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CHAPTER 2

Into the Atlantic

Justifying Title and Establishing Dominion

Upon returning from his first voyage westward across the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus penned a statement to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel as prologue to his Diary of the First Voyage that covered the events of 1492–93. While the original copies of his journals and logbook were lost, his account survives in a copy transcribed by Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the first entry of the diary, Columbus articulated a powerful and enduring association between the conquest of Granada, Christian expansion, and Castilian possession over lands encountered. He wrote, “After Your Highnesses ended the war against the Muslims who ruled in Europe, and having ended that war in the very great city of Granada, where this year [1492] … by force of arms I saw the royal flags of Your Highnesses in the towers of the Alhambra, the fortress of that city, and I saw the Muslim king emerge from the gates of that city and kiss the royal hands of Your Highnesses.” Later that month, “by the information I gave to Your Highnesses of the lands of India and of a Prince called the Great Khan … of how many times he and his predecessors requested that Rome send doctors in our holy faith so that they could be taught it.” When the calls for Christian missionaries went unanswered, “so many peoples were lost, falling into idolatries … and Your Highnesses, like Catholic Christians and princes who love the holy Christian faith, and increase it and are enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies, you thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, on the said voyages to India to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of everything, and the manner which should be had for their conversion to our holy faith.”¹ This idea was echoed in the papal bulls granting the Spanish dominion over the Americas and upheld by the official policies of subsequent monarchs and the Council of the Indies.

Associations between conquering lands under Muslim rule and spreading Christianity overseas were also echoed in the papal bulls of donation and resurfaced in subsequent Spanish claims to empire and dominion in the New World. As imperial claims became intimately linked to the evangelization of native communities, it became imperative for the Crown to restrict the movement of peoples and ideas to the Americas to devout Catholics. As definitions of Spanishness became increasingly linked to exclusionary attitudes based on genealogy and religious identity, restrictions on overseas emigration also became more and more connected to emerging notions of “race”—to individuals who could prove their lineages were of “pure” old Christian ancestry.

Like the Portuguese, the Spanish presented a “world on the move.”² Following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, Portuguese ships in search of African gold and slaves began to make voyages into the southern Atlantic. During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established trading posts and colonies in the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores.³ In competition with the Portuguese, the Castilians also staked their claim to the Canary Islands, raiding and enslaving the native guanche population. With growing competition over access to maritime trade routes, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had to negotiate treaties with Afonso V of Portugal. In 1479 they signed the Treaty of Alcáçovas in which Portugal recognized Castilian sovereignty in the Canary Islands and Castile acknowledged Portuguese claims to the other Atlantic islands and the African coast south of Cape Bojador. Following Columbus’s return from his first voyage to the Caribbean islands, Ferdinand and Isabel became concerned the Portuguese would attempt to claim them under the Treaty of Alcáçovas.⁴ They immediately appealed to Alexander VI to grant them title to these islands and any subsequent “discoveries,” which the pope conceded in the bulls of donation.⁵

Spanish authorities’ interest in restricting new Christian presence in the Americas was in many ways shaped by the terms of the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493). In this bull, Alexander VI granted dominion to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel to oversee the conversion of peoples encountered in the new territories, effectively rendering the Spanish Crown’s title to the Americas contingent upon the successful evangelization of indigenous peoples.⁶ The bull highlighted the role played by Ferdinand and Isabel in the conquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada in 1492. It buttressed their claim to being Catholic monarchs who, because of their actions in Granada, presented themselves as the most suitable rulers in Europe to oversee the expansion of the church in the new territories.⁷ The language and terms of Inter Caetera infiltrated subsequent legal decisions and debates concerning the legality of Spanish conquest and colonization. Other legal documents and protocols tied to conquest, such as the Requerimiento, attested to the continued importance that spreading Catholicism held for the colonial enterprise.⁸

For decades to come, jurists and theologians at the Spanish court debated the legality and morality of Spanish dominion and just title to the Americas. Initial juridical arguments drew upon Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval period that recognized the pope’s jurisdiction over lands belonging to non-Christians. Precedents for European claims over non-Christian peoples generally involved lands deemed “vacant” or societies labeled “primitive,” such as the guanches in the Canary Islands. The Spanish Crown needed to establish clearly the legitimacy of its claims to the Americas before an international audience.⁹ Numerous lawyers, theologians, and royal officials convened in Salamanca to debate the lawfulness of the conquests, their arguments grounded in Castilian legal culture.

