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Introduction

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish authorities restricted emigration to the Americas to long-standing Christians, individuals who could prove they descended from families that had been Catholic for at least three generations. Due to the Crown’s preoccupation with maintaining religious orthodoxy across an expanding empire, frequent royal decrees prohibited Moriscos or Iberian Muslims, many of whom had been forcibly baptized at the beginning of the sixteenth century, from settling in Spanish America. But these laws, like so many others during the period, faced uneven enforcement. The extensive legislation prohibiting Morisco emigration has led many historians to assume that no or very few Moriscos settled in Spanish America. However, the rich parallel historiography concerning Spanish and Portuguese conversos in the New World, who were subject to the same legislation as Moriscos, suggests that individuals evaded the restrictions by a variety of means and settled in the forbidden territories. That the royal decrees were reissued on a regular basis also indicates that controls on emigration were not so tight in practice and that individuals discerned openings through which to slip unnoticed.

Moriscos, both free and enslaved, traveled clandestinely from Spain to Spanish America. Colonial sources reveal their mobility both geographically through the crossing of the Atlantic and socially as they forged new lives for themselves. While the numbers of Moriscos appearing in the archives are relatively low, representing only the denounced, their presence had a significant impact on colonial Spanish American society and the everyday workings of empire. Indeed, even small numbers could induce powerful anxieties about defining nation.¹

Understanding the attitudes projected onto Moriscos and North African Muslims by sixteenth-century Spaniards can reveal how Spaniards were coming to understand empire and their place within it. For some commentators, the presence of Muslims and Moriscos in Spanish America challenged prevailing notions that Spain was a Catholic empire whose goal and justification rested on the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity. Some Spanish officials were actively defining their role as members of a nation on the verge of acquiring preeminent status through conquests overseas and the incorporation of a new continent and its inhabitants into its sphere of influence. Spaniards brought with them definitions of conquest and colonization drawn from both their experiences with non-Christians on the Peninsula and in the Mediterranean, and their interpretations of Greek and Roman texts. The role that Muslims played in these understandings of “Spanish” nation and identity, and by extension empire, was crucial. In creating their global empire, Spanish authorities drafted and debated a series of policies that were informed by their interactions with peoples in various parts of the world and at home. They aimed to create a Catholic empire, and in doing so, they focused their attention on molding the religiosity and customary practices of peoples in the Americas.

Moriscos inspired extraordinary fears among many Spanish imperial authorities, who associated Muslims with rebellion and disloyalty. These officials conflated religious and political loyalty, and they viewed Moriscos as a fifth column that would ally with the Ottoman Turks or with North African corsairs. Peninsular attitudes toward Moriscos hardened by the late sixteenth century, at a moment when royal officials were also concerned with maintaining their empire and jurisdiction over Amerindians. Anxieties about native rebellions and incomplete conversions were increasingly embedded within these fears of Muslims and Moriscos. Royal authorities’ restrictions on travel to the New World also tightened during this period, as they required prospective emigrants to prove their purity of blood and exemplary Christian conduct. Accordingly, depictions of Morisco and Muslim bodies became increasingly racialized, and eventually colonial officials composed treatises that projected these images onto indigenous bodies in the form of arguments advocating native groups’ subjugation and enslavement.

During the sixteenth century, Muslims and Moriscos were being incorporated into colonial legal categories, and anyone suspected of being a Morisco was obliged to define themselves in relation to these categories.² Individuals labeled Moriscos could negotiate their status in court, by arguing in Spain that they were “good and faithful Christians,” or in Spanish America, that their actions during the conquests gave them the same rights to rewards and status as any other Spaniard. In the case of Moriscos, religious identity contributed greatly to how individuals were perceived and incorporated into the emerging Spanish nation.

Much of the prevailing work on citizenship, identification, and belonging in various corners of the early modern world has focused on the eighteenth century, but a rich and growing body of scholarship addresses these questions for the earlier period.³ My work intervenes to shed light on how these relationships operated in the lives of suspected Moriscos in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America. For example, the ways that people described each others’ public behavior and appearance, and by extension a group’s religious and customary practices, had legal implications. Descriptions of individuals and of peoples informed legal identities such as Spaniard, Indian, African, the mixed-race castas, new or old Christian, noble or commoner, slave or free person. These public identities could be appropriated, manipulated, or redefined through litigation or self-presentation to establish oneself through “public and notorious” behavior to which witnesses could testify.

