The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain 9781784996970

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The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY This series aims to publish challenging and innovative research in all areas of early modern Continental history. The editors are committed to encouraging work that engages with current historiographical debates, adopts an interdisciplinary approach, or makes an original contribution to our understanding of the period. Series Editors Joseph Bergin, William G. Naphy, Penny Roberts and Paolo Rossi Also available in the series Jews on trial: The papal inquisition in Modena, 1598–1638    Katherine Aron-Beller Sodomy in early modern Europe    ed. Tom Betteridge Princely power in the Dutch Republic: Patronage andWilliam Frederick of Nassau (1613–64)    Geert H. Janssen, trans. J. C. Grayson Representing the King’s splendour: Communication and reception of symbolic forms of power in viceregal Naples    Gabriel Guarino The English Republican tradition and eighteenth-century France: between the ancients and the moderns  Rachel Hammersley Power and reputation at the court of Louis XIII: the career of Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes (1578–1621)    Sharon Kettering Absolute monarchy on the frontiers: Louis XIV’s military occupations of Lorraine and Savoy    Phil McCluskey Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720    eds Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, Benjamin Kaplan and Judith Pollman Daum’s boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in early modern Germany    Alan S. Ross Orangism in the Dutch Republic in word and image, 1650–1675   Jill Stern The great favourite: the Duke of Lerma and the court and government of Philip III of Spain, 1598–1621    Patrick Williams Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.com

The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain CHRISTINA H. LEE

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Christina H. Lee 2016 The right of Christina H. Lee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 7849 9120 3 hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Figures Acknowledgements Note on translations Introduction

page vii ix xi 1

I  The usurpation of nobility and low-born passers

21

1 Theorising and practising nobility

23

2 The forgery of nobility in literary texts

47

II   Conversos and the threat of sameness

99

3 Spotting Converso blood in official and unofficial discourses

101

4 The unmasking of Conversos in popular and literary texts

124

III Moriscos and the reassurance of difference

151

5 Imagining the Morisco problem

153

6 Desirable Moors and Moriscos in literary texts

184

Conclusion

213

Bibliography Index

221 237

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Figures

2.1 Jacob Matham, Envy (c.1587). Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org).

82

2.2 Jacques Callot, Envy, from the Seven Capital Sins (c.1610). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Dr Ludwig A. Emge.

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3.1 Photograph of a Sambenito in the Cathedral of Tuy (Galicia) with the name and image of a judaiser condemned by the Inquisition in 1619. Asociación Galega de Amizade con Israel.

110

5.1 Vicente Mestre, Detail from Departure of the Moriscos in the Port of Denia (1612–1613). Fundación Bancaja de Valencia.

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5.2 Vicente Mestre, Detail from Departure of the Moriscos in the Port of Denia (1612–1613). Fundación Bancaja de Valencia.

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Acknowledgements

The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain marks the culmination of about ten years of research. It sprang out of a different book project, which had attempted to examine Cervantes’s exceptional treatment of the dominant religio-cultural practices of his time. It dawned upon me a couple of years into the project that I was spending as much time analysing the fascinating language and tropes that appeared in so-called historical accounts as I was the literary texts. It was at that point that I gathered the courage to write the book I was implicitly developing, that is, a broader study about the early modern Spanish obsession with genealogical purity. This book would not have materialised had it not been for the scholarly support I received during this long journey from friends, family, and fellow Hispanists. Ignacio Navarrete played a key role when he introduced me to Cervantes’s Don Quixote when I  was an undergraduate at Berkeley. I  am indebted to Alban Forcione, my doctoral adviser at Princeton, for more generally guiding me through the fascinating masterworks of the Spanish Golden Age, and for convincing me early in my career that I  too could be an early modernist. I  consider myself incredibly fortunate to have Marina Brownlee and Ronald Surtz as my senior colleagues at Princeton. I am grateful to Marina for being a great source of encouragement during some of the most laborious moments of writing this book. I owe Ron for advising me to come back to Princeton as a faculty member and for mentoring me since my return in 2007. I am especially beholden to him for the endless hours of stimulating conversations and laughter, and for his critical assessment of this book in its earlier and less appealing variants. Ron, I cannot thank you enough por decirme las cosas sin pelos en la lengua. I would also like to thank the many scholars who made helpful comments on the parts of this book that I presented at meetings of the Renaissance Society of America, the Sixteenth Century Society, the Cervantes Society of America, the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, the

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Modern Languages Association, and the Renaissance and Early Modern Studies programme at Princeton University. I am indebted to the office of the Dean of the Faculty for facilitating travel and access to research materials through a number of grants, and to our outstanding library and its head, Karin Trainer, for the amazing resources and services they have provided. I am grateful to the editorial staff at Manchester University Press, who could not have been more helpful and professional during every step of the process of turning my manuscript into a book. I would also like to thank the two anonymous peer-reviewers who carefully read my manuscript and whose excellent feedback has made this book better. There is a proverb that says that it takes a village to raise a child. The same may be said about bringing a book to light. I am forever grateful to my ‘village’ friends in Princeton: Karen Hong, Francois Gaudet, Joann and Jarett Messina, Nelly Alvarado and – especially – to Pei Hsiang, my children’s Ya-ya. Thank you for your confidence in my work, your encouragement, and for babysitting and hosting more play dates and sleepovers than was fair. To my Umma, thank you for being such an exemplary model of resilience. Growing up in Buenos Aires in the 1970s and 1980s with my grandfather, Kyo-Bum Lee, provided me with the foundational tools that have defined my academic interests. I only wish he were alive today to see this book in print. I am grateful to him for imbuing me with a love of reading and with a desire to understand the richness and complexities of all cultures, without prejudice. His aspirations for a professorship in History were cut short by the Second World War and the Korean War, yet he persevered in his intellectual pursuit in exile and amidst the difficulties of living under dictatorial regimes, first in South Korea and then in Argentina.To him I owe him the gifts of inquisitiveness and perspectivism. I dedicate this book to David, my best friend and feminist partner, who never once questioned my decisions to sometimes suddenly go to Spain for research, or my absences during vacations and family gatherings; and who bore the heavier load on too many weekends so that I could have uninterrupted time to think and write. Thank you, David, for walking next to me throughout my journey in birthing this book.

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Note on translations

Unless otherwise stated, all English translations of Spanish texts are the author’s.

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Introduction

A well-known urban legend in late 1500s Seville concerned an unnamed so-and-so, or in Spanish, a fulano. According to the version published by a former prosecutor at the jail in Seville, the breakout took place in broad daylight. The chained prisoner, a man from Cabra (Córdoba), had been placed at the altar of the infirmary, where he was to await his execution the next day. Approaching a black inmate who worked in the infirmary, the condemned man cried for help: he urgently needed to urinate, but with the chains around his ankles, he was not likely to reach the distant latrine in time. Expressing pity for the condemned man, the black man carried him on his back; however, along the way – in the blink of an eye – the fulano was lifted onto a partition wall. He climbed up to the ceiling and, with the aid of a drill, managed to make a small hole. Although the hole was only large enough ‘to fit a mouse’ (‘caber por él un ratón’), the man was able to somehow slip through and escape.1 Meanwhile, his black helper became stuck in the hole as he attempted to follow suit, and removing him required taking down the roof the next day. Once free, the fulano moved to a nearby fishing town and blended into the community unnoticed, until he was captured a year later. The legend of the rogue who slipped away from the underworld like a mouse – or, according to another source, an eel – indulged Spaniards’s paradoxical fascination and perturbation with the idea that their exclusive social spaces were being secretly infiltrated by stained or innately immoral subjects. In this book, I explore the Spanish fixation on ‘passing’ and ‘passers’ as represented in a wide range of texts produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More specifically, I examine cases – from fictional and non-fictional sources – that express the anxiety of dominant Spaniards (of assumed highborn ancestry and/or Old Christian lineages) that low-borns, Conversos (converted Spanish Jews and their descendants) and Moriscos (converted Spanish Muslims and their descendants), could and did impersonate and pass as ‘pure’ Christians like themselves.

2

Introduction

According to anthropologist Mary Douglas, societies tend to define as pollution or ‘dirt’ the elements within their individual community that challenge the validity of the system that places structure on that particular community. For Douglas, ‘[t]‌here is no such thing as absolute dirt’, for dirt is simply ‘matter out of place’.2 Whatever might be termed anomalous, ambiguous, and ambivalent within a specific social order is classified as polluted and polluting. In order to create a unity of experience and to enable the avoidance of contamination, says Douglas, ideas and rules are set up to demarcate the polluting components of the social body from the non-polluting components. Especially applicable to early modern Spanish discourses is Douglas’s observation that ‘[i]t is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created’.3 This exaggeration is, then, a means for preventing the subversion of the established social order, but it is also a way to maintain the veneer of neatness in cases in which the supposed polluter challenges their predetermined role. My study further pursues the implications of circumstances when dirt, in its personified form, refuses to be contained and crosses over into the territory of the ‘clean’. How do those who are presumed to be pure respond to the threat of infiltration? And what are the specific tactics they employ in their attempts to secure their social spaces and identities? Passing or deliberate identity concealment is a concept that Barbara Fuchs brought to the study of Miguel de Cervantes’s literary production in Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity.4 Fuchs argues that Cervantes exposes his audience to the notion of the fluidity of individual identity by producing scenes in which characters impersonate one another’s ethnicity, religion, and gender. For Fuchs, the trope of passing allowed Cervantes to obliquely challenge the Crown’s attempt to exclude or alienate minorities of Moorish or Semitic lineages from the social/political centres of the body politic. More specifically, she argues that the discourses of passing in Cervantes’s fiction may be viewed as the writer’s response to the official rhetoric of categorising normative and marginal Spaniards by exposing the permeability of identity boundaries. Complementary to Fuchs’s book, which is primarily concerned with analysing the subaltern’s strategies for crossing traditional boundaries of identity, my study sheds light on how the dominant reacts and responds to those who are believed to cross traditional boundaries of identity, as well as how they repudiate the very notion of the fluidity and arbitrary constructiveness of identity. Additionally, I seek to capture the representation of human experience from a broad range of cultural expressions (which includes some works by Cervantes): prose fiction, plays, poetry, jokes, aphorisms, and other ‘popular’ modes as well as official discourses and court records. This approach stems from the notion that representations of social realities and perceptions may be

Introduction

3

captured texturally from imaginative literature as well as from non-literary narratives. In selecting which texts to examine, I have placed more weight on a text’s representational significance than on its aesthetic value. Inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s approach to cultural productions, I adopt the view that all types of narratives – whether technically literary or not – can be meaningful sources for the analysis of ideological discourses.5 As argued by Greenblatt, avoiding a preconceived notion of literariness may allow the critic to become engaged with texts that might reveal unanticipated aesthetic dimensions.6 In step with Mary Douglas, James Boon, Clifford Geertz, and other anthropologists, Greenblatt suggests that ‘the facts of life are less artless than they look, that both particular cultures and the observers of these cultures are inevitably drawn to a metaphorical grasp of reality’.7 This approach recognises that all cultural practices are shaped by the circulation of a type of social currency, a ‘social energy’ infused by emotions of power, anxiety, and desire.8 This social energy is reflected in textual representations, which themselves contribute to that very same social energy.9 I  focus on one important aspect of the social currency of early modern Spain, that is, the anxiety that arose from the physical similarities between peoples of supposedly conflicting religious origins and inherited social ranks, and on how this anxiety shaped the world-view of dominant Spaniards. Ever since Américo Castro demonstrated the pervasiveness of impersonation among converted Jews and low-borns during early modernity, studies on early modern Spain have been considerably focused on unveiling the strategies utilised by new Christian converts and alleged social inferiors to express dissenting views in the context of Counter-Reformation Spain.10 The investigations of the literary and cultural critics Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Carroll Johnson, William Clamurro, and more recently Barbara Fuchs have reminded us that in seemingly innocuous scenes of disguise and masking, one may find glimpses of the mechanisms used by Conversos, Moriscos, and/or low-borns to survive and, in some cases, thrive in unfavourable environments.11 The premise of this scholarship is that subaltern Spaniards camouflaged their religio-cultural roots and unorthodox ideas as a means to coexist with dominant Spaniards – that is, Old Christians (Spaniards without Jewish or Moorish ancestry) and presumed high-borns – who were intolerant of beliefs and behaviours that ran counter to conventional Christian ideology. This approach has implicitly postulated that the social energy that led to the massive marginalisation of Conversos, Moriscos, and/or low-borns from central social spaces, and the marginals’s attempts to hide their true identity, had its roots in the dominant’s rejection of sociocultural and genealogical heterogeneity, or ‘difference’. My book proposes that there was a parallel phenomenon at play during early modernity that might have been as resounding and influential as an

4

Introduction

anxiety roused by the presence of those who were clearly different. It examines a cultural phenomenon that stems from the insecurity and distress generated when boundaries that differentiated and separated the dominant and the marginal of society could be breached, diminished, or even forgotten, sometimes to the point of changing the very identity and meaning of belonging to the dominant group – a phenomenon I call ‘the anxiety of sameness’. I argue that while conspicuous religious and socio-cultural difference was certainly perturbing and unsettling, in some ways it was not as threatening to the dominant Spanish identity as the potential discovery of the arbitrariness that separated them from the undesirables of society – and therefore the recognition of fundamental sameness. Taking this perspective does not require one to diminish the value of the approach of the past several decades, which has emphasised the subversive discourses of alterity. Indeed, a focus on the complex narratives that underline the ideology of the dominant individual or group could be viewed as the natural counterpart to the examination of the discourses of marginality. While the dominant narratives I examine are varied and, at times, conflicting, they are comparable in that they express an invested concern with the identification of difference through visible appearance or other decipherable indicators. The anxiety of sameness, in the way it is conceptualised here, blooms in the Spanish imagination as the result of the efforts for cultural homogenisation in the post-1492 period, after the Jew and the Muslim disappear from the body politic and at a point when all Spaniards were officially Christians. It is an anxiety that takes the form of an obsession with identity fraud and, more specifically, genealogical fraud. The texts I examine, produced largely in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, express an unprecedented and heightened awareness that identities are malleable and that they could be subject to self-fashioning; that a person’s self-presentation might mask his or her inherited identity. These works speak of a reaction to the culture of outward compliance, dissimulation, and identity camouflaging that followed the expulsion of the Jews (1492), the Muslims (1502–1526), and the Moriscos (1609–1614), as well as the legalisation of discriminatory practices targeting genealogical ‘inferiors’, namely Conversos, Moriscos, and low-borns. I  agree with Georgina Dopico Black that, by the seventeenth century, the lack of ‘any reliable way to identify otherness’ generated ‘a kind of nostalgia for the more secure legibility of bygone days’.12 This is not to say that anxieties about religious, social, or genealogical camouflaging were completely absent prior to the period on which this book is focused. To better appreciate the flourishing of this type of anxiety in early modern Spanish texts, it is helpful to consider the preceding events that influence the development of the genealogical fixation. Historians have noted that

Introduction

5

the mass conversions that resulted from the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391, and the barrage of segregation rules and economic restrictions placed on non-Christians in the early 1400s, engendered doubts about the authentic faith of the newly converted.13 David Nirenberg points out that both Jews and Christians (old and new) were fearful of betrayals within their own groups, and grew frustrated at the inability to pin down the religion of individuals who had converted and/or apostatised. But Nirenberg clarifies that the link between religious ancestry and religious affiliation was rarely made.14 It was in the second generation after the first mass conversions that natural or birth Christians (cristianos de natura) began to place a growing emphasis on religious inheritance. This development coincided with an unparalleled number of new converts gaining distinguished political positions in royal, urban, and ecclesiastical administration in Castile and Aragon and further infiltrating oligarchies by marrying into aristocratic circles. Jewish converts Fernando de Cavallería, who became the royal treasurer of Fernando I of Aragon, and Pablo de Santa María, who became Bishop of Burgos and a trusted counsellor of Enrique III, were well known among very many other Conversos whose baptisms were followed by their meteoric rise within influential institutional hierarchies.15 The authenticity of the conversion of Muslims in Christian Castile and Aragon, in contrast, was not a matter of contention in the high middle ages due to the mere fact that conversions were so rare among Muslims living under Christian rule. Brian Catlos has found that, save a few exceptions, Mudéjares in late Christendom tended to hold on to their religion and cultural practices, even in cases of enslavement.16 Mark Meyerson’s research confirms that ‘until 1501 the complicating factor of a large number of Moriscos, Muslim converts to Christianity, did not exist … there was still no confusion between Muslim and Christian identities [sic]’.17 Mudéjares were not overtly interested in Christian conversion and absorption. Ana Echevarría found in her study of Muslim converts in Castile, based on about a hundred Moorish guards of King Juan II and King Enrique IV, that most of the New Christians had conspicuously retained their native place-name or their father’s name, following Islamic tradition.18 It could be surmised, then, that Conversos were singled out as problematic while the few Moorish converts were not, mainly because the latter were not in positions that could exert fiscal authority over the general population and did not compete for political posts with Old Christians in urban oligarchies or in the royal courts. Fiscal problems and anxieties about political competition were indeed factors that led to the earliest theorisation of the corrupted lineage of Conversos during the Toledan revolts of 1449. It is necessary to emphasise, nonetheless, that the uprisings in of themselves were not exclusively motivated by

6

Introduction

anti-Semitism. According to Angus MacKay and Nirenberg, the revolts manifested a general frustration of the Toledan population and its leaders, which was grounded in a complex combination of the sharp rise in prices of food staples in the mid-1400s, the decline in the economic fortunes of the petty nobility, and political rivalries between the non-Converso Toledan elite and the government of Juan I.19 The revolts began as protests against a tax levied by Juan II’s constable Álvaro de Luna at a time when there was serious crisis of subsistence in the region. Mobs, rallied by an odrero (leather-bottle maker) known to have been infuriated by the two gold coins he was forced to pay by tax collectors, burned the home of the Converso municipal treasurer Alonso Cota and slaughtered a number of other Conversos who had come to the defence of their neighbour.20 The anti-Semitic turn of events – which resulted in the burning, pillaging, and murder of Converso residents – came only after the alcaide and royal liaison Pero Sarmiento turned against Juan II and became the primary demagogue of the rebellions.21 Sarmiento – resentful about a recent demotion at Court  – seized on the collective disappointment with the Crown’s fiscal policies and essentialised the issue as a Converso problem. Sarmiento asserted that virtually all Conversos were Christians only in name, and as they were indistinguishable from their Jewish parentage, sought to destroy the bodies and souls of Old Christians.22 The sentencia-estatuto – an incipient form of a limpieza de sangre or purity of blood statute – formulated by Sarmiento and fellow Toledan rebels ruled that all persons of Jewish linage should be barred from all public offices in the city of Toledo. In subsequent versions, limpieza clauses also encompassed Moriscos and heretics. It is in the sentencia-estatuto, Max Hering Torres points out, that we first find the manifestation of the idea that Old Christians were lindos, that is, pure.23 Inspired by Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Antonio Dominguez Ortiz’s inference that both lindo and limpio derive from limpidus (clean or clear), Hering Torres makes the perceptive observation that ‘as the language of the decree illustrates the concept of limpieza de sangre had not yet emerged, but that of lindos had’.24 Sarmiento essentially suggests that religious identity and behaviour are inextricably connected to a person’s lineage. Conversos are ‘descendants of the perverse lineage of the Jews, in any guise’ who are responsible for ‘heresies and other wrongdoings, seditions, and crimes’.25 He furthermore implies that despite the fact that they identify as Christians, they cannot be trusted. Just like their progenitors, they strive to destroy and cause harm to Old Christian hidalgos, their ladies, and their estates with cunning and deceit. In a move that anticipates the authors of Converso lineage catalogues (libros verdes), Sarmiento ends his pronouncement by exposing the names of existing officials of Converso descent, which he deems ‘convenient to learn’ in order to discharge them from their posts.