Bartolomé de las Casas, whose writings questioned the extent of Spanish dominion and cited horrific abuses of indigenous peoples as its consequence, was not alone in his critiques.¹⁰ In 1565, Franciscan friar Alonso de Maldonado also petitioned the king to protect indigenous peoples, claiming the Crown lacked legitimate title to the Americas. At court, Friar Diego de Chaves responded that Maldonado’s propositions would allow other monarchs to assert claims over the Indies and deemed Maldonado’s failure to recognize the papal grant “scandalous and seditious.”¹¹ In 1568, with the encouragement of the Jesuits, Pope Pius V created a commission to examine the Catholic missions in the Spanish Americas.¹² Those who participated in the commission submitted a report to Philip II concerning the good treatment and conversion of indigenous peoples. Echoing Tridentine reforms, their report reiterated that the papal donation stipulated true conversion of the Amerindians, and it recommended that well-educated priests carry out this enormous task with the financial support of the encomenderos.¹³ Encomenderos therefore were responsible for upholding the religious instruction of indigenous peoples under their supervision, and in some cases they became vulnerable to accusations that they were new Christians who were ill suited to this role. While the Crown did not heed the papal briefs in their entirety or the commission’s instructions, growing criticism of both the encomienda system and royal policies toward Amerindians produced a flurry of reforming activity.¹⁴

What was at stake? Critics across Europe also actively disputed Spain’s claim to the Americas. With the Reformation, Protestant rulers had little regard for the papal bulls granting dominion to Spain. Even Catholic monarchs such as Henry VII of England and Francis I of France held differing opinions from those of the Spanish Crown about the role of papal intervention in secular matters of state.¹⁵ They argued that papal authority did not extend to granting the Americas to Spain, and they financed their own voyages under John Cabot and Jacques Cartier to explore the lands north of the territories settled by Spain. Spanish jurists soon found themselves having to defend papal authority against the wave of disturbing images in manuscripts and printed books surging across Europe.¹⁶ Theodor de Bry produced vivid engravings of Amerindians and Protestants ravaged by Spanish soldiers and the Inquisition in his 1594 and 1596 editions of Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del Mondo Nuovo (1565).¹⁷ Other polemical images critical of Spanish dominion conflated Spaniards with cannibals in their Eucharistic devotion, fanning rival nations’ expansionist claims and aiming to challenge Spain’s moral title to the Americas.¹⁸ As late as the seventeenth century, Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira continued to defend the Crown’s title to the Americas. He argued that indigenous peoples possessed humanity and a right to dominium, and only papal support for their conversion to Christianity to ensure their salvation justified Spanish rule.¹⁹ The English and Dutch built up fleets to challenge Spanish dominance in the Caribbean, yet Spanish defenders of papal power, as late as Solórzano, hoped their bid for the “spiritual welfare” of indigenous peoples would stave off English, French, and Dutch interference with their activities, by articulating a legal basis for conquest.²⁰

The Spanish sovereigns’ determination to present themselves as Catholic monarchs, who complied with the papal bulls that established their title to the Americas, had a profound impact on their imperial policies. These included religious restrictions on settlement and emigration. Official policies issued by the Crown in royal decrees were often met with differing attitudes and projects on the ground. As a result, they issued restrictions on the emigration of recent converts to Christianity—Moriscos and conversos. Emigrants also had to prove their upstanding behavior and pious comportment. Because it was a matter of faith, church and state both defended these exclusions, through institutions such as the Inquisition and the ecclesiastical courts, and even the Casa de Contratación. Individuals such as Estevanico in the early and still fluid period of exploration had an opening to the Americas, yet they were always vulnerable to accusation. As valuable as he had been to Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos de Niza, the vivid description of his downfall by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado tells a more complicated story.

ARABIC SPEAKING INTERMEDIARIES IN THE EARLY ATLANTIC VOYAGES

A number of Europeans, including Magellan and Columbus, recruited or captured Arabic speakers to act as interpreters in the lands they traded in or conquered, due to their perceived linguistic skills.²¹ They followed patterns well established by the Portuguese, who left individuals behind to learn local languages and then picked them up again for future voyages. In the case of many of the Arabic speakers, the Spanish and Portuguese also used captives from North Africa or Asia to act as interpreters in their first meetings with local rulers to establish trading relationships. For example, in his first voyage to the Antilles, Columbus brought as interpreter Luis de Torres, who was familiar with several languages, including Hebrew and some Arabic.²² Portuguese chronicler and historian João de Barros described how Pedro Álvares Cabral used speakers of Arabic and West African languages to try to communicate with the peoples of coastal Brazil. When Cabral realized indigenous peoples did not understand these languages, he switched strategies to leave a group of criminal exiles (degradados) behind to learn the local languages.²³ Bringing Arabic speakers on initial voyages must have seemed an obvious choice to the Portuguese who were familiar with seizing Berbers during their attempts to conquer parts of North Africa, then carrying these men and women south as interpreters to sub-Saharan African ports.²⁴ On Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, Arabic speakers facilitated trade with Muslim merchants in Mozambique and acted as interpreters during both his and Cabral’s encounters with the Muslim ruler of Calicut.²⁵ Estevanico’s home city of Azemmour, a Portuguese protectorate in the Kingdom of Morocco from 1508 to 1540, was described by Leo Africanus as attracting Portuguese merchants in the 1520s who had been trading in Africa since the conquest of Ceuta.²⁶

