Exotic Nation

Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain

Barbara Fuchs

• Editore: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812207354
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: European Literary Criticism

In the Western imagination, Spain often evokes the colorful culture of al-Andalus, the Iberian region once ruled by Muslims. Tourist brochures inviting visitors to sunny and romantic Andalusia, home of the ingenious gardens and intricate arabesques of Granada's Alhambra Palace, are not the first texts to trade on Spain's relationship to its Moorish past. Despite the fall of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 and the subsequent repression of Islam in Spain, Moorish civilization continued to influence both the reality and the perception of the Christian nation that emerged in place of al-Andalus.In Exotic Nation, Barbara Fuchs explores the paradoxes in the cultural construction of Spain in relation to its Moorish heritage through an analysis of Spanish literature, costume, language, architecture, and chivalric practices. Between 1492 and the expulsion of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity) in 1609, Spain attempted to come to terms with its own Moorishness by simultaneously repressing Muslim subjects and appropriating their rich cultural heritage. Fuchs examines the explicit romanticization of the Moors in Spanish literature—often referred to as "literary maurophilia"—and the complex, often silent presence of Moorish forms in Spanish material culture. The extensive hybridization of Iberian culture suggests that the sympathetic depiction of Moors in the literature of the period does not trade in exoticism but instead reminded Spaniards of the place of Moors and their descendants within Spain. Meanwhile, observers from outside Spain recognized its cultural debt to al-Andalus, often deliberately casting Spain as the exotic racial other of Europe.

1

The Quotidian and the Exotic

Sang, moeurs, langage, manière de vivre et de combattre, en Espagne tout est africain. Si l’Espagnol était mahométan il serait un Africain complet.

—Stendhal

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS do not align themselves neatly even with such major events as the end of the Christian conquest of Granada. The gradual nature of Christian military advances meant that Christian and Moorish practices coexisted more or less uneasily for centuries in Iberia, even in areas where the Christians had triumphed. In terms of everyday life, the fall of Granada was far from decisive: the treaty known as Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, which detailed the terms of the Moors’ surrender, included significant protections for Moorish culture and religious practices.¹ Although these terms were not respected for long, and Muslims were increasingly persecuted, Andalusi cultural forms nonetheless survived for decades in a variety of guises. The neat model of supersession that appears so frequently in official historiographies is thus primarily a rhetorical fiction designed to consolidate an emerging sense of national identity. And yet, for all that, it has been extraordinarily powerful: for centuries Spain’s self-fashioning has been predicated on the strict boundary between then and now, mapped onto Moors versus Christians. Even from our own more sophisticated historiographical purview, we tend to assume that everything changed in 1492. Yet a culture profoundly marked by Andalusi forms survived in sixteenth-century Spain, long after the fall of Granada, and stood as an often unacknowledged challenge to the official narrative of supersession. Its various quotidian practices, often linked to Moorishness by Spaniards and especially by travelers to Spain, usefully complicate our understanding of historical rupture and the construction of national identity, by showing how daily life confutes or modifies ideological strictures.

The effort to recover these practices poses significant methodological challenges. First, there are several distinct geographical spaces in which Andalusi-derived cultural practices appear: the valence of Moorish costume, for example, is very different in Granada—a border zone only gradually incorporated into the new nation—and elsewhere in Castile. In Granada, the Moorish survivals not only counter the supersessionist narrative, but also exemplify the larger problem of center versus periphery, or regional versus national culture. As the Morisco advocate Francisco Núñez Muley, whom I discuss in Chapter 2, powerfully argued, “Moorish” practices were also the local, Granadan culture. Similarly vexed is the issue of how to read the Christians’ continued embrace of many self-consciously Moorish practices, such as the juegos de cañas, or jousting games, which I discuss in Chapter 4. Should this be read as a nostalgic revival of a culture safely defeated, or as a ceremonial, symbolic enactment of the other that helps to solidify the self? These explanations, while plausible in some cases, fail to account for the complex self-identification of Spain with Moorishness in certain situations, or for Arab-derived domestic practices, such as sitting on cushions among braziers, so commonplace that they are not even recognized as such by Spaniards themselves. One solution is to turn to travelers’ accounts of Spain, which describe its self-presentation to foreigners as well as the everyday practices that, while invisible to Spaniards, are strikingly unfamiliar to other Europeans of the time. These narratives, at the intersection of the quotidian and the exotic, provide the most significant evidence of Spain’s continuity with its Moorish past.

