Chapter 33: Religious troubles in "Las Españas" (1550-1570)
By 1570 Cardinal de Cisneros was in the apex of his power. Whilst as a prime minister in all but in name, he brought god into all he did. However, he was an oddity in himself. Whilst Medieval Hispania had often been defined by the huge role of the Catholic Church in secular affairs, by the late 16th century it has been replaced by the secular bureaucracy. De Cisneros attempted to turn the clock back by filling the court and the government with loyal Bishops and priests. As Eduardo II centered his attention in the buidling projects that were taking place all over the Empire, from new palaces to new universities and shipyards, and in the foreign policy, de Cisneros was free to govern Hispania as he pleased. However, the king and his chancellor soon came to grips. After the reorganization of the Hispanic church as an autonomous branch of the Catholic church, de Cisneros waited for his nomination as its head. However, time went on and nothing of that sort happened. Thus, in March 1572, when Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, Archbishop of Toledo died, the king replaced him with Gaspar de Quiroga . De Cisneros felt insulted by this move, and even more when Eduardo II secured the Cardinalship for de Quiroga in 1574,
De Quiroga and de Cisneros despised each other for the last twenty years. The Edicto de Sevilla (1541) had forced both Muslims and Jews to live in separate quarters and to wear a red or a yellow slice on their right shoulder (1). From 1542 onwards, the Muslim and Jewish quarters were converted into ghettos surrounded by walls and the Jews were confined in them, a process that took two years to finish and which was not exempt from problems and abuses by Christians. This would take a turn for the worse when in 1556: All the distinctive Muslim and Jewish elements were prohibited, such as the language, the dresses, the baths, the ceremonies of worship, the rites that accompanied them, etc. In addition to this, the Castilian bishops, led by de Quiroga, asked the king to increase the control measures, proposing that the Muslim houses were visited regularly on Fridays, Saturdays and holidays, to ensure that that they did not follow the Koranic precepts, and that the notable Moors were closely watched to set an example, and that their children were ordered "to be brought and raised in Old Castile at the expense of their parents so that they could collect customs and Christianity from there and forget those from here until they were men". These proposals were discussed by a board of jurists, theologians and military men meeting in Madrid (presided by the Duke of Alba himself) that agreed to recommend that the king apply the prohibitions agreed by the board. However, the king, persuaded by de Cisneros, put the measures on hold in exchange for 80,000 ducats that the Muslims gave him and another 80,000 from the Jews. Then Eduardo II appointed Pedro de Deza as president of the Chancery of Granada, a character whose performance would stir the spirits of both Jews and the Moors and would be the direct cause of the tragedies that took place from 1563 to 1564 and the misery it followed.
This turmoil in Castile had its effects also in Aragon as many Jews from Murcia, Andalucia and Navarre fled to that kingdom. From 1541 to 1550, 700 Jews left Castile and settled in Aragon; from 1555 to 1570 this number rose to ten thousand Jews. Then, in 1558, Fernando de Valdés y Salas, the bishop of Seville and a protegée of de Quiroga, began to launch anti-Muslim speeches, stirring the people up against them. He would interfere with the administration of justice with his prejudices and he even went so far as to write to the nearby authorities and command them to remove the Jews and the Muslims from living among them. By 1560 de Cisneros, aware of the Jewish importance to the royal finances, sided with them and told de Valdés to stop his persecution of the Jews. However, he kept preaching violence against the Muslims as he abused his power in the religious judiciary in spite of de Cisneros' instructions. De Valdés' belief that he was doing the right thing by persecuting the Muslims was shared by his followers, who anxiously waited for the opportunity to attack and raid their quarters. This eventually led to the Riots of March 1563, when the mob broke out and killed Muslims and plundered their houses. Soon, the riots had already spread to nearby cities and around 4,000 Muslims were murdered in Andalucia, tand those that weren't killed were terrified into converting in an attempt to not be murdered as well. The riots spread even to Aragon, as the authorities could do nothing to prevent the same pattern of plunder, murder, and fanaticism (although it did not go completely unpunished). About 500 Muslims in Valencia were murdered and about 5,000 of them converted rather than face death. There were als riots in Barcelona, where several Jewish houses were pillaged in July by the angry mob, around 25 Jews were murdered and 300 were forced to convert. Eduardo II and de Cisneros took these events very badly, as it was an attack against their authority. As punishment, several of the leaders attackers were imprisoned and one of them hanged, but the royal anger did not end there; eventually 300 of the attackers were arrested and jailed. The king was not to forget de Valdés' actions and, when Archbishop Carranza died in 1572, Eduardo II not only ignored de Valdés as the obvious replacement for the late archbishop, but made de Valdés aware of the fact. Many point out that the old bishop died a few months later heartbroken for this treatment.