Estevanico’s involvement in the Pánfilo de Narváez and Friar Marcos de Niza expeditions demonstrates the precarious turns his role as interpreter could take. Following several years of wandering what is today the American Southwest, in 1536, Estevanico and Cabeza de Vaca finally stumbled across a group of “Christians,” including Captain Diego de Alcaraz who had participated in Nuño de Guzmán’s 1530–31 conquest of Nueva Galicia. Having learned the local trade language that enabled him to communicate with the peoples of northern Mexico, Estevanico returned with indigenous escorts. They guided the remaining two survivors of the Narváez expedition, Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, and a group of six hundred indigenous peoples from Sonora and Sinaloa, back to join the Spaniards in San Miguel.²⁷ The reaction of some Spaniards, according to Cabeza de Vaca, was to try to enslave them, and Estevanico had to persuade the Indians that they were not like the other Spaniards. Although many Spaniards in the first entradas into “hostile” frontier regions hoped to enslave Amerindians, others acknowledged the Crown’s emphasis on evangelization and limiting enslavement and personal service, so they spoke out.

In 1537 Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza purchased Estevanico from Andrés Dorantes to act as a guide, being a “persona de razón” who had prior knowledge of northwestern New Spain.²⁸ In 1539 Estevanico joined the expedition of Friar Marcos de Niza. The friar describes him as having perished alongside three hundred Indian allies near the legendary city of Cíbola, amidst the Zuni pueblos, although they most likely never made it beyond northern Sonora.²⁹ A more contradictory and negative portrayal is provided by the 1540 report of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. He had written to Viceroy Mendoza that Estevanico was killed because “the Indians of Chichilticale said that he was a bad man, and not like the Christians who never kill women, and he killed them, and because he assaulted their women, whom the Indians love better than themselves.”³⁰

Estevanico’s contradictory characterization as both a good Christian and “person of reason,” and as a violent and unpredictable man, lie in his liminal status in the colonial documentation as being labeled a negro alárabe. Alárabe was a loaded term in the period, which was associated with Islam and used by sixteenth-century writers to refer to the seminomadic peoples inhabiting North Africa.³¹ Regardless of Estevanico’s actual background, the mere association with alárabes would have raised concerns among his contemporaries. Estevanico and his supporters would have had to constantly justify his position and his behavior as a good Christian. For example, when Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza requested that the king grant encomiendas to the first conquerors of New Spain, and by extension their direct descendants, he portrayed his father’s slave Estevanico as a Christian martyr who was “shot through with arrows like a Saint Sebastian, in the service of His Majesty.”³²

Estevanico is perhaps the best-known interpreter among this group of Arabic speakers in New Spain. Yet other enslaved North Africans and Moriscos learned indigenous languages upon their arrival in the Americas.³³ Knowledge about captivity in the Muslim world played a role in everyday interactions between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the so-called frontier regions of Spanish America. During the 1530s, Spaniards brought interpreters to northern New Spain, and there were some who were Moriscos or North African Muslims conversant in Arabic dialects. Their perceived facility with languages made these individuals attractive candidates for becoming naguatatos, or translators of Nahuatl, the language spoken in much of central Mexico.³⁴

Records from the earliest entradas into northern New Spain during the 1530s reveal the growing need for interpreters to translate between Spaniards and their Nahuatl speaking allies, and the new indigenous linguistic groups they encountered.³⁵ Spanish incursions to conquer and subjugate the seminomadic peoples inhabiting Nueva Galicia dragged on for decades. These events took place during the term of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, a member of the influential Mendoza noble family from Granada. He traced his lineage to ancestors who fought in battles of the so-called Reconquista, and his father, Iñigo López de Mendoza, Count of Tendilla, acted as captain-general of the Christian forces conquering Granada. Historical memory of these earlier battles continued to hold meaning for elite Spanish families and continued to be mentioned in histories and genealogies composed on both sides of the Atlantic. Viceroy Mendoza’s brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, composed the Guerra de Granada, one of the more detailed and well-known accounts of the Alpujarras uprising.³⁶ As can be seen through the Mendoza family, Christian-Muslim interactions on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean influenced many Spaniards who made their way to the Americas and guided their responses to the “new” lands. Imperial and local policies, perceptions of others, and strategies for self-fashioning were all bound up in peninsular interactions that were transformed during the course of new encounters and experiences in the Americas.

