Early Modern perceptions Flashcards
Hess
Muslim fifth column in Spain served Ottoman purposes by diverting Habsburg energies toward the repression of an internal revolt while the Muslims took two of their major objectives, Cyprus and Tunis. Despite the suppression of the Moriscos and the subsequent distribution of the rebels, the problem of a disloyal minority still tormented the Spanish. Both Ottoman and Spanish records testify to the continued attempts by the Muslims to use the Moriscos as a military weapon, or, at the very least, as part of an espionage system. Ottoman power had now, furthermore, moved uncomfortably close, placing, with the aid of Spanish refugees,9’ an Ottoman candidate on the Moroccan throne in 1576.
Although after 1580 the Ottomans and the Spanish disengaged, could Philip II be sure that the Ottomans would never use this tyrannized minority and a strong position in North Africa to reverse the reconquest?
Even the resources of the mighty Habsburg Empire were not sufficient to confront both Islam and the Reformation. The second revolt of the region of Alpujarras, the Calvinist rebellion in the north, and the advance of the Ottomans in North Africa revived the question of the Moriscos at a time when religious feeling was running high, and when there was a definite threat of a Muslim-supported revolutionary alliance with connections throughout and around Habsburg territories. Important political reasons, which were deeply rooted in Iberian history, gave free rein to an enthusiasm for a reformed Catholicism that masked many other interests. Self-defense dictated some sort of action. Expulsion was to be the final, tragic solution, and the Strait of Gibraltar became the dividing line between two civilizations
The Lutheran sect does not cease its war and combat with those who are subject to the Pope and his school. You shall [, therefore,] secretly communicate with them, and when they set out upon war and combat with the Pope you also shall take care, jointly, to cause losses to the provinces and soldiers [of the Pope] from your side.72
Here the Sultan encouraged the Moriscos to act in conjunction with the revolutionary Protestant movement in the Netherlands. There, since the religious riots of i566, Philip II had applied a policy of repression, which, under the stern hand of the Duke of Alva, had provoked a major reaction against Habsburg rule.3
Hess
Based on the results of battle, on the public expressions of joy, and on the sense of accomplishment contained in diplomatic correspondence, historians have argued that the brilliant success of Don Juan in 1571 removed the feeling that the Turks were invincible. Maybe so. On the other hand, the diplomacy of the post-Lepanto era shows neither Philip II nor the leaders of Venice coming to terms with the Ottomans under favourable conditions time when Europe was passing through a major religious revolution. How and when European attitudes towards the Turk changed is a complex question depending less on the results of one naval battle and more on the mobilization of intellectuals, a matter that surely takes time.
The Tunis campaign demonstrated how quickly the fleet could be rebuilt and staffed with experienced manpower from the frontier. It was the state decision after the Tunis victory to forgo further conflict in the Mediterranean that ended the major role of the navy in Ottoman military operations. If these conclusions then suggest that the old organization of Mediterranean imperial history underestimated the power of the Ottoman empire, the actions of state leaders after 1580 also underlined how much the Venetians anticipated the end of large-scale religious warfare in the Mediterranean when they left the Holy League during the year 1573. Spain, after the battle of Alcazar, did not attack the Islamic community across the Straits of Gibraltar, but signed a truce with the Ottomans, conquered its defeated Catholic neighbour Portugal, and prepared for war with Protestant England. The Ottomans, on their part, abandoned the Muslim community in Spain after a series of North African victories which brought them close to both the Iberian peninsula and Sicily to fight heterodox Muslims in Persia
All along the military frontier in the western Mediterranean, rulers had concluded that an appeal to religious warfare would not substantially change the space of respective civilizations
Integrating the records of two Mediterranean civilizations, the battle of Lepanto takes its place in Mediterranean history as a major frontier clash in the brutal struggle between two different and relatively powerful civilizations. The siege at Malta in 1565, the Morisco revolt in 1568-70,
the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the conquest and reconquest of Tunis between 1569-74, and the Portuguese defeat at Alcazar in 1578 not only provide a measure of that hostility but also mark out the long frontier between the two civilization, a zone of division determined not solely by battles but by where Muslim and western European states could not or would not impose their institutions.
Stripped of its mythical framework, humbled by the strength of another civilization, and outflanked by the internal history of Europe, the great galley engagement of 7 October 1571 seems of much less consequence. Yet it is only the internal concerns of European history that have diverted attention from the major event underlying this grand sixteenth-century battle. When Ottoman and Spanish rulers agreed to a truce during 1580 they confirmed an increasingly rigid division of the Mediterranean not only between Islamic and Christian states, but also between the revolutionizing economic societies of western Europe and the successful but socially conservative Turko-Muslim world. If, in the centuries to come, this differentiation of Mediterranean civilizations became so unbalanced as to inflict warfare and internal change of unprecedented dimensions on the Muslim community, then grand history did not desert the Mediterranean after the battle of Lepanto
MacCormack
I will accordingly argue that during the early decades of evangelization in the Andes the model of conversion by persuasion was implemented by some missionaries, in particular by the friend and follower of Las Casas, Domingo de Santo Tomás. Subsequently, however, this model was supplanted by an ever-increasing insistence on the authority, not only of Christianity, but of European concepts of culture, to the exclusion of their Andean equivalents. Conversion to Christianity thus came to entail, not only the acceptance of a set of beliefs and religious observances, but also a broad acceptance of alien customs and values.