However, Eduardo II turned a blind eye when de Cisneros acted against the alumbrados (2). This heretic group had been persecuted and repressed in the second half of the XVI century but, in spite of the persecution, some groups went underground and survived; furthermore, some alumbrados managed to evade the persecution and a few of them managed to survive in Seville until the 1570s, when they finally left Castille for either Aragon or France. From 1574, Inquisitorial courts were established throughout Castille (and in 1576 in Navarre) and Eduardo II made pains to ensure they were legal and comtrolled by the Crown. Then de Cisneros fixed his attention in the Lutheran groups of Valladolid and Seville. They were a source of concern for the Inquisition as they introduced in Castille many forbidden books. Only in 1552 the Inquisition confiscated in Seville about 450 Bibles printed abroad. Several humanists, like Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, who was also a convert, ended up being arrested by the Inquisition, dying in its dungeons several years later. Most cases that ended facing a Inquisitorial court were anti-Catholic crimes or against radical Reformers who openly refused to accept the Catholic dogma. Even these men avoided execution, however, as the King was always keen to prevent undue brutality. De Cisneros, on his part, was happy "seeing the heretics fled, thus cleaning Castille from their pestilence". When some emboldened Catholics attacked outspoken Reformers, he reacted slowly and with a constant and vigilant tolerance until 1575, when the violence also spread against the large Jewish community of Castille. Soon armed parties were deployed to protect the Jweish quarters and, in some extreme cases, a few rioters were killed in the resulting street confrontations.
When some of the Reformers fled to Aragon, de Cisneros attempted to arrest them there, but the local Parliaments denied him any authority over the Aragonese subjects and blocked his attempts with their old traditions and uses. If there were going to be any 'geretic' tried, it would be following the Aragonese law. Thus, from 1560 to 1570 there were several trials of the so-called "aganaus" (3) until the Cortes of Aragon discarded taking any measures against them as "none of their opinions was explicitly heretical.” Even if de Cisneros was victorious and destroyed the Lutheran group in Seville, he resented the Aragonese blockade and swore to himself that he would "iluminate the Parliaments to make them see how wrong they were". The Hispanic Cardinal was clearly worried by the spread of Reformist ideas in Aragon, reinforced in the 1520s by the arrival of French Reformist groups that settled in Tortosa, Barcelona, Valencia and the Balearic Islands. However, in spire of de Cisneros' fears, Reformism in Aragon was not the product of the same historical process that took place in Europe by that time, but the consequence of subsequent reforms or "spiritual awakenings'' that began in the 1540s, as we have already seen in Chapter 26. They were the fruit of the so-called free churches, which assume the mission of embodying the Reformation in Catalonia, both both with local priests and the generous collaboration of prominent foreign pastors. In Aragon, the Reformist ideas would enter through the trade routes that link that kingdom to Navarre, to Castile and to the other countries of the Aragonese Crown. Nevertheless, de Cisneros' presssure would lead to the 'Barcelona trials of 1570', when 26 "Aganaus" were tried in that city on September 10, 1570 after being accused of public offenses to Catholic religion and were heavily fined as a punishment.