Antonio Tello’s Libro segundo de la cronica miscelanea en que se trata de la conquista espiritual y temporal de la Santa Provincia de Xalisco recounts the history of Jalisco to 1653. Tello’s depiction of the conquests of New Spain and Nueva Galicia develops gendered parallels between Spanish interactions with North African Muslims and Turks in the Mediterranean and with indigenous peoples in the Americas. Describing Cortés’s participation in a Spanish campaign to Algiers in 1541, Tello emphasized Cortés’s masculinity and the authority he gained from direct experience in the conquest of Mexico, in light of peninsular Spaniards’ skepticism: In Algiers, Cortés “served his majesty, and had some disagreements when he gave counsel concerning the winning of that city, because they told him that he thought that that war was with the naked Indians of New Spain. To this he replied, ‘It only takes one of those Indians to fight with six clothed Spaniards’.”³⁷ Through Tello’s eyes we can envision how his readers might have imagined these parallels that were already being inscribed onto early accounts of conquest. Describing Spaniards battling indigenous groups in northern New Spain, Tello notes, “When they fight, they yelp and cry out like Muslims.”³⁸ Nuño de Guzmán’s forces engaged peoples in feathered dress in Chiametla, whose bows were “so big they appeared Turkish.”³⁹

As in Spain, St. James or Santiago reputedly assisted the conquerors during his “first apparition” in New Galicia. A shrine was built in his honor on the mountain ridge (cerro), and the adjacent settlement added Santiago to its name, becoming Santiago de Tonalán, thereby transforming the landscape to reflect Spanish devotions to Reconquest saints.⁴⁰ After the fall of Granada, St. James, or Santiago Matamoros, had gained currency as the patron saint of Spain, as myths depicted his early arrival on the Peninsula, making it the first European nation to learn about Christ, thus bestowing preeminent status on Spain. Santiago had been invoked during Christian battles against Muslims in medieval Iberia, and he continued to be called upon during conquests in the Americas. Depictions of Santiago had become more prevalent in the changing political climate in Spain, especially as the Catholic monarchs’ personal devotions to him seeped into their political decisions.⁴¹ These images inhabited the mental worlds of the Spaniards as Estevanico was making his way with Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos de Niza as interpreter and as later generations reinterpreted these events in their written histories of the early conquests.

In 1535 Viceroy Mendoza sailed to New Spain to assume his fifteen-year post, which involved establishing Spanish control and jurisdiction over the recently explored and conquered territories of the viceroyalty, extending from La Florida and the Caribbean, to the area that is now the southwestern United States and Baja California. In Nueva Galicia, Spanish settlers were met with strong indigenous resistance in 1540, when native leaders formed alliances to oust the early settlements established under Nuño de Guzmán. Viceroy Mendoza quickly sent Spanish forces to suppress the mostly Cazcan-speaking “rebels” in the Juchipila Valley, in a two-year struggle that became known as the Mixton War.⁴² However, conflicts between Spaniards and indigenous groups in Nueva Galicia never completely died down after the Mixton War, setting the stage for the Guerra Chichimeca that broke out nearly ten years later in 1550.⁴³ The Spaniards had left a profoundly transformed society in their wake, in both the emerging towns of Guadalajara, Purificación, San Miguel de Culiacán, and Compostela, and in settlements such as Jalisco, Etzatlan, and Juchipila, which had previously belonged to indigenous communities. In Nueva Galicia, the demographic balance shifted after the Mixton War to comprise a multiethnic society of Spaniards, Africans, and mixed-race peoples, as well as the native peoples whose population was dwindling due to the ravages of war and disease.⁴⁴

By the 1541 Spanish campaigns against the peoples whom they labeled “Chichimeca,” Viceroy Mendoza had working for him a group of interpreters who were reputed to be Moriscos.⁴⁵ The 1546–47 tour of inspection or visita that Francisco Tello de Sandoval carried out against Viceroy Mendoza and the Audiencia of Mexico provides ample information about the activities of these Morisco naguatatos.⁴⁶ Through denunciations and complaints tying these men to Mendoza, it is also possible to glimpse attitudes toward Moriscos that would surface in later disputes over offices and encomiendas. It is hard to gain a sense of who these men were from the visita records, but read alongside other documents, it reveals the importance in early expeditions of Morisco interpreters, the need for them to fill certain niches in the emerging viceroyalties, and the opportunities for gaining status available to those who participated in the first generations of conquest.

Francisco de Triana, Marcos Romero, and Alonso Ortiz de Zúñiga were all described during the visita as sons of Moriscos. Their cases were bound to an investigation of Antonio Ortiz, interpreter for Viceroy Mendoza in the Guerra de Jalisco, and they were all affected by the charges against him for extortion, illegally selling “indios jaliscos” as slaves, and cheating the people for whom he was interpreting. Licenciado Lorenzo de Tejada, judge of the Audiencia of Mexico, presented charges against these men as part of his ongoing enmity with Antonio Ortiz, whom he accused of bribing them to ruin his credibility as visitador. Tejada’s accusations reveal insights into the lives the interpreters forged for themselves in New Spain, as well as Spanish conceptions of honor and anxieties about intermixture between Amerindians and Muslims. They cast Ortiz de Zúñiga, Triana, and his cousin Romero as men who “live more like Muslims than like Christians.”⁴⁷ They had achieved some degree of authority in colonial society due to their role as interpreters, which may have made other Spaniards uncomfortable or envious, given their reputedly lower status. Tejada described Triana as a Morisco slave whose parents were also “newly converted” Muslim slaves in the household of the Marqués de Tarifa in Seville. In New Spain, Triana had found work as a gardener (hortelano) for the Marqués del Valle Hernán Cortés before being removed from his post for unseemly behavior. Triana’s cousin Marcos Romero was also portrayed as a “Morisco, son of newly converted Moriscos.”⁴⁸ Finally, Alonso Ortiz de Zúñiga, who acted as tutor and guardian to a young woman from a prominent family, was labeled a “bad Christian … the bastard son of the Morisca slave of Doña María, wife of the señor de Ginés.”⁴⁹