Introduction

7

The sentencia-estatuto was repudiated by Juan II and condemned by Pope Nicholas V, as well as Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (the grandfather of the first Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada) and the Bishop of Burgos Alonso de Cartagena (son of Pablo de Santa María), among other religious high officials.26 All opposing arguments insisted on the shared inheritance of Jews and Christians and on the spiritual sameness between baptised Jews and baptised gentiles.27 Support for anti-Converso legislation, however, continued in some sectors, especially after the founding of the Inquisition in 1478, which was itself motivated largely by a need to distinguish the truly converted from the fraudulent ones. Statutes excluding Christians of Jewish descent were passed in the 1480s by two universities, the Colegio Mayor of San Bartolomé (Salamanca, 1482) and the Colegio Mayor of Santa Cruz (Valladolid, 1488), the military orders of Alcántara and Calatrava (1483), the Hieronymite order (1486), and the Spanish Inquisition (1483). In the first half of the 1500s, a few other important religious, educational, and military institutions passed statutes of limpieza, such as the Benedictine house of Montserrat (1502), the Cathedral Chapter of Bajadoz (1511), the Cathedral Chapter of Seville (1519), the Franciscan Order (1525), the military order of Santiago (1527), and the Cathedral Chapter of Córdoba (1530). Henry Kamen has alerted us about the dangers of exaggerating the impact of these statutes, as he asserts that they were not widely implemented until the second half of the sixteenth century. Kamen points out that the limpieza exemption decrees of the late 1400s were intermittently applied and were generally used against Conversos who had been condemned as heretics.28 The efforts to officially disenfranchise Conversos, the attacks they suffered during the mass revolts throughout the second half of the 1400s, and the fear of the Inquisition had an ironic and unintended outcome that became more evident a few generations later. Conversos began to contrive actions that disengaged them, at least superficially, from their religious origins. They progressively moved out of Jewish neighbourhoods, adjusted their eating practices to those of the local majority, abandoned rituals long practised by their ancestors, married into Old Christian families, and hid their Jewish lineages.29 The priest Andrés Bernáldez wrote in his Historia de los reyes católicos (History of the Catholic Monarchs) (c.1488–1513) that an unacceptable number of Conversos had become ‘learned men and scholars, and bishops, and canons and friars, and abbots, and accountants, and secretaries, and officers of Kings and of Grandees’.30 Bernáldez expresses dismay at the arrogance and vainglory that Conversos displayed after having acquired wealth and prominent social positions, in his estimation, through deceitful commercial practices such as usury and by marrying their children to Old Christians of good names.31 But what upset Bernáldez most is that immoral Conversos – in his estimation some of them secret Jews – were successfully able to pass for ‘good’ Christians.32 The

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Introduction

camouflaging of Jewish ancestries among Conversos was not new. What is compelling, however, is that it became a common practice among Conversos, as all unbaptised Jews and Muslims (1502–1526) were expelled after the fall of Granada in 1492, and especially as statutes of limpieza gained momentum in the mid-sixteenth century.33 As cultural differences between New and Old Christians were growing more ambiguous, the boundaries between wealthy commoners and the low nobility were also becoming more porous. In the texts I examine, the socially dominant could be seen as delineating the members of undesirable groups through the production of discourses that promoted myths about the heresy and the foreignness of New Christians or the uncouthness of false hidalgos (the lowest ranked noblemen). This book explores the multilayered and contradictory obsession with genealogical passing – which often complemented social passing and vice versa – at its height.34 It examines the perspective of individuals who self-identified as genealogical ‘betters’ – Old Christians and/or noblemen – and who found the religio-cultural sameness claimed by Conversos, Moriscos, and commoners problematic and destabilising. It seeks to reveal the discursive methods that the insecure but socially dominant subject utilises in order to imagine impure lineages and classify the other in monolithic terms. Among financially insecure Old Christians and/or members of the established nobility, in particular, we see a pervasive fear that they could be potentially mistaken for or even surpassed by others who bore a likeness in semblance but who were traditionally viewed as innately inferior to them. The divergence between the idealised depiction of the foreign Moorish nobleman of pre-Reconquest times and the problematised rendition of the Spanish Morisco illustrates the point that the clearly demarcated outsider was preferable to the Spaniard whose identity was more culturally hybrid and malleable. The Moorish knight in the Abencerraje (1561, 1562, 1565)  commands an irreproachable dignity and virtue, something with which his Morisco successor is never endowed. There are a few examples in popular anecdotes about the wisdom of pre-Reconquest Jews, but among the texts I evaluate I have not found a single literary text published and contextualised in the post-1492 period in Spain in which a Converso is identified as an unequivocally exemplary character. And while some social reformers produced compassionate accounts about orphans and the abject poor, and proposed measures to improve their lot, they condemned the socially mobile, whom they often identified as overreaching Conversos or Jews. The anxiety of sameness is a by-product of the anxiety of difference. This is not to say that both anxieties – of sameness and of difference – cannot coexist in the same discourse. Indeed, an anxiety of sameness cannot take root without a pre-existing fear and hostility towards difference embodied in the other. In Spain, this anxiety arises in spaces in which material markers become less

Introduction

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effective in classifying subjects into the dominant and the marginal. The dominant then responds to the fear of being overtaken by a passing subaltern by desperately imagining differences – real or not – that would reinforce the validity of the ruling social system. In the case of the urban legend of the runaway, both the black man and the fulano are seen as dangerous beings who must be confined away from legitimate society. Not nearly as threatening as the fulano, the black man cannot escape, and even if he succeeded, he could not blend into society. The fulano is aware that the black man’s body is too pronounced to coalesce into the masses and purposely makes an aperture that will only allow himself to pass to the other side of the roof. While the black man’s overt figure guarantees his inevitable confinement, the fulano’s eerily versatile body allows him to ‘miraculously’ escape his imprisonment and pass as an acceptable member of Spanish society. Upon hearing this story, Spaniards might have felt that they were under the imminent menace of passers whose bodies were unreadable. After all, anybody could be a fulano or the progeny of a fulano, perhaps even without being aware of it. The question of why Iberian Hispanic blacks never posed a social or political ‘problem’ in the way that Moriscos and Conversos did is a subject that needs to be investigated further and falls outside the bounds of this book. In order to begin to approach this complicated question, however, it might be helpful to consider that blackness was associated with the most abject servant class in the period I examine, even if not all blacks were slaves.35 The majority of Iberian Hispanic blacks were by and large of sub-Saharan origins, and were forcibly brought to Spain to be sold in the slave market.36 In early modern Seville, sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants formed the largest group of slaves, followed by light-skinned North African Muslims (berberiscos) and Canary Islanders among others.37 Historians of Iberian slavery of early modernity seem generally to conjecture that black slaves were in demand because they were stereotyped as being more docile and less likely to flee than berberiscos.38 José Luis Cortes López argues that they were also believed to be more prone to subjugation, especially if they were bozales (non-natives and not speakers of a romance language), were amenable to Christian conversion, and were non-agents in competitive socio-economic spaces.39 Berberiscos had the reputation of being arrogant, deceitful, false converts to Christianity, and given the chance, prone to betray their masters. It is possible that the fear of betrayal developed from the stereotype that the berberisco slave was a former enemy whose dormant violence had to be contained. Debra Blumenthal found in Valencian court cases of the late fifteenth century that while Muslim slaves were ‘presented as feared but respected enemies, these black African moros seem to have been regarded as beneath fear and beneath contempt’.40 Baltasar Fra Molinero’s study of black characters in Golden Age Spanish theatre supports the view that blacks were

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Introduction

formulaically portrayed as either comically simple-minded or potentially dangerous to the body politic but containable because they were seen as being naturally barbaric, morally inferior, and ultimately acquiescent of their contingent existence. Like the black man in the legend of the fulano, the plays examined by Fra Molinero represent the body of the black man as bearing the sign of ostensible difference, which provokes anxiety but it is at the same time paradoxically represented as a mark of safety to the body politic.41 In contrast, the anxiety of sameness provoked by the equivocal body of the fulano, the body that could potentially carry the Jew, the Converso, or the low-born, breeds imaginative scenes of persecution.42 This study identifies and explores the representations and expressions of this anxiety of sameness. It analyses scenes in which socially dominant Spaniards are beset by the breakdown of the boundaries that separate the high and the low and by the perils of hidden social stains. Not knowing who did and did not carry a stain led to the danger of infiltration, of contagion, guilt by association, and identity devaluation. This ambiguity suggested that even the noblest Spaniard who prided himself or herself on his or her pure Visigothic roots could be a passer or the unknowing descendant of one. The anxiety of sameness is, ultimately, a manifestation of the early modern individual’s confrontation with his or her own subjectivity. In Part I: ‘The usurpation of nobility and low-born passers’ (Chapters 1 and 2), I discuss representations of the identity crisis that social mobility engendered among members of the established nobility. Hidalguía or nobility by birth was a privilege shared by all of the noble ranks of Spain, whether they were, in order of ascending grades, hidalgos, caballeros, títulos, or grandes. It was a condition that recognised the genealogical superiority of noblemen over common people. Noblemen were guaranteed, among other material benefits, exemption from direct taxation. But more significant than the financial advantages given to hidalgos was their claim to social honour. All hidalgos, with the exception of hidalgos who had purchased rather than inherited their title, expected and demanded to be publicly acknowledged as equals by fellow hidalgos and to be esteemed as superiors by common men. Given that it was naturally impossible for commoners to ever become birth hidalgos, the next best option for wealthy merchants and farmers with aspirations of breaking rank was to feign nobility. Successful false nobles would, then, go to great lengths to have their claim to hidalguía validated in the royal courts with a writ known as the carta ejecutoria. The perception that true hidalgos were under the siege of low-born impersonators is conveyed in official and prescriptive discourses as well as literary works of the period. For the royal canon Pedro Fernández de Navarrete the pragmatic approach to thwarting the breeding of ‘pseudonobles’ was to prevent commoners from aspiring to social mobility in the first place.43 He argued

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that the children of farmers and manual labourers should learn the trades of their parents and be discouraged from pursuing professional careers. Francisco de Quevedo, famously known for his contempt of New and Old Christians with upward mobility, used satire to express his frustration at his own inability to be able to know who was a real nobleman and who was a passer. Throughout his works, Quevedo draws attention especially to the essential role that money plays in the fashioning of a fraudulent nobleman. For Quevedo, money, or Don Dinero as he sarcastically calls it in a poem, can deviously reverse the natural social order and transform a miserly shopkeeper into a caballero. In my discussion of Diego de Hermosilla’s Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio (Dialogue about the Life of Palace Pages) (1573), a dialogue on the subject of nobility that has received little critical attention, I argue that the writer of the treatise voices the anxiety experienced by the impoverished hidalgo towards socially mobile merchants, often passing for hidalgos, who surpassed them in wealth and rank. The impoverished hidalgos of Hermosilla’s dialogue echo other treatise writers, who believed that passing low-borns had laid siege to the traditional nobility and ‘usurped’ their highborn names with the purpose of destroying their noble lineages. But, as expressed in Hermosilla’s work, the hidalgo’s identity paradoxically depended on the commoner’s longing for his title. As much as hidalgos insisted on having commoners comply with the expectations of their inferior status, hidalgos also wished them to covet their noble titles. Without the envy of others, hidalguía failed to be a social reality and existed as nothing more than a legal status that might have qualified a person for certain theoretical privileges. In the imagination of the ostensible Old Christian elite, all kinds of impure types were passing into what they believed to be their exclusive domain. Just as the rogue of the legendary story of the jail of Seville could turn himself into a mouse or an eel-like creature and slip into lawful spaces, bastard foundlings were believed to be to able turn themselves into lawyers, and low-born merchants into prestigious members of government councils. The literary figure of the Spanish rogue – or pícaro – may be seen as embodying the prototype of contemptible low-borns. Indeed, the picaresque works I  examine show that their anti-heroes’ immoral activities are essentially propelled by an unquenchable envy of the hidalgo.The pícaros of Lope de Vega’s El caballero del milagro (The Knight by Miracle) (1621), Francisco de Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos (The History of the Life of the Swindler Named Don Pablos) (1626), and Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (The Girl of the Lies,Teresa de Manzanares) (1632) manage to infiltrate and almost stain the lineage of unsuspecting victims. I argue that rather than representing the closure to social mobility or the ‘re-feudalisation of Spain’, as purported by Antonio Maravall, these picaresque works could alternatively express the very

12

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opposite point of view: that upper mobility was too accessible to undesirable subjects. The texts I  analyse express the fears of their target audiences by conjuring up the worst-case scenarios of break-ins and veiled assaults by illicit low-borns and by resolving them sensationally on behalf of the ostensible Old Christian elite. They also give the intended readers the sense that they can peek into the otherwise mysterious lives of these imagined impostors and proffer the false impression that they have an insight into the well-shielded secrets of their deceptive performances. I continue the discussion with the example of a different and unique narrative phenomenon, less satirical than the picaresque but also written for the noble circles and its sympathisers. I focus on Vicente Espinel’s representation of what his public would have considered the extreme case of social demotion suffered by a virtuous hidalgo. The case presented in Espinel’s novel Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (Tales of the Life of the Squire Marcos de Obregón) (1618) concerns its eponymous protagonist, a nobleman of the lowest rank, whose poverty forces him to live in a state of servitude to others, who often have shameful backgrounds. The story of Obregón certainly played out one of the most frightening cases for financially insecure nobles. It imagines the nightmarish scenario in which an hidalgo has been stripped of the external markers of his class – dress and other signs of wealth – and lives like a commoner, without the social respect that is guaranteed to his class. I end my discussion of social anxiety with an interpretation of the hidalgo hero in Cervantes’s Don Quijote as a figure who initially incarnates the anxiety of sameness and eventually conquers it. The knight-errant departs on his journey with the objective to show the world that he was born for eminence, but in the second part of the book, as the dukes try to turn him into a stereotype, he places greater value on his individuality and softens the elitist social views he had promoted in the first part of the novel. His final return home, confession, and self-baptism as Alonso Quijano el Bueno is proof that he can only find absolute peace when he accepts his sameness with the rest of humanity. Both commoners and New Christians were often described in elitist narratives as abominable people, but the label of manchado/maculado (stained) or sucio (dirty) was almost exclusively associated with the latter and, more precisely, with Conversos. Derogatory terms for Conversos connoted either uncleanliness, such as Marrano (pig),44 or emphasised the unreliability of their religious identities and loyalties, such as tornadizo (turncoat, renegade) and confeso (one who confesses, repented renegade). The texts I  examine in Part II:  ‘Conversos and the threat of sameness’ (Chapters  3 and 4) construct and reinforce the notion of the deceitful identities of Conversos and their stained lineages. They manifest the fear by Old Christians that they were

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under the constant danger of having their lineages contaminated by unidentifiable Conversos who attempted, and often succeeded, at secretly melding their stained blood with the pure blood of Old Christians. These texts implied that if armed with knowledge of the distinguishing features of Conversos, Old Christians could become proficient at identifying even the most sophisticated veneer of sameness. Discursive forms of denunciating passing Conversos, furthermore, were unofficial methods of propagating and reinforcing the view that Conversos were morally and physically distinct from Old Christians. Among these we find religious and medical treatises aimed at rendering the Converso body as subhuman and tainted. Theologians Pedro Aznar Cardona, Vicente da Costa Matos, Francisco de Torrejoncillo, and the medical doctor Juan de Quiñones (Philip IV’s personal physician) argued – making extensive references to biblical, classical, and scientific sources – that Jews and Conversos exhibited their sinfulness through physical signs, such as elongated rears and skin eruptions, and/or suffered from periodic anal bleeding. Cataloguing the genealogies of presumed Conversos was another method of unmasking Old Christian impersonators. Libros verdes or green books were anonymous catalogues exposing the hidden Converso taint in the ancestries of distinguished families. They aimed at curbing the efforts of Conversos who strove for cultural sameness. I  focus on the anonymous Libro verde de Aragón (The Green Book of Aragón) (1507) and El tizón de la nobleza española (The Stain of the Spanish Nobility) (1560) by Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla. Both genealogies reveal a clear, albeit implied, aim: to unyoke the meanings of hidalguía and limpieza. Green books were essential components of the machinery that produced difference in early modern Spain. But in the end, it is hard to dispute that oral and written genealogies heightened the anxiety of sameness instead of curbing it, especially in high social circles. While treatises and other elite forms of literature focused on highlighting the difference embodied by the Converso through the use of (pseudo) scientific, historical, and biblical references, popular narratives produced for the general public were more invested in perpetuating the image of Conversos as essentially greedy, non-pork-eating Jews. The folklore of anti-Semitic tales and jokes has been passed on to us partly in written versions, which appear in Melchor de Santa Cruz de Dueñas’s Floresta española de apotegmas o sentencias (A Forestal Compilation of Apothegms or Maxims) (1574), Luis de Pinedo’s Libro de Chistes (Book of Jokes) (c.1550), and Luis Zapata’s Miscelánea (Miscellaneous Tales) (1592). Variants of many of the popular stories in these collections were also incorporated in dramas, poetry, prose fiction, and in other miscellaneous writings. Regardless of the literary forms, the tales invariably voice the Old Christian’s resistance to acknowledging that social and cultural sameness between Converso and Old Christian could eventually be a reality. The

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anonymous author of the Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura (Dialogue between Laín Calvo and Nuño Rasura) (1570) and Quevedo in his anti-Semitic satire similarly aim at revealing the hidden Converso body, but they are more interested in rendering Converso bodies as grotesque entities that arouse their audience’s sense of utter disgust. The Old Christian anxiety of being unknowingly stained by the passing Converso through marriage is specifically addressed by Lope de Vega in his play El galán escarmentado (The Reproved Gallant) (1598). In this play, the archetypical Converso  – wealthy, arrogant, and overreaching – fails miserably in his attempt to infiltrate pure Old Christian lineages. The Converso is denied sameness and Lope de Vega’s presumed Old Christian audience is expected to be relieved at this happy outcome. I  conclude my discussion of the fear of passing Conversos with an analysis of Cervantes’s El retablo de las maravillas (The Spectacle of Marvels) (1615), a play representing the madness and disorder that ensues when limpieza-obsessed Old Christians find themselves incapable of tagging the impure subjects who, they believe, live amongst them. Ultimately, Cervantes alludes to the dominants’s fear of confronting the unbearable truth that they might not be different from the conspicuous impure after all. The term Morisco could be used as an insult when said in a disparaging tone and context. Nonetheless, unlike Converso – and evidently confeso, tornadizo, or Marrano – the word Morisco was less uniformly stigmatised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term begins to be used in legal documents to denote a Christian convert of Muslim origins more uniformly in the first half of the 1500s. Prior to it, cristiano nuevo de moro (Moorish New Christian) and its variants were the common designations of Muslim converts.45 In literary texts, the term Morisco was somewhat unstable. It generally carried negative overtones, but not necessarily. It could indicate a subversive subject, if he or she is portrayed as a renegade or overreaching, but it could also be used to designate a pitiful subject deserving compassion as long as he or she recognised the inferiority of his or her origins and did not try to hide his or her ancestry. Prior to the wars in the Alpujarra Mountains, the Morisco nobleman Francisco Núñez Muley wrote a memorandum to the non-Morisco leadership in Granada, requesting that Moriscos be allowed to continue practising certain key Moorish customs that he argued were non-Islamic. In the memorandum, Núñez Muley referred to himself and his peers as the naturales del Reino de Granada (natives of the Kingdom of Granada). The use of the common euphemism punctuated the fact that Moriscos were not foreigners, but rather long-time residents of the kingdom going through a slow process of acculturation.46 As Bernard Vincent argues, Núñez Muley’s limited use of the word Moriscos is probably reflective of the negative impressions Old Christians had of the term.47 After the rebellion of the Moriscos in the Alpujarras, the

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characterisation of a Morisco as a natural del Reino de Granada could be used to connote subversiveness along with ancestral longevity in Spain. As conflicting as the responses that the appellation Moriscos could prompt on non-Moorish Spaniards were the views regarding the faithfulness of Moriscos to Christianity and to the Spanish King at the end of the 1500s. Disregarding opposing views, the Spanish Crown justified the official expulsion of more than 250,000 Moriscos between 1609 and 1614 – about 4 per cent of the Spanish population – by arguing that they were innately foreign members of the Spanish kingdoms and lacked the capability to acculturate to Old Christian society. In Part III: ‘Moriscos and the reassurance of difference’ (Chapters 5 and 6), I concentrate primarily on texts in which, in opposition to the Crown’s view, Old Christians expressed tolerance of the cultural differences that set Moriscos apart from Old Christians. I first introduce the propagandistic discourses that justified the expulsion of the Moriscos by figuring Moriscos as the last Moors of the Reconquest, and therefore potential enemies within. I also evaluate Pedro de Valencia’s Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España (Treatise on the Moriscos of Spain) (1606), a text that historians and literary critics have deemed to be exceptionally progressive in the context of the time when it was produced. Valencia believed that instead of expelling them, the government should double its efforts to completely and definitively convert all baptised Moriscos. For Valencia, ‘true’ conversion entailed the Moriscos’s abandonment of all Moorish rituals, dress, and food, and their willingness to intermarry with Old Christians. Valencia believed that religio-cultural tensions could be eliminated if Moriscos achieved absolute cultural and social sameness with Old Christians. But I  argue that Valencia’s premise that Old Christians could only tolerate Moriscos if they mirrored them in semblance and behaviour runs counter to the sentiments expressed in some of the testimonies given by Old Christians in judicial cases. In three specific cases that I examine from the post-expulsion period, Old Christians tolerated Moriscos as long as there were some undeniable, distinguishing traits, and as long as they did not threaten the established economic and social order. The ‘good’ Moriscos – those whose attempts to avoid expulsion were aided by Old Christians – were likely to have simultaneously established reputations as devout Christians and as individuals who recognised their inherent inferiority to Old Christians. In other words, Old Christians saw these Moriscos as being acculturated enough to communicate, socialise, and provide meaningful services to Old Christian society, but were comforted by the fact that their underclass status made them unlikely passers. The Moriscos’s signs of difference, in this context, functioned as unassailable marks that reminded Old Christians of their superiority. In effect, a ballad composed years after the expulsion purports that the Moriscos were expelled not because they were

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unable to acculturate, but on the contrary, because they began impersonating the appearance and behaviour of wealthy Old Christians. The maurophilic trend in literature, which romanticised the Moor before he became a Morisco, might be indeed interpreted as evidence that Old Christians were more at ease in situations where the assigned inferior subjects carried visible signs of difference. In my readings of Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa (History of Abencerraje and the beautiful Jarifa) (1561, 1562, 1565) (Morisco ballads), the first part of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (The Civil Wars of Granada) (1595, 1604), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra (Tuzaní from the Alpujarra) (c.1633, also known as Amar después de la muerte (Love After Death)), I find that Spaniards may have been attracted to the figure of the noble Moor because he embodied the exemplary defeated enemy. His conspicuous exoticism made him desirable and ultimately domesticable by the figure of the Christian Knight. Cervantes further explores the Old Christian attraction to the figure of the exotic Christianised subject in the second part of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1615). Through the exposition of the fictionalised case of Ana Félix, a Morisca attempting to be exempted from the Morisco expulsion edict, Cervantes suggests that her capacity to survive in Spain depends on her willingness to fully repudiate her cultural heritage and at the same time accept that she will not be fully absorbed into the Old Christian population. Cervantes appears to point out through this episode that, ironically, Ana Félix, like the figure of the North African Zoraida of the first part of the novel, has a chance to be retained in Christian Spain because she can still be referred to as a mora (a Moor). The anxiety of sameness arises when both the dominant class and potential social passers agree that the dominant class is more desirable and innately superior, and when the barriers for socio-cultural passing are formidable but are nevertheless somewhat permeable, allowing infiltration by the lower-class individual. The purpose of my book is to expose and study literary and non-literary narratives in which the dominant’s anxiety of sameness becomes a focal point in the construction of the other. It does not argue in any way that these discourses were not fraught with self-contradictions or that they were not subject to subversive forms of opposition and resistance. But the narrative ambiguities and contradictory argumentation do not necessarily detract from the dominant’s all-pervasive obsession with markers of difference in the period I examine. In the final analysis, the mere notion that there were passers who succeeded in remaining undiscovered was particularly disquieting because it implied that all subjects could be suspected as being counterfeit versions of ‘true’ Spaniards. My approach to the question of how early modern Spaniards responded to the realisation that their system of classification had been compromised potentially reaches beyond the field of Hispanic Studies. The anxiety

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of sameness may well apply to other societies ruled by an order that allows for permeable cracks and crevices, through which the undesirable can enter and pass as a legitimate member until he or she stops passing and literally ‘becomes’ one. Notes

 1 Pedro de León, Grandeza y miseria en Andalucía:  testimonio de una encrucijada histórica (1578–1616) (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1981), 383–384.  2 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:  An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 5.  3 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 50.  4 Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003).  5 Stephen Greenblatt first discussed at length his approach to the study of texts, which he coined ‘Poetics of Culture’ and which subsequently became better known as ‘New Historicism’, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the NewWorld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). More recently, he (along with Catherine Gallagher) attempted to more clearly articulate the application of the critical approach he founded in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).  6 Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 10.  7 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 4.  8 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 6–11.  9 For Greenblatt, the circulation of social energy is ‘partial, fragmentary, conflictual’, and thus impossible to define (Shakespearean Negotiations, 19). 10 Influential among Américo Castro’s works are España en su historia:  cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires:  Losada, 1948); La realidad histórica de España (México:  Porrúa, 1954); Hacia Cervantes (Madrid: Taurus, 1957); De la edad conflictiva: El drama de la honra en España y en su literatura (Madrid:  Taurus, 1961); Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1966). 11 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del Quijote (Madrid:  Taurus, 1975) and El problema morisco desde otras laderas (Madrid:  Ediciones Libertarias, 1998); Carroll Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana-Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2000); William Clamurro, Language and Ideology in the Prose of Quevedo (Newark:  Juan de la Cuesta, 1991) and Beneath the Fiction:  The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares (New  York:  Peter Lang, 1997); in addition to Fuchs’s Passing for Spain, I  refer to Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 12 Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 41. 13 See Philippe Wolf, ‘The 1391 Pogrom in Spain: Social Crisis or Not?’, Past and Present 50 (1971):  4–18; Angus MacKay, ‘Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-Century Castile’, Past and Present 55.1 (1972): 33–67, at 59–60; Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: El pogrom de 1391 (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1994); and David Nirenberg, ‘Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities’, Past and Present 174.1 (2002): 3–41, at 10. 14 Nirenberg makes the observation that Jews who chose migration over conversion were also suspected by their new Jewish neighbours of having renounced their faith, or they were treated with prejudiced for having received baptism, even if they had done so through force (‘Mass Conversion’, 16–20).

