Visions of Deliverance

Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Mayte Green-Mercado

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501741463
• eBook ISBN: 9781501741487
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

CHAPTER 1

Christian Visionary or Muslim Prophet?

Re-Creating Identities in Late Spanish Islam

In 1540 the General Council of the Inquisition in Madrid wrote to the inquisitors of Toledo asking for a thorough investigation of a Morisco youth named Agustín de Ribera. According to a Morisca denouncer named Ana de Fonseca, groups of Moriscos in the Castilian towns of Toledo, Arévalo, Ávila, Medina del Campo, and Valladolid believed that young Agustín was a “prophet and messenger of Muḥammad (profeta y mensajero de Mahoma).”¹ The General Council ordered the Toledo inquisitors to interrogate the young Morisco “about the things he is said to have done in Arévalo, because if he confesses the truth of what he knows, it will shed great light on uncovering what we suspect is being concealed in Arévalo and other places where Moriscos live.”² By August 1541, after a long and careful investigation, Agustín was arrested and had begun to confess.³

What exactly did the inquisitors suspect was being concealed? Were they worried, as they had expressed, that the evangelization attempts carried out by local parish priests were not bearing fruit? Were the stubborn Moriscos still holding on to their old religion? Was the Inquisition, as they suspected and argued, the instrument most apt to carry out not only the religious instruction of the Moriscos but also oversight of all matters pertaining to the new converts? Or was it rather that what was being “concealed” was a conspiracy of another sort? Perhaps a secret plan to take the road of exile, as had been happening in all the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula,⁴ or even worse, a rebellion plot?

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The story begins in the small Castilian village of Ajofrín, where young Agustín began to have what appear to be highly Christianized visions. It then takes us through the city of Ávila, where he lived with a merchant family, and ends in Toledo, where his career became markedly Islamic. As this chapter shows, in his contacts with merchant and artisan nuclei in Castile, and as his circle broadened, Agustín came to fulfill the religious and communitarian expectations of a crypto-Muslim community that desperately wanted to be re-Islamized. Yet not only did the content of his message change; his spiritual persona transformed accordingly. Over the course of his young life, Agustín went from being a Christian visionary to becoming a Muslim saint, culminating in a promised future as a prophet. In this process, apocalyptic prognostications and prophetic visions became the medium for the reconstruction of a community whose process of conversion and of learning about Catholicism was not yet complete.

When a circle of followers that extended from the Castilian cities of Valladolid to Toledo began to organize around young Agustín, the inquisitors were naturally alarmed. Not only were they worried that the new converts might still harbor an allegiance to their old religion, but they were suspicious of any claims to prophethood.⁵ The presence of a prophetic figure among the New Christian Morisco community was unprecedented. This is not to say that belief in End Times prophecies and prognostications was trifling to the Moriscos, rather that we have no information about the presence of prophets or other figures whose mission was to bring divine messages to this particular community at this time. Among the Old Christian and Converso Jewish communities, in contrast, many “prophets” stood before the Inquisition throughout the sixteenth century. In the 1520s and 1530s the number of Christian prophets bearing eschatological revelations of spiritual and political reform multiplied, particularly among the Franciscans and Dominicans.⁶ A similar apocalyptic fervor had spread among crypto-Jews after 1492, when a series of prophets urged the Conversos to continue believing in “the law of Moses,” vowing they would return to the Promised Land. Among the Moriscos, however, this sudden proliferation of divinely inspired messengers did not occur. Rather, a phenomenon of circulating apocalyptic prognostications emerged from the very moment of the conquest of Granada, intensifying after the subsequent forced conversions to Catholicism after 1502.

The case of Agustín de Ribera thus provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on the issue of prophethood among the Moriscos. The apparent lack of divine messengers begs the question of the plausibility of such a figure for a community that desperately struggled to hold on to Islam. Was the presence of a new prophet even possible? Was Agustín viewed as a prophet in the Islamic sense if Muḥammad was the Seal of the Prophets, the last prophet sent by God to His people? Would his followers be aware of the different notions of prophethood in Islam, such as the distinction between rasūl (a prophet who brings a law) and nabī (a messenger)? Or was he seen as one of many Christian prophets in sixteenth-century Iberia who brought messages about the future? Agustín de Ribera’s case complements the Morisco prognosticative texts (jofores), in this way providing an invaluable source of information for understanding Morisco apocalyptic thought in its own terms. It also offers glimpses of the ordinary and religious life of the Castilian Moriscos in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Although Agustín de Ribera’s inquisitorial trial record is not extant, his numerous confessions to the inquisitors, as well as his testimonies against neighbors and family members, are contained in the records of several of his followers.⁷ The most important source on the activities of the young Morisco prophet is contained in the trial record against Juan de Sosa, Agustín’s older cousin and one of his staunchest supporters. In addition to the statements made by members of the group before the Inquisition, the trial records also contain the confessions of Agustín’s older brother, Luis de Ribera, which form a rich trove of information on the activities of the young prophet. By contrasting the confessions and accusations contained in the trial records of Agustín’s followers with the testimonies in Juan de Sosa’s inquisitorial dossier, this chapter sheds light on the socioeconomic composition of Agustín’s followers, the geographical reach of the movement, as well as their beliefs.⁸ The testimonies included in these inquisitorial trial records thus provide a wealth of information about the mental universe of Castilian Moriscos. What follows is a chronological narrative of the trajectory of Agustín’s career. Through a close reading of the events of Agustín’s visionary experience, a concept of how the Moriscos in sixteenth-century Castile understood holiness emerges, shedding light on the social and political implications of prophethood, sainthood, and apocalypticism for Spanish Moriscos and highlighting the centrality of apocalyptic ideas to the reconstitution of the Castilian Moriscos as a community in the early decades after their c...

Table of 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