A recurrent concern in the accusations against the interpreters was their contact with indigenous women. Triana lived “among Indians” and had in his house a tavern where he sold pulque to Indians and Africans. Spanish authorities remained anxious about indigenous drinking throughout the colonial period, as consumption of fermented beverages like pulque in New Spain or chicha in the Andes had enduring religious and ceremonial significance that ecclesiastical authorities deemed contrary to Christian baptism.⁵⁰ Triana’s “conversation and dwelling has always been with Indians and among Indians, eating with them on the floor and doing their dances and ceremonies (mitotes).”⁵¹ Furthermore, although married to a Spanish woman in Castile, Triana was “cohabiting (amancebado) with many Indian women, living more according to the law of Muhammad than as a Christian.”⁵² In Cuernavaca, Triana also allegedly stole from Alonso Pérez Tamayo a female slave and a free indigenous woman, both of whom he held “captive and hidden for many days, being a drunk, a thief, and an amancebado, and having other dirty and low vices.”⁵³ Similarly, Marcos Romero had resided “among Indians and outside the traza of the Spaniards,” before the Royal Audiencia ordered him to leave his house and live with Spaniards under pain of one hundred lashes “for the damage and evils he does to [the Indians].”⁵⁴ Romero was “blasphemous and amancebado with many Indian and mestiza women. He lives more like a gentile and according to the law of Muhammad than as a Christian, and his business and conversation was and is with Indians.”⁵⁵

Although Spanish authorities attempted to keep the “Republic of Spaniards” and the “Republic of Indians” physically and jurisdictionally separate, recent studies have demonstrated that a great deal of interaction did occur. Royal officials developed and implemented urban spatial models such as the congregación, in which native communities were to be organized and settled under the care of priests who would see to their religious instruction. This idealized spatial arrangement was intended to keep indigenous peoples separate from the feared “vagabonds” and persons of mixed ancestry who were known as castas and generally deemed disorderly.⁵⁶ In both viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, members of religious orders strived to create segregated settlements that would facilitate their efforts to evangelize indigenous peoples, establishing missionary village parishes (doctrinas). Viceroys such as Francisco de Toledo in Peru carried out programs of resettlement (reducción) to move indigenous peoples into small towns and villages on a Spanish model that would be easier to administer and control.⁵⁷ However, by the 1550s in New Spain, this sometimes controversial project to maintain two separate republics was already being undermined by the movement of castas into indigenous settlements.⁵⁸

The design of the new Spanish settlements echoed idealized images of Roman city plans, in the form of the traza, or grid pattern, that surrounded a central plaza, in ways that also followed the contours of early modern Spanish ideas about what constituted good government (buen gobierno, policia).⁵⁹ In Nueva Galicia, the Spanish towns were also likely founded according to this orderly municipal model, with the cabildo (town council), church, public works, and governor’s house given their own blocks (cuadras) along neatly organized streets radiating from the main plaza. Residents, or vecinos, were assigned spaces for their homes, four to a block.⁶⁰ The surrounding indigenous pueblos were then granted by the governor to the men who had participated in the conquest as encomiendas, or labor grants, to be exploited.⁶¹ The grid pattern layout of Spanish American settlements stood in sharp contrast to the Iberian towns and cities such as Granada, Córdoba, and Seville, their winding narrow streets mirroring the medinas across North Africa. Marcos Romero’s life “outside the traza” cast him as disorderly and unwilling to live a lifestyle associated with proper Spanish and Catholic mores. The traza established a deliberate spatial distinction from Muslim cities, a rupture from the Islamic past in a “New World,” as Spaniards increasingly looked back to ancient Rome for a model of imperial expansion, conquest, and settlement. Romero’s dwelling also put him in too-close proximity to the indigenous peoples whom authorities hoped to Hispanize and assimilate into colonial society, while still keeping them legally separate.

The question of trustworthiness also arises frequently in witnesses’ testimonies. A perceived lack of proper Christian comportment, or anything that would cast doubt on an individual’s piety, could call into question that individual’s credibility or loyalty in business ventures, especially in their role as interpreters. In the early Portuguese accounts by João de Barros and Eanes Gomes de Zurara, members of these expeditions expressed concern that a translator who was a Muslim captive would defect once among other Muslims, or translate in ways that would benefit his or her own precarious position.⁶² Go-betweens could assume the role of arbitrator, someone whose allegiance was crucial to the success of colonial projects, yet who ultimately ended up favoring a certain side in the encounter, or whose actions were aimed to benefit only themselves. Intermediaries were often shrouded with suspicion, due to their ability to speak multiple languages and inhabit two or more worlds.⁶³ While members of these early Atlantic expeditions may have relied on Arabic speakers as cultural brokers, they did not entirely trust them.