But of course the methodological challenge does not end here. Travel narratives—a heterogeneous category in their own right—are themselves invested in constructing a particular version of Spain. Courtiers, merchants, and ambassadors all come to Spain with specific agendas and preconceptions. As I note in Chapter 5, over the course of the sixteenth century the difference and specificity of Spain often become part of hostile accounts of its exceptional cruelty or greed—the war of words we refer to as the “Black Legend.” Thus the appearance of Spanish difference in the travel accounts, and particularly in any discussion of Moorishness, must always be handled with great care, for the travel literature often reflects primarily what foreigners wish to find in an exoticized, racialized Spain.² Nonetheless, and despite all these caveats, the travel narratives remain a key source for recovering the persistent hybridity of everyday culture in early modern Spain, however occluded it might be by the opposed prejudices of Spaniards and of foreigners.

The Convivencia of Objects, Spaces, and Practices

For the medieval period, there is clear evidence of the widespread use of Andalusi goods among Christians and of their influence on quotidian practices. In high aristocratic culture, this was a long-standing phenomenon, especially as the Christians conquered the sophisticated cities of Toledo (1085) and Seville (1248). Colin Smith, whose felicitous phrase I borrow for my heading to this section, argues that the Christian élite “enjoyed . . . a daily convivencia with Moorish objects in their homes and places of work.”³ As Smith notes, and as more recent work has explored in greater detail, Christian monarchs, like their Muslim counterparts, regarded Andalusi goods as the gold standard of luxury. Although, as Smith carefully points out, the use of such objects does not indicate Islamicization, it does bespeak a pronounced taste for Moorish cultural production. Moreover, beyond the choices that taste makes consciously, Andalusi forms are often reproduced without an explicit or conscious aim, in what I propose to call a Moorish habitus, widespread throughout Iberia.⁴

Perhaps the most famous example of Christian taste for Moorish goods is the trove of Andalusi textiles found in the royal pantheon at the monastery of Las Huelgas, in Burgos. Here, in a part of Spain that had largely escaped Moorish domination, thirteenth-century Christian monarchs nonetheless chose to be buried in fine Andalusi silks. As María Judith Feliciano points out, this practice seems paradoxical primarily because such luxury textiles have typically been read both as manifestations of a particular religion—Islam—in isolation from the dense network of social relations that would account for such a choice on the part of a Christian elite.⁵ Moreover, as Feliciano and others have argued, the presence of such Moorish objects is surprising only when we abstract them from the larger dynamics of cultural borrowing and interpenetration that characterize Iberia in the period. The shrouds, Feliciano posits, reflect a “pan-Iberian aesthetic vocabulary” (105) in that “the consistent use of Andalusi materials to fashion Castilian clothes was a well-established cultural practice that amounted to a clear, unambiguous, and easily intelligible sign of respectability and propriety” (109).

The last Christian conquests, which gradually led to the fall of Granada, did not significantly change the dynamic of cultural interpenetration, which continued apace in the late medieval period. Conquest also brought new forms of forced intimacy, as Christian immigrants to Andalucía occupied the very houses abandoned by Muslims who had fled the invasion, as the law intended and their own impoverished circumstances demanded.⁶ In the time that most concerns me here, from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, travelers to Spain constantly noted the Moorishness of Iberia, in everything from its built landscape to its domestic practices to its costume. While fascinating to the foreigners who experienced it, the Spain that emerges from these accounts is also suspect for its exoticism.⁷ Nonetheless, while the travelers are hardly objective, they notice aspects of Iberia that often go unremarked by Spaniards themselves.

One of the Spanish peculiarities most often remarked upon in this light was the estrado. This often luxurious household space, primarily for the use of women, was furnished with a low platform covered in carpets, as well as tapestries and wall-hangings, cushions, and braziers. Derived from Arab practices that may or may not have been gender-specific, the estrado, which can be viewed in sixteenth-century houses preserved in Spain (Casa de Lope de Vega, Madrid; Casa Natal de Cervantes, Alcalá de Henares), continued to be used throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even as the Renaissance fashion for furniture gradually penetrated Iberia.⁸ The estrado was “the leisure space par excellence” of the house, in which ladies entertained each other or the occasional male visitor, for whose benefit low stools were provided.⁹ It was also the space in which they performed hand labor such as needlework. The actual and imagined presence of “Turkish” rugs in the estrado contributes to its reception as an exotic or Oriental space, as in the Burgundian courtier Jean de Vandenesse’s description of the estrado in the Madrid Alcázar, in 1560. For Vandenesse, the finery of the Queen’s apartments is apparent in the proliferation of sumptuous cloth, with every surface covered in richly embroidered hangings or “Turkish tapestries.”¹⁰

What struck visitors as much as the space itself was the custom of women sitting on the floor. Antoine de Lalaing, the Flemish courtier who accompanied Philip the Fair to Spain in 1501, notes: ‘Monsigneur se assist sur une chayère de velour et Madame par terre sur coussins de draps d’or”¹¹ [“My lord sat on a velvet chair and the princess on the floor on cushions of cloth of gold”]. The practice persisted through the early modern period, in the most exalted Spanish households. In the palace of the Infantado, in Guadalajara, home to the powerful Mendoza family, Helen Nader writes: “Until late in the seventeenth century, Christian women sat on the floor Muslim style; to accommodate this custom, in the women’s salon, a low platform (estrado) covered with carpets and cushions occupied most of the floor space.”¹² The practice is clearly not controversial in Iberia, yet it marks both Spain’s difference vis-à-vis Europe and the undeniable hybridity of early modern Spanish culture.

In the much later narrative of the French almoner Barthélemy Joly (1603–4), the estrado and its practices are explicitly conflated with the oriental seraglio and, for good measure, the convent. Joly describes the female attendants to the Queen:

Les principales sont celles dictes de l’estrado, qui assistent partout sa personne et s’assient sur des oreillés pres d’elle . . . [La Royne] disne en public trois ou quatre fois l’année, et ces jours là comme ceux du bal, sont fort attendus et desirez des gentilzhommes seruiteurs de ces dames, qui ont le priuilege durant le disner de la Royne d’entretenir chacun la sienne et, me disoit-on, le chapeau en teste, sans estre interrompus ny qu’on oye ce qu’ilz disent, moyennant que la Royne les voye. Apres cela, plus de moyen de parler à elles, estant guardees comme au serrail par gens appellés guardadamas, mesme leurs parens ne leur pouuans parler sans permission de la Royne et encor par des tournois ou grilles comme à des religieuses.¹³

[The principal ones are those called of the estrado, who assist with her person everywhere and sit on cushions near her . . . [The Queen] dines in public three or four times a year, and those days, like those of the ball, are anxiously awaited and hoped for by the gentlemen who serve those ladies, who have the privilege during the Queen’s dinner of addressing each his own and, I was told, with their hats on their heads, without being interrupted or anyone hearing what they say, as long as the Queen can see them. Beyond this, there is no way to talk to them, as they are guarded as in a seraglio by those called guardadamas; even their relatives cannot speak to them without the Queen’s permission, and then through a turnstile or bars like nuns.]

Beyond the explicit orientalization of the estrado and its practices in Vandenesse and Joly, however, there was a widespread perception that Iberian architecture and architectural practices were primarily inward-looking, with buildings offering a deceptively simple exterior that disguised secluded private spaces.¹⁴ The Italian ambassador Andrea Navagero notes in his 1523 account of Toledo:

[Toledo] Ha gran numero di bone case, e palazzi commodi quanti forsi nessun’altro loco di Spagna: ma son senza vista alcuna ne demostration di fora: son tutti fabricati con i cantoni, & alcune parti solo de pietra viva o di pietra cotta, & tutto il resto di terra al costume di Spagna. Fanno pochisimi balconi, & picoli, & questo dicono che è per il caldo e freddo: & il più delle lor sale non ha altro lume che quel de la porta: lor fabricar è far il patio in mezzo, et poi i quattro quarti, come che a lor pare divisi.¹⁵

[It has many good houses and comfortable palaces, more perhaps than any other city in Spain, but from the outside they look like nothing at all; they are all made with only the corners and some part of stone and of brick and the rest of stucco as is the custom in Spain; they have few balconies and those are small, which they say is because of the heat and the cold, and most of their rooms have no other light than what comes through the door: their way is to build the courtyard in the middle, and then four rooms, so that they seem divided.]

The sense of delightful, secluded spaces away from public view was reinforced by the prevalence of the patio, or inner courtyard, in Iberian architecture. While courtyards obviously existed elsewhere in Europe, the organization and circulation of domestic life around the patio was perceived as particularly Iberian.¹⁶ Laurent Vital, one of Charles V’s courtiers, describes its centrality:

Il monta une montée, pour venir sur une belle large gallerie, qui circuoit les quatre sens de la maison, comme en ce pays; et là c’est assés bien la coustume, et principallement aux logis des seigneurs et grants maistres, lesquelz sont carrés et à jour par le milieu de la maison de quelque terre ou pavement, à manière d’une courch: et alentour, hault et bas, ce sont larges galleries pour y pourmener à secq et hors du soleil. Alentour de cesdictes galleries de tous sens il y a des huys, pour aller de chambre en aultre.¹⁷

[He climbed some stairs to reach a beautiful wide gallery that went around all four directions of the house, as in that country; and there it is very much the custom, and principally in the houses of lords and great masters, which have a square, open-air space in the middle of the house, earthen or paved, like a courtyard, and all around, above and below, there are wide galleries for strolling while keeping dry or away from the sun. Aroun...