Christian thinking about what is entailed in conversion to Christianity has followed divergent patterns. On the one hand, it was thought, conversion occurs according to an inner understanding within the individual, in which the missionary is merely a helper. Thus, Paul, in his address to the Athenians, suggested to his listeners that the god whom he preached was in some way already known to them, as witness their altar to the “unknown god.”’ All that he would add was a more specific understanding of a truth already familiar. This model of conversion had many advocates in early Christianity. Eusebius
In the early fifth century, Augustine took up and elaborated this argument in the City of God.
On the other hand, Paul asked in the second letter to the Corinthians, “what is there in common between justice and injustice?” According to this model, more is required in conversion than a mere reminder of what a person already knows to be true. Early Christian advocates of this model therefore argued that little in non-Christian religion could be salvaged, and that conversion to Christianity entailed a rejection of earlier ways of worship and of thought
Santo Tomas here alludes to a statement in Aristotle’s Politics, which had also been expounded by Aquinas, according to which it is language that distinguishes man from the other animals and qualifies him for a social life, life in a state. Languages, however, vary, and the sophistication, or lack of it, of any given language is an indicator of the sophistication, the social and political order of those who speak it.24 According to Domingo de Santo Tomas, therefore, the order and regularity of the Quechua language demonstrated that the Incas and their subjects were civilized people, and had, before the conquest, lived in a rightfully constituted state.
One reason for Toledo’s commitment to a policy of evangelization was that Christianity, or rather the organization by the church of the Indians into parishes, could be a means of strengthening the hold of government over the vast territory of the Viceroyalty of Peru. A case in point were the reducciones, resettlements in villages of Indians who had formerly lived in scattered communities
By the late sixteenth century, missionary Christianity had thus crystallized into a rigid and self-contained body of doctrine impermeable to any influence from Andean religion. Quechua terminology used to describe Christian concepts had been carefully eliminated from dictionaries, catechisms, and manuals of preaching to Indians, and the same purist attitude defined all other aspects of Christian life in the Andes. In the wake of the Council of Trent, which regulated the appearance of holy images, Indian sculptors and painters of such images had to conform their work to European iconographies and aesthetic norm
The early seventeenth century witnessed a new missionary strategy, in the form of systematically organized ecclesiastical campaigns designed to extirpate idolatry among the Indians, and to destroy what was left of the old religion. These campaigns revealed that in many places, the old religion, so far from having been dislodged from the minds of the Indians, had become a vehicle to resist not only Christianity, but all other forms of absorption into Spanish ways. The practice of removing the bodies of the dead from the Christian cemetery and of reburying them next to their pagan ancestors in the ancient sites for burial was almost ubiquitous, and was the means of reaffirming non-Christian values and beliefs. Christianization had amounted to a reorganization of space
MacCormack
Ever since the twelfth century, the Virgin both in Spain and Europe at large had protected her devotees by delivering the sinners among them from the negative consequences of their actions, by healing the sick and righting social wrongs. Spanish Virgins, moreover, performed miracles designed to convert Jews and Muslims to Christianity.25 In the Andes a generation after the invasion it came to be believed that Mary had appeared to help the Spanish during the siege of Cuzco,26 and by the end of the century a handful of shrines attracted pilgrims from all parts of the continent and in due course even from Europe
Missionaries in Peru occasionally cited precedents of Visigothic ecclesiastical practice (see below at n. 87) but very rarely referred to peninsular attempts to convert Jews and Muslims as in any sense comparable to their own activities. One reason is that Indians were gentiles, which meant that, in the eyes of a Spanish observer of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, different legal rules and procedures applied to them
Mills
Does coercion lead to genuine conversion, or does it instead encourage dissimulation and feigned Christianity? Such questions deeply troubled many of the clergy and members of the religious orders who were involved in the evangelization of Spanish America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Ideally (it was hoped) the conversion of indigenous peoples would come through their exposure to the natural appeal of Christian truths and teaching. While coercion was allowed, American conditions required that it be restricted. It was limited because Indians were regarded as new converts, deficient in intellectual capacity and especially vulnerable to the wiles of the Devil, but also because they were subjects of the Spanish crown. The great Dominican professor of theology at the University of Salamanca, Vitoria (c. 1485-1546), developed lengthy arguments about the Spanish right to convert the native peoples of America and about the methods to be used to achieve this end. In New Spain, the junta eclesiastica convened in 1539 recommended only “light punishments” in dealing with religious offenders and their sacred objects.