In this context, labeling someone a Morisco and noting they did not attend Mass was sensitive in its connection with the Crown’s projects to evangelize indigenous peoples and professed concern to limit their exploitation by Spanish settlers. In their role as intermediaries, interpreters could easily fall under suspicion of manipulating translations for personal gain. This anxiety is reflected in Licenciado Lorenzo de Tejada’s charges against the interpreters accused of being Moriscos. The judge of the Audiencia of Mexico took aim at Triana’s trustworthiness, in what must have been an attempt to cast doubt on his reliability as an interpreter: Triana was “such a liar that he never, or only by mistake, tells the truth, and a very bad Christian who never enters any church, nor has anyone seen him confess.”⁶⁴ Tejada claimed Marcos Romero took advantage of his role as translator in order to trick and mistreat the Indians. Romero’s frequent drunkenness also led him to lie and hurl insults, rendering him as dubious a figure as his cousin Triana.

Each of these charges amounted to an attack on the interpreters’ personal honor. The full list of charges presented by Tejada as he summoned witnesses against Triana noted that because he lived among Indians, took part in their dances, and “serve[d] them for pay and as watchman of their fields, which is the greatest cowardice, vileness and dishonor that a Spaniard can do in this land.”⁶⁵ Triana also “eats with them [the Indians] on the ground” and is “so full of vices and bad customs that in these parts there is not known a man so vile … of so little honor and such a bad Christian.”⁶⁶ Marcos Romero was also a “very poor man of vile roots (raiz) without honor or shame.”⁶⁷ Clearly outraged, Tejada exclaimed, “even if one looked, I wager that there would not be found in all of New Spain or in any of the Indies three persons so vile, without honor, and bad Christians, so lacking in truthfulness and shame, nor in whom coincide so many ugly and enormous vices as in the said … naguatatos.”⁶⁸

As seen in the denunciations against Triana, Romero, and Ortiz de Zúñiga, perceived new Christian presence added to already existing anxieties about the catechization of indigenous peoples and the infiltration into the Republic of Indians of non-Catholic beliefs and unorthodox behavior. Spanish authorities increasingly restricted Spaniards’ and Africans’ access to indigenous communities, and the recent converts from Islam fell in between these two categories. Some Moriscos did make their way to Spanish America during the early years of colonization, before greater attempts were made to enforce the royal decrees restricting emigration. In a few cases local authorities requested their participation in local projects, as interpreters or as artisans, occupations traditionally associated with Moriscos. A number also arrived as slaves.

MORISCO SLAVES

Many of the Moriscos arriving in Spanish America during this earlier period were slaves who accompanied their masters’ households as dependents. The royal licenses granted for them to emigrate placed strict limits on the length of their presence in Spanish America. However, a number of these Morisco men and women remained in Spanish America, either because their masters looked the other way, or because they were able to run away and forge new lives for themselves, in communities where they would presumably, although not always, go unrecognized. Traces of these individuals can be found in the records of the Casa de Contratación in Seville, which kept track of the length of time Morisco and North African slaves remained in the Americas. The license that Bartolomé de Anaya y Villanueva obtained for his berberisca slave María in 1624 to accompany him to New Spain, where he was to assume his post as secretary of the Consejo de Guerra, shows the process whereby slaveholders proved their slaves were qualified to enter the Indies. Anaya summoned witnesses who signed statements that María was commonly held to be “a Christian, because they see her go to Mass and pray, and she does Christian works.”⁶⁹ The final portion of the document was her official royal license to emigrate without restrictions, “despite being of the berberisca nation,” and like most official licenses, it listed her identifying markers: María was “twenty-four years old, white, fat, branded on the chin and forehead.”⁷⁰ While no limits were placed on María’s term in this license, earlier ones show that individuals of lesser status were subject to restrictions on the number of years their slaves could spend in the Indies, and could be prosecuted if they did not comply. For example, in 1578 the Crown issued a royal decree to the officials of the Casa de Contratación, to ensure that Ruy Díaz de Mendoza return the two Morisca slaves he brought to New Spain for a limited period of four years, and if he did not comply, that he would be punished.⁷¹

In 1512 Hernando de Peralta was granted a license to bring to the island of San Juan two esclavas blancas, or “white slaves,” a term often applied to Moriscas, so long as they were baptized Christians. They were to be brought for the service of his wife and household, which he was transplanting to San Juan.⁷² Another license was granted in 1537 to Licenciado Iñigo López de Cervantes who was traveling to Santo Domingo as judge (oidor) of the audiencia, to bring two esclavas blancas in addition to four African slaves. The two slaves were Christians, “raised in his household,” and they were granted royal licenses so long as López de Cervantes could prove they had been Christians since before the age of twelve.⁷³ The license stipulated that the women “be brought to the island of Hispaniola … for the service of his household. He cannot take them from the said island to any other place other than to return them to these kingdoms [Spain].”⁷⁴

