect a specific narrative to the Prophet). In these apocryphal ḥadīths, the Prophet predicts the trials that the last Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula will endure. One of the ḥadīths, in a moving display of empathy, portrays a weeping Muḥammad who laments the tribulations that the Moriscos will suffer at the End Times.²⁴ Yet not all is lost for the Morisco community in this prediction, for the Prophet promises that God will send a king who will restore Islam in the Peninsula. A central message in these apocalyptic ḥadīths is an admonition to the Moriscos to wake up from their negligence. Recalling the agitations of the Day of Judgment and the fury of hell, with its fires, another jofor warns Muslims to turn to God and do not sleep, for you will wake up buried under rubble.²⁵

As noted above, the prophetic text attributed to ʿAlī ibn Jābir Alferesiyo (al-Fārisī) is preserved in three versions (Aljamiado, Arabic, and Spanish) and was especially popular among Moriscos.²⁶ In it, al-Fārisī narrates an encounter between an old hermit and a being that descends from heaven to inform him about the state of the Muslims of Spain at the End Times. The divine being laments that "many ugly things will take place among them. The first thing that they will do is that they will cease to learn the Qurʾān, they will abandon the asala (prayer), and they will not pay the azzake (alms), they will fast little, and they say that Allāh is truthful in their hearts, but they will be empty in naming Allāh. And because of this, they will sow a lot and will harvest little, and they will work hard and have little benefits.²⁷ There will be, the prophecy continues, great tribulations among the Muslims of Aragon and Huesca, and they will convert to Christianity and their mosques will be turned into churches. But God will send a sultan who will dominate the earth and the seas," and will bring justice and order to the world. His name will be Aḥmar (in the Arabic version)²⁸ or Aḥmad (in the Aljamiado version).²⁹ God will also touch the hearts of the Muslim kings, who will come to the aid of the Muslims of the Peninsula, commanded by the Ottomans. This apocalyptic vision ends with the conversion of Christians to Islam and the restoration of peace.

Moriscos also drew from well-established Christian apocalyptic material to compose their prognostications. Their tampering with Christian prophecies presents a most interesting exercise of appropriation and mimesis: they adopt and adapt the discourse of the opponent to present a scenario in which their community emerges as the victors. The Christian texts read and commented on by Moriscos have a common thread inspired by the influential medieval thinker Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), who foretells the destruction of a corrupt Church that will give way to a period of renewal. One jofor is an adaptation of the famous prophecy Vade mecum in tribulatione (The Handbook in Tribulation), written in 1356 by the French spiritual Franciscan John of Rupescissa (d. 1366). This prophecy circulated widely in Spain soon after it was composed.³⁰ The Vade mecum depicts the ruin of members of various social and religious groups. The cruel sufferings endured by secular lords and clergy served, as DeVun has noted, not only as punishments for their sins but also as a purging of sorts for the entire community.³¹ Similarly, in the Aljamiado rendition of Rupescissa’s prophecy, people will undergo great tribulations because of the sinful Church, but they will rise against the evil clergymen.³² But in this version, the punishment of Christians serves as vindication for Muslims. The jofor reveals that God’s final chastisement will come at the hands of the Ottomans (el Turco), who will come to destroy the Christian people.³³ In a subversion of victors and vanquished at the End Times that departs from Rupescissa’s Vade mecum, after narrating the calamities that will befall the most important European cities the Aljamiado jofor predicts that only those who profess the Muslim faith will be spared from God’s wrath.³⁴

The Aljamiado manuscript BnF 774 contains two prognostications that purport to have been prophesied by a Christian authority who envisions a favorable outcome for Iberian Muslims. After describing the terrible trials that the Muslims will suffer at the hands of Christians, St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) predicts the final victory of Islam over Christianity. It seems, as Luce López Baralt has pointed out, as though the calamitous events are necessary for the purification of Muslims; only after enduring great tribulations will this community be worthy of the final victory.³⁵ As the text forecasts, when the wheel (rueda) or turn of 1501 comes no one will be able to read the Qurʾān. The Arabic term dawla, which signifies the period of an individual’s or dynasty’s rule or power, and whose most basic meaning is to turn or alternate, is akin with the medieval Christian idea of the Rota Fortunae (Wheel of Fortune). Taking these two concepts into account, the turn of the wheel signified the moment when Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula would come to an end.³⁶ The turn of the wheel would be followed by the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity. But a second turn of the wheel in 1502 will bring a favorable outcome for Muslims, who will rise up against the Christian king, take him captive and send him to Valencia, where he will follow him. Upon seeing their king’s conversion, all Christians will follow him. St. Isidore concludes his prophecy with the expected prediction: that Muslims will be victors with the power of God (rendered in the Aljamiado text as Allāh).