But these and other theoretical restrictions on the use of force as an integral part of evangelization proved difficult to observe in the Indies. Churchmen grew impatient with their Indian charges as hopes for a New Jerusalem faded. Faced early with religious resistance from powerful Indian opponents and also with more widespread cases of apparent subterfuge and duplicity among the newly converted, many regular and secular officials - including even Zumarraga himself - abandoned patience and restraint in favour of repression. Accustomed as they were to the presence of an undercurrent of force in their efforts at evangelization, many churchmen saw no contradiction between means and end. The constitutions of the First Council of Lima (1551-2) simultaneously forbade and sanctioned the use of force in evangelization. Moreover, the dividing line between instruction, moral regulation and outright coercion is far from clear in the response of evangelizers to the challenges they faced in the Indian parishes.
Religious change was occurring slowly, fitfully and, from the point of view of the agents of Christianization, sometimes “in reverse”.10 The Indian peoples of the Lima region, who were collectively to have been resettled and reoriented by generations of priests and administrators, were becoming parishioners. But they were doing so on their own terms, within the bounds of local relationships that included parish priests as well as ‘unofficial’, Indian religious authorities
The entry of Andean peoples into a deepening relationship with Catholicism began with the baptisms and teachings of the first missionaries in the sixteenth century. It continued in the day-to-day relations between priests and their Andean parishioners, relations that were of little or no interest to the idolatry inspectors of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The progress of this relationship was slower in the Andes than, for example, in parts of central Mexico. The number of friars in New Spain was greater from the beginning, and - as many scholars have shown - many of their attitudes towards the evangelization of Indians had been formed in earlier, more optimistic times. Moreover, in central Mexico such difficulties as the decades of civil war and immense geographical constraints, factors which were immediately present in the Andes, raised fewer obstacles to missionary endeavour. Finally, the Christianization of the Andeans was clearly not limited solely by self-imposed restraints, nor by the invincibility of Indian religious tradition, nor by a presumed recalcitrance. Andeans were active agents in the challenges that beset their world, but the particular face of the Christianity which was epitomized by the idolatry visitas and their diligencias contributed significantly to the religious outcomes. Extirpation campaigns bred a sort of natural resistance which allowed for myriad forms of religious intermixture; extirpation encouraged an aversion to what was being trumpeted as official Christianity. The Extirpation’s forms of coercion may also have fostered a need to withdraw and a deep distrust and hatred which would brew until an outlet was found in later rebellions. And it is not so difficult to know how to interpret an indigenous response to religious investigation which is more common in the evidence from the eighteenth century, that of guarded silence. We know that in at least one region elders had learned a valuable lesson by 1725: they instructed people to keep their true beliefs to themselves
This is not to suggest that contestation between Spanish Catholic and Andean leaders over religious (and secular) power in the parishes was eliminated or lacked significance. In many communities there were clearly Indians who, through their testimonies, demonstrated that they were allies of the priests, and that as committed Christians they were opponents of Andean religion. And there were ardent practitioners of Andean religion who articulately countered the religious assimilations they could discern and who actively disputed the growing place for elements of Christianity in the Indian world. In Acas, dogmatizers warned that if the huacas and malquis were not nourished by offerings the people would “lose their plots of land . . . and their irrigation canals and springs would dry up” and they would be condemned “to walk poor and desolate and . . . all waste away”.
few people faced Christianity with an attitude of either complete acceptance or steadfast opposition. Many, in effect, contravened the precise dictates of both their parish priests and their Andean dogmatizers, proving themselves more discerning and even experimental in their religious decisions. The possible examples are numerous, ranging from elaborate instances such as those noted above when huacas and saints were absorbed into each other’s observances, to more mundane ones. In 1661, for instance, Callao, a famous healer from Lunahuana, consulted an unnamed outcropping of rock and employed largely Andean substances and massaging methods in the performance of her art; yet, by her own admission, she rubbed her patient “in the name of Our Father and Our Lady”.
It is this middle ground which is frequently labelled “syncretism”. Yet the term is imprecise. While the entrance or incorporation of elements of Christianity into Andean religious thinking and practice are undeniable and are increasingly apparent in a number of spheres, these aspects of the Europeans’ faith became elements in the Andean religious framework by a fluctuating agenda, varying from place to place, individual to individual, and usually without clearly eclipsing the existing religious connections. The crosses erected by the visitadores, near or on top of the regional huacas, take their place amidst these complicated realities in the mid-colonial Andean religious world
By the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, the confidence of the Catholic church in the success of its efforts to convert the peoples of the archdiocese of Lima, Peru, to a steadfast and orthodox Christian faith was severely shaken. The Indians’ attachment to their own religious system had been, as the contemporary rhetoric put it, “discovered” or “unmasked”; a secretive and vile “idolatry” had been revealed beneath the guise of proper Christian acceptance. The main thrust of efforts at evangelization in this part of the Andes was about to change. The predominantly missionary-style and parish-centred instruction of Indians was being superseded by a new obsession with the place of idolatry in the lives of baptized Indians. Official support grew quickly for a systematic and forceful initiative to solve the widespread problem of religious error and to continue the absorption of the Indians into Christendom. The process which developed to meet the new needs and express the change of will was “the Extirpation of idolatry”.
The Extirpation amounted to a series of inquisitorial investigations held in a succession of parishes. Specially commissioned and empowered visitadores de idolatria invited individual confessions of guilt and denunciations of other religious offenders. Along with a range of punishments for the guilty, an idolatry visitation also meant a time of intense instruction for the Andean communities.
