Prophecy as Diplomacy

This chapter focuses on the period immediately before the expulsion of Moriscos that occurred from 1601 to 1605. It examines several attempts by the Moriscos to secure help from Henry IV of France for an uprising planned for the Kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon. This chapter traces communications between the French and the Moriscos and captures the moment of agony when the Moriscos were banished from their homes and sent off to unknown lands with the expulsion decrees of 1609 and 1610. It also analyzes the incident of the ringing of the Bell of Velilla, which was considered a miraculous occurrence that spread to Italy and France. The ringing of the bell anticipated an imminent threat to Spain, that the Moriscos of Aragon and Valencia were going to rebel.

Prophetic Fabrications of a Morisco Informant

This chapter 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. This chapter also centers on the career of a man by the name of Gil Perez, 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 the Moriscos who identified as Muslims, and the ways in which prophecies were deployed as political discourses. The Gil Perez affair often has been discussed as a curious case of a Morisco rogue.

The Return of Muslim Granada

This chapter examines how the newly converted Muslims of Castile dealt with the trauma of forced assimilation into Catholic society from the 1530s to the 1560s. It looks at the cultural resources that the Morisco rebels relied on to construct that rhetoric and discourse of mobilization, focusing on the cultural idioms with which the Moriscos who participated in the rebellion expressed their grievances—the apocalyptic prognostications known as “jofores.” The “jofores” that circulated during the rebellion were aimed at creating affective associations that would reinforce the Muslim identity of the Morisco rebels and their potential supporters. This chapter also analyzes the significance of apocalyptic prophecy in mobilizing the Morisco population for collective action. More specifically, it demonstrates that the rebellion of the Moriscos in the Alpujarras mountains was encouraged by a discourse of martyrdom that was articulated in an apocalyptic key, an element that has hitherto been overlooked in the historiography of the Alpujarras revolt.

Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the analysis of 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. The chapter describes how Moriscos were not impervious to the apocalyptic excitement of their Old Christian counterparts, such as reading the same prophecies of St. Isidore of Seville and John of Rupescissa. It also explains how Morisco political culture and practice were transformed, amd it highlights events in which Moriscos met such powerful Mediterranean actors like the Ottomans, the French monarch Henry IV, and the Saʿdī sultans of Morocco.