Printed and manuscript works such as titles of nobility, accounts of services to the Crown (probanza de méritos y servicios), and histories of conquest also rendered an individual’s status public in a variety of legal settings. A copy of an individual’s méritos y servicios could have many afterlives, circulating from the viceroyalties of New Spain or Peru to Spain and back again, before being transmitted to heirs who could request recognition for their ancestors’ deeds during competing claims for lands or encomiendas. A conviction by an inquisitorial tribunal could similarly impact future generations through the hanging of sanbenitos in churches and the circulation of pamphlets naming individuals penitenced or executed in autos–da–fé. Witnesses who testified in each case, whether an individual wanted a license to emigrate, freedom from slavery, or to enslave others through claims to just warfare, or increase in status, dredged up rumors and gossip about families that carried weight in the courtroom. In this context, ideas about Muslims and Moriscos played a critical role in defining colonial relationships. Some Spanish authorities increasingly associated Moriscos with racialized qualities and invoked anxieties about converted Muslims and their descendants to justify both imperial policies and the outcome of local court cases. By studying the often-overlooked references to Muslims and Moriscos in colonial documents, we can better understand how sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century inhabitants of Spanish America conceived of their relationships to each other and of their own location within the empire.

The black North African slave Estevanico who accompanied Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca on his journey across the American Southwest is one of the better-known converts from Islam. Like many Moriscos in Spanish America, traces of his presence survive in few sources. Unlike the three other survivors of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, Estevanico did not produce an account (probanza de méritos y servicios) describing his sufferings and heroic deeds during the expedition. Instead, he is only glimpsed in the writings of Cabeza de Vaca, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and Friar Marcos de Niza, whom he later accompanied on an ill-fated expedition to the Zuni. Reputed to have been from Azemmour in the Kingdom of Morocco, and the slave of Andrés Dorantes, also a survivor of the Narváez expedition, Estevanico acted as scout and intermediary during Cabeza de Vaca’s journey.⁴ He was not the first Arabic speaker to be sought out to accompany an expedition in Spanish America. In fact, some officials requested Moriscos for their perceived skills as interpreters or artisans. Yet from the earliest voyages to the New World, the Spanish Crown issued decrees that restricted the overseas presence of new Christians of Muslim and Jewish descent. Throughout the sixteenth century, additional royal decrees issued by subsequent Spanish monarchs reinforced and expanded these initial measures.

Perhaps the most we know about Estevanico concerns his death at the hands of the Zuni. The surviving Spanish accounts describe him in contrasting ways, from fellow Christian and “persona de razón” to, in Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s words, the object of indigenous rage who assaulted local women and behaved like a “bad man, and not like the Christians who never kill women.”⁵ Were his associations as an alárabe, the term Cabeza de Vaca used to describe him in his Relación, enough to cause him to be cast as such a violent figure? Suspicions that someone was a Morisco carried with them a series of associations that surface in the denunciations housed in the inquisitorial archives. Similarly contradictory images appear in trials from the royal courts (audiencias) across Spanish America, as in the case of Diego Romero, an encomendero in New Granada who was accused of being a runaway North African slave. As will be explored in later chapters, Romero defended himself successfully as one of the privileged first conquerors of the region whose services to the Crown entitled him to retain his encomienda. Depictions of Estevanico in the Spanish sources remain consistent with contemporary perceptions of Moriscos, revealing the local contests and rivalries as individuals negotiated their status in their new surroundings. While Estevanico could not speak for himself in the colonial records, other cases like Romero’s step in to suggest some of the dynamics taking place.