Many of the enslaved Moriscos were women, and some of them were eventually freed. They gained status through marriage to Spaniards, thereby joining prominent or upwardly mobile families in the Peruvian viceroyalty.⁷⁵ In 1968 James Lockhart proposed that Morisca slaves “did not have a broad spectrum of roles,” acting only as concubines for Spanish male conquistadors. They then “disappeared from view” during the 1530s with the arrival of Spanish old Christian women who were the preferred companions.⁷⁶ However, their supposed disappearance was likely related to the cédulas restricting Morisco immigration, which were issued during this period. Such restrictions and brushes with authority may have driven individuals to be more careful when transporting slaves, or when emigrating to the Americas themselves. In this sense, Joanne Rappaport’s idea of the “disappearing mestizo” is useful in describing the active choices individuals made to present themselves before their communities. This goes beyond racial “passing” by encompassing attempts to hide one’s lineage or religious identity while making claims to status in colonial society.⁷⁷

Testimonies describing the slave market in Lima in one riveting case mention the notable presence of Moriscas in Peru. In 1543, Juana, a “white slave” and a Morisca from Tunis, petitioned for her freedom before the Royal Audiencia and Chancery of Panama. She had been the slave of Hernando de Zevallos in Peru before she was sold to cover a debt that he owed the royal treasury. Juana’s new master Juan de Cáceres freed her and her infant daughter Ynés, but Zevallos wanted them back, citing the nullity of their sale to Cáceres, under an illegitimate judge appointed by Diego de Almagro the Younger’s tyrannical government, formed after the assassination of Francisco Pizarro. Zevallos also claimed that his debt to the royal treasury was unfairly leveled against him by another “tyranically” appointed alcalde and should now be forgiven.⁷⁸ Juana gave Luis Suárez, the father of her daughter, power of attorney. He was to appeal in her name to the Royal Chancery in Panama the order that the governor of Peru, Licentiate Cristóbal Vaca de Castro (1541–44), had issued in favor of Zevallos that he keep Juana and Ynés as his slaves. Juana and Luis Suárez presented the freedom papers (carta de libertad) given to her by Cáceres and emphasized that “in conformity with the law, her freedom should be favored being as she is a free person possessing a title…. It should never have been ordered that she return to servitude and captivity.”⁷⁹ They expressed concern that Zevallos was planning on labeling Juana and her daughter physically as his property, by “marking them with a brand or a sign so that they appear to be subjected to servitude, being as they are free persons…. [This mark would be] injurious and an affront.”⁸⁰ Witnesses testified that Juana had conceived Ynés with Luis Suárez who was an “honorable and rich” Lima merchant and whose responsibility it should be to free the girl, especially as Juana became pregnant after having been manumitted by Cáceres.⁸¹ A number of witnesses also discussed the average price of Morisca slaves auctioned in Lima, as Zevallos was attempting to determine the value of Juana and her daughter. Alonso de Huete testified in Suárez’s favor, saying that he knew Juana and that she and her daughter were worth no more than 300 or 350 pesos because he “had seen other Morisca slaves sold in Peru for less, who were as beautiful or more so than the said Juana.”⁸² Two other witnesses for Suárez testified to similar practices in Lima, including Jerónimo de Aliaga.⁸³ Aliaga stated, “According to what he had seen, there have been sold in Peru Morisca slaves of Juana’s quality for [300] and [400] pesos, some for more and others for less.”⁸⁴ Miguel Vendrés added, “According to the experience and knowledge I have concerning slaves, especially Moriscas, Juana as a slave and her daughter could be worth up to 400 pesos of gold, in the places and provinces of Peru.”⁸⁵ The Council of the Indies finally ruled in 1547 that Zevallos drop his cases against Juana Morisca and Luis Suárez, and cover the cost of the trials. Juana and her daughter were now presumably free either to live with Suárez who had remained by their side during the years that the trial unfolded, or to forge their own lives altogether.⁸⁶ In 1547 she is mentioned in the final documents of the case as a resident of the city of Nombre de Dios in Panama, and Suárez had assumed the post on the city council of Nombre de Dios previously held by his brother. By this time, Suárez and his extended family represented merchants in Seville and Panama, and they ran one of the most lucrative firms in Peru.⁸⁷ Juana’s case is echoed in others of Moriscas in Peru who associated themselves with prominent families.