Depending largely on the inclinations of successive prelates in Lima and on the persuasiveness of the many provincial “enemies of idolatry”, the Extirpation was intermittently active in the seventeenth century. In some instances, its authority extended (though much more sporadically) into the first half of the eighteenth. Treatises on Indian religious error calling for the eradication of idolatry were written by contemporary churchmen in other parts of Spanish America (most notably New Spain), but unlike the manuals and other anti-idolatry material from seventeenth-century Peru, these were not accompanied by campaigns of investigation and punishment. Despite the flaws in its organization and execution, its intermittent existence and its marked dependence on the patronage of certain archbishops and viceroys, the Peruvian Extirpation was the most systematic attempt ever made in colonial Spanish America to repress Indian religion and uproot its alleged perversions of Catholicism.
The tenure of Archbishop Pedro de Villagomez of Lima (1641-71) represented a critical moment in the church’s struggle with Andean religion. Villagomez revitalized the Extirpation in the middle of the seventeenth century after it had been out of favour for almost three decades.
Surtz
The Spanish Moriscos, while nominally Christian, attempted to retain the Islamic identity of their forefathers, even in the face of inquisitorial persecution. Morisco men had different relationships to forbidden texts in Arabic than women did. When the officials of the Inquisition arrived to search their homes, men were seldom inclined to defend their books against seizure and, if anything, resorted to attempting to bribe the inquisitorial constables. In contrast, women went to great lengths to hide forbidden books in their clothing, usually in their bodice or between their legs, with the result that inquisitorial searches can be considered a sort of symbolic violation of the female bodies that sought to protect those writings. Through such actions, Morisco women demonstrated an almost visceral relationship with written texts and created for themselves a crucial role as the guardians of Islamic tradition.
Moriscos were prosecuted for such crimes as practicing circumcision, performing ritual Muslim prayers, keeping the fast of Ramadan, and owning books written in Arabic. Morisco women illiterate, but significant number of women were tried by the Inquisition for owning illegal texts in Arabic and resisting their confiscation.
Friction between the Muslim and Christian populations of the Kingdom of Valencia continued in the sixteenth century as the medieval ideal of cultural pluralism gave way to intolerance on the part of the dominant Christian caste towards religious minorities. In the course of the Germania rebellion (1521-22) against the government of CharlesV, many Mudejar communities were attacked and their inhabitants forcibly baptized. After the rebellion had been put down, while theologians debated the validity of such forced conversions, the converted Muslims, now known as Moriscos, returned to their old religion. When ecclesiastic and royal officials determined that the conversions were valid, in 1525 the emperor decreed that all the remaining Mudejars of Valencia should accept Christianity or leave Spain. However, in view of the difficulties involved in providing religious instruction for so large a number of forced converts, and in exchange for a large sum of money from the Valencian Moriscos, in 1526 CharlesV granted a period of grace of forty years during which the Inquisition was not to persecute the Moriscos of the Kingdom ofValencia for backsliding. Despite Charles V’s royal edict, the Inquisition did sporadically prosecute Moriscos in the period 1526-60. In 1560 the Holy Office launched a new offensive, this time attacking Morisco religious and political leaders, as well as their noble protectors.
Inquisitorial violence against a Morisco woman is also evident in the case of Catalina Mandarani. When the constables arrived at her house, Catalina made to leave with something under her apron. The official followed her, and after she tried unsuccessfully to pass the incriminating evidence (a copy of the Koran) to another Morisca, Catalina hid it under her skirts.
As the dominant Christian caste became ever more intolerant of religious and cultural differences, those courageous Morisco women were active subjects who played an important role in resisting attempts to assimilate them and, ironically, thereby helped to make the expulsion of the Moriscos inevitable. Up until the very moment of that expulsion, Morisco women’s visceral opposition to the Inquisition and their attempts to safeguard their cultural heritage were instrumental in the transmission and preservation of Islamic culture in Morisco Spain.
Bohnstedt
European curiosity about the Moslem infidels was by no means a new phenomenon. It had been strong in the age of the Crusades and had persisted in more or less intense form throughout the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
After the thirteenth century the rulers of Christian Europe no longer seriously intended to take united action against the infidel; yet the crusading ideal continued to appeal strongly to the European imagination. From the fourteenth century onward crusade projects directed specifically against the Ottoman Turks circulated throughout Europe. After the fall of Constantinople, Pope Calixtus III (1455-1458) actually proclaimed a crusade but met with little response except from Capistrano and his followers, the men who marched to the relief of Belgrade in 1456. The herculean efforts of the next Pope, Pius II (1458-1464) to bring about a general crusade ended in complete failure. Another advocate of a crusade was the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I (1493-1519), a natural opponent of the Turks in view of their frequent raids into Carniola, Styria, and Carinthia. Maximilian seems to have been motivated by the traditional crusading ideal with a strong admixture of personal and dynastic ambitions
(Project for a Crusade against the Turks and All Other Enemies of the Christian Faith [1518?]). The author envisaged a general European crusade aiming at nothing less than the Christian reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher and the destruction of the Ottoman Empire.