Estevanico’s case, and the language his contemporaries used to describe him, raise the question of what model we can apply to studying Moriscos in the early modern Spanish world. The meaning of the term “Morisco” was slippery and varied depending on who was using it. It would therefore be problematic to accept the narrowest definition of Morisco, as a Muslim convert to Catholicism.⁶ I move away from trying to determine who was or was not a Morisco, thereby mirroring Spanish authorities’ assumptions about Moriscos, by shifting the focus to practices and attitudes that early modern Spaniards associated with Moriscos.⁷ Expanding the term Morisco to include its usage in Spanish as an adjective, “Muslim-like,” can also broaden and pose questions about a range of cases in which the accused may or may not have resembled what we traditionally think of as Morisco. Defining Morisco as Muslim-like would have also resonated with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish audiences. Accusations ranged from religious practices to language, dress, occupation, and racially inflected physical descriptions.⁸

I use the term Morisco in its broadest sense, in a way that would have been intelligible to Spaniards during the early modern period. The word “Morisco” had appeared in Castilian beginning in the medieval period as an adjective to refer to all things “Moorish” in material culture. By the first decade of the sixteenth century, after the first Alpujarras rebellion when Granadan Muslims rose up against violations of the surrender treaties negotiated after the 1492 conquest of that city, many were forced to choose between exile and baptism. “Morisco” began to be applied to a few of these converts from Islam, although the label “newly converted from a Muslim” (nuevamente convertido de moro) was more common. Nonetheless, by the mid-sixteenth century, the term Morisco gained greater currency and was being conceived of broadly as a quasi-legal category, to define converts to Catholicism from Islam. In practice, Morisco described a range of people. Some descended from voluntary converts in medieval Iberia who had gained privileges under Christian rule from their new status, including exemption from certain taxes. During the sixteenth century many of these Castilian Moriscos petitioned the Crown to be considered old Christians, having converted before the forced baptisms at the turn of the sixteenth century.⁹ Others attempted to continue to practice their versions of Islam in secret, as was the case with many of the Granadan and Valencian Moriscos who were swept up in the waters of mass baptism. This was a difficult proposition, as the Granadan and Valencian Moriscos were increasingly subject to restrictions on not only their religiosity but also their cultural and regional practices. North African baptized slaves, known as berberiscos, were also sometimes referred to as Moriscos in contemporary documents. Prior to baptism, they were also sometimes called alárabes, as occurred with Estevanico. The derogative term “moro” (Moor) that was applied to Muslims throughout the early modern Spanish world denoted a category separate from that of Moriscos and also had legal implications.¹⁰ For sixteenth-century Spaniards, Muslims were not subject to the same rights and privileges as Christians, and the Moriscos who rose up in protest during in the second Alpujarras rebellion in 1569–72 were labeled moros and apostates, thereby subjecting them to enslavement, something that was not permissible for Christians. In the Philippines, moro referred to members of the Muslim population of the islands who were also subject to enslavement, unlike many other indigenous groups under Spanish rule.

As a legal category, defined according to religious terms and varying geographically, Morisco could invoke some protections despite its marginal connotations. For example, Moriscos could also claim status as baptized Christians who were not subject to enslavement and who were legitimate members of the body politic. During the period leading up to the expulsion, some Castilian Morisco communities, supported by their parish priests, defended themselves as good Christians and loyal subjects against those making arguments against them. In contrast, proponents of the expulsion focused on exclusionary and protoracist imagery, defining Moriscos as Muslims and apostates who were excluded from the emerging Spanish nation. How Moriscos and old Christians understood this label and applied it to themselves and to others therefore varied greatly.

By examining Morisco as a legal category, I am concerned with the meaning that the debates over the status of Moriscos in Spain held for contemporaries and their transformation and repercussions in communities across the Atlantic. My focus is on how individuals labeled Moriscos negotiated their public reputations, both as they faced secular and religious authorities’ attempts to categorize them and in daily interactions in their communities. Spanish jurists and theologians, and people on the streets, became increasingly invested in defining and describing customs and behavior, in ways that had legal implications. Descriptions of a range of peoples, from Muslims and Moriscos to Amerindians, were invoked in the realm of imperial policy at the Spanish court and universities, in the courtroom, and in published works that connected customs to groups of peoples, making arguments about their status. I am interested in how the category of Morisco was conceived of and invoked in a New World context. What did it mean to be a Morisco and to be deemed a Morisco in the Americas? How did images of and ideas about Moriscos and Muslims circulate overseas? How did they enter into daily interactions “on the ground” as Spaniards, Africans, and indigenous peoples negotiated the spatial and ethnic boundaries of a new colonial society? How did individuals conceive of and define community in the early modern Spanish world, and how were such conceptions set in motion to include and exclude people? Accusations of Morisco descent were leveled in disputes over offices and encomiendas. The legal makeup of the category Morisco, as construed by religious and cultural practice that was constituted publicly, pointed to who could enjoy certain rights or be denied others.