The authority of St. Isidore in this prophecy seems to conform to both Christian and Islamic notions of revelatory models. In a manner similar to that of John of Rupescissa in his apocalyptic work Liber secretorum eventuum (The Book of Secret Events), the St. Isidore of the Aljamiado jofor assuredly asserts that he is neither a prophet or a son of a prophet.³⁷ Rather, the gift of foresight came to him by virtue of being a "servant of the Unity (God) and his prophets, each one in his own place, and may Allāh place me in his al-janna (paradise)."³⁸ In the Aljamiado text, then, the Christian deliverer of divine messages strategically places himself beneath Muḥammad, God’s last prophet.

A final jofor, attributed to St. Isidore the Plaint of Spain, is not so favorable to the Moriscos. Once again, St. Isidore rejects a potential claim to prophethood but instead draws his knowledge of the future from a very ancient book entitled Secreto de los secretos (Secretum secretorum or Secret of Secrets). Also known in medieval Iberia as Poridat de las poridades and in Arabic as Kitāb sirr al-asrār, the Secreto de los secretos is the celebrated translation of a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise that delineates the princely advice that Aristotle supposedly offered to Alexander the Great.³⁹ Although the book contains no such prophecy, reference to this famous work imbues the apocalyptic message with antiquity and authority. In the Plaint, St. Isidore, after lamenting great calamities for Spain, who will boil in the passions of her evils,⁴⁰ foresees that the Hagarene [Muslim] beasts will emerge from their poisonous caves to destroy upper and lower [northern and southern] Spain.⁴¹ Curiously, the images of boiling and burning contained in this prophecy are reminiscent of John of Rupescissa’s alchemical apocalypticism. Evoking the traditional process of transmutation through images that evoke at once destruction and purification, Rupescissa argued that humans who wished to understand prophetic secrets were tested by the heat of flames and transformed by whitening and dying.⁴² After this, God will send the Hidden King (El Encubierto) to drive the Muslims out of Spain.⁴³ In her reading of these texts, Luce López Baralt reflects on the contradictions that these last two jofores pose. While one celebrates the final triumph of Islam over Christianity, the other one foretells the end of Islam in the Peninsula. Puzzled by this apparent incongruity, López Baralt wonders how these texts might have been read by Moriscos.⁴⁴ Shedding light on the ways in which the Moriscos read, commented on, and understood these jofores is a central concern of this book.

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The last three decades have witnessed a surge in scholarship on the Moriscos. From their religious life, literary production, and persecution by the inquisitorial authorities to the fateful expulsions of 1609–14, nearly every aspect of Morisco life in Spain has been examined. Though still in its infancy when compared to the abundant scholarship on the Moriscos in their Peninsular context, more recent work has moved toward studying Moriscos in the Mediterranean, their networks, as well as the postexpulsion diaspora in North Africa.⁴⁵ By contrast, the migration of Moriscos around the Mediterranean in the preexpulsion period is still a relatively understudied subject. Visions of Deliverance begins to fill this gap by tracing the networks through which Morisco prophecies circulated. More importantly, unveiling the activities of Iberian Moriscos within the wider Mediterranean world sheds light on a generally underappreciated aspect of Morisco history: their political life and agency.

Already in the sixteenth century, the presence of apocalyptic prognostications and prophecies among Moriscos was noted among their Christian contemporaries, who mentioned that these narratives surfaced primarily during moments of rebellion. Among modern scholars, the importance of jofores has been recognized since 1930s, although there has recently been a renewed interest in analyzing these texts, employing different methodological approaches, from historical to literary, to understand their meaning.⁴⁶ In contrast to this body of scholarship, I seek to understand jofores through an analytical focus that centers on the context and processes of production and deployment of Morisco prophecies during the sixteenth century. As a subject of literary and historical analyses, Morisco apocalyptic texts have previously been studied as polemics, as identity myths, or as consolatory literature that reflects a Morisco consciousness of their own destruction. The most significant drawback of these analyses is their assumption of a stable and verifiable Morisco identity or culture as reflected by the jofores. Visions of Deliverance challenges fixed notions of Morisco identity by analyzing jofores as dynamic examples of religious and political discourses and practices rather than as an isolated, inert element of Morisco culture. Moreover, while previous scholarship has regularly portrayed Moriscos as a beleaguered and even endangered group in need of consolation,⁴⁷ a focus on their prophetic culture, especially in their self-understanding as protagonists at the End Times, reveals them to be peers of the diverse imperial actors that operated across the Mediterranean.