Obviously the Türkenbüchlein is a combination of anti-Turkish propaganda and ideas concerning the moral and political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and Christendom in general. The author’s main argument is that the Christians must desist from sin and put their own house in order before they can free themselves from the Turkish menace. The Turk is confident that his “emperor,” the Sultan, will soon make further conquests at the expense of Christendom. He boasts of his emperor’s vast power, which he attributes largely to the civil and military virtues of the Turkish people and to their unity under the absolute authority of the Sultan. At the same time, he maintains that the various Christian nations will not be able to offer serious military resistance to Turkish aggression. He belittles the Christians because of their constant wars with one another, their lack of unity in the face of the Turkish menace, and their many other shortcomings. Of all the Christian nations, he says, the Germans are the least feared by the Turks. The German Emperor has an impressive list of titles but little real power because his own subjects will not obey him. Although the Germans were formidable soldiers in the old days, their military spirit has declined and their soldiers have become almost useless because of drunkenness, gluttony, and lack of discipline
During the years between 1532 and 1540 only a few Türkenbüchlein appeared, presumably because Suleiman was occupied with Near Eastern affairs, so that for the moment there was no acute Turkish threat to the Holy Roman Empire. The German public turned its attention to other problems, notably the religious issues of the Reformation
After Suleiman’s seizure of Buda (1541) German concern with the Turkish question became more intense than ever before. A larger number of Tiirkenbiichlein appeared in the years 1541 and 1542 than at any other time during the period under review. The authors were deeply aware that after a decade of intermittent encounters with the Turk, the German armies had never yet won a decisive victory
The Turkish war of 1542 prompted Nausea, the Catholic bishop of Vienna, to issue A General Model Sermon, along with Some Pious Prayers for the Attainment of Victory; To Be Used by Chaplains Ministering to the Warriors in the Field.’ Nausea assures the Christian soldiers that they are fighting for a just cause and may kill Turks with an easy conscience. In this connection he uses much space to refute the pacifist arguments of the Anabaptists, a strange subject to stress in a sermon intended for violently inclined mercenaries. Nausea was otherwise noted as a keen polemicist against the Lutherans
The authors’ knowledge of the Ottoman Turks was limited and inaccurate. With the exception of Curipeschitz, none of them had visited the Ottoman Empire, and even he based his statements more on anti-Moslem prejudice than on what incidental knowledge he may have acquired during his trip to Constantinople. There is little clear evidence on the sources of information used by the pamphleteers. It seems highly probable that most of them had access to two books on the Ottoman Empire that circulated in both Latin and German versions in this period: the memoirs of an anonymous Transylvanian who spent years as a slave of the Turks (and has become known as the Captivus Septemcastrensis) 49; and the history and description of the Ottoman Empire by the Italian bishop, Paolo Giovio Neither source was altogether adequate, and the former particularly contains serious errors. At any rate, the authors of Türkenbüchlein had little interest in accuracy; they were committed a priori to the belief that the Turk was an arch-enemy of Christendom, and they used any convenient “evidence” to prove their point. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that the pamphleteers tended to copy one another’s errors of fact and judgment; the misinformation that appears in the Türkenbüchlein of 1522 and in the so-called Letter from a Resident of Turkey (1526) was repeated by the authors of later pamphlets
In the vocabulary of the German authors the word Turck was virtually synonymous with “Mahometan” or “Moslem.” After all, the particular Moslem enemy who threatened the security of Central Europe was the Ottoman Turk, not the Moor or the Persian. The very word Turck conjured up in German minds memories of the immemorial conflict between Christendom and Islam. The pamphleteers habitually called the Turk the “hereditary foe” (erbfeind)l of the Christian faith
According to Dietrich, the Turk proves his insatiable lust for blood by habitually butchering “large masses” of Christian captives, including women and children.
While emphasizing Turkish violence, some authors add that the Turk also uses other methods to overcome his Christian antagonists: He negotiates solemn surrender terms, peace treaties, and alliances, only to break his promises as soon as it suits his purpose
Moralists have always taken a pessimistic view of their own society, and the writers of Türkenbüchlein were no exception. Some authors complained that all estates in Christendom were shamefully disregarding their divinely imposed duties to society. A particularly good example of such general criticism is provided by the anonymous Advice and Exhortation of 1536. The author charges that there is no brotherly love among the Christians; everyone selfishly pursues his own interests; “no good deeds are done, and yet we call ourselves
Christians.”
an anonymous Catholic author, writing shortly after the battle of Mohacs, interpreted the Turkish threat to the Holy Roman Empire as a sign that the Germans had angered God by adhering in large numbers to the self-appointed prophet, Martin Luther
Clark
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SCHOLARS and clergy who fought for the dispersal of a translation of the Koran were motivated by the desire to refute rather than promote its ideas. So anxious were they to defeat Mohammad’s teachings in open combat that they pushed for publication with a zeal which would have become the most fervent of Moslems. Those whom they fought against were members of their own professions, scholars and clergy, who feared the Koran as the work of the devil, which must be suppressed as dangerous to Christian souls. The debate was settled not by any appeals in favor of freedom of the press-an idea whose time was not to come for another century-but by the power of one of the leaders of Protestant Christendom, Martin Luther.