18

Introduction 15 Conversos had successfully taken important roles in royal and ecclesiastical administration, and in some municipal governments, starting in the 1400s. Among highly achieved and noble Conversos were Fernán Díaz de Toledo, relator of Toledo and royal secretary to Juan II; Friar Alonso de Cartagena, Archbishop of Burgos and judge of the Royal Tribunal of Juan II; Alonso de Palencia, Latin secretary and chronicler of Enrique IV; Fernando del Pulgar, secretary and royal chronicler of Enrique IV and the Catholic Monarchs; Friar Hernando de Talavera, personal confessor of Isabel I and Archbishop of Granada; and Francisco de Villalobos, personal physician of Fernando of Aragón. Lope de Barrientos, in Contra algunos zizañadores de la nación de los convertidos del pueblo de Israel (1449) and Fernán Díaz de Toledo in Instrucción del Relator para el obispo de Cuenca, a favor de la nación Hebrea enumerate the names of aristocrats and royal court officials who were of Converso descent. See Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 377–378; MacKay, ‘Popular Movements and Pogroms’, 45–52; Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea,Vol. 1 (Madrid: Istmo, 2000), 129–135; Francisco Márquez’s Villanueva, ‘Conversos y cargos concejiles en el siglo XV’, Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 63 (1957): 503–540; Nicolás López Martínez, Los judaizantes castellanos y la Inquisición en tiempos de Isabel la Católica (Burgos: Seminario Metropolitano, 1954), 56–58. 16 See Brian Catlos, Muslims of Latin Christendom, c.1050–1614 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82–89, 262–280, and 340–346. 17 Mark D. Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 12. 18 Ana Echevarría, The Fortress of Faith (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 192–196. Although there were some areas  – such as in Seville in the early 1400s  – where Conversos similarly flaunted their Jewish ancestry, especially if they had descended from high nobles, Conversos were more likely not to acknowledge their origins (Rafael Sánchez Sauz, ‘Sevillian Medieval Nobility: Creation, Development and Character’, Journal of Medieval History, 24. 4 (1998): 367–380, at 376). 19 Before the uprising in Toledo, there had been attempts to single out Conversos and distinguish them legally from natural Christians in Barcelona in 1433, and to prevent them from becoming notaries in 1436, and to strip them of brokerships in Lleida in 1437. 20 Eloy Benito Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV:  Vida política (Madrid:  Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1961), 33–37. 21 See Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV, 38–59; Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Crónica del Señor Rey Don Juan Segundo (Valencia: Benito Monfort, 1779), 536–539; Juan de Mariana, Historia general de España, Vol. 12 (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Leonardo Nuñez de Vargas, 1819), 45–50. 22 Sarmiento’s belief that Conversos were camouflaged Jews is first stated in a letter to the king in May 1449 (in Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV, 186–190). 23 Max S. Hering Torres, ‘Purity of Blood. Problems of Interpretation’. Race and Blood in the Iberian World. Ed. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 11–38, at 16. Sarmiento refers to Old Christians as ‘lindos’ twice in his document (Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV, 193 and 195.) 24 Hering Torres, ‘Purity of Blood’, 16. 25 ‘Descendientes del perverso linaje de judíos, en cualquier guise que sea’, ‘por razón de las herejías e otros delictos, insultos, sediciones e crímenes por ellos fasta hoy cometidos y perpetrados’ (in Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV, 194). 26 Other distinguished religious and political leaders who were against the sentencia-estatuto were Bishop Lope de Barrientos, Fernán Díaz de Toledo, and Francisco de Toledo. See Robert A. Maryks in The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 4–29. 27 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition:  A  Historical Revision (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1992), 232. 28 Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 233–236; María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 43.

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29 Norman Roth and Benzion Netanyahu argue that although the forced mass conversions in the aftermath of 1391 harboured a strong crypto-Jewish movement, it substantially declined in the following three generations. By the time the Inquisition was established, they agree that most Conversos considered themselves faithful to Christianity. Old Christians were able to distinguish them well into the 1400s because they formed compact groups in urban areas and naturally held on to remnants of Jewish culture (Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), 196–197; Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, 216–270, 317–318). Yitzhak Baer and Yosef Haim Beinart contend, on the other hand, that crypto-Judaism was active all throughout the fifteenth century (Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Trans. Louis Schoffman. Vol. 2 (Philadelphia:  Jewish Publication Society, 1966), 246, 278, 424; Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 2, 19). I agree with María Elena Martínez, who takes the view that the attempt to classify a true convert v. a false convert is problematic in itself because of the impossibility of separating cultural practices from religious beliefs and practices. According to Martínez, most Conversos ‘fell in between these two categories and partook in a variety of Christian and Jewish practices’, depending on their knowledge of Christian/Jewish doctrine, sociopolitical contexts, and personal experiences (Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 38). 30 ‘Sabios, e doctos (sic), e Obispos e Canónigos, e Frailes, e Abades, e Sabios, e Contadores e Secretarios, e Factores de Reyes e de Grandes Señores’. (Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos D. Fernando y Da Isabel, Crónica inédita del siglo XV, escrita por el bachiller, Andrés Bernáldez, cura que fue de los Palacios. Vol. 1 (Granada: D. José María Zamora, 1856), 97). 31 Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos, 98. 32 ‘Algunos se mezclaron con fijos e fijas de Caballeros christianos viejos con sobre de riquezas que hallaron bien aventurados por ello por los casamientos y matrimonios, que ansi ficieron, que quedaron en la inquisicion por buenos cristianos (Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos, 99). 33 Moderate estimates place the number of Conversos who stayed in Spain after the expulsion at about 750,000 (Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain,332). 34 I do not mean to suggest that religious passing was substituted by genealogical passing. In most cases concerning Conversos passing for Old Christians, we see that these concepts appear conflated. 35 Douglas’s point that societies at large believe that marginals ‘who become too numerous and bold can threaten their patron’s lineage’, may partly explain why sub-Saharan Africans were not considered to be a danger to Spanish society at large, like the Conversos or Moriscos (Purity and Danger, 129). 36 Sub-Saharan Africans came overwhelmingly from upper Guinea, Senegambia, and Angola in the sixteenth century (José Luis Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI (Madrid: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989), 160). 37 María del Rosario Santos Cabota found that about 75 to 80 per cent of Sevillian slaves were blacks, while Rocío Periáñez Gómez found that about 66 per cent of the slaves in Zafra, one of the largest slave markets, were black (María del Rosario Santos Cabota, ‘El Mercado de Esclavos en la Sevilla de la primera mitad del siglo XVII’. La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de historia. Ed. Isidoro Moreno Navarro (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), 501–509; Rocío Periáñez Gómez, ‘La introducción de los negros por la frontera extremeña y sus distribución posterior’. La esclavitud negroafricana en la historia de España. Siglos XVI y XVII. Ed. Aurelia Martín Casares y Margarita García Barranco (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2010), 35–54). The number of black slaves increased dramatically between 1580 and 1640 due to the annexation of the Portuguese Crown to Castile and its increased access to the slave trade from Angola and Guinea (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La esclavitud en Castilla durante la edad moderna (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2003), 372). Slaves could also be Turkish Muslims, Arab Muslims, Amerindians, and Asians.

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In the sixteenth century there was an increase in slaves born in Iberia and of mixed race. The captured Moriscos in the Alpujarras wars and after the expulsion of 1609–1614 were also subject to enslavement (William D. Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 14–27). Superficial classifications of slaves became complex. A slave could be called berberisco, blanco, negro, mulato, membrillo, loro, moreno, moreno claro, membrillo cocho, membrillo cocho claro, membrillo cocho oscuro, trigueño, trigueño claro, trigueño oscuro, rubio, rosa, pelinegro, or ‘de buen color’ (Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, 74–77). 38 Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, 72–74; José Luis Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España (Madrid:  Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1986), 59; Manuel Lobo Cabrera, Los libertos en la sociedad canaria del siglo XVI (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1983), 28. Alfonso Franco Silva’s work on Andalucian slavery between 1470 and 1520 shows that the stereotype of the docile black slave was probably not accurate. His study of the records of runaway slaves reveals that out of 297 fugitive slaves, the majority (123) were identified as blacks (La esclavitud en Andalucía 1440–1550 (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1992), 114–121). Ruth Pike points out that a significant portion of thieves and murderers in Seville were black or mulatto slaves (‘Crime and Criminals in Sixteenth-Century Seville’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 6.1 (1975):  3–18, at 15). 39 Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud, 133–150. 40 Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars. Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 272. 41 Fra Molinero’s La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 1995) focuses on entremeses or dramatic interludes and other forms of short plays, and four comedias: Lope de Vega’s El prodigio de Etiopía (1645), El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo (c.1606–1607), and El negro del mejor amo, Antiobo de Cerdeña (c.1599–1603); Diego Jiménez de Enciso’s Juan Latino (1652); and Andrés de Claramonte’s El valiente negro en Flandes o El triunfo por las armas (1638). 42 Although publications focused exclusively on dark-skinned Iberian Spaniards of sub-Saharan extraction are scarce, there is a rising interest in the subject and the expectation is that upcoming findings will lead to fruitful comparative approaches to understanding why blacks were seen as less of a threat than other minorities (i.e., Conversos and Moriscos). Erin Rowe’s work-in-progress on sub-Saharan African saints and their popular following in early modernity might provide further guidance. 43 Pedro Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías y discursos políticos (1626) (Madrid: Don Benito Cano, 1792), 99. 44 Sebastián de Covarrubias supposed that the word was introduced by Moorish inhabitants: ‘[l]‌os Moros llaman al puerco de un año marrano, y pudo ser que al nuevamente convertido, por esta razón, y por no comer la carne del puerco, le llamassen marrano’ (Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. (Barcelona: Editorial Alta Fulla, 1998), 791). 45 Cristiano nuevo de moro, nuevo convertido de moro, and other variants continued to be used along with Morisco (Mercedes García Arenal, Inquisición y moriscos. Los procesos del tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid:  Siglo veintiuno, 1978), 32). Descendants of Muslims or former Muslims from North Africa were not called Moriscos, but berberiscos, gazís, or tunecís. The Moorish who converted prior to 1 January 1492 and their descendants were known as cristianos viejos de moros (Moorish Old Christians) and had the same legal rights as the non-Morisco population (William Childers, ‘Disappearing Moriscos’, Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness. Ed. Michal Jan Rozbicki and George O. Ndege (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 51–66, at 54–58). 46 I discuss Francisco Núñez Muley’s defence of Moriscos in Chapter 5. 47 Bernard Vincent, El río morisco (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2011), 168.

I The usurpation of nobility and low-born passers

‘I took her life so that my noble blood would not be mixed with that of a ­peasant’ – Don Alonso. María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Desengaños amorosos (1647)

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1 Theorising and practising nobility

María de Zayas’s short novel ‘El traidor contra su sangre’ (‘The Traitor to his Own Blood’) relates the following story: Don Pedro is a wealthy and highly respected nobleman in Jaén who is obsessed with preserving or augmenting the purity of his noble lineage and his material possessions. Don Alonso, his son, shares in his father’s extreme ideology and when he finds out that his only sibling, Doña Mencía, intends to secretly wed Don Enrique, he – with his father’s approval – contrives their murders. After stabbing his sister multiple times, he leaves a note beside her body in which he succinctly justifies his action. It reads: ‘I took her life so that my noble blood would not be mixed with that of a peasant.’1 Don Enrique is not technically a peasant himself. He is the grandchild of Old Christian peasant-farmers whose success in the market-based economy allowed their children and grandchildren greater social mobility. The narrator of Zayas’s story, Doña Francisca, tells us that Don Enrique’s family was quickly inducted into the social elite and became one of the most influential in Jaén, because of the financial provisions they made available to the nobility in times of economic crisis. Doña Francisca suggests that the residents in Jaén were unsuspecting, unconcerned, or complicit in Don Enrique’s social passing. The ‘taint [of commonness] in the blood’, she adds, is easy to dissimulate with an Old Christian lineage and money.2 But Doña Francisca does not censure Don Enrique for his origins and admits that, for all intents and purposes, Don Enrique should be recognised as an honourable nobleman. While she attributes Don Pedro’s disdain for Don Enrique and his family to ‘hubris’ (‘soberbia’), she also implies that his contempt is motivated by his fears of social demotion.3 She conveys that Don Pedro and Don Alonso are troubled by financial instability and that, unlike many of the other petty nobles in Jaén, they have refused to befriend Don Enrique’s family, which would be to their benefit. Don Pedro lacks the funds to grant a desirable dowry for his daughter, but he is neither willing to split his family estate nor have her marry beneath

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her rank. Rather than stain his blood, Don Pedro prefers to have his daughter Mencía enter a convent. Don Alonso and Don Pedro’s reaction to Don Enrique’s ‘impersonation’ of nobility reflects the insecurity that some established petty noblemen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced regarding their own status. This kind of angst about social impersonators was caused by their perception that their ranks were under siege by wealthy commoners whose goal was to promote themselves while demoting the lineages of the established nobility. Unlike Don Francisca or Don Enrique’s allies, Don Pedro and his son resolve to force their ideology of nobility into the realm of experience. The predominant theory of nobility was that it was determined by ‘birth’, but as historians have already shown, nobility had more to do with the wealth, the social networks, and the convincing performance of the parties claiming it.4 Don Pedro and Don Alonso refuse to accept the fact that their monolithic world-view is questionable and decide to eliminate the two individuals who expose the conflict. Although Don Alfonso does successfully murder his sister, he fails to eliminate the socially mobile Don Enrique, who survives the attack.5 While I dedicate the second part of this book to discussion of the presumed Old Christians’s responses to passing Conversos, I focus this part on the representations of the anxieties that rose from the belief that fraudulent nobles were actively engaged in exploiting privileges that did not belong to them by birth and in tarnishing the lineage of unsuspecting nobles. The categories are not mutually exclusive, as passing Conversos might be discovered to be false nobles and vice versa. As Zayas’s story evinces through the example of Don Enrique, nobility did not necessarily imply limpieza de sangre.6 Even after limpieza became an essential prerequisite to acquire or to legitimise one’s nobility, it was only one requirement for achieving the status.7 Old Christians and New Christians used similar strategies of masking and impersonation to achieve upward mobility. This chapter’s emphasis on the anxiety about potential social passers highlights the significance that the rhetoric of genealogy could play in determining the moral and social value of an individual, regardless of his or her religious origins. In the texts I examine in the next two chapters, the established nobility is seen as resisting similitude with plebeian trespassers through discourses that assert the genealogical superiority of ‘natural’ nobles  – even if they themselves are not – and the indomitable desire of commoners to destroy their lineages. Social passers are figured in these texts as dangerous to the stability of the nobility precisely because their passing proves its very instability. Successful trespassers, in turn, are shown to adapt the behaviour of their models and join them in obstructing the upward mobility of other potential passers.

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Defining hidalguía in early modernity A consideration of the prevailing ideology of nobility and the actual processes by which nobility was attained or maintained is conducive to a better appreciation of the chasm that existed between the two and of the general anxiety that the awareness of this chasm provoked among the lesser nobility. The literal meaning of hidalgo or hijodalgo was ‘the son of something’. Sebastián de Covarrubias may be trusted to provide the dominant interpretation of who was an hidalgo. According to Covarrubias, hidalgo is equivalent to “noble, of a good and ancient lineage.”8 Covarrubias explains that “something” stands for the long-time nobility, royal grants, tax-exemptions, honour, and material possessions given to a nobleman by inheritance.9 Hidalguía denoted the condition of being an hidalgo or nobleman. Covarrubias recognises that an hidalgo inherits a high moral calibre by virtue of his rank, but clarifies that the latter does not guarantee honourable behaviour.10 The term hidalgo was used generically to denote anybody who belonged to the noble class – from a destitute squire to a grandee – and who was not a pechero (tax-payer). There were material and symbolic benefits to possessing the condition of hidalguía. All noblemen were exempt from direct personal taxation, as well as conscription, billeting, forced levies, degrading punishments, and imprisonment for debt. They commanded the right to display their coat of arms on their shields, houses, and tombs. Their residences, horses, and weapons could not be seized as payments for debts. In some towns, half of all of the municipal and judicial offices were reserved for noblemen.11 Most Spaniards did not seem to consider the status of New Christians as equivalent to those of Old Christian noblemen, despite the fact that exceptional writers, such as Friar Juan Benito Guardiola, believed that Conversos should be recognised as hidalgos as long as they could prove that they had long inherited their nobility.12 If Conversos acquired nobility titles through legal means – and this was especially true after limpieza statutes began to be implemented more widely – it was never by claiming noble Jewish roots, but rather by alleging that they had high-born Old Christian ancestry. Historians have estimated that in Castile, the largest region of the peninsula, up to 10 per cent of the population claimed to be hidalgos towards the end of the sixteenth century.13 About 80 per cent of Castile’s hidalgos were located to the North of the River Tagus, and among them most were concentrated in the mountainous regions north of the Duero and the Ebro rivers. The regions that were known more generally as ‘the mountains’ were the areas of León, Asturias, Santander, and Vizcaya. The people known as hidalgos from the mountains (hidalgos de montaña) claimed communal hidalguía because they maintained that they were the descendants of the original inhabitants of Spain and that their lineage had been preserved, that is, kept pure from Jewish

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or Muslim influences.14 Hidalgos were growing in number and started living in more densely populated towns and in close proximity to each other. In Palencia, for instance, there were thirty-four hidalgo families in 1622, in contrast to three households in 1530.15 For urban dwellers, it might have seemed that self-appointed hidalgos were swelling everywhere. Categorising hidalgos into neatly drawn stations, even if only in theory, proved to pose some problems. One official who attempted to outline the different stations of hidalguía was Count-Duke of Olivares. In a discourse written for the young King Philip IV in 1624, Olivares identifies the stations in descending order: infantes (princes of the royal family), grandees (a singular group of nobles upon whom this special status was conferred), títulos (titled nobles), caballeros, and hidalgos. Although Olivares does not hesitate in clarifying that the first three categories are visibly recognisable by their distinguished titles and their sizeable estates, he is less clear in defining caballeros and hidalgos.16 Caballeros, he says, fall beneath the grandees and are divided into two classes: ‘the caballeros who are lords of manors and estates, a very small group ever since titles have been given out so liberally, and the other class being caballeros without manors’.17 Hidalgos, continues Olivares,‘make up the lowest grade of the nobility, for it is from that rank that one ascends to all the others.’18 The precise elements that distinguish a caballero from an hidalgo (whether either possesses a manor or not) remain unresolved in Olivares’s text. In effect, his inability or unwillingness to make a transparent distinction hints at the permeability between the two ranks. Similarly imprecise is the definition of caballero provided by the Diccionario de Autoridades, which says that a caballero is simply an old-time hidalgo with ‘some luster greater than that of other hidalgos’.19 ‘Greater luster’ in this context was nothing other than a euphemism for sizable wealth.20 In some urban areas such as Seville, however, the terms hidalgo and caballero, and its hybrid caballero-hidalgo were used indiscriminately to refer to wealthy and influential individuals regardless of whether or not they were sanctioned noblemen.21 The titled nobility and caballeros were technically eligible to carry the honorific prefix ‘Don’. But given the fluidity between the categories between wealthy commoner, hidalgo and caballero, the title Don could not be taken as a clear indication of a person’s station.22 According to Manuel Ferrer-Chivite, the general overuse and abuse of the title becomes noticeable in second half of the 1500s when it is informally appropriated not only by poor hidalgos, and pretentious commoners (Old Christians and Conversos), but even by courtesans in its feminine form Doña.23 Philip III, pressured by the middling nobility, attempted to restrain the use of Don by passing a decree in 1611 that limited its use to prelates, bishops, counts, the titled nobility, wealthy hidalgos, knights of the military orders, religious orders, and individuals in high levels of government. The decree also allowed the wives and daughters of hidalgos to