However, it was in Seville where de Cisneros made his great show of power. There was a Reformist group made up of about 500 people, which included Cipriano de Valera, Casiodoro de Reina (4), Juan Pérez de Pineda and Antonio del Corro who fled before being discovered. Some of them went to Aragon and most of them fled abroad, becoming very important figures in the European Protestant Reformation. Initially, these Hieronymite monks, great readers of Luther and Melanchthon, settled in Geneva, but a few of them opted to take root in Aragon while forty Sevillian heretics were captured and burnt down when they tried to fled to France through Navarre. De Valera would arrive to England around the late 1570s and, eventually, became Professor of Theology of the Magdalene College, Cambridge (5), but Pérez de Pineda settled in Zaragoza in 1560, where he wrote the so-called Epístola Consolatoria (Consolatory Epistle), intended to strengthen the spirits of the Protestants in the Peninsula who suffered the rigors of the Inquisition. He died in Paris in 1567. Henry Kamen states that the Castilian Protestants were finished by the late 1580s, when after the Valladolid and Seville autos-da-fé of 1569-1572, the "autochthonous Protestantism was practically extinct in Spain" as the Inquisition burnt at the "thousands of Castilians whowere trapped into its nets who, one moment of carelessness, had made some praise of Luther or pronounced anti-clerical demonstrations". Thus a large part of what could have been the Hispanic reformers emigrated abroad, either to Aragon, the Americas or Europe. De Cisneros would attempt, in several ocassions, to extend his authority to the New World and to Aragon. In both cases, the local authorities blocked his attempts and only acted against some conspicuous heretics after much pressure exerted upon them. By then, the heretic in question had either fled to Europe or went underground. This clashes with the Aragonese Parliaments would cause a breach between de Cisneros and those councils, and would, from time to time, force Eduardo to intervene to persuade the Aragonese to collaborate with the angered Chancellor
Meanwhile, one of the darkest chapters of Hispanic history was shamefully written. Still persecuted and hated by his Christian neighbours, the Muslims of the south of Hispania had to endure many hardships that, eventually, led to the Emigration Crisis of 1568-1571, when a significant portion of the Muslim population fled from the former Kingdom of Granada. In the next three years, 30,000 Muslims, or roughly a quarter of Granada's Muslim population, crossed to North Africa. The emigration caused a big fall in population, which took decades to offset and caused the economy to collapse, as many fields laid uncultivated. By 1576 the Hispanic authorities had already laid down the basis for repopulation. The land left free by the expulsion of the Moriscos would be given to Christian settlers, who would be supported by the Crown until their land began to bear fruit. The settlers were assured of bread and flour, seed for their crops, clothing, material for cultivating their land, and oxen, horses, and mules. Furthermore, there were various tax concessions. By 1590, however, life was not easy there and many settlers gave up. The Alpujarras would be a wasted land until the beginning of the 17th century.
-1- TTL Edict is a mixture of the measures applied against the Spanish Jews in OTL 1412 and 1480.
-2- a term used to loosely describe practitioners of a mystical form of Christianity in Spain during the 15th-16th centuries. Some alumbrados were only mildly heterodox, but others held views that were clearly heretical, according to the contemporary rulers. Consequently, they were firmly repressed and became some of the early victims of the Inquisition.
-3- ITTL an Old Catalan word for Protestant. It comes from the Sanscrit word agnau—in the fire
-4-IOTL, a Spanish religious convert to Protestantism, famous for making the well-known Spanish translation of the Bible called the "Bible of the Bear" because a drawing with this animal appeared on the cover; this bible was published in Basel, in 1569.
-5- Perhaps the most well-know Protestant heretic in OTL history of Spain. He was named in the Index librorum Prohibitorum (Madrid, 1667, p. 229) as "the Spanish heretic" par excellence. De Valera was a Hieronymite monk and humanist, author of the so-called Bible of the Pitcher (1602), considered as the first Corrected edition of the "Bible of the Bear" of 1569, known until today as the Reina-Valera Bible.