Taking a cue from the work of the historian of religion Bruce Lincoln, who highlights the place of discourse in the construction of social and political identities, I argue that only through a reconstruction of the modes and contexts of circulation of jofores (rather than just their pure textuality) can we understand their exact role in Morisco politics and society. Yet prophecies are not simply coding devices on which important information is conveyed, on the basis of which actors can then construct society; that is, they are not simply messages, but rather practices.⁴⁸ I contend that it was precisely in the moments of production, circulation, and diffusion of prophecies—during moments of political upheaval and crisis—when a particular kind of Morisco identity was shaped, one that sought to re-create a perfected Islamic society at the End Times. As speech acts, prophecies evoked sentiments out of which Morisco society was constructed. The discursive processes to which Lincoln refers in his discussion of mythical discourses such as prophecy are echoed in the theory of collective identity formation and social mobilization of Alessandro Pizzorno and other Italian sociologists. Collective identity theory suggests that a subject’s identity is not guaranteed unless she or he participates in the formation and preservation of a group that recognizes and acknowledges the individual’s identity.⁴⁹ When subjects are prey to the uncertainties of their own constitution, they are compelled to construct or give shape (within a group) to an identity in an operation that is, above all, social. In that sense, the subject’s identity does not precede action, but it is inferred from it. Identity, in this context, should be understood as the process by which social actors recognize themselves—and are recognized by other actors—as part of broader groupings, and develop emotional attachments to them.⁵⁰ This definition of collective action and identity formation is useful in thinking through the centrality of jofores in moments of Morisco mobilization. Thus, the Moriscos’ political identity did not precede their actions, but rather emerged as a result of them. We should look for that identity not only in their collective actions, such as in moments of rebellion, but also in the meanings they gave to them—as part of a divinely inspired plan, articulated in the jofores.

Prophecies in Context: The Circulation of Jofores in Early Modern Iberia

I deploy a Mediterranean approach in order to map out the dissemination and reach of Morisco apocalyptic prognostications. First, on this regional scale I analyze chronicles, diplomatic correspondence, and inquisitorial records as essential sources to reconstruct a microhistory of Morisco apocalyptic practices. While the use of such source material might be called into question given its deep antagonism toward Moriscos, it undoubtedly reveals information not available elsewhere. For example, reading contentious inquisitorial sources alongside Ottoman or Italian sources can cast new light on the information offered by the inquisitorial trial records.⁵¹ Second, I also analyze the transmission of prophecies within and outside the Iberian Peninsula to trace the circulation of apocalyptic ideas and texts through formal and informal networks of merchants, spies, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians in the Mediterranean. An analysis of inquisitorial records of Morisco trials sheds light on the transmission of prophecies between Istanbul, Venice, and Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco political resistance. As these cases show, apocalyptic prophecies that cast the Ottoman sultan as a messianic redeemer encouraged Moriscos to establish contacts with Muslims in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean in order to gain Ottoman military support for an insurrection against the Spanish monarchy. Thus, by engaging several lines of inquiry in the fields of Morisco, Mediterranean, and Islamic studies, I reveal Moriscos to be not hapless victims of the Spanish Catholic authorities but members of a group with agency that actively sought ways to resist those authorities.

This book also aims to highlight the continued fruitfulness of a Mediterranean perspective as an object of inquiry. The Mediterranean turn has begun to garner detractors among scholars moving away from regional or area studies.⁵² While it is imperative to bear in mind critiques of Mediterranean perspectives that have served as excuses to advance certain political and cultural agendas that frame the Mediterranean as somehow inferior to Northern Europe, the simultaneous unity and diversity of the Mediterranean can shed light on aspects of history that would otherwise be obscured by narrower foci, such as national histories. Peregrine Horden asserts that, as historians, we must put the Mediterranean within our frame, rather than assume it as the frame itself.⁵³ In that vein, studying the Moriscos within their Mediterranean setting brings forward connections and continuities that would otherwise be obscured by an exclusively Iberian perspective. In the cases analyzed in this book, seemingly communal and local phenomena, such as the circulation of prophecies, can only be understood through a wider Mediterranean lens.

This perspective inevitably begs the question of how we study the history of Moriscos, who have occupied a liminal space in both the fields of Islamic and Spanish studies. From the perspective of Islamic history, Moriscos are the remnants of the once-glorious civilization of al-Andalus. Moreover, because the Moriscos were forced to convert to Catholicism, they are not considered to be Muslims at all, hence their almost complete exclusion from the Islamicist paradigm.⁵⁴ A cursory glance at any textbook or survey of Islamic history and civilization will confirm this state of the current scholarship. Exercising the methodological approach of regional microhistory but from a broader Islamicist perspective, I argue that Moriscos were as much part of the early modern Islamicate world as the Ottomans were part of the early modern European world.