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be called Doñas, although the hidalgos themselves were not eligible to carry the title of Don.24 This royal decree, which was largely ignored, reflects efforts by the established untitled nobility – that is, by those who were officially eligible to be Dons – to tangibly sharpen boundaries that hypothetically separated an hidalgo and a wealthy commoner from a caballero, but which remained obscure in practice. Blood nobility, as opposed to purchased nobility, was for most Christian treatise writers the only genuine form of hidalguía.25 The most definitive authority on hidalguía was Fernando Mexía’s treatise, the Nobiliario vero (Of True Nobility) (1492). Accordingly, Mexía – as did all other Castilians who wrote on the subject in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries  – reiterates King Alfonso’s definition: ‘hidalguía … is the nobility that comes to men through lineage’.26 Mexía argues that a person is not a true noble unless he is a member of the fourth generation of hidalgos, or until there is no longer a memory of when his ancestors gained their title.27 Comparing the transformation of a commoner to the alchemical transmutation of mercury into gold, Mexía states that ‘and so the plebeian or tax-payer or village dweller cannot be cleaned or purged [from his taint] by being initiated into the nobility until the fourth grade since [his lineage] was made hidalgo. It is by this grade that he is purified from the baseness of his linage.’28 Echoing Alfonso’s Partidas almost verbatim, Mexía states that all noblemen were to avoid marrying low-borns, which would contaminate their bloodline. Mexía reiterates that despite the fact that a child theoretically inherits hidalguía from his father even if his mother is a plebeian, he will have lost the integrity of his lineage. Furthermore, in order to discourage miscegenation and the mixing of pure and impure bloodlines, Mexía reminds his readers that the first monsters to populate the earth, the giants from Genesis, were the progeny of intermarriage between the children of Seth and the children of Cain. With this allusion, Mexía suggests that the mixing of bloods is to be blamed for the wickedness of the earth.29 After Mexía, the most influential treatise writer on the subject was Juan Arce de Otálora, a judge of hidalguía lawsuits in the royal courts of Granada and Valladolid, who, like Mexía, believed that a nobleman is born, but never made. While Mexía emphasises the proclivity of the nobleman to behave morally, Arce de Otálora considers nobility and virtuousness to be essentially equivalent attributes. In his Summa nobilitatis hispanicae (Treatise on Spanish Nobility) (1553), he writes: ‘True nobility is virtue, and the quality inherent in blood and mind is derived from ancestry.’30 For Arce de Otálora and his conservative followers, the ennoblement of commoners was anathema. The king could give a noble title to a commoner, but he could not endow the person with a true, noble essence.31 Arce de Otálora might have had a personal agenda given his highly exclusive and pre-determined definition of nobility.

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His paternal grandfather’s lineage might have been questioned because Arce de Otálora requested a certificate of nobility, which he received in 1492; thus, by insisting in blood hidalguía as the only viable form of nobility, Arce de Otálora was making an argument for his grandfather’s blood nobility.32 According to his logic, his grandfather’s carta ejecutoria de hidalguía, or certificate of nobility, was not a means of social mobility. Rather, it served to confirm the condition of his family’s pre-existing nobility. At the end of his treatise, Arce de Otálora personalises Mexía’s stance against noble–plebeian intermarriages. He expresses the wish that his descendants preserve their noble lineage from the ‘stain of shame’ (‘pudoris macula’) by keeping plebeians from infiltrating his lineage and by never ‘exercising any base or dishonest office’.33 It is also significant that Arce, like Guardiola, makes it explicit that Jewish or Moorish ancestries do not immediately revoke the nobility of a person.34 Friar Guardiola in Tratado de nobleza y los títulos y dictados que oy tienen los varones claros y grandes de España (Treatise on Nobility and the Titles and Orders of Unblemished Men and Grandees of Spain) (1591) adheres to the view that members of the nobility are inherently more virtuous than commoners, and insists upon the danger of confusing wealthy commoners with true noblemen, and of creating new nobles who would negatively affect the reputation of blood nobles due to their baser nature. More pragmatic than Mexía, Guardiola was more interested in finding a system by which individuals from the different ranks could be differentiated. For Guardiola, commoners should be prohibited from wearing the luxurious garments reserved for the nobility and for the knights of military orders, and the use of the ‘Don’ should be restricted to only wealthy and highly accomplished blood nobles.35 His aversion towards marriages between nobles and commoners is the most hyperbolically expressed among treatise writers. He insists that both men and women need to marry strictly within their inherited ranks: ‘a woman should choose a similar man, and man should choose a similar woman, so that both will be equal in blood, and in rank: that is, caballero with caballero, merchant with merchant, squire with squire, peasant with peasant: because if there is non-conformity in this, the lesser person will be discontent, and the greater person will be desperate.’36 He also insists that the progeny of mixed marriages between noble mothers and plebeian fathers should be banned from taking the mother’s surname. He additionally regards any individual who takes his maternal surname in order to hide his paternal common ancestry as a ‘usurper of nobility’. He compares this type of individual to a mule who, if given the ability to speak, would identify the mare as his mother but not mention that his father is an ass.37 Guardiola then suggests that it is better for a father to see his daughter dead than to have her marry a person either above or below his social rank: ‘finally, I say that the person who lets his daughter be with somebody unequal, should know that it is better to

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see her buried than to see her married, because if she were to die, she would be mourned for one day, but if she is not married well she would be mourned every day.’38 Alonso Téllez de Meneses’s treatise Primera parte del libro llamado Luzero de nobleza (First Part of the Book Named the Guiding Star of the Nobility) (c.1570) has been virtually unknown to Hispanists since its appearance, but it is illuminating for our purpose, since it represents the most extreme view of nobility as a strictly genealogical condition – a perspective that is also expressed in popular texts and other imaginative forms of literature. The treatise also allows us to hypothesise that since it was founded on popular Christian beliefs, Téllez de Meneses’s argument might have been accepted by his contemporaries on theological grounds. The author goes beyond Mexía’s allegory, stating that the division between higher and lower humankind has been divinely predetermined.39 To make his point, he reminds the reader that since the establishment of the ancient post-lapsarian order, God had given privileges to the virtuous that he does not proffer to the wicked. Téllez de Meneses explains: The division of good people and bad people was manifested in the first sons born of our parents Adam and Eve, and also in the sons of Noah … [S]‌ome of his descendants travelled with him [Noah], who by their effort and virtue achieved great reputation and pre-eminence over all others. Some strove to gain honour and valour more than others, from which they continued to make themselves more industrious, brave, and noble, which is in contrast to those who ruined themselves, making themselves low, vile, and downcast; this is the origin of the nobility of blood.40

Thus, blood noblemen – the ‘good people’ – enjoyed benefits not afforded to the descendants of the ‘low, vile, and servile’.41 For Téllez de Meneses, blood nobles simply could not be made. He explained that the men who received hidalguía certificates, thanks to their military or intellectual services to the Crown, were not commoners, but noblemen by birth who just needed to be officially recognised as such. According to Téllez de Meneses, if Spaniards wished to follow the example of their creator, they should recognise and honour the superiority of blood nobles. Like Guardiola,Téllez de Meneses believed that noblemen should marry and socialise endogamously, but he justified this as a mandate from God. In what is an obvious misinterpretation of the scriptures, he told his reader that the first disciples of Christ had been chosen from the nobility. Christ ‘thought it [was] good that the majority of his apostles and disciples were noble, and allowed a noble person to bury him, because Joseph of Arimathea was a noble and a courtly caballero’.42 Moreover, ‘Christ loved the nobility very much’ because he chose Joseph, from the royal family of Israel – ‘from the Royal house of Israel’ – to be the earthly father to Christ, and Mary – ‘a woman of royal blood’ – to carry his physical body in her womb.43 For him,

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‘nobility cannot be appraised highly enough because its creator and [the creator] of all things loved it and took his human nature from it.’44 The radical ideology promulgated by Téllez de Meneses, as well as Mexía, Arce de Otálora, and Guardiola, and its self-defeating repercussions, is exposed by Zayas at the end of the novela discussed above. Don Pedro’s choice to have both of his children killed over having them marry with social unequals is exposed by Zayas as injudicious and self-destructive. One could even interpret it as a form of symbolic suicide, since Don Pedro ends up alone with his bloodline supposedly unblemished, but with no progeny to carry on his noble lineage. A minority of intellectuals, namely, Bernabé Moreno de Vargas  – the Governor of Mérida – in his Discursos de la nobleza de España (Discourses on the Nobility of Spain) (1622) and the Benedictine theologian Benito de Peñalosa Mondragón in his widely read and referenced Libro de las cinco excelencias del español (Book of the Five Excellences of the Spaniard) (1629), challenged the view that hidalguía was only legitimate if it was genealogical. Their exceptionally progressive view echoes the spirit of the Fuero viejo de Castilla (Customary Laws of Castile) in which it was suggested that the privileges of hidalguía were more contingent on service and merit than on lineage.45 In a clearer reference to Bartolo di Sassoferrato’s fourteenth-century Tractatus de insigniis et armis (Treatise on Insignia and Arms) (c.1355), Moreno de Vargas states that all forms of nobility can be created ex nihilo by the King.46 For Moreno de Vargas, hidalguía de sangre and hidalguía de virtud – that is the endowment of nobility for deeds or through purchase – were both equally legitimate and honourable.47 He argues that the oft-cited passage from King Alfonso’s Partidas in which hidalguía is described as a condition that is acquired through lineage could not be read as an absolute defence of blood nobility, but as one of two authentic kinds of hidalguía.48 He also reminds the reader that King Alfonso had effectively stated that in exceptional cases it was ‘possible to bring honour to hidalgos who did not acquire it through lineage’.49 Peñalosa y Mondragón is the other exceptional writer who agrees with Moreno de Vargas. He affirms that that all lineages were created equal in the beginning, and that men’s sinful deeds occasioned a loss of nobility. He therefore believes that nobility is not an inherent birth condition, but one that has to be ‘regained’ through exceptional behaviour and actions. He asserts that allowing commoners to move socially upwards through exemplary conduct is beneficial for society-at-large, because it provides an incentive for men to want to strive for higher virtue. He deems that men of past centuries ventured into greater and more frequent honourable and courageous deeds because they were granted titles of nobility. He advocates, then, that nobility titles be utilised because ‘we can see how important is the reward for men to be virtuous and never to stop doing good works’s.50 Despite the few vocal authors, such

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as Moreno de Vargas and Peñalosa y Mondragón who advocated for the higher respectability of acquired nobility, most treatises only recognised blood nobility through Christian lineage as the genuine form of hidalguía. Moreno de Vargas’s notion that fortune and time could turn the descendant of a slave into a king and vice versa was not an appealing proposition for noblemen who were insecure about their own ranks.51 Instead of convincing his contemporaries to transcend the limitations of structuring society through genealogical status and to accept the legitimacy of new nobles, progressive thinkers like Moreno de Vargas only heightened the social insecurity of hidalgos or to-be hidalgos. The purchase of a privilegio de hidalguía (patent of nobility) was an expeditious way to claiming the legal benefits of nobility, but it was considered to be double-edged and generally undesirable. The fact that the patent was purchased was taken as proof that the grantee had attempted to acquire with money a condition he had not acquired at birth. Even the Count-Duke of Olivares, who supported the sale of titles of nobility, concedes that the hidalgo by privilege is a person ‘of extremely low quality and much lower in reputation’ than blood hidalguía.52 It is not surprising that most nobles or aspiring nobles preferred to ‘prove’ their hidalguía through litigation than through direct purchase, which remained low in the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.53 Buyers of patents of nobility, in the same vein as the seekers of ejecutorias of hidalguía, generally justified the purchase by stating that it was not a means of acquiring a higher rank, but rather of confirming their pre-existing ownership of their condition. The actual patent of hidalguía used language that emphasised the noble linage of the grantee, his and his ancestors’s services to the Crown, his membership to elite confraternities, governmental posts, and other qualifications associated with hidalgos. Most importantly, these documents never disclosed what was obvious to anybody else: that the grantee had purchased the patent.54 In 1570 the officers of the Castilian Cortes (parliament) complained to the king that buyers of privilegios were likely to lie about the origin of their titles due to the social stigma attached to it. The members of the Cortes found this trend troubling, and asked the king to enforce a rule that required the new nobles to disclose their privileges upon request. The memorandum read: many people who have bought hidalguías in these kingdoms hide them and cover them up in hopes that they will be forgotten … so that they can later take advantage of this possession … and it is unbelievable that they want to cover up the means by which they became hidalgos and the understanding that there is a difference between these hidalguías and the ones that come through blood and ancestry. We beg to Your Majesty to order that nobody could claim to have the privilege of hidalguía without showing it [the certificate] to his municipal council, so that the said council can be satisfied and could hold and take note of its memory and judgment.55

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Although we do not know the specific events that led the council members to make this request, we can safely assume that it could have been somewhat self-motivated. As Antonio Domínguez Ortiz reminds us, these officials were usually of moderate means and were overly concerned about being replaced by a newer and independently wealthier upper class.56 The case of Pedro Marcos from Getafe exemplifies the kind of social ostracism the commoner who purchased a title of nobility might have experienced.57 Despite the patent of hidalguía Pedro Marcos had obtained for 4,000 ducats in 1618, his honourable post as a familiar of the Inquisition (he was an Old Christian lay contributor to the office), and his personal fortune, the members of the town council refused to recognise him as an authentic hidalgo worthy of being exempted from taxes. The town council wrote to Philip III to request that his privilege be annulled. The councilmen of Getafe argued that Pedro Marcos was a commoner by birth and that by failing to pay taxes, he placed a higher burden on the other citizens of Getafe, including many poor peasants. The king ultimately upheld the hidalguía of Pedro Marcos. This case may be viewed in line with Michael Crawford’s conjecture that municipal courts often opposed the nobility of individuals or families who acquired hidalgo titles through purchase or grants as a means to assert the authority of the locality to determine the nobility of one of its citizens and to maintain control of its registry of tax-payers.58 Although Crawford reads the opposition by local elites to the ennoblement of a resident (often a newcomer) strictly in terms of the conflicted relationship between local and royal governments, it is hard to ignore the fact that for the individuals claiming hidalguía and those resisting such claims, the conflict was personal and interpreted as caste or class antagonism. Crawford, for instance, speaks of the case of Diego Jaymes, who sued the city of Seville in 1526, for not recognising his hidalguía and placing him on the pechero roll. In his initial statement, Jaymes specified that he believed that the denial of his status was caused by the animosity shown to him by Juan Aguado and Francisco Pinelo, two of the hidalgo officials representing his parish in the city council.59 The councilmen’s interest in the taxes that Jaymes could provide to the local treasury does not preclude the possibility that they also opposed Jaymes’s hidalguía because they simply viewed him – and other aspiring hidalgos like him – to be undignified to carry the title. How could a self-proclaimed hidalgo prove that his nobility was genuine? To determine if a person was an authentic hidalgo, the courts carried out an investigation on the subject’s family history, ancestry, limpieza de sangre, membership in confraternities, service, and lifestyle. Court officials were sent out to interview neighbours – especially highly regarded fellows and elders – about the litigant’s background. If judgment was passed in favour of the self-declared hidalgo, the court issued a declaration validating his blood nobility, a carta

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ejecutoria. In contrast to the carta de privilegio, the ejecutoria was not a grant that generated nobility; instead, it was a legal recognition of one’s pre-existing blood hidalguía. Indeed, for Thompson, the contrast between the very low number of grants of hidalguía by privilegio purchased from the Crown – less than 300 – and the high volume of ejecutorias granted by the royal courts in Valladolid and Granada – most probably in the tens of thousands – serves as evidence that the carta ejecutoria was perceived as the more desirable means for claiming nobility.60 The growth in hidalguía lawsuits at local and appellate courts was probably encouraged by the general culture of litigiousness that, according to Richard Kagan, permeated sixteenth-century Castile.61 Whether or not hidalguía was determined through litigation, it may be said that what actually determined the legitimacy of a person’s hidalguía was his public reputation. This notion can also be seen in the case of Pedro Riquelme, a resident of Jerez, who refused to pay taxes because he claimed to be an hidalgo. The municipality of Jerez rejected his self-identification and sued him in 1570 in order to collect the taxes he presumably owed the town. The witnesses who supported his claim to hidalguía stated that they had no doubt he was a nobleman, because he was always seen with other honourable caballeros in public and never with pecheros. Riquelme’s neighbours also stated that if he were not a nobleman, he could not have held posts that were given to nobles in the city council, and would not have belonged to an exclusive religious confraternity for noblemen. He and his family were known to own highly valued ancient homes in which they had many servants, slaves, valets, horses, hunting dogs, falcons, and an armoury of twenty knights. In other words, there was no doubt in their minds that he was a recognised hidalgo with an established bloodline and lineage.62 The manner by which Riquelme and countless other Spaniards established their nobility leads us to believe that Don Francisco Amaya, a seventeenth-century caballero, fittingly defined nobility as ‘not something essential, corporeal, real, and palpable, but something that depends on human opinion, in the opinion of the people’.63 And public opinion, as Kagan has shown, could be manipulated on behalf of hidalguía claimants through bribes.64 Aspiring noblemen could eventually achieve a status of hidalguía by first pretending to be hidalgos. But giving the appearance of coming from a noble background required more than just acting the part; it took patience, social intelligence, good luck, and, most importantly, large sums of money. Masquerading as a ‘real’ hidalgo might have entailed uprooting one’s family and moving to an area where the expected lifestyle of a noble could be displayed until collective memory no longer identified the individual and his family as plebeian. If possible, the aspiring noble could choose to move to a town with poorly kept registries of citizens and taxpayers, or to an area where residents

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paid communal but not personal taxes.65 Regardless of the political structure of a town, a passing nobleman could not play the part without acquiring property, horses, servants, luxuriously furnished homes, and elegant dress, or without fashioning a coat of arms. Passing as a nobleman also involved attempting to send male children to prestigious institutions of higher education for entry into professions in medicine, government, or the church. It also required disengaging from trades that were associated with manual work and the direct handing of money. Moreover, aspiring hidalgos were more likely to succeed if they forged friendships and marital alliances with neighbouring noblemen.66 A  governor in Granada, Jacinto de Fuentes, explains in 1625 how he identifies the hidalgos in his city. Hidalgos spend time ‘attaching themselves to the company of other hidalgo gentlemen in this city of Granada, and showing off, and going to fiestas, and can joust with many servants and horses, and surrounding themselves with the most illustrious people.”67 After one or two generations of performing hidalguía, commoners could request to be categorised with tax-exempt citizens of their town and/or just stop paying taxes. If a passing hidalgo’s tax-exempt status went unopposed, he and his family could argue that it was an implied declaration of their hidalguía. In many of the recorded cases studied by Thompson, aspiring hidalgos stopped paying taxes, anticipating that their local government would oppose their claim; this would then open the door for the hopeful to petition for a statement of hidalguía at one of the two royal courts with jurisdiction over cases of hidalguía (the Chancillería of Valladolid or the Chancillería of Granada). Most hidalguía cases lasted from seven to ten years, which meant that only individuals or families with sufficient disposable income were able to sustain the litigation.68 One of the most famous examples of passing commoners who effectively staged hidalguía relates to the father and uncles of Saint Teresa de Ávila (Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda). According to Jodi Bilinkoff, Saint Teresa’s family provoked their municipality to file an hidalguía lawsuit against them in Valladolid since they were sure that their friend Francisco de Pajares, who was then Procurador general de los pueblos y tierras (general supervisor of towns and lands) of Ávila, would serve as the municipal prosecutor of their case.69 In 1485 Saint Teresa’s paternal grandfather, the merchant Juan Sánchez, had a penance imposed upon him by the Inquisition in Toledo for practising Judaism. After his penance, Juan Sánchez moved to Ávila and established a successful business in the sale and trade of silk and wool. Saint Teresa’s father was Juan Sánchez’s eldest son, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, a successful tax-farmer and financier. He married, after being widowed from his first wife, a woman who belonged to a highly respected hidalgo family on both sides and who would become Teresa’s mother, Doña Beatriz de Ahumada. Alonso did not hesitate to manufacture a family shield with the image of a castle and a cross, suggesting both a noble

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and an Old Christian lineage. Saint Teresa’s paternal uncle, Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda, made an even more tactical move than Alonso by contracting marriage in 1506 or 1508 with the sister of the wife of a powerful nobleman and municipal official in Ávila, Francisco de Pajares. A stronger relationship between the Sánchez Cepeda and the Pajares families was forged a few years later in 1515, when Pajares’s daughter became Saint Teresa’s godmother. Around the time of Saint Teresa’s baptism, the Sánchez Cepeda brothers refused to pay taxes, inciting a lawsuit from the municipality of Ávila in 1519. In their defence, the Sánchez Cepedas claimed ‘to be hidalgos from the side of their father and grandfather’.70 The general consensus among the people of Ávila was that the Sánchez Cepeda appeared to be ‘very unblemished, honourable, and rich’.71 Neighbours testified that they lived like honourable hidalgos and in the manner of Old Christians. One particular witness in their trial, Cristóbal de Salcedo, stated that the Cepeda family had the reputation of being hidalgos; they were married to ‘illustrious women, daughters of caballeros’, had servants and wet nurses, served the king with horses and arms, and had never paid taxes.72 There were some rumours that the Inquisition in Toledo had convicted their father, but none of the neighbours of the Sánchez Cepeda could affirm that with certainty. Even Juan Nieto, a commoner from Ávila who served as witness against Sanchéz Cepeda in the ejecutoria trial, seemed to hesitate when asked about the taint in their lineage. Nieto stated that there were some people who had said that Juan Sánchez, the deceased patriarch, had had a penance imposed upon him, but regardless, he stated: they are honourable and rich men and they have behaved in the manner of men without taint, and they have their horses and their persons in respectable shape and dress, and are well spoken, and because they have married daughters of hidalgos and enjoy the favor of the city judges they have mingled and are mingling with other hidalgos of the said city as if they were hidalgos.73

The fact that Nieto was unable to deny outright the nobility of the Sánchez Cepedas is a reminder of the difficulty that average villagers of little influence had in distinguishing wealth from hidalguía. For both Salcedo and Nieto reputation was equivalent to truth. We might also infer that for them, as for most commoners, the orthodox definition of hidalguía was irrelevant. Their motivation to side with either opposing party in an ejecutoria lawsuit was probably determined by financial and other discretionary incentives, and not by an interest in (de)legitimising the hidalguía of a family. Perhaps due to their fast and growing financial resources, the Sánchez Cepedas were granted hidalguía in 1522, about thirty-seven years after the Inquisition had condemned the elder Sánchez to public humiliation. The

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Sánchez Cepeda’s metamorphosis from commoners to passing nobles, and then to lawful nobles, was made possible due to their sustained, credible performance of nobility, which would not have been achieved without extensive financial investments in their personal appearance, real estate, and cultivating social networks. The successful social mobility of merchants (often a synonym for Conversos), such as the Sánchez Cepedas, created a generalised fear on the part of presumed noblemen that their social identities were on the verge of being eclipsed by people they believed to be inherently inferior to them. ‘The natural hatred they harbour for hidalgos’ In a memorandum produced by the members of the Castilian Cortes in 1624, the writer noted, ‘the officers of villages and regions do not dare to register just anybody who wants to litigate, even if he is a well-known pechero and they have him listed as if he were hidalgo, and so he is able to acquire it [nobility].’74 The intention of the memorandum’s writer is to compel his reader, the king, to see that the legal system of contesting hidalguía allowed a viable means for wealthy false nobles to be legally proclaimed hidalgos. By implication, the writer is making the point that the promotion of passing hidalgos results in the downgrading of the rank of poor but authentic hidalgos. Commoners are seen here as exploiting this judicial system as a means to act on their base impulses and torment the people who were superior to them in rank, but financially insolvent. Money, from the point of view of an official of the Castilian Cortes, allows low-borns to pass, while it purloins the nobility of true hidalgos. The only solution, according to this official, is to lower the expenses of litigating for an ejecutoria. He explains: this provision [about the fees involved in an hidalguía lawsuit] has allowed and even given much licence to the rank of commoners and to others of even lower quality, because of the natural hatred they harbor for hidalgos, to torment the ones who are poor by registering them as tax-payers, and breaking into the privileges of their nobility … it can be seen by experience the calumnies and falsities that they [the commoners] scheme in order to torment them and it is not fair that the poor hidalgos, who console their poverty with the respect their nobility affords them in their villages, be disenfranchised in this way, and that commoners [be] so free to trouble them and to fail to show them [the hidalgos] the respect they owe them by right.75

The writer of the memorandum argues that commoners are engaged in a concerted project of overpowering, if not subverting, the social order in the localities of Castile. In addition, he suggests that, if allowed to do so, wealthy commoners would deploy their financial resources to specifically target poor

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hidalgos and challenge the legitimacy of their nobility at the judicial courts. As a result, commoners must be prevented from acting upon their innate abhorrence towards hidalgos, which when unchecked could lead to the demise of the latter as a legitimate social group. To emphasise this point, the writer evokes images of groups of commoners plotting together to humiliate impoverished hidalgos. The view that commoners were unable to control their loathing of noblemen appears to have been widely held in elite circles. Mateo Alemán fictionalised this notion that commoners harbour a ‘natural hatred’ for high-borns in an episode in Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), in which he stages a plebeian attack on two caballeros (one a Moor and the other one an Old Christian). Unable to find a causal explanation for the unprovoked attack, Alemán’s narrator reasons that the assault must have been triggered by low-borns: The plebeian people always harbour  – in secret  – a natural hatred towards noble people, like that of the lizard towards the snake, the swan towards the eagle, the rooster towards the francolin, the prawn towards the octopus, the dolphin towards the whale … It is no wonder that things of different species have this [natural hatred], because they are made of constitutions, qualities, and natures that are different; but it is surprising that rational men, all made from the same mud, of one flesh, one blood … must bear this vice because lowborns, tougher to break than the Galician walnut, torment the nobility with so much vehemence.76

Although it is impossible to know the extent to which the imagined hatred that low-borns held of noblemen was grounded on experience, we may gather from the memorandum, as well as from Alemán’s text, that elite readers – those who identified with them – were predisposed to believing that, if given the opportunity, the common people would viciously devastate the established nobility because of the instinctive hostility they felt towards people who were superior to them in nature. Just as watchful high-borns could see the stain of low birth, low-borns were supposed to be able to detect individuals who carried better quality blood. Peñalosa y Mondragón gave considerable attention in his discourse about nobility to the unreliable methods used to discern who possessed noble status. His major concern was that wealthy false nobles were able to establish their nobility because they were favoured by powerful people, while poor birth noblemen were likely to lose their rank because they lacked the funds to invest in advantageous social networks.77 One of his fears was that the inefficiency of investigations of hidalguía allowed false hidalgos to stain honourable lineages. The mixing of noble blood with the blood of ‘moths of Spain’s honour’ had to be stopped.78 False hidalgos, according Peñalosa y Mondragón, were ‘slandering, back-biting people, [who, as], thieves of the honor of others, could

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hurt them in an irreversible way, by poisoning them without much difficulty’.79 Similarly, Juan de Guardiola could not have been more emphatic in calling attention to the ‘abuse’ that caballeros must endure when low-borns call themselves Dons. He laments: ‘it is a sad and painful thing that even the wives of landlords and [other] people of low stations, and even public prostitutes with all their shamelessness dare to usurp this most pure title, which is something that deserves punishment.’80 The royal canon and arbitrista (proto-economist) Pedro Fernández de Navarrete also suspected that most sons of manual labourers do not hesitate to ‘usurp the esteem earned by true nobility’ by their use of the title of Don.81 He believed that they were lazy and criminally inclined. But even worse was that these ‘pseudonobles’ had no shame and took the liberty of wearing the garb of caballeros.82 Fernández de Navarrete was particularly concerned that there were too many false hidalgos gaining entry into government positions. In fact, he was convinced that any ‘blot’ in the loyalty to the kings of Spain had been caused by ‘pseudonobles’.83 The key, for Fernández de Navarrete, was to prevent commoners from nurturing aspirations to nobility, and to encourage them to accept their roles as manual labourers and farmers. James Casey references a memorandum sent to the Crown by the town council of Salvatierra in 1550; the forging of false hidalguías often entailed subjecting the more vulnerable members of the municipalities to emotional and physical intimidation by powerful low-borns.84 In it, the council tells the king that twenty-five influential individuals in Salvatierra had been discovered to have lied about their ancestry. According to Salvatierra representatives, every single one of them was a false hidalgo. The memorandum also states that the councilmen were putting their lives at risk by denouncing these usurpers of hidalguía, because the false hidalgos were ‘wealthy men, well connected and well supported by their friends’.85 By contesting the legitimacy of false hidalgos’ status, the councilmen feared being ‘hurt, or killed, or dishonoured, in the same way in which others who stood up to them were killed, or found dead in that area’.86 Money is presented in these documents, without question, as the most important variable in the making of an hidalgo. The message that is relayed is that a commoner could metamorphose into a nobleman if he was able to carry out a skilfully contrived, and, more importantly, a well-financed performance of hidalguía. Peñalosa y Mondragón laments this state of affairs in his distinctively pragmatic voice: ‘nobility is conserved and increased with wealth … Rich men have been esteemed in such a way that scholars … affirm that nobility had its origin in wealth and that to be rich is to be noble no matter how dark one’s lineage might be, because lowliness covers and masks itself with the splendor of wealth.’87 Other elite writers, such as Guardiola, also express cautiousness about the influence of wealth, making distinctions between positive

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and negative forms of wealth. Money is figured as a positive force and even as a virtue when placed in the hands of the nobility. It is also presented as a benefit to farmers who are respected by their peers for their morality and for publicly embracing their plebeian status. Most members of elite circles would have agreed with Guardiola that wealth leads to detrimental consequences for the rest of society when commoners with aspirations of social climbing acquire it through capital investments and commerce.88 But even a person with great wealth and influence could rarely attain the transformation from a commoner into an hidalgo or caballero within a generation. It was generally the end-result of a process that took many decades. The tactical performance of hidalguía by an aspiring commoner with wealth and social connections would have turned into reality for his children upon rare occasions, or, with more likelihood, for his grandchildren. As long as passing low-borns made strategic financial investments to bribe or befriend the neighbours who had the potential to expose their impersonation, they were likely to sustain their performance of hidalguía. To summarise, a forceful trend we observe in representations of hidalgos is the focus on the social insecurity they experienced about their status.This social anxiety might be interpreted as the contradiction that is born from the nobleman’s desire to state his superiority to the masses and prevent the low-born from joining his rank, while also recognising his dependence on the commoner to validate his status. We see the hidalgo fearful of having his identity usurped, but needing the threat of usurpation to be there, in order to sustain the illusion of his superior self. Hidalgo envy was indeed how some hidalgos explained the threat of identity theft. Juan Bautista Valenzuela Velázquez – one of Philip III’s legal scholars – presumed the danger of an overhaul by commoners of any level of government because he was under the impression that ‘those who were not nobles had an envy and a natural desire to envy the nobles’.89 Valenzuela feared that plebeians or their descendants, driven by envy and unable to ever acquire the features of nobles, would eventually pose as nobles and forever ruin the moral purity of the chosen legitimate nobles. He was particularly concerned about the damage that plebeians would levy upon high-borns if they were given the authority to act upon their envidia (envy) for hidalguía. Addressing the concern expressed by contemporaneous noblemen such as Valenzuela, Fernández de Navarrete argued for the necessity of preventing commoners from desiring nobility in the first place. Addressing Philip III in 1626, Fernández de Navarrete said: ‘It is not in the state’s interest to allow all subjects to aspire to nobility.’90 Fernández de Navarrete, furthermore, believed that in order to curb the desire among commoners for upward mobility, it was necessary to prevent unexceptional low-borns from having access to higher education.91 To the indignation of the arbitrista, education had led even orphans and foundlings – for Fernández de Navarrete, ‘the children of the scum and filth of the republic’ – to hope to

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become judges, scholars, and government officers, and therefore to potentially corrupt those posts.92 In the worst case scenario, he feared that the street urchins, whom he probably saw at every other corner in Madrid and whom he called ‘the lowest and most dejected section of the world’, would be provided with opportunities to enter elite circles and suggested, instead, that they be trained to work as manual workers, artisans, and farmers.93 Fernández de Navarrete’s contention that people without inherited honour were likely to behave in depraved and amoral ways if they were placed in positions of influence is emphasised in a wide range of literary works, which I examine in the following chapter.94 Notes

 1 ‘Yo la quité la vida, porque no mezclara mi noble sangre con la de un villano’ (Don Alonso). The citation comes from the eighth tale in Desengaños amorosos, which is also known as ‘El traidor contra su sangre’ (María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Novelas completas. Ed. María Martínez del Portal (Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1973), 547–574, at 561).  2 Zayas y Sotomayor, Novelas completas, 555.  3 Doña Francisca comments: ‘como las soberbia de don Pedro predominaba en él más que su nobleza, no hacía dentro de sí mismo la estimación que a don Enrique se le debía … y esto nacía de saber no sé qué mancha en la sangre de don Enrique, que don Pedro no ignoraba, que a la cuenta era haber sido sus abuelos labradores; falta que, supuesto se cubría con ser cristianos viejos, y con tanta máquina de hacienda, no fuera mucho disimularla’ (Zayas y Sotomayor, Novelas completas, 555).  4 See Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Las clases privilegiadas en el antiguo régimen (Madrid: Ediciones ISTMO, 1973), 19–48; I. A. A.Thompson, ‘The Nobility in Spain, 1600–1800’, The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Ed. H. M. Scott (New York: Palgrave, 1995), 174–263; and ‘The Purchase of Nobility in Castile 1552–1700’, Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979): 313–360; Michael Crawford, The Fight for Status and Privilege in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile 1465–1598 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).  5 Scott Taylor’s investigations of court cases in Castile have shown that, in actuality, Spanish males rarely acted upon their murderous compulsions in the way that they do in the stereotypical honour-murder dramas or prose fiction of Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, or María de Zayas (Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)). These literary works and other Golden Age production do express, nonetheless, deeply seeded anxieties about the precariousness of male honour.  6 As I discuss in Chapter 3, a large portion of the nobility in urban areas was believed to have Jewish origins.  7 Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders. Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1972), 21–52.  8 Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Barcelona: Editorial Alta Fulla, 1998), 591.  9 Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 591. Policies on tax exemptions for noblemen varied from municipality to municipality prior to the sixteenth century. Michael Crawford recalls, for instance, that hidalgos did not enjoy special tax exemptions until 1515 (Crawford, The Fight for Status and Privilege, 44). 10 ‘Y el que siendo hijo de algo no obra como tal, es pródigo de la obra que le dexaron sus passados, y más culpable que otro; pues la deviera conservar y aumentar’ (Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 591).

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11 Benito Peñalosa y Mondragón, Libro de las cinco excelencias del español qve despveblan a España (Pamplona, Carlos de Labayen, 1629), 88–88R; see I. A. A. Thompson’s ‘The Nobility in Spain’, 193 and ‘The Purchase of Nobility in Castile’, 329. 12 Juan Benito Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza y los títulos y dictados que oy tienen los varones claros y grandes de España (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Gómez, 1591), 8r–9. Guardiola believed that commoners should not be allowed to serve the king (Tratado de nobleza, 10–11). 13 Thompson, ‘The Nobility in Spain’, 192; Annie Molinié-Bertrand, ‘Les “hidalgos” dans le royaume de Castille à la fin du XVI siècle: Approche cartographique’, Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 52.1 (1973): 51–82, at 68, 75. Others believe that the percentage could have been higher, at about 14 per cent (see John Lynch, Edad moderna: Auge del Imperio, 1474–1598 (Madrid: Editorial Crítica, 2005), 351). 14 Moreno de Vargas references Fernando Mexía and Juan Arce de Otálora when he explains the reason why the people of Northern of Spain are entitled to communal nobility: ‘y siguiendo este discurso, se halla, que los solares antiguos, y casas primeras en que los nobles hijosdalgo después de la perdida de España habitaron, están en la Montañas de Leon, Burgos, Vizcaya, Asturias, Galizia, Nauarra, Aragón, y de Catalunia: y los que destas casa, y solares proceden son los verdaderos descendientes de la reliquias de los naturales Españoles, Romanos, y de los Godos, que en aquellas partes se retraxeron y edificaron solares, y casas fuertes para defenderse de los Moros’ (Bernabé Moreno de Vargas. Discursos de la nobleza de España (Madrid: Viuda de Alonso Martín, 1622), 27R). Juan García de Saavedra in Tractatus de hispaniorum nobilitate (Valladollid: Herederos de Bernardino de Santo Domingo, 1588), 295–296 is arguably the only sixteenth-century writer who openly denies the universal nobility of the people of the mountains. 15 See Thompson, ‘The Purchase of Nobility in Castile’, 340; John Lynch, The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change, 1598–1700 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 369. 16 Guardiola (Tratado de nobleza, 112) and Peñalosa y Mondragón (Libro de las cinco excelencias, 81) prefer the term ricoshombres to grandees to refer to this rank. 17 Count-Duke Olivares (Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental), ‘The Count-Duke of Olivares: Instructions on Government (1624)’, Spain: A Documentary History. Ed. and trans. Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 152–157, at 155. 18 Olivares, ‘Instructions on Government’, 155. 19 ‘Que tiene algún lustre más que los otros hidalgos’ (‘Caballero’, Real Academia Española, Autoridades, 1729, www.rae.es, accessed on 15 January 2012); Olivares, ‘Instructions on Government’, 58, trans. Cowans, 154–155. There is no entry for caballero in Covarrubias’s Tesoro. 20 As Peñalosa y Mondragón states, hidalgos may gain ‘epithets’ and ‘greater names’ and be raised to the status of caballeros through the accumulation of capital (Libro de las cinco excelencias, 74). In the Medieval period, caballero could be used as a general designation for a nobleman and to identify individuals engaged in mounted military service. In fifteenth-century Seville, some noblemen could carry the hybrid title of caballero-hidalgo (Crawford, The Fight for Status, 6). 21 See Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, 27. 22 Covarrubias thought that Don is derived from the Latin dominus. Juan de Madariaga (in Vida del Seráfico Padre San Bruno, 1596), on the other hand, believed that Don had originated in the Hebrew ‘Dum’ (Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 482; Manuel Ferrer-Chivite, ‘El factor judeo-converso en el proceso de consolidación del título “Don”’, Sefarad: Revista de Estudios Hebraicos y Sefardíes 45.1 (1985): 131–174, at 134–135). According to Jaime de Salazar y Acha, the title is documented for the first time in 1194, in reference to the minister of Alfonso IX, Don Pedro Veláez. It begins to be used more frequently in the 1200s to qualify the names of grandees and titled nobles (Manual de genealogía española (Madrid:  Ediciones Hidalguía, 2006), 301). Nina Melechen explains that, in fourteenth-century Castile, the use of Don was variable. It was used legally to indicate the nobility of a person, but in some cases it was also used to signal the Jewishness of an

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individual. In the fifteenth century, in an attempt to limit the use of Don to the Christian nobility, the Castilian Crown passed an edict in 1412 prohibiting Jews from using the title Don. The order did not prevent Jews in Toledo from using Don in their communities, where it was used as an indication of noteworthiness (not necessarily nobility), and did not prevent Jewish officials from using it as a sign of their nobility (Ferrer-Chivite, ‘El factor judeo-converso’, 135–137). Antonio Descamps thought that Castilian nobles in the high middle ages refused to use the title as a way of making sure that they could distinguish themselves as Christians (Ferrer-Chivite, ‘El factor judeo-converso’, 133). 23 The title Doña to indicate a wealthy noblewoman was more often used than its counterpart Don in the first half of the sixteenth century (Ferrer-Chivite, ‘El factor judeo-converso’, 139 and 150–154). 24 Salazar y Acha, Manual de genealogía española, 302. 25 Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 8r–9. Guardiola deals with the taint of having Jewish lineage in 10–11. 26 ‘fidalguía es nobleza que viene a los hombres por manera de linaje’ (Alfonso el Sabio, Las siete partidas del Rey Don Alfonso el Sabio, cotejadas con varios códices antiguos por la Real Academia de la Historia: Partida segunda y tercera, vol. 2 9 Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1807), 199; Moreno de Vargas, Discursos de la nobleza de España, 6; Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 61R). Fernando Mexía slightly misquotes King Alfonso. He actually stated ‘Nobleza es vna fidalgia que viene a los ombres por linaje’ (Libro intitulado nobiliario perfetamente copylado y ordenado por el onrado cavallero Hernando Mexia, veinte y cuatro de Jaen (Sevilla, 1492), I. 48). 27 Mexía says that ‘ninguno es propiamente noble saluo aquel que es venido de claro alto y antiguo linaje generoso’ (Libro intitulado nobiliario, II. 32). 28 ‘Así el plebeo o pechero o villano no se puede ser limpio ni purgado por via del principio de su nobleza hasta el quarto grado en el que el es fidalgo, en el qual grado es alimpiado de la vileza del linaje’ (Mexía, Libro intitulado nobiliario, II. 23). 29 Mexía, Libro intitulado nobiliario, I. 48. 30 ‘Vera Nobilitas est virtus, et qualitas sanguini et animo inhaerens a maioribus derivata’ (Juan Arce de Otálora, Summa nobilitatis Hispanicae et immunitatis regiorum (Salamanca:  Ioannes Baptista, 1570), 189). 31 ‘Princeps potest plebeium inmunem et exemptum facere, et illi concedere ius nobilitatis; non tamen potest eum vere et essentialiter nobilem facere’ (Arce de Otálora, Summa nobilitatis, 103). 32 María Isabel Lorca Martín de Villodres, El jurista Juan Arce de Otálora (s.XVI): Pensamiento y Obra (Madrid: Fundación Francisco Elías de Tejada y Erasmo Pércopo, 1997), 30–32. 33 ‘Vlli eorum officium vel exercitium vile aut inhonestum’ (Arce de Otálora, Summa nobilitatis, 357). 34 ‘inter nobiles ac illustres nostrae Hispaniae sunt nonnulli de quibus constat, vel saltem est vehemens opinio, quod per lineam virilem parentum habeant non nihil derivatum a Iudaeorum et Sarracenorum genere’ (Arce de Otálora, Summa nobilitatis, 198). 35 Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 104r–104v, 111r. 36 ‘La muger elija tal hombre, y el hombre elija tal muger, que sean ambos yguales en sangre, y en estado: es a saber el cauallero con cauallero, mercader con mercader, escudero con escudero, y labrador con labrador: porque si enesto ay desconformidad, el que es menos viuira descontento, y el que es mas estara desesperado’ (Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 22r). 37 Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 21r. 38 ‘Finalmente digo que el que no sea con su ygual a su hija, le fuera menos mal enterrarla, que casarla porque si muriera lloranla vn dia, y estando mal casada, la lloraran cada dia’ (Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 22r). 39 Alonso Téllez de Meneses, Primera parte del libro llamado Luzero de la nobleza. This book was never published. His entire handwritten manuscript is available at the Basque Digital library (http://hdl.handle.net/10357/366). There is virtually no biographical information on Téllez de Meneses. The only information is provided by Gonzalo Argote de Molina, who

Theorising and practising nobility

43

describes him as a caballero from Alburquerque who emigrated to Portugal (Nobleza de Andalucía (Sevilla: Fernando Díaz, 1588), 88). 40 ‘La división de los buenos y malos se manifesto en los primeros hijos que nuestros padres Adam y Eva tubieron, y lo mismo en los hijos de noe … andubieron con el algunos de sus descendientes que por su esfuerzo y virtud alcanzaron Reputación y preheminencia sobre todos, pretendieron unos más que otros honra y valor, de donde se siguió hacerse esforzados, valerosos y nobles; lo que fue al contrario a los que se abatieron, haciéndose vajos viles y oscuros, este es el origen de la nobleza de sangre’ (Téllez de Meneses, Luzero de la nobleza, 1). 41 Peñalosa y Mondregón explains that the exemption was due to the belief that ‘con ser Hidalgo vno suele dezir que no deue nada al Rey’ (Libro de las cinco excelencias, 87r). 42 ‘Tubo por bien que la mayor parte de sus Apostoles y discípulos fuesen nobles y que le diese sepultura persona noble porque Joseph Abarimatia lo era y cauallero cortesano’ (Téllez de Meneses, Luzero de la nobleza, 15r). 43 Téllez de Meneses makes reference to the Gospel of Luke as his source (Luzero de la nobleza, 15r). 44 ‘La nobleza no se puede envalor apreciar pues su criador y de todas las cosas la amo y tomo della su humanidad’ (Téllez de Meneses, Luzero de la nobleza, 15r). 45 See Crawford’s discussion of the Fuero viejo de Castilla (The Fight for Status, 25–26). 46 See Jesús Velasco’s discussion of Bartolo di Sasoferrato in his Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile, trans. Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 116. 47 Gregorio López Madera, Gutiérrez de los Ríos, Jiménez de Urrea, and Guardiola had introduced the concept of nobility of virtue, but Moreno de Vargas is the first to develop a forthright and systematic thesis extending it to blood nobility. 48 Moreno de Vargas also called the first kind of hidalguía ‘a statutory right and not a natural one’ (‘de derecho positiuo, y no natural’) (Discursos de la nobleza de España, 8). 49 ‘Puedeles dar honra de fijosdalgo à los que lo non fueren por linaje’ (Moreno de Vargas, Discursos de la nobleza de España, 8). 50 ‘Es justo, necessario, y conueniente, que en estos tiempos aya el premio para la virtud que hubo en los siglos passados, con el qual se dio causa a que se hiziessen tantas, y tan excelentes obras como ha auido, y podemos ver de quanta importancia es el premio para que los hombres sean virtuosos, y no se aparten jamas de obrar bien’ (Peñalosa y Mondragón, Libro de las cinco excelencias, 96R). 51 ‘No ay Rey que examinado el principio de su linage, no se halle ser descendiente de algún esclavo, ni ay esclavo que no descienda de Reyes: porque la variedad de los sucessos hizo que los unos subiessen, y los otros cayessesn’ (Moreno de Vargas, Discursos de la nobleza de España, 4). 52 ‘De moderadísima calidad y muy desigual en la estimación’ (Olivares, ‘Instructions on Government’, 60; trans. Cowens, 155). 53 Thompson calculates that between 1552 and 1700 the Crown sold only 272 patents of privilegios in the Kingdom of Castile (Thompson, ‘The Purchase of Nobility in Castile’, 338). The spirited grievances against the purchase of nobility recorded in official documents might give the impression that there were more commoners buying them than was actually the case. An official of the Chancillería de Valladolid, for instance, writes:  ‘para todo género de gente es odioso vender las hidalguías, porque los nobles sienten que se les igualen personas de tan diferente condición y se oscurezca la nobleza … y los pecheros sienten que los que no tuvieron mejor nacimiento que ellos se les antepongan por solo tener dineros’ (quoted in Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en la edad moderna (Madrid: Istmo, 2005), 182). 54 Thompson, ‘The Purchase of Nobility in Castile’, 315; Crawford, The Fight for Status, 180. Linda Martz conjectures that the Crown marketed the sale of hidalguía patents by appealing to the idea that they served as a statement of confirmation of nobility (Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 199–202).

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55 ‘Muchas personas que han comprado hidalguías en estos reynos, las esconden y encubren queriendo que se olviden … para después aprovecharse de la posession en que han estado … y no es de creer que quieran dexen de entenderse las causas que uvo para que los dichos fuessen auidos por hidalgos, y las que ay que para que se entienda la diferencia destas hidalguías á las de sangre y sucessión. Á vuestra Magestad suplicamos mande que ninguno pueda usar del priuilegio de hidalguía que tuuiere sin presentarle en el ayuntamiento del lugar donde fuere vezino, para que en el libro del dicho ayuntamiento se assiente y tome y tenga dél memoria y razon (Actas de las Cortes de Castilla (1570), Vol. 3 (Madrid:  Imprenta Nacional, 1863), 412–413). 56 Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en la edad moderna, 176. 57 I first found the reference to this case in Noël Salomon’s Lo villano en el teatro del Siglo de Oro. Trans. Beatriz Chenot (Madrid: Castalia, 1985), 658. More details about the case were recorded in Actas de las Cortes de Castilla (1618), Vol 31 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1909), 248, 268, 298. See also María Teresa Fernández-Mota de Cifuentes, ‘El concepto de justicia y regimiento de Getafe, contra Pedro Marcos, vecino de dicho lugar,” Hidalguía 35 (1987): 295–299. 58 Crawford, The Fight for Status, 34–43, 168–189. 59 Crawford, The Fight for Status, 59. 60 About 30,000 individuals and/or families filed lawsuits in the Chancillería of Valladolid to attain an ejecutoria between the late fifteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The exact number of patents of nobility given by the appellate courts in Valladolid and Granada in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has not been determined, but Thompson suspects that they might be in the ten thousands (‘The Nobility in Spain’ 196, ‘The Purchase of Nobility in Castile’ 333–339). Crawford sees a noticeable increase in the number of lawsuits brought to the city council of Seville after 1515, but due to the incompleteness of the documentation is unable to provide definite numbers (The Fight for Status, 47–48). 61 Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 62 ‘Hidalgo notorio de sangre y solar conocido’ (Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en la edad moderna, 173–174). 63 ‘La nobleza no es algo esencial, corpóreo, real y palpable, sino algo que consiste en la opinión humana, en la opinión del vulgo’ (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Los conversos de origen judío después de la expulsión (Madrid: Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1955), 193). 64 Kagan reports that a trade developed for false witnesses who participated in lawsuits on behalf of hidalguía litigants (Lawsuits and Litigants, 41). 65 Jaime Contreras Contreras, ‘Linajes y cambio social:  la manipulación de la memoria’, Historia Social 21 (1995): 105–124, at 116. The registry of baptisms and marriages was more systematically established in the late 1500s. There were many towns and cities in the 1500s and 1600s that did not keep records of their inhabitants. In some cases, the lack of records was due to the fact that the town or city levied taxes on all of its inhabitants, whether noble or not, and there was no need for a special registry (Domínguez Ortíz, La sociedad española en la edad moderna, 172–173). 66 Salomon, Lo villano en el teatro, 672–673. 67 ‘Allegándose a las conbersaciones de los caballeros hijosdalgo desta dicha ciudad de Granada y tratándose lustrosamente, y saliendo a las fiestas y juegos de cañas con muchos criados y caballos, y acompañándose con la gente principal’ (quoted in James Casey, España en la edad moderna: Una historia social. Ed. Manuel Ardit (Madrid: Universitat de València, 2001), 223). 68 Actas de las Cortes de Castilla (1592–1598),Vol. 13 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1887), 64–65. Crawford’s research of lawsuits of hidalguía initiated by citizens of Seville shows that the average length of lawsuits in the 1560s was nine years and in the 1570s seven years (The Fight for Status, 112–113). 69 Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of SaintTeresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 65–67.

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70 ‘Ser omes hijosdalgo de padre y de aguelo’ (quoted in Narciso Alonso Cortés, ‘Pleitos de los Cepedas’, Boletin de la Real Academia Española 25 (1946): 85–110, at 87). 71 ‘Muy limpios, honrados y ricos’ (quoted in Alonso Cortés, ‘Pleitos de los Cepedas’, 368). 72 ‘Mujeres principales, fijas de cavalleros’ (quoted in Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa, 67). 73 ‘Son honbres muy honrados e ricos e se tratan e han tratado muy linpiamente e han tenido e tienen su cavallos e personas muy ataviadas e de buena conversacion, e que a causa de ser casados con hijas de onbres hijosdalgo e tener fabor de los regidores han echado y echan suertes como hidalgos con otros hidalgos de la dicha ciudad’ (quoted in Alonso Cortés, ‘Pleitos de los Cepedas’, 94–95). 74 ‘Los oficiales de las villas y lugares no se atreven a empadronar a qualquiera que quiere litigar, aunque notoriamente sea pechero y le dejan reservado como si fuera hijodalgo, y con esto adquiere posesión de tal’ (Actas de las Cortes de Castilla (1624), Vol. 40 (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1917), 90). 75 ‘Con esta provision se ha dado lugar, y aun muy larga licencia, á que el estado de los pecheros y aun otros de menor calidad, con el odio natural que tienen al de los hijosdalgo, persigan al que vieren que es pobre, y repartiéndole como á pechero y quebrantándoles los previlegios de su nobleza … se ve por esperiencia las calumnias y conjuraciones que entre sí hazen para perseguillos y no es justo que los pobres hidalgos, que con las estimación de sus noblezas recogidos en sus aldeas consolauan su pobreza, queden por este camino inhabilitados, y los pecheros tanto más licenciosos para molestarlos y perderles el respeto que les deben por todo derecho’ (Actas de las Cortes de Castilla, Vol. 13, 65, emphasis added). 76 ‘La gente villana siempre tiene a la noble – por propiedad oculta – un odio natural, como el lagarto a la culebra, el cisne al águila, el gallo al francolín, el langostín al pulpo, el delfín a la ballena … Que las cosas de diversas especies tengan esto no es maravilla, porque constan de composiciones, calidades y naturaleza diversa; mas hombres racionales, los unos y los otros de un mismo barro, de una carne, de una sangre … en éstos haya este resabio, que aquesta canalla endurecida, más empedernida que nuez galiciana, persiga con tanta vehemencia la nobleza, es grande admiración’ (Mateo Alemán, Guzman de Alfarache. Ed. Benito Brancaforte (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1996), 155). 77 Peñalosa y Mondragón, Libro de las cinco excelencias, 95. 78 ‘Polillas de las honras de España’ (Peñalosa y Mondragón, Libro de las cinco excelencias, 102). 79 ‘Las personas maldicientes roedoras, y robadoras de honras agenas, puedan hazer vn daño irreparable, vaciando su ponçoña a su salvo’ (Peñalosa y Mondragón, Libro de las cinco excelencias, 102). 80 ‘Es cosa de lástima y dolor que hasta las mugeres de arrendadores y gente baxa, y aun las Rameras publicas con su grande desverguenza se atreven a usurpar este clarisimo nombre que es cosa digna de castigo’ (Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 110v–111). 81 ‘Usurpar la estimacion debida a la verdadera nobleza’ (Pedro Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías y discursos políticos (1626) (Madrid: Don Benito Cano, 1792), 97). 82 Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 99. 83 ‘Y oso afirmar, que si la fidelidad Española pudiera rezelarse alguna mancha de poca lealtad á sus Reyes, habia de ser causada por estos pseudonobles:  en que se debe advertir, que no es conforme á buena razon de estado el permitir que todos los vasallos aspiren á nobleza’ (Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 99, emphasis added). 84 Casey, España en la edad moderna, 223–224. 85 ‘Personas ricas y emparentados, y favorecidos de suyos’ (quoted in Casey, España en la edad moderna, 223). 86 ‘Heryrán o matarán o afrentarán, como mataron e fueron muertos en aquella tierra otros que pusieron otras semejantes demandas’ (quoted in Casey, España en la edad moderna, 223). 87 ‘La nobleza se conserva y crece con la riqueza … De tal manera han sido estimados los ricos, que muchos hombres doctos … afirman que la Nobleza tuvo su origen de la riquiza [sic] y que el ser rico es ser noble por obscuro que sea su linage porque la bajeza se encubre y

46

Theorising and practising nobility disimula con el esplandor de las riquezas’ (Peñalosa y Mondragón, Libro de las cinco excelencias, 74–75). 88 Guardiola, Tratado de nobleza, 67. 89 ‘Envidia y emulación natural de los que no son nobles contra los nobles’ (Juan Bautista Valenzuela Velázquez, Consilia sive juris responsa omnibus utriusque jurisperitis qui in scholis (1618), Vol. 2, (Geneva: Marci-Michaelis Bousquet & Sociorum, 1727), 396). Valenzuela Velázquez became president of the Real Chancillería de Granada – one of two courts that adjudicated cases of hidalguía – in 1637, and bishop of Salamanca in 1642 (see Ernesto de la Torre Villar, ed. Elogio y defensa del libro (México: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1990), 94). 90 ‘No es conforme á buena razon de estado el permitir que todos los vasallos aspiren á nobleza’ (Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 400). 91 Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 401. 92 ‘Hijos de la escoria y hez de la república’ (Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 403). 93 ‘Lo más baxo y abatido del mundo’ (Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 403). 94 Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías, 404.

2 The forgery of nobility in literary texts

Literary texts that were destined for elite audiences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain often involve scenarios in which hidalgos are threatened by low-born passers determined to do them harm, and ultimately arrive to the felicitous conclusion that the established nobility prevails. The fictional narratives and dramas of low-born passers allow the target reader or audience member to peek into the otherwise mysterious lives of these imagined impostors and proffer the false sense that he or she has an insight on the well-shielded secrets of their deceptive performances. For the elite public, these texts might have been functionally analogous to the rituals examined in Mary Douglas’s analysis of the construction of dirt. In Douglas’s study, dominant members of society engage in specific rituals aimed to reassert their social ideology of purity when its vulnerabilities have been exposed or when the rules that are supposed to govern it are inconsistent. Douglas’s observation that ‘[p]‌urity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise’ is as applicable to the Chagga tribe as it is to the Spaniards who wished for hard-set and, by implication, safer experiences.1 For readers who found themselves amidst contradictions in their pursuit of purity – as in the case of Zayas’s Don Pedro – imaginative literature legitimised their yearnings for a way of negating the fluidity of social categories and provided a platform from which they could release their anxieties about the openness of their own identities.2 The irreversible effect of allowing a foundling to believe that he could transform himself into a nobleman is reflected in Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s El caballero puntual (The Proper Knight) (first volume: 1614; second volume: 1619).3 His protagonist, Juan, is abandoned by his parents at a church in Toledo and adopted by a childless hidalgo who believes that he can turn the child into a valuable member of society and a service to God. Rather than learning a useful profession, however, Juan spends all of his time thinking about his desire to become one of the highest ranked noblemen at court. Salas Barbadillo likens his protagonist’s attempt to turn himself into a caballero to a demented pursuit.

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This is most evident in his description of the moment when the former foundling decides to rename himself as ‘Don Juan de Toledo’, a moment that seems to be written as a deliberate echo of the passage in Cervantes’s novel when Alonso Quijano fashions himself as Don Quijote de la Mancha. Like Alonso Quijano, Juan contrives a new explicitly noble identity. Salas Barbadillo describes this moment in the following manner: ‘he got up passionately from his bed, somewhat frenetically, and wearing an old cape, took out an old tarnished piece of paper from his underpants and looking for a pen and an inkpot … so overtaken by his fantasy, he began to sign “don Juan de Toledo, D. Juan de Toledo … to D. Juan de Toledo whom Our Lord may protect for many years” ’.4 In contrast to Alonso Quijano – who forgets his former identity after he self-fashions as Don Quijote – Juan is aware of his former identity and is consciously aware of the deceitful behaviour he attempts to sustain in order to pass for a caballero. Juan is also more successful in his impersonation than Cervantes’s hero because he is young, wealthy, and disposes himself with the right tools to implement the creation of his new identity – at least in the first book of the novel. Salas Barbadillo’s narrator never hides his objection to Juan’s behaviour, often digressing from the storytelling in order to insert comments about the wrongdoings of his protagonist. He condemns Juan for leaving his habitat, like a fish out of water, and moralises: ‘all the things that do not stay where nature destined them to be are violent and run the risk of dying quickly’.5 This predicament is fulfilled from this point forward in the narrative, as Juan de Toledo is eventually exposed as a liar, progressively loses his sanity, and becomes the butt of practical jokes at Court.6 For Salas Barbadillo madness may be defined as the belief that a foundling could become the same as a birth nobleman. The arbitrista Pedro Fernández de Navarrete and Salas Barbadillo might have used different genres, but they aimed at the same objective of advocating for rigid divisions between social classes. At the same time, they appear to have been paradoxically fascinated by the idea that envious nobodies were involved in massive schemes in order to gain a social position in their exclusive domains. One prominent author who is as famous for his literary talent as for his vehement opposition to the social climbing of low-borns is the satirist Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Quevedo, the progeny of Charles V’s courtiers, prided himself in being among the few true-blood caballeros in Spain. Quevedo’s induction into the exclusive Order of Santiago publicly confirmed his high birthright and, from his point of view, only high-born Old Christians like himself were qualified to hold positions of authority at Court, in government, and in religious institutions.7 Quevedo was particularly known for his unforgiving ridiculing of people he suspected of passing for noblemen and New Christians. He was as critical of noblemen who betrayed their own kind by forging business partnerships and marital relationships with affluent commoners

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who could provide them with the monetary resources they lacked. The result was that money and financial interests blurred the boundaries that divided the high-born from the low-born, the true-blood noblemen from imposters. James Iffland, in his Quevedo and the Grotesque, attributes Quevedo’s attack on the commoners and noblemen in the business of pursuing wealth to his anxieties about economic security and the devaluation of his noble status.8 In contrast, George Mariscal has argued in his Contradictory Subjects that despite the fact that Quevedo verbalised over and over again throughout his literary output that one’s place in the social hierarchy can be determined solely by birth, some of the content of his literary production undermines his very assertion of the incontrovertibility of nobility by lineage. For Mariscal, Quevedo’s writing is fraught with self-contradiction, which he interprets as being representative of the ideological clash between dominant, subject, and marginal in the author’s own thinking and, by extension, of the Spanish elite as a whole. Mariscal’s conjecture is based, for the most part, on examination of Quevedo’s picaresque works, in which underworld characters voice the dysfunction of the established social order and choose to live outside its limitations. Mariscal conjectures, in essence, that while Quevedo publicised his hatred for self-made nobility in order to cater to his aristocratic patrons, he covertly admired the opportunities afforded by greater social mobility. But as Anne Cruz and Lázaro Carreter, Maurice Molho, and Marcel Bataillon have argued, Quevedo’s perspectivistic portrayal of underworld characters ‘need not negate his allegiance to the dominant hierarchy’.9 In effect, I would argue that Quevedo’s contemptuous stance towards low-borns is pervasive enough to overwhelm the rare instances in which he shows sympathy for the low-born and the marginal. Rather than undermining his conviction in the established elitist ideology, the instances in which Quevedo presents contradictory representations of low-borns and Conversos might stem from his unsuccessful quest to find a comprehensible solution to define and detect otherness. And however conflicted and illusory, it is undeniable that Quevedo never stopped openly vocalising his contempt for the socially mobile. As Iffland implies, it is likely that Quevedo’s personal insecurities about his social and financial status are reflected in his extensive treatment of the unreliability of human perception. Throughout his literary output, Quevedo’s narrators and poets strive to reveal to their audiences the decay and evil that hides beneath the masks of impostors. Quevedo was deeply perturbed by the idea that there were alienating forces deliberately masking the true essence of a person or a thing. He thus sought to find a way to detect the features of fallaciousness that might allow the untutored eye of his elite readers to discern truth from falsehood and good from evil. According to Iffland: [Quevedo] does often refer to the shortcomings of the senses in perceiving the true nature of reality (thus bringing him to praise Reason as being the only way out of the labyrinth), but the problem would not exist at all if there were not

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someone or something malevolently creating the appearances, setting the traps for the senses to fall into [sic]. Mistakes committed by our own untutored powers of perception are one thing and those committed because appearances have been consciously manipulated are another. In the latter instance we are doubly lost, not only because of the limitations of our senses, but because there is an adversary taking advantage of them in order to bring about our downfall.10

For Iffland, Quevedo’s ‘paranoia’ about the presence of pervasive physical and moral fraud (ersatz) is the primary motor of his grotesque style.11 Quevedo exploits the grotesque style through black humour, hyperbole, conceit, and a complex network of similes in order to expose the mismatch between outward appearance and ‘true’ nature.12 Although Iffland analyses this anxiety of ersatz mainly in the context of Quevedo’s ontological explorations, it seems fitting to implement and develop Iffland’s approach in the context of social passing (and ethnic passing, which is the focus of the next chapter). We could go so far as to conjecture that for Quevedo, passing low-borns were among those malevolent creatures he condemned for purposely blurring the boundaries between high and low, and between good and evil. In his satirical handbook on successful deception and imposture, the Libro de todas las cosas (Book of All Things) (1631), he mockingly advises aspiring noblemen: ‘In order to be a caballero or hidalgo, even if you are a Jew or a Moor, use bad handwriting, speak slowly and loudly, ride on a horse, drink substantially, and go to live somewhere you are unknown, and you will be it.’13 But Quevedo’s objective is not to solely ridicule the badly forged copies of true noblemen. Since all of the features he lists were presumably common among many mid-ranked noblemen, he implicitly disputes the noble identity of all of his readers who speak slowly, ride horses, drink, or have relocated their domiciles. It is certainly palpable in the text that underneath his satire, he is profoundly disturbed at his own inability to recognise reality from imitation. How could one tell, asks Quevedo in ‘El mundo por de dentro’ (‘The World from the Inside’) (1627), that the person one thinks is a well-dressed hidalgo is not just a talented tailor who is disguised as one?14 Addressing his fellow noblemen, a frustrated Quevedo expresses his spite towards low-borns who attempt to pass for his noble peers in Providencia de Dios (God’s Providence) (1641): Many times you have been irritated, and exasperated to the point of grumbling and losing your modesty and patience upon seeing a low-born man, surrounded by pages and hidden among the members of his family and luxury, living in the house that used to be of a great gentleman … and with these and other actions, you know that he appears to be somebody else … Upon your admiration, you ask about the origin of this man, to which they say that he is the grandson of a powerful shopkeeper, [who] since he was a child has been in the company of great men and has become used to the habits of princes, and that he adds with money and opulence what he lacks in natural quality.15

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Quevedo captures in this image the transitional stage between the common rank and the nobility. The ‘great gentleman’ has learned to carry the appearance of an honourable caballero, but has not yet been able to avoid being recognised socially as a livestock herder in the collective memory. But knowing the true origin of the gentleman does not appease Quevedo, for it is the incongruity between the man’s external appearance and his inner self that disturbs him most. Still, Quevedo rejects the possibility that this lowly man might share any sameness with noblemen and simply presumes that any difference he fails to see must have been covered up with money. Quevedo most famously commented on how dishonourable money worked the magic of turning day-labourers into caballeros in his letrilla ‘Poderoso caballero es don Dinero’ (‘Don Dinero, a Powerful Caballero’) (1603). Quevedo imagines Don Dinero (Money) to be a false caballero, who claims to be a nobleman from the Orient: His parents are princely; they descend from nobility; for in the veins of the East all the bloodlines run blue. Because shepherds and kings he puts on the same footing, a mighty knight is Don Dinero.16

The East and West Indies are not only the mythical locus of concentrated riches, but also the place wherein low-borns sought to quickly accumulate wealth. Quevedo is also satirising false nobles who claimed to come from remote lands, because they could not substantiate that they had a noble ancestral home, a solar conocido.The Orient was associated in the early modern Spanish imagination with savagery and paganism, and as a knight from the Orient, Quevedo’s Don Dinero behaves immorally, with no regard for the natural order of things. A sort of pagan wizard, he uses his occult powers to break the established hierarchy of society: And though his pains are great, his majesty is greater, for even drawn and quartered, he retains his value. And because he bestows glamour on both nobles and beggars, a mighty knight is Don Dinero.17

Quevedo’s point is reiterated in Lope’s La prueba de los amigos (The Test of Friends) (1604) by a false caballero who justifies his social deceit by stating that ‘only

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having money / is defined as the perfect hidalguía’.18 And it is again emphasised by another character in the play, who declares metonymically that a person with money can impersonate whoever he wishes: ‘Do not doubt that money is everything everywhere, / it is a prince, it is an hidalgo, it is a knight, / it is noble blood, it is a Gothic ancestor.’19 But Quevedo’s poem further complicates the attributes of money, for Don Dinero has two interconnected rhetorical functions:  he is the personification of false nobility and, as Patricia Marshall has recently noted, Don Dinero stands for the mercantile economic system that Quevedo so passionately detested.20 For Quevedo, money is not just a means for committing forgery of identity; as he conveys in the letrilla, money in the hands of low-borns constitutes forgery in and of itself. The anxiety financially vulnerable noblemen experienced under the presumed all-powerful and deceitful force of new money had been fictionalised by one of Quevedo’s courtly predecessors, Diego de Hermosilla, in a dialogue that is virtually unknown to Hispanists. Hermosilla was a chaplain to King Charles V and well-seasoned in the life and culture of all ranks of the nobility, and he dedicated a large part of his Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio (Dialogue about the Life of Palace Pages) (1573) to a commentary on the disdain felt by hidalgos, and especially by impoverished ones, towards passing merchants. The dominant character of the dialogue is an hidalgo page who, constrained by his family’s poverty, works and resides at the palace of a duke. He is only identified as Godoy, a surname that would have evoked a noble Old Christian ancestry for any of his contemporary readers. Godoy presents himself as a voice of authority on the subject of nobility and all his views are supported by Medrano and Guzmán, who are also impoverished hidalgo pages, albeit with less refined manners. Readers are compelled to accept as infallible truths Godoy’s pronouncement against social mobility like the fictitious listeners in the text. The only critic who has analysed the text, Donald McKenzie, takes Godoy’s authoritative moralising at face value and claims that Godoy’s part of the dialogue might be read as a treatise on nobility. But if we consider that Godoy is a disgruntled hidalgo with few prospects for improving his present lot, we cannot take his words at face value.21 Rather, Godoy’s statements might be more appropriately perceived as veiled and self-interested protestations at society for his degraded status. The Diálogo begins with a conversation between Medrano, whose name ironically means ‘social climber’, and a wealthy merchant named Juan de Lorca. Juan de Lorca has come to the duke’s palace with his young son to deliver him to the duke so that he can enter into service as a page. Lorca had lent the duke three hundred ducados a few months prior and the duke had promised that he would allow Lorca’s son to become a page in return. Lorca believes that having his son serve a high noble will allow his son to reach a

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higher social rank than his own. But before proceeding, he wants to consult Godoy, with whom he became acquainted when he made the loan to the duke. While Lorca waits for Godoy to show up in the antechamber of the palace, he speaks to Medrano.When Medrano hears about the motive of Lorca’s visit and the conditions under which the duke had made his offer, he admonishes Lorca, telling him that the duke had also accepted him as a page, but that it was not just for one monetary favour, but for the loyal service that his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had rendered to his family. Lorca understands the veiled insult and answers: ‘a service, even if small, made at a critical time carries a lot of value’.22 Medrano does not hesitate to reply that one of the great deeds was his grandfather’s, who saved the life of the duke’s father during a war, when the elder duke was only a child. Lorca is not moved by Medrano, however, and in a matter-of-fact way states: ‘The great lords of these times do not find themselves with needs of that type anymore; rather, they are always in need for the type of service I  provided for the duke, which I  find more worthy than the service provided by your grandfather.’23 Medrano, angry and unable to deny Lorca’s claim of the importance of money, retaliates by telling him that if it is true that the life-saving deed of his grandfather is equivalent to Lorca’s loan of money, then the outcome might also be the same: the duke might forget about the existence of Lorca’s son, in the same way that he has forgotten Medrano himself in the ten years that have passed since he first entered his service. By the time Godoy finally appears in the antechamber, Lorca is no longer sure if it is advantageous for his son to serve the duke. What we surmise is that Lorca is not only worried about the possibility of social mobility within the palace, but also concerned about his exposure to other pages like Medrano, who would subject him to humiliation in no uncertain terms. Despite the fact that Godoy is more articulate and more learned than Medrano, his pronouncement is the same: pages cannot expect to gain much from their service. They are not fed well and suffer constantly from the abuse of their superiors; at best, they can expect to be promoted to major-domo, chamber steward, stable master, secretary, or squire. On a superficial level, Godoy’s stance towards Lorca is more courteous than that of the other pages, but as conversation shifts to the topic of hidalguía at the request of a curious Lorca, Godoy becomes increasingly condescending. He remarks that in his ideal world nobles would be unequivocally recognised at first sight by their title or by their clothes.24 When Lorca expresses his lax attitude about passing hidalgos by suggesting that hidalgos and caballeros are not necessarily harmed by false nobles, Godoy is exasperated:  lowly commoners change their surnames to ones that ring of nobility – such as Saavedra or Narváez – and ‘in a matter of two prayers turn themselves into hidalgos and even knights, despite the [efforts of the]

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prosecutor of His Majesty to investigate [their cases].25 Godoy sees the false nobles as ‘usurpers’ of true nobility, who, sooner or later, will prove that they cannot leave their inferior natures behind. Godoy projects that ‘in fifty years or eighty years, one of the false nobles or their descendants will do something evil or contemptuous, because … they develop habits and return to their natural state … and it will be said that such a Narváez or such a Saavedra was responsible, and those with the surname will be condemned.’26 In other words, impostors stain and ruin the lineages of rightful nobles, and, by extension, disrupt the organic relationship between nobility and morality. Given the dim prospects for securing his own social mobility, Godoy appears to be invested in revealing the strategies used by false hidalgos who manage to infiltrate social spaces in which he himself would never be allowed to reside. Godoy’s attitude about the almost magical ways in which good lineages are usurped and spoiled by plebeians is undoubtedly hyperbolic and highly speculative, but it might also express a dimension of the social insecurity felt by impoverished hidalgos, whose sense of worth depended solely on the notion that their blood was purer and of higher worth than that of the populace at large. The bitterness of the hidalgo pages becomes transparent when Lorca enters the duke’s chamber and is received with great courtesies by his debtor. This chamber symbolises a space where the pages are not allowed to enter, other than when they are called upon to provide assistance to the duke. At this point, for example, the duke commands: ‘pages, bring a chair here for Juan de Lorca’.27 Incensed by the better treatment that Lorca receives from the duke, Godoy complains to Guzmán: ‘can you believe, Guzmán, the duke’s reception of Juan de Lorca? Did your father ever receive such treatment, or even other caballeros who are related to him?’28 Again, Godoy speaks of this injustice in terms of a theft of merits; he grieves the sad lot of nobles who are robbed of the honour they deserve by people without any qualifications. Such acts, he claims, ‘go against distributive justice’.29 Godoy’s comment on distributive justice evokes Thomas Aquinas’s explanation that the ruler of a social body must strive to allocate material and social resources to each member according to his rank and merit.30 As Godoy reasons, taking away that which belongs to the better kinds and giving it to the lowly opposes God’s natural order. But one wonders if he is not trying to rationalise the plain and simple fact that while he waits for the duke’s next command from the antechamber, the merchant is in the ducal chamber being courted by his master. Throughout the work, we witness his seething jealousy towards merchants like Lorca, and even towards commoner cooks and wine makers who earn a higher wage than he does at court, as well as his resentment of the high nobility – embodied by the duke – for their failure to give more privileges to the noble servants over the plebeians, and for their self-degrading relationships with debtors and, especially, with rich Conversos.

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Godoy suggests that aristocrats have become willing victims of identity usurpation in exchange for quick financial profit. Godoy’s own bloodline, in contrast, has resisted the greed that has compelled many others to stain their clean lineages by allowing people with ‘ruined’ blood to enter their families or by taking a vile trade.31 The more we hear Godoy speak, the clearer it becomes that his social vision is dictated by what is an almost visceral aversion to being deemed of ‘similar’ or of worse value than those whom he judges to be of inferior blood. No experience is more humiliating to Godoy and his colleagues than one in which they are scorned by new suspicious hidalgos or wealthy commoners. Citing Juan Arce de Otalora’s treatise on nobility, Summa nobilitatis hispanicae (1570), Godoy goes as far as claiming that it is illegal for new hidalgos to assert that their lineage is as ‘illustrious and clean’ as the lineage of ancestral nobles.32 He is also incensed by the lack of hesitation among rich plebeians in addressing him with the pronoun tú, instead of the more formal vuestra or vuestra merced.33 When Guzmán refers to Lorca as a ‘Jewish son of a whore’, he most candidly expresses what Medrano and the other pages in the duke’s household do not dare to say aloud.34 Guzmán’s insult, however, does not seem to be based on his belief that Lorca is either a Converso or the son of a prostitute. It appears to be the only means by which he can increase his perceived innate difference that separates him from Lorca. Godoy departs from his generally measured demeanour and becomes visibly angry at Lorca’s announcement that it is best for his son to follow in his footsteps and become a merchant instead of working as a page (like Godoy). Lorca realises that being a page will entail a life of begging and entreating, while being a merchant will bring wealth, and with wealth, nobility. Lorca has thus rendered a thinly veiled insult to the hidalgo page, for he has declared his refusal to have his son hold the same profession. He suggests that his young son has no advantages in achieving ‘sameness’ with Godoy. Here lies the paradox of the hidalgo’s tense yet dependent relationship with the commoner. In part, hidalguía is a valuable condition because it is recognised and coveted by those who do not have it; yet Godoy does not recognise the role that Lorca plays in sustaining his hidalguía. Hermosilla’s pages reveal a fear of social devaluation that their real-life hidalgo counterparts experienced in their daily lives. This social anxiety might be interpreted as the contradiction that rises out of the nobleman’s desire to vaunt his superiority to the masses and prevent the low-born from joining his rank while recognising his dependence upon the commoner to validate his status. In other words, we see the hidalgo as fearful of having his identity usurped, while being dependent upon the threat of usurpation, in order to sustain the illusion of his superior self. Hidalgo envy was indeed how some hidalgos explained the threat of identity theft. And as I discuss in the following section, the self-proclaimed hidalgo’s

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fantasy of wanting to be envied found a very specific representation in the form of picaresque narratives.35 Hidalgo envy in picaresque narratives In the convenient imagination of the Spanish elite all kinds of impure types were attempting to steal their material belongings, their place in society, and, worst of all, their identities. For government and religious leaders, as mentioned below, the low-born’s potential criminality and flexible identities posed a threat to the well-being of the social body. Laws were passed and there were attempts to implement programmes to limit these subjects’ movement and self-misrepresentation, but those attempts seemed to have done little to dispel the idea that low-borns could, in theory, with their chameleon-like bodies, gain access to legitimate realms of society. Just as the rogue of the legendary story of the jail of Seville could turn himself into an eel-like creature and manage to find passage to lawful spaces, bastard foundlings could turn themselves into lawyers and immoral Converso merchants into members of government councils. This perception might have been influenced largely by the fact that noblemen and their supporters favoured high-density urban areas where they were exposed to vagabonds, destitute children, and miscreants on a daily basis. These marginal members of society were easily distinguishable in most cases by their ragged garments and grimy bodies, as well as by their own parlance. They could be dangerous because they were seen as potential passers masquerading as legitimate members of society (i.e., crippled beggars, soldiers, servants). Writers of fiction and dramatists were particularly aware of this anxiety that pervaded hidalgo readers who were either sympathetic to them or in socially unstable positions. In order to address these readers’s interests, writers produced picaresque works of prose and drama that imagined situations in which the lowest social offender – the pícaro or roguish lowlifer – attempts to break free from his or her wretched given social condition and to move up in the world through any means possible. The enormous publication success of the picaresque narratives in general might be interpreted as the by-product of the early modern reading public’s demand for narratives that addressed the elite public’s preoccupation with social passing. In effect, the figure of the pícaro/a may be seen as the hyperbolic reflection of the unscrupulous low-born who watchfully inhabited the margins of legitimate society. A figure associated with constant movement, the pícaro/a is primarily a solitary person. Occasionally, he or she travels with companions, but he or she is devoted to none other than himself or herself. The founding picaresque texts – the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604) – were written in

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the first person in the form of pseudo-autobiographies. Subsequent to the publication of these two founding works, however, a significant number of prose works with pícaro protagonists were composed in the third person. Pícaros also appeared as the main characters of comedias. Thus, by picaresque text or narrative, I mean a prose or dramatic text with a protagonist who fulfils the distinctive attributes of the literary pícaro/a.36 Over time, Hispanists have attempted to explain the success of picaresque texts in numerous ways. Critics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries interested in the subject of literary realism conjectured that texts with pícaros as central figures were popular in early modern Spain because these anti-heroes mirrored the historical rogues they encountered in daily life. Américo Castro’s scholarship broke new ground in the first half of the twentieth century when he conjectured that the literary pícaro had been invented by Converso writers – the author of the Lazarillo de Tomes and Mateo Alemán – in order to have them articulate the Converso resentment for the rhetoric of inherited honour and blood purity that ruled Spanish society and which I will address in the following chapter.37 As suggestive as Castro’s view was, however, it did not explain why the elite would have been so fascinated by the ploys of his purported Converso characters and authors. Since Castro’s essay on the subject, most critics have either rejected his thesis that the picaresque is a strictly Converso genre or have attenuated the thesis that rancour and disenchantment were sentiments that pertained only to Conversos.38 Even Marcel Bataillon, who recognises Castro as a source of inspiration, suggests that the pícaro’s bitterness towards the upper echelons of society might reflect the view of low-borns, whether Conversos or not, who felt some kind of social marginalisation. Bataillon analysed picaresque narratives in the context of the Spanish obsession with hidalguía and social honour, and concludes that the struggle of the pícaro exaggerates the ‘intimate torments of certain privileged classes.’39 Mariscal, following Bataillon, further argues that the first person narration of these novels allows pícaro speakers to take a position of authority, in spite of their fictionalisation. To underscore the privileged classes’s attraction to the less constrained life of the pícaros, he makes reference to a festival recorded initially by Cabrera de Córdoba in 1605 in which aristocrats traditionally outfitted themselves like pícaros.40 According to Cabrera, during the celebration of the day of Saint John, aristocrats parodied lowlifers by appearing on the streets ‘disguised in picaresque fashion’.41 From the point of view of the dominant, however, the first person pícaro narrator may have been seen more like an absurd figure of authority than a figure that challenges the established authority. The illustration of the masking of aristocrats in a courtly festival may be interpreted as an instance in which they externalised their fears of the rising underclass through parody. The aristocratic act of dressing down could be conceived as an analogous function to the carnivalesque act of dressing up. On

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one hand, it allows the aristocratic participants to symbolically incarnate the marginal subjects they feared, and, on the other, they allowed the viewers at the festival to imagine a grotesque version of what the world would look like if the social hierarchy were overturned. Furthermore, it must be emphasised that the aristocrats were dressed purposely in an exaggerated manner so that the viewers would be aware of the gap between their ‘true’ selves and the role they were mock-playing. The attraction of this type of performance resided in reinforcing the view that passing down was as ridiculous as passing up. José Antonio Maravall also interpreted the picaresque as a medium that articulated the frustrations of low-borns, but with an explicit political agenda.42 For Maravall, the picaresque functions essentially as an anti-authoritarian literary medium that subverts the stratified class order by focusing on the injustice suffered by Spaniards in the lower ranks. From his point of view, through the character of the pícaro/a, the authors express the frustrated ‘impulse’ of the underclass and the marginalised for social betterment.43 Although Maravall’s conjecture is relevant for the first two major works of picaresque literature, Lazarillo and Guzmán de Alfarache, it proves to be less relevant for the picaresque literature published subsequently. Unlike Lazarillo and Guzmán, who are mainly driven into delinquency by a visceral need to quench their physical hunger, the pícaros of the 1600s are propelled by hidalgo envy and the desire to be recognised as honourable members of elite society, even if only superficially. One may argue that Guzmán de Alfarache also seeks ‘to be somebody else’, in Benito Brancaforte’s words, but he never intends to join the purported blood nobility. He is well aware that his pretensions are limited by his low birth.44 He masquerades as a Don on several occasions, but generally with the objective of feeling superior to his low-born peers, not with the intention of ever being accepted in noble circles, and, even so, Guzmán proves to be a terrible actor. He might be dressed as a nobleman, but his crude and exaggerated mannerisms reveal his true identity, and he is ultimately rejected and ridiculed by the very people whom he attempts to impress. The anti-heroes of subsequent picaresque works were conceived as both more ambitious and potentially threatening to the social order, which arguably served to accentuate their eventual fall. While Lazarillo de Tormes or Guzmán de Alfarache act as marginal bystanders witnessing the benefits afforded to the noble and wealthy, these pícaros engage in the performance of hidalguía to receive its benefits. Among representative picaresque narratives that fall into this category are Francisco López de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina (Justina The Trickster) (1605), Salas Barbadillo’s La ingeniosa Elena (The Ingenious Elena) (1612, 1614), Lope de Vega’s El caballero del milagro (The Knight by Miracle) (1621), Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos (The History of the Life of the Swindler Named Don Pablos) (1626), Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s Las harpías de Madrid (The Harpies of Madrid) (1631) and La

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niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (The Girl of the Lies,Teresa de Manzanares) (1632). In contrast to Maravall’s view, these texts may be seen as expressing the established order’s perception of a threat emanating from the lower classes and reinforcing the values of that social elite, which were based on hierarchical stratification. And they are shaped in a way that caters to the expectations of their target readers, namely, the elite and the aspiring elite who determined the success of these books in the marketplace. Rather than viewing picaresque narratives as fictionalised examples of the limits of social mobility, one could argue that these texts express an opposing concern – that upward mobility was too accessible to unwanted subjects. Lope de Vega’s El caballero del milagro, Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos, and Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares are three specific examples of picaresque literature in which the nobility’s anxiety of sameness regarding social rank is most transparently addressed. The protagonists of these works are moved by an uncontrollable envy of the higher born and by the desire to infiltrate elite social spaces. In every case, the passing pícaro comes dangerously close to infiltrating and staining the lineage of his or her unsuspecting victims. Lope dramatises an improbable world in which the most despicable rogue could pass for a member of the noble elite with no more than a simple change of clothes in his little-known play.45 The protagonist of the play, Luzmán, is a peasant-turned-rogue whose life is solely animated by the desire to transform himself into a wealthy nobleman. In line with authoritative treatises on nobility, this anti-hero proves that one’s physiognomy and morality is predetermined by his or her birth. Luzmán is accordingly duplicitous, immoral, disloyal, arrogant, and unrepentant. Lope’s unsympathetic portrayal stands in stark contrast to the protagonists he depicts in his comedia de villanos or peasant plays. While the honourable peasants he introduces betray all the conventional expectations of their social rank, Lope’s Luzmán conforms to the worst stereotype of the conniving low-born (who is allegorised in the figure of the lowlifer). Moreover, by naming his protagonist Luzmán, a name that obviously evokes that of the eponymous character of Mateo Alemán’s novel, Lope makes clear to his audience that his anti-hero is a literary pícaro. A self-centred and amoral rogue, Luzmán is determined to transform himself into a wealthy nobleman through whatever means necessary. There are times when Luzmán’s obsession with becoming a nobleman verges on the delusional. Echoing Salas Barbadillo’s Juan de Toledo, Luzmán convinces himself that he was handed the identity of a low-born by mistake. At one point, he daydreams about the being the bastard son of an aristocrat. He would rather believe that ‘a duke or count … had an affair with my beautiful mother’ than accept his given low birth.46 Luzmán’s unscrupulousness and

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enjoyment of secretly infiltrating proscribed social circles and breaking taboos, however, may be seen as his most dangerous attribute. His servant, Tristán, describes him as a master of deceit. He can be shrewd, fraudulent, two-faced, and ‘change colours’ according to need.47 Evoking the eel-like rogue of the prison of Seville, Luzmán can break into vulnerable spaces by unpredictably taking any necessary shape and form. Like Pedro de León’s rogue, his powers of persuasion and impersonation are described as being ‘miraculous’. He is, thus, the caballero del milagro, that is, ‘a knight by miracle’. Luzmán can impersonate any nobleman of his choice, and is not intimidated by the presence of even the highest nobleman. Whenever possible, he adds Don to his name, and if the opportunity arose, he would not hesitate to call himself a grandee. His servant Tristán marvels at his master’s prowess for mingling with the most respectable noblemen: You must see him go about with princes and grandees. It is foolishness of those who hold him in esteem, and ask him to speak, write, or tell them a story. They offer him their tables, they sit next to him, and show him more honour than to one of their own.48

Luzmán’s impossible reverie of transforming himself into a nobleman propels him to move to Italy, where his origin cannot be traced and where he can pass as a caballero. Once in Rome, he deliberates on the choice of a surname that would match the identity he yearns for. Unable to choose among the most honourable lineages of Spain, he decides to take them all, and he calls himself ‘Don Luzmán de Toledo, y de Mendoça, Girón, Enríquez, Lara’.49 This self-baptism may well have been seen as a grotesquely comical representation of identity usurpation by Lope’s elite contemporaries from whom Luzmán can steal enough wealth to carry out his ultimate goal – to move back to Spain, marry an impoverished noblewoman, and live the rest of his life like a legitimate caballero. His plan is to find a rich, vulnerable noblewoman whom he can seduce. He chooses Isabela, the young wife of a much older Roman patrician. To gain her favour, he stages a scenario in which he casts himself as a hero. He instructs two of his servants to stand outside her home and make loud and disparaging comments about her. Isabela becomes visibly upset upon seeing strangers attack her honour, and, as planned, Luzmán intervenes on her behalf. He feigns an attack on his servants as well as the killing of one of them. Moved by what she believes is Luzmán’s chivalry, Isabela immediately falls in love with him. Spellbound by Luzmán, she showers him with servants, horses, and anything else needed for the lifestyle of a nobleman in Rome. Eventually, Isabela gives to him a chest with all of her jewels, with the intention of running away with

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him. Luzmán realises that with the value of the jewels, he can retire to Spain and forge for himself a credible caballero identity. His life-long dream has been to live among the elite in Toledo and he believes that he can fulfil this desire by exploiting Isabela’s treasures. Elated by the thought of putting an end to his search for nobility, Luzmán announces to his servant Tristán that he will finally live without envying the nobility: ‘I should be able live without envying the Prince / and in the service of God, which is what matters most.’50 Hidalgo envy, he suggests, will be defeated only when he himself may be found among the envied. Luzmán evokes in exaggerated form the figure of the commoner who argued for the right to enter noble spaces, but whose unprincipled actions proved the unsuitability of his aspirations. For Lope’s elite audience, a pícaro like Luzmán would have reminded them of the misguided conviction that the lower their social rank, the greater the person’s natural proclivity to act immorally. When it appears that Luzmán will acquire the status he has yearned for all of his life, none other than his former servant Tristán cuts his expectations short. Having helped Luzmán to carry out his acts of fraud, Tristán had expected to be compensated generously. Before departing for Toledo, however, his master leaves him with nothing but a single low-value coin.The fact that this coin is known as doblón, or two-faced, is as comical as it is grotesquely demeaning for Tristán. Tristán reveals the true identity of Luzmán and his deception to Isabela, who, scorned and humiliated by having been tricked by a low-born, summons a group of rogues to stage a hold-up of Luzmán. Mirroring the performance of Luzmán’s servants, Isabela’s rogues attack Luzmán and take from him not only the jewels he had stolen from her, but also all of his clothes. In a desperate attempt to cover his nakedness, Luzmán seeks help from the courtesan Octavia, whom he had also seduced and betrayed prior to meeting Isabela. Luzmán approaches Octavia’s window and asks her to hand him any type of garb that he might use to cover himself. But Octavia sees Luzmán as a despicable lover who cruelly ridiculed and abandoned her without remorse. She avenges his betrayal by emptying a large basin of refuse water on his head from her window. Octavia’s act is doubly meaningful. First, she intensifies Luzmán’s humiliation, forcing him to walk through the streets drenched with foul-smelling waste in the freezing cold. Second, the act is a symbolic purging of the human filth that Luzmán personifies. This act of revenge is even ironic given that Octavia – a promiscuous and immoral individual herself – deems Luzmán to be unworthy of inhabiting her own domain. It is in this last scene that, for the first time, Luzmán’s outward appearance is revealed as an appropriate reflection of his inward self. It is in this state that Luzmán retreats to his village in Spain. Lope’s audience would have most likely accepted Luzmán’s pathetic state as evidence of his downcast origins.

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In line with the expected character of the pícaro, Luzmán never shows remorse for his actions: if he retreats to his village in Spain, it is not because he feels any contrition for his misguided pursuit to join the ranks of the nobility, but because his conspicuous otherness leaves him with no other option. The message that is conveyed in this drama is unequivocal: morality is transmitted through blood, and regardless of the environment in which individuals are raised, the corrupt identities of low-borns who attempt to transcend their rank are bound to be exhibited in due course. I do not mean to argue that this play manifests Lope’s personal ideology on the issue of social mobility. Given Lope’s wavering and contradictory views on the matter in his works, it is almost impossible to determine which he sponsored and which he did not. While he upholds the established views on nobility by birth in El caballero del milagro, he also subverts the stereotypes of the rustic and morally inferior peasants in the renowned Peribáñez (1614) and Fuenteovejuna (1619). Yet in other plays, such as El perro del hortelano (The Gardener’s Dog) (1618), the playwright refuses to emphasise a particular stance, and, instead, perspectivistically explores both pro-elite and subversive points of view. In other words, the case of the low-born secretary who successfully passes for an aristocrat and successfully marries a duchess (with her knowledge of the identity scheme) might be interpreted as the espousal of the ruling social system and its satirisation at the same time. Lope’s biographical information further complicates the endeavour of determining his thoughts on the matter, for he himself attempted to pass as a caballero. The son of an embroiderer, Lope had displayed an invented noble lineage and an equally fictitious coat of arms – legendary Bernardo de Carpio’s – on the frontispieces of his pastoral novel La Arcadia (1598), his prose romance El peregrino de su patria (The Pilgrim in His Fatherland) (1604), and his epic Jerusalén conquistada (The Conquest of Jerusalem) (1609). His nemesis, the caballero poet Luis de Góngora, made sure that Lope’s self-promotion would not go unnoticed and wrote a sonnet in which he faulted his enemy for concocting the towers in his coat of arms ‘out of the wind’.51 In spite of Lope’s own passing attempts, however, it is too speculative to assume that Lope’s social condition predisposed him to promote a subversive ideology. Privately, Lope could have empathised with some of the social passers of his plays as much as he could have preferred to identify himself with the elite he attempted to emulate. It would be most accurate to state, then, that Lope’s sponsorship of the class-based segregation of society conveyed in El caballero del milagro is a factor determined by its picaresque mode and not by any social doctrine he personally promoted. At the very least, Lope’s primary objective – in line with that of the authors of the picaresque works examined here – was to attend to the anxiety of sameness of the dominant class by indulging their

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fantasies about the naturalness of class, morality, and the ‘normalisation’ of social boundaries. Quevedo further explores the social fantasies of his aristocratic peers in El buscón, the most widely read picaresque novel of the seventeenth century.52 The high-born Quevedo is much more despondent in his vision of the socially mobile and deeper in his exploration of the process that shapes the dominant’s contempt of the lowlifer. The author had a courtly readership in mind, as is revealed by the fact that he circulated an early version of El buscón prior to its publication among his peers in the upper-crust circles in Madrid.53 Criticism of the novel has generally concurred with the view that Quevedo’s anti-hero, Pablos, acts as the grotesque and contemptible embodiment of the low-born with aspirations to break rank. Scholars, however, tend to gravitate towards one of three interpretations. For Anne Cruz, the pícaro Pablos is viewed as an illustration of the condition of the indigent of early modern Spain;54 for Barry Ife, he is the embodiment of the Converso subject in a desperate journey to escape the predetermined failed destiny of his religious caste; and for Edmund Cros and Paul Smith, he is the incarnation of the emerging bourgeois individual.55 Although these readings are not mutually exclusive, the last interpretation is the most compelling, especially if we take into account that the established nobility was most concerned with their own socio-economic security, which as far as they were concerned was put into jeopardy by low-born wealthy merchants and financiers. For the aristocracy, the destitute and the poor certainly posed a social problem, but they were a nuisance at worst. In regards to Ife’s point, there are reasons to suggest that Pablos’s Converso blood cannot be isolated as the exclusive feature that damns his attempt at social mobility. Quevedo presents Pablos’s religious origins not as the single source of his impurity, but as one more component of his inferior extraction. One might recall, for instance, that the insults directed at Pablos explicitly refer to his damned plebeian lineage rather than to his New Christian ancestry. One could even visualise how much the economically insecure nobility must have revelled in the failure and downfall of the lowlife onto whom they could safely project their socio-economic angst. I would further elaborate on Cros and Smith’s interpretation by adding that Quevedo’s purpose to punish Pablos is motivated not so much for his aspirations for an easier life, but more for striving to impersonate a high-ranked nobleman like himself. El buscón may therefore be construed as a mock-memoir of an identity usurper. This is not to say that Quevedo’s representation of the pícaro is invariably negative. Whereas Quevedo univocally vilifies and slanders the passing low-born in Sueños, Providencia de Dios, and ‘Don Dinero’ for his attempt to confound society’s sense of perception through identity masking, he traces the development of Pablos with added dimensionality. In effect, at the outset of Pablos’s narration even the most elitist reader is compelled to feel some

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sympathy for the unfortunate circumstances under which the anti-hero is born, even as he or she is appalled at Pablos’s overreaching ambition for nobility. The despair with which Pablos describes the moment in which he learns that his mother is a prostitute and that he is the offspring of one of her illicit sexual encounters is indeed heartbreaking. Pablos candidly recalls: ‘I was left lifeless; and realising I had been betrayed, I determined to promptly gather everything I could from my home, and to leave the house of my “father”, because I was so full of shame.’56 Pablos’s description of the painful humiliation and desolation he experiences as a child upon discovering that he has no true home or father adds an element of subtlety to his otherwise burlesque character.The affection Pablos shows initially for Don Diego, by willingly offering to him his toys and food in exchange for affection, though self-interested, also has the effect of deepening the representation of the anti-hero. The shared hunger Pablos suffers along with his high-born and low-born schoolmates under Bachelor Cabra’s hands, moreover, emphasises the shared humanity of all subjects alike. Shame, loneliness, and hunger are certainly attributes that humanise Pablos, albeit briefly, and hint at the lowlifer’s unfulfilled potential for redemption. A few critics, such as William Clamurro, have suggested that Quevedo unintentionally projected onto Pablos his own insecurity about his limited financial resources and his precarious position at the king’s court.57 Clamurro’s conjecture might explain the contradiction readers have seen between Quevedo’s project of censuring the protagonist’s desire for social mobility – and, by extension, the potential passers he symbolises  – and his empathetic portrayal of Pablos in the first chapters of the novel. But aside from a hypothesis about Quevedo’s latent and self-embattled ideology, we cannot make any assertions about Quevedo’s identification with the pícaro. Even Mariscal, who insists on Quevedo’s attraction to the figure of the literary lowlife because of the alternative, freer form of subjectivity he embodies, acknowledges that in the end ‘we are faced with the probability that the figuring forth of an unruly pícaro in a poetic text destined to be read by a limited courtly audience almost always worked to contain alterity’.58 In effect, the deeper features afforded to the pícaro do not take away from reinforcing the aristocrat’s sense that he is a hopelessly cursed individual who must be fenced off from dominant spaces. As Francisco Rico puts it, Quevedo forces Pablos to betray himself in his narration, ‘to denounce himself out of his own mouth’, in order to feature him in the narrative as the butt of his joke.59 The pícaro’s self-betrayal is most apparent at the very outset of Pablos’s narration when he rails against his own lineage and makes a statement of his blood impurity, a deed that would have been unthinkable for any Spaniard of any social rank. His insistence in renouncing his lineage, an impossible feat for the authors of the dominant discourses examined above, is his most damning act. All of Pablos’s efforts to distance himself from

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his heritage and to deny his sameness with his parents have the adverse effect. Pablos ends up being a thief like his father and in a relationship with a prostitute, who is like his mother. In the last chapter of his story, Pablos mourns the fact that no matter how much he attempts to disguise himself, he cannot run away from ‘fortune’s persecution’.60 His geographical movement southbound – from Segovia, to Madrid, to Toledo, to Seville, and finally to the New Indies – alludes to his fall downwards into the underworld to the point of no return. Pablos informs his reader from the beginning of the novel that even as a child he hated his impure extraction and became obsessed with escaping the miserable familial fortune that he was expected to inherit. After reporting that his mother was a New Christian who worked as a prostitute and a sorcerer, his father a thief, and his uncle a hangman, he explains to his reader that in spite of his parents’s attempts to train him in their respective trades, he refused because he was convinced that he belonged to a higher social space than they did. In his words, ‘since I was a young child, I always thought of being a caballero, and did not have interest in learning either [trade]’.61 When the opportunity is presented for the school-aged Pablos to be employed as the personal attendant of Don Diego, he does not hesitate to turn his back on his family. He explains, ‘I was determined to not come back to school or to my parents’s home, and instead, to serve Don Diego, or better said, to be his companion.’62 In Don Diego’s countenance, Pablos sees the image of the caballero he desires to resemble. Pablos’s intention is to draw himself closer to Don Diego, in hopes that he can absorb some of his master’s better fortune and achieve a more reputable status. It may even be argued that from the moment he joins Don Diego’s household, his true desire is to become Don Diego’s social equal. It is notable that Pablos changes his statement about leaving home to ‘serve’ Don Diego into one in which he says his function is to ‘be his companion’. But Pablos quickly realises that being Don Diego’s companion does not afford him any of the social benefits enjoyed by his master. One of the more significant examples of society’s embrace of Don Diego and rejection of Pablos is the divergent reception they receive upon arriving at the school in Alcalá de Henares. Once Don Diego pays the unofficial ‘initiation’ fees to his new peers, all the privileges of an old member of the school are bestowed upon him, and he is kindly ushered by family friends to the classroom reserved for the elite.63 Pablos, on the other hand, is identified as belonging to a servile rank and is ushered into the school courtyard, where he is surrounded by a multitude of students who claim that he reeks of death and then proceed to spit on him. Instead of being on route to a more honourable space, Pablos lands in the underworld he was escaping. The shower of spit he endures might be interpreted as a mock-baptism into a life characterised by symbolic and literal filth. Pablos recognises the initiation that has been forced upon him

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when he likens himself to ‘the washbasin of an old man’.64 Other assaults follow and it dawns upon Pablos that his master will take no measure to protect him against the abuse of both noblemen and low-borns. ‘Watch out for yourself’, Don Diego warns him, ‘because here you have neither father nor mother’.65 He thus becomes aware that he will not find protection – much less patronage for mobility – under Don Diego and decides to break free from the bounds of servitude. And, since he realises that he will never become a caballero through legitimate means, he decides that he will pass for one. For Quevedo, Pablos’s unwillingness to embrace his shame and given rank causes his downfall. All moments of sympathy for Pablos that readers might have shared are likely to crumble when, as Alexander Parker recalls, Pablos rejects his last chance to properly insert himself into the dominant hierarchy. Without being able to contain an ironic laugh, Pablos tells Don Diego: ‘Sir, I’m now a different person and have other plans; I strive higher and wish to have a position of authority. I had accepted my place in the sun up to this point, but I now know who my father is.’66 By ‘father’, Pablos is of course alluding to the false patrimonies he will concoct in his career as a social passer. Hence, instead of shadowing Don Diego, Pablos aims to become his symbolic substitute through deceit and impersonation. Soon after Pablos has decided that he will become the type of usurper of lineages that Fernández de Navarrete and Diego de Hermosilla would have despised, he heads for the locus of choice of social climbers, Madrid. Pablos eventually meets a false hidalgo, ‘Don Toribio’, who teaches him how to contrive a noble identity: he changes his name to Don Felipe Tristán, and seeks a wealthy noblewoman he can deceive into marrying him. Costumed as a caballero and accompanied by other pícaros posing as lackeys, he wanders the areas in Madrid frequented by professed hidalgos in the hope of being noticed. He is finally approached by a woman who claims to be looking for an honourable marriage partner for her Old Christian niece with a dowry of 6,000 ducats. Believing Pablos to be an Old Christian caballero, the woman begins to make arrangements for the formal union between her niece, Doña Ana, and the false Don Felipe Tristán. But Pablos’s plan falls apart as his former master, Don Diego – who turns out to be the cousin of the lady he courts – becomes suspicious that Don Felipe is none other than his former servant. Once Don Diego learns that Pablos is indeed Don Felipe, he executes a plan to insult and humiliate his old servant for his impertinence. Don Diego’s punishment plays on Pablos’s desire to impersonate his master: Don Diego convinces the unsuspecting Pablos to wear his cape. His friends then attack Pablos, who is recognisable by the cape. They ruthlessly beat him and slash his face with a knife from ear to ear. Pablos is thus exposed publicly with a visible bloodstain that alludes to the shameful lineage he so

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desperately attempted to conceal. The mark on his face reminds readers that Pablos’s desire to ‘deny the bloodline we carry’ is unattainable.67 As Cruz observes, Pablos pays a high price for having symbolically appropriated Don Diego’s identity.68 As Quevedo wished to imagine it, the moral filth of impersonators always seeped through their masks. The greatest irony of Pablos’s ambition, however, is that he is unable even to find a legitimate model to imitate, for Pablos attempts to mimic his master without ever realising that Don Diego is a Converso who strives to cover up his own lineage.69 The fact that Quevedo’s pícaro idealises a Converso nobleman without being aware of it underscores the absurdity of his pretension to transform himself into a caballero. Unlike Pablos, however, Quevedo’s aristocratic readers would have immediately identified the surname Coronel as Converso. Carroll Johnson convincingly argued in the 1970s that Quevedo was making a reference to the historical Coronels when naming his character. According to Johnson, the Coronels from Segovia were a noble and wealthy family of Converso ancestry and known to the Spanish court.70 Following Johnson’s conjecture, Don Diego’s indignation directed at Pablos may be seen as expressing a noble Converso’s anxiety of sameness about another Converso whom he deems to be inferior due to his low-born origins. Don Diego might also be seen as the embodiment of ‘Don Dinero’, the protagonist of his eponymous letrilla, whose affluence allows him to pass undisturbed into the highest social spaces, despite his impure origin. But Quevedo satirically unveils the impurity of both Don Diego and Don Dinero (whose names conspicuously form a rhythmic pair) with the objective of providing a cathartic release for elite audiences. Quevedo caters to his readers by grotesquely deflating the power that money has in the hands of social passers. The readers, in turn, would have laughed heartily at the ridiculousness of the lowlife’s ambition and at the rich Converso’s erroneous conviction that he had successfully passed for an Old Christian. Feminising social climbers: the case of  Teresa de Manzanares The female rogue, the ‘pícara’, fulfilled a similar function as her male counterpart. She provided dominant Spaniards with a space in which to gaze and peek into the otherwise unfamiliar lives of the imagined overreaching imposters who inspired self-doubt, apprehension, and – in their most grotesque renditions – disgust. It also gave them a sense of affirmation and security regarding the existing social order. Picaresque works that revolve around a female protagonist include Francisco López de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina (Justina, the Pícara)

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(1605), Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s La hija de la Celestina (Celestina’s Daughter) (1612), and Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (1632) and La garduña de Sevilla y anzuelo de bolsas (The Sevillian Thief and the Bait of Purses) (1642).71 The pícaras in these novels lack a valid feminine voice that could be distinguished from that of their male counterparts. As Peter Dunn observes: ‘It is useless to look for any trace of authentic feminine discourse in these narratives. The question of gender is occluded; it is absent as a discursive category.’72 Like the fictional male rogues of the seventeenth century, the protagonist of female picaresque novels also lacks any sense of morality and desires upward social mobility. Pícaras are susceptible to hidalgo envy, but given their marginal status as women, are also more profoundly aware of the limitations of their rank. They seek the title of ‘Doña’, in order to distinguish themselves from their low-born peers and not because of a belief that they can access elite social spaces. In Úbeda’s La pícara Justina, for instance, the protagonist is aware that, given her background, she will never marry a wealthy hidalgo, but takes comfort in the notion that her peers can show deference to her, even if only in the most superficial manner.73 She announces to her brothers that she seeks to marry a nobleman who will ‘honour my lineage and turn our abode into an honourable home of noble roots’.74 Justina succeeds in seducing an indigent and