In the pages that follow, I trace how legislation and attitudes concerning Moriscos in Spain crossed the Atlantic, assuming new forms and meanings in Spanish America. Debates over the legal status of Moriscos in Spain that ranged from restrictions on their religious practices, to whether or not they could be enslaved, influenced Spanish policies and attitudes toward indigenous peoples. The label “Morisco” held public meaning, constituting evidence that could be brought into court and reflected the “public and notorious” nature of an individual’s gestures, speech, and performance in charged settings such as during Mass. Contemporaries tied Catholic religiosity to trustworthiness in business and personal relationships and loyalty to the Crown.

Few historians have studied the ramifications of Morisco emigration to Spanish America, and to date no scholars have delved into the wealth of archival documentation on Moriscos in the Americas to produce a monograph on the subject.¹¹ In contrast, a rich parallel historiography on the conversos, Iberian converts from Judaism and their descendants, has surveyed their religious practices, social relationships, and transatlantic commercial networks. Historians working on this subject have examined how individuals continued to practice their faith in the face of increasing persecution and have focused on periods of intense inquisitorial repression during the union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns. Works on the conversos suggest how migration to the Americas brought a number of advantages to those wishing to escape increasing inquisitorial surveillance in Spain. The benefits of remaining within a familiar Iberian culture may also have attracted free Moriscos to the Americas. Moriscos and conversos did emigrate to Ottoman lands following their expulsion from the Peninsula, but they were not always welcomed by the societies where they settled.¹²

Before the 1570s, conversos who wished to live as Catholics, or to continue practicing their faith without the constant pressure of the Inquisition, could do so in territories where the tribunals in Peru and Mexico were not yet officially established.¹³ Ecclesiastical authorities’ complaints about the difficulties of regulating religiosity on the frontiers of the expanding Spanish Empire suggest that areas far from Lima and Mexico City provided greatest respite from inquisitorial control. An obsession with purity of blood arising from the statutes of limpieza de sangre and stemming from competition over offices between old and new Christians in Spain also intensified in Spanish America with the establishment of inquisitorial tribunals.¹⁴

The creation of empire and patterns of settlement produced an interconnected world as individuals and ideas crossed the Atlantic. Morisco emigrants, as both individuals who struggled to join a community that was increasingly restricting their activities, and as fictive entities who fueled authorities’ fears and sparked denunciations, shed light on the negotiated nature of empire in the Spanish world. Yet there was no single pattern that emerged in the Americas, and the range of experiences under consideration requires close analysis of a series of case studies that reveal how Moriscos negotiated their status, religious practices, and relationships. Through a thorough examination of colonial legislation, inquisitorial records, and court cases it becomes possible to reconstruct individual actions and explain how they illuminate broader imperial relationships. Such cases shed light on issues of religious identity, honor, and local power struggles, including the role that images of Muslims played in Spanish ideologies of conquest and in the uneven consolidations of colonial rule. Furthermore, the presence of Moriscos in Spanish America, as well as the circulation of knowledge about them, complicates notions of what it meant to be a Spaniard and part of an early modern Spanish world. Morisco presence requires us to rethink the colonial category of Spaniard (español) by troubling its implication of an “old Christian” who possessed purity of blood and formed part of a unified Catholic society. Moriscos and conversos formed part of the Republic of Spaniards, despite attempts to racialize these categories and exclude them from membership in the emerging nation and empire. Moriscos also appear in colonial discourses, interacting with peoples of indigenous and African descent, pointing to more complex ways of understanding how people negotiated status and defined belonging to a community. The story begins in fifteenth-century Iberia, in changing relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and in the first Spanish and Portuguese voyages to conquer the Atlantic islands and find trading routes that put them in contact with new peoples.