The rhetorical uses and meanings of apocalyptic prognostications, with their hortatory language and images of violence and redemption, permit us to analyze the discursive value of prophecy for social and political mobilization and for the construction of Morisco society. In the age of confessionalization, which entailed processes of social disciplining and (in the particular case of Iberia) forced conversion and assimilation, the deployment of prophecies among newly converted populations radically shaped their religious, cultural, and political identities and discourses, inserting them in the dynamics of larger political structures. This is precisely how the Moriscos came to negotiate with Ottomans, Moroccan Saʿdīs, and even French Protestants as they attempted to secure military and logistical aid for their insurrections. In this sense, Morisco apocalyptic thought and practice was not an isolated case within the Iberian Peninsula but was part of a broader intellectual, religious, and political landscape in the early modern Mediterranean.

Organization and Overview

Visions of Deliverance is broadly divided into three thematic sections, each comprising of two chapters. The first section deals with the politics of prophecy in sixteenth-century Iberia. The first two chapters analyze the relationship between prophecy and the delineation of the contours of Morisco identity after the forced conversion of Muslims in the Kingdom of Castile that began as a result of the rebellion of Granada in 1499. The uprising was sparked by the intervention of the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros (1436–1517), whose arrival in Granada in the summer of 1499 quickly saw the forced conversion of elches, former Christian converts to Islam. This had taken place in contravention of the Granada Capitulations that regulated the rendition of the Muslim Naṣrid Kingdom (1230–1492) to Ferdinand and Isabella after its final conquest on January 2, 1492. The conversion of elches was met with the resistance of the Muslim populations in the city of Granada, which then extended to the countryside. It would take some time for the rebellion to be fully extinguished; the rebel leaders were not captured until 1501. According to common law, a sovereign had the authority to abolish the rights of a rebellious population and so Ferdinand and Isabella nullified the original Capitulations and determined to expel any Muslims in Granada who did not accept the Christian faith. Much of the rural population had no choice but to convert, lacking the resources to embark on such a difficult and costly journey.⁵⁵ While many aspects of the daily lives of Mudéjars and Moriscos in Castile remained the same, the experience of forced conversion profoundly shocked the Iberian Muslim communities. Chapters 1 and 2 examine how the newly converted Muslims of Castile dealt with the trauma of forced assimilation into Catholic society from the 1530s to the 1560s.

The second section moves from the local Castilian milieu to the circulation of prophecies in the Mediterranean, broadening the geopolitical scope of the book to explore the movement of apocalyptic ideas and texts and analyze the place of the Ottomans in Morisco apocalyptic thought and practice. Chapter 3 examines Morisco apocalyptic texts and inquisitorial sources alongside parallel Venetian, Greek, and Ottoman prophecies in the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) to trace the Mediterranean-wide idea of the Ottoman sultan as a just ruler. Chapter 4 analyzes the most significant Morisco rebellion plot in the Kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon after 1570, highlighting Morisco agency in their dealings with the Ottomans.

The final section of the book presents prophecy as a broader political discourse deployed outside the Morisco community for strategic purposes. In this sense, prophecy reveals itself as a language of negotiation and diplomacy. Chapter 5 centers on the career of a man by the name of Gil Pérez, a Morisco double agent who acted as informant of the inquisitors of Zaragoza and spy for the Morisco communities of Aragon and Valencia. His story reveals a great deal about the socioreligious functions of prophecy among those Moriscos who identified as Muslims, and the ways in which prophecies were deployed as political discourses. Chapter 6 centers on the period immediately before the expulsion (1601–5), examining several attempts by the Moriscos to secure help from Henry IV of France for an uprising planned for the Kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon.

Returning to the incident that opened this introduction, the Bell of Velilla tolled with great fury, so that when the parish priest attempted to grab the rope attached to it, he was violently pulled to the ground.⁵⁶ The bell continued to toll for weeks, and news about this miraculous occurrence spread to Italy and France, according to the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijóo. What calamity did this tolling anticipate? An imminent threat to Spain, wrote Feijóo: the Moriscos of Aragon and Valencia were going to rebel, having sent ambassadors to the Ottoman court. The conspiracies to which he was referring, discussed in chapter 6, failed, and the bell would ring again in 1609 to announce the decree expelling the Moriscos and in 1610 to mark their final expulsion. Visions of Deliverance concludes with a reflection on the Morisco expulsion and the ways