REQUESTS FOR MORISCOS DENIED

Local authorities in Spanish America on a number of occasions requested that the Crown send Moriscos to help settle and build colonial towns and fortifications. Reputed to be skilled artisans in Spain, Moriscos were sought to start silk-raising production in New Spain and to build fortifications in Havana and along the northern coast of South America in the area that is today Venezuela. These requests were eventually denied by the Crown, and Moriscos were not officially granted licenses to pass to the Americas to carry out these activities. However, as the cases of interpreters show, their perceived usefulness enabled some to make the journey anyway, supported by powerful Spaniards in need of their services.

During the early years of Spanish colonization of the Caribbean islands and mainland, the granting of licenses and the enforcement of emigration restrictions was more fluid. Officials of the town councils and royal courts composed a stream of letters to the Council of the Indies, lamenting the small Spanish population and requesting that more emigrants be recruited to populate and settle the new towns.⁸⁸ From the late 1550s to 1575, African slaves were transported to Havana to construct the fort of La Fuerza, and approximately two hundred slaves continued to work on urban military constructions into the seventeenth century. According to Alejandro de la Fuente, in 1596, some of the forty-five forced laborers on Havana’s forts were Muslim and Turkish slaves.⁸⁹ These Havana slaves also included the Mandinga and Wolof peoples of the Senegal Valley, deemed Muslims and potentially rebellious. In the seventeenth century the neighboring Fulo, also thought to be Muslims, joined the Mandinga and Wolof as slaves in Spanish America.⁹⁰ The Spanish Crown placed some restrictions on their importation to the Americas, but a number nevertheless were also forcibly taken across the Atlantic. In Havana, local officials were aware of the presence of Muslims laboring as royal slaves, and in the 1650s ordered slave owners to declare their Muslim and North African slaves.⁹¹

Demands were similar along the northern coast of South America, in the defense of the coastline of what is today Venezuela. By 1600 fears of Dutch incursions along the Caribbean basin led local officials to petition the Crown for assistance in defending their towns and islands. In 1604 the engineer of the Cartagena fortifications Juan Bautista Antoneli examined the salt pans of Araya, a haven for Dutch smugglers. Antoneli determined that the salt mines should be inundated via canals linking the ocean with the low-lying salt-producing areas, in order to discourage the Dutch who had been actively loading their ships with salt. Approaching the eve of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, Antoneli requested that the Junta de Guerra de Indias allow between five and six hundred Moriscos from southern Spain to travel to Araya to construct the canals that he hoped would drench the salt pans, rendering them useless to the Dutch.⁹² While gaining initial support from the Junta de Guerra, Antoneli’s project was soon abandoned due to lack of funds.

Moriscos were noted for their skills as artisans in Spain, and some local colonial officials considered bringing them to Spanish America to work on a number of projects. This was in sharp contrast to Crown policies. In 1537 the bishop of Mexico Friar Juan de Zumárraga requested that a group of married Moriscos be allowed to travel to New Spain to teach indigenous peoples the delicate art of raising silkworms and producing silk. Zumárraga hoped sericulture would provide both a civilizing activity and a source of income for the indigenous peoples congregated in the newly founded mission communities.⁹³ However, the Crown rejected his request to grant Granadan Moriscos licenses. The intricate wooden ceiling and door carvings on churches in the new city parishes and countryside doctrinas also suggest the work of Morisco carpenters and artisans in Spain. However, recent art historians have found evidence that Amerindians trained by Spanish artisans and clerics, not Moriscos, participated in their construction in the Americas.⁹⁴ If Moriscos ever did labor on these, they most likely would not have been officially listed as Moriscos in the records, after requests like those of Zumárraga were turned down by the Crown. The churches of the doctrinas were well inland, in close proximity to indigenous dwellings, unlike the fortifications that drew galley slaves who were bound by royal decrees to return to their ships in the more cosmopolitan ports such as Havana, Callao, or Veracruz.

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Due to the concerns over title and dominion, the Spanish Crown sought to control and limit access to indigenous peoples to only devout Catholics who could prove good social standing, pious behavior, and eventually trace their lineage back several generations to old Christian families. While there was some demand for Moriscos and North Africans to labor in the Americas, primarily as slaves, but also as interpreters and artisans, due to their perceived linguistic abilities or skills as carpenters or silk workers in Spain, the Crown’s concerns with evangelization took precedence. Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish monarchs issued a number of royal decrees restricting emigration. However, enforcement wavered during the early conquests, and free emigrants obtained false licenses or crossed the Atlantic in a variety of clandestine ways.

Unfree emigration accounted for the presence of many Moriscos in Spanish America, and the status of slaves plays into the discussions over the social standing of suspected Morisco encomenderos and wealthy office holders. This is a very different dynamic from the one that conversos faced. Although Jews in medieval Iberia could in theory be enslaved under similar conditions as Muslims, no such cases in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain or Spanish America were uncovered during my research. As potentially enslaveable, Moriscos faced a very specific set of circumstances that defined their social status. Actions, dress, customs, and appearance mattered, and descriptions of individuals in the courts emphasized some elements over others in determining if someone had been a slave, whether someone could be enslaved, or whether they could possess honor and the accompanying benefits.