The first Türkenbüchlein appeared in 1522 and quickly became a bestseller. The theme of the work, that the Turks were the scourge of God on Christians, was sounded over and over by its successors. The Turks were cruel, capable of killing a man’s family before his eyes or of separating them for different forms of slavery; they made every effort to convert their captives to Moslem doctrines; and, of course, they practiced the devshirme on their Christian subjects-condemning the chosen youths to hell by converting the boys to Islam. God had loosed the Turks on Europe because of Christian wickedness, and spiritual reform as well as military action was necessary to repulse them.
Leaders in Basel and Zurich declared themselves for and against publication, and in many cases opinions seemed to follow loyalties formed during the recent crisis at the university. Leaders who rallied to support the publication included Myconius and Bertschi; strongly opposed were Amerbach and Wyssenberg. Oswald Myconius, a follower of Luther, was the leading preacher in Basel. He did not have a degree and had felt himself insulted by the university’s patronizing offer to grant him a degree without an examination. Max Bertschi was preacher in Saint Lawrence’s in Basel. Boniface Amerbach, a celebrated printer and humanist, had been one of the leaders of the movement to require doctorates at the university. Amerbach was never won over, but a direct appeal to the council outweighed his influence. Martin Luther, having heard of the controversy through his own book-dealer, wrote the council on October 27. His letter begins with the usual respectful compliments to the recipients, granting the sincerity of their motives. It continues by recalling to the council his own efforts over more than twenty years to take arms against all kinds of dangerous books and writings, to purify and clarify the sacraments and services of the church. He then states that he would not willingly see his work nullified nor his conscience burdened with harmful books at his death. Having stated his position firmly, Luther then gives his opinion of the Koran: It has struck me that one is able to do nothing more grievous to Mohammad or the Turks, nor more to bring them to harm (more than with all weaponry) than to bring their Koran to Christians
Fuchs
The powerful myth of Arthurian restoration, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1138), transforms the English exploits in Ireland into an odd version of the Spanish Reconquista of peninsular territory from the Moors. In these instrumental narratives, territory is never conquered, but instead reconquered from usurpers or interlopers.2
The legislations targeting the Moriscos on the one hand and the Irish on the other-both ostracized cultures that threaten culturally to absorb the colonizers-follow a similar progression. Initially, the laws focus on keeping native and conqueror apart. Where England passes the Kilkenny Statutes to prevent the Old English from adopting Irish customs, the Spanish pass laws in 1513 (more than twenty years, that is, after the fall of the city to the Catholic kings) forbidding the adoption of veils and almalafas (mantles) by Old Christian women living in Granada.2’ Soon, the restrictive legislation turns from the conquerors to the conquered, in a wholesale attempt to destroy native cultural forms. The Spanish laws, passed repeatedly but enforced sporadically, become more and more repressive over the course of the sixteenth century.
In its most virulent form, in 1567, the law states “that the
Moors of Granada and its Kingdom (for they were baptized and Christians), the better to serve God our Lord, should change their clothing and not speak their language, or have their songs and instruments, nor perform their weddings as is their custom, nor have their traditional dishes on Christmas or the New Year, which are called ‘mezuamas.”‘2
In both cases, the consolidation of imperium by the new masters requires a concerted legal attack on older customs, from language to dress to clan structures. Only by legally erasing the signs of native culture can the colonizing power assert its own customs and supply the missing “civility” that the colony lacks
I want to argue that, while this complex othering is certainly part of the point, the representation of Souldan as a figure for both Islam and Spain signals the episode’s uneasy identification of England with Spain. The first equation, of Spain and Islam, operates via an implicit appeal to the same history foregrounded in (Spencer’s) A View’s Irish genealogies: what is Spanish now was Moor is not long ago. As I have shown in my reading of A View, that diachronic account of Spain offers specific political advantages for England. Critics who quickly read a “souldan” as Spanish thus unwittingly replicate the dynamics of early modern English propaganda, which relentlessly othered Spain as African and no better than the infidel
Root
Father Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles (1612) - [The Moriscos] . .. were the wolves in the sheep… the heretics among the Catholics
Trial evidence, Inquisition 1500: Jeronima la Franca and her relatives with other Moriscos placed themselves squatting, and put couscous in a large vessel, and with everyone surrounding this they ate of the couscous with the hands, making handfuls like the Moors used to do by tradition and ceremony of the sect of Mahomat
WHILE THE SPANISH INQUISITION DEFINED as heresy any deviation from orthodoxy, the passages quoted above indicate that heresy could also function as a social and even genealogical category. Religious deviance by Spaniards of Muslim descent came to be denoted by cultural deviance, or heterodoxy in respect to customs, and eventually by genealogical deviance, or heterodoxy in respect to lineage, or “purity of blood.”
The specific policies developed by the State and Church to deal with these internal minorities had implications for colonial and religious policies overseas and were coextensive with a shift in religious rhetoric, which became more virulent and unforgiving in the late fifteenth century. We can see in Spain at the same time a deterioration of the convivencia, or coexistence, of preceding centuries that characterized relations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and that permitted religious minorities to affirm their separateness and traditional practices and customs. While Muslims had always been “different” from Christians in Spain, this difference had not been an issue to be systematically adjudicated by law (except in occasional statutes) until the end of the fifteenth century, when the last independent Muslim territories in Spain were conquered and the country began unification under Christian and royal authority. Although Muslims were not legally subject to the Inquisition until forced baptism made them “Christian,” the tribunal viewed this religious minority as a potentially dangerous element of society. This antagonism culminated in the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609-14 after more than a century of inquisitorial repression.
The expulsion of the Moriscos was the result of a particular trajectory followed by the inquisitorial system in Spain, a trajectory characterized by an inten- sification of surveillance and an increase in demands for proof of orthodoxy from the Morisco minority. Through the juridical process, Morisco deviance was constructed as something that had to be repudiated by orthodox Christians. The production of the Moriscos as an internal other and of Morisco culture as something deviant, to be recognized and rejected by the community, is articulated in the three moments of the inquisitorial process that define the infidel, the heretic, and the impenitente negative. 1) The infidel was marked in the initial moment of conquest, at the fall of Muslim Granada in 1492. The Christian conquerors were able to affirm political and religious sovereignty, which made it possible both to circumscribe “infidelity” and to extend this (religious) definition to social and cul- tural levels. In this way, the “infidel” was placed outside the community of which he or she had formerly been a part; 2) the heretic was produced in the repetition of the coercive moment: the forced baptisms of Muslims made possible by the extension of Christian political and religious jurisdiction enabled infidelity to be reinscribed as heresy, and this heresy was rendered visible to the Christian community; and 3) the impenitente negativo was produced as the final “product” of the inquisitorial process, as one who will not repent and who must be rejected by the community, turned over to the secular arm, and burned or expelled. The Inquisition was concerned with locating and suppressing “heterodoxy,” initially defined in canonical terms, later in reference to customary practices and traditions, and finally in terms of genealogy
The three moments of the inquisitorial process reflect the increasing homogenization of cultural orthodoxy, or espafolidad, in Spain: the rejection of deviance occurred first at the religious level, later at the religious and cultural levels, and finally at the level of blood and of physical bodies. The initial moment of conquest was repeated throughout the inquisitorial process, reiterated both in heresy trials and in the activities of the “secular arm” of the State, which executed heretics and administered the expulsion. With respect to the Morisco minority, the activities of Church and State were closely linked; religious jurisdiction, that is, the ability to adjudicate orthodoxy (of faith, custom, or blood) was underdetermined by the coercive capabilities of the Crown, the superior force initially deployed in the
reconquest of Muslim Spain.33 Aznar Cardona describes the expulsion, emphasizing its disorder: “[They]
… went on foot, tired, in pain, lost, weary, sad, confused, shamed, furious, corrupted, upset, bored, thirsty, and hungry: so, that by a just punishment from heaven, they leave neither satiated nor satisfied.”34 Yet questions remain: did the expulsion of the Moriscos advance the project of national unity and of orthodoxy; is it indeed possible to erase difference by expelling the bodies that represent it? Certainly, after the expulsion the Inquisition would discover other sources of heterodoxy before being abolished in 1820; “Lutherans,” Catholic mystics, and sexual deviants would all be prosecuted for threatening orthodoxy in Spain. At the same time, traces of the Morisco presence lingered on after 1614, as evidenced by continuing trials of crypto-Muslims and reports of Morisco communities hidden in the mountains. The Morisco response to the expulsion was varied: some attempted to remain in Spain, others desired to go to North Africa and live among Muslims. Despite the activities of the Inquisition, many Moriscos had sought to defy the official version of espafiolidad by retaining their traditional practices and customs. In Aznar Cardona’s description of the expulsion, Morisco women leave Christian Spain wearing the jewelry and clothing which had been forbidden for nearly a century: From time to time there appeared many women, who were very colorfully dressed, with diverse brooches of silver on their chests, with necklaces and collars hanging from their necks, earrings, corals, and with a thousand sophistications in their clothes and costumes with which they dissimulated somewhat the pain of their heart
Cardona, an Aragonese priest, wrote a polemic at the time of the expulsion that indicates the way the “Morisco heresy” came to be defined in terms of ethnicity, and in the essential qualities manifested in Morisco “manners and customs” and reproductive capacity. He begins by declaring that Moriscos “raise their sons dirty as beasts…. They are clumsy in their reasoning, bestial in their discourse, barbaric in their language, ridiculous in their costume”
The Repertorium inquisitorum was published in 1494 in Valencia as a dictionary to aid inquisitors by defining certain terms and concepts.
The internal heretic: the problem of dissimulation. It is written in the Repertorium: “The double man is to be shunned, because he is evil: he is evil according to his language, and also according to his heart” (78). In order to distinguish between the heretic and the faithful, the Inquisition had to be able to distinguish between those who were “truly” Christian and those who only appeared to be so, in other words to recognize dissimulation. The evil of the “double man” lay in his ability to dupe the tribunal and the Christian community. The “doubleness” of the Moriscos was expressed in several ways: first, at the social level, because their traditional religious practices were forced underground (in this respect, many Moriscos were what the inquisitors said they were-dissimulators and “double men”); second, in the way the Inquisition utilized its own definition of duplicity and dissimulation in its efforts to discover traces of Islamic culture. In order to
find evidence of heresy, it increasingly invaded private terrain, moving into Morisco houses to find evidence that would expose the “evil in the heart.” Third, this intrusion into the private sphere produced a cultural redoubling as Moriscos were forced to internalize the codes of their oppressors. Despite the fact that many Moriscos affirmed their “Moorishness” and refused to assimilate, the Inquisition’s ability to coerce was not without effect. By the time of the expulsion in 1609-14, two major changes were apparent: first, at the linguistic level, although many Moriscos spoke “bad” Castilian, most could no longer read or write Arabic (many wrote in Castilian after being expelled to North Africa); second, at the religious level, their grasp of Islam became rather tenuous, in effect
stripped down to knowledge of the Five Pillars of the Faith and the prohibitions against pork and wine (they were referred to as “Spanish Christians” in North Africa).22
Salem
Islam was refuted by most Christian writers of the time, for that was a scholarly obligation. Thus Burton refutes Islam and calls the Muslims ‘ superstitious idolaters’ (‘). The Reverend Joseph Hall (d. 1656) examines five religious - the Jewish, Turkish, Greekish, Popish and Reformed - and he refutes them all with the exception of the Reformed church, which he loads with praise (2).
Elizabethan interest in the Near East led eventually to
greater and more accurate information on the Turks and on the religion of Islam. English Scholarship on the Near East began to take form at the end of the 17th century. As scholarship developed, the mythology of the East and of Islam faded gradually before the light of facts and experience. In 1632 Sir Thomas Adams founded the first chair of Arabic at Cambridge
Our writers knew very little of the time and life of Muhammad and therefore were brief and repetitious in actual accounts of his life. They were fluent, however, in their subjective description of his character and of his religion. In their eyes Muhammad was not only fickle but ugly. This is characteristic of the Medieval mind, which represented the ‘enemy ‘ as devilish and weird-looking. Thus we read in Lithgow that the prophet of Islam was of mean feature, big-headed, of sanguinal
complexion, ‘possessing a desperate stomach’ (2).
To Cartwright he was ‘ a sinner, an idolator and adulterer, and inclined to women above measure, and that in such uncivil terms, as I am ashamed to repeat’ . He was represented as having encouraged all sorts of evil deeds. Newton speaks of him as a ‘ counterfeiter and dissembler ‘ but eloquent.
Muhammad was accused by the Elizabethans as having ‘fabricated ‘ Islam with the connivance of three heretics: a Jewish magician, John of Antioch, and a monk called Sergius. The Jew was a man named Abdallah who was also an astronomer. John of Antioch was to the Elizabethans a name with little meaning. Sergius was described by Lithgow as a ‘ diverted Thalmudist’
d’Entreves
Medieval vision of society was not a pluralistic vision but one of unity
Church and state were conceived to be one in the respublica Christiana
Spiritual and temporal power viewed as two necessary props, two departments, of a single and universal society composed of the same members united by the same faith
Those who do not share the common faith are automatically excluded
Jews may be tolerated, but as a foreign body. Religious orthodoxy is the condition of political allegiance
Any menace to that orthodoxy, to the Church, is a menace to the state
Persecuting heretics is not only religious duty but reason of state
Heresy = most serious challenge to unity and uniformity
Prot Ref started from similar premises. Set out simply to reform Church
Mattered above all to safeguard oneness of society even at cost of breaking up unity of Christendom and destroying once and for all dualism of powers which in medieval eyes had formed necessary counterpart
These were views set out in Statute of Appeals 1533 and Act of Supremacy 1534
Once unity of Christendom broken, oneness of society could only mean that the national Church completely coincided with the national state
Doctrine laid down in Peace of Augsburg 1555
Archbishop Whitgift - no room for dissent in state based on religious orthodoxy
Protest of Christian conscience vs control of the state over Church matters led to modern notion of religious liberty
Wouldn’t have been practical proposition had not an entirely different and new concept of society carried the day
Recognition of self-sufficiency of Church and State
Fanatical groups fought vs dom theory of uniformity
Purely spiritual nature of the Church proclaimed the absolute impossibility of the state intervening in matters of religion - spell of religious/ political uniformity broken
Pluralistic view of society = no longer a monastic society
Reinhard
Confessionalization
Broadly, designates the process through which the people subject to each of the three German ‘confessions,’ Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic, developed a religious identity
In its narrower meaning, as formulated by Schilling and Reinhard, this ‘consolidation of official religions’ was a program driven by an educated elite with power in both ecclesiastical and state institutions, and had the long-term effect of modernizing society by its ‘promotion of rationalization, growing bureaucracy, social discipline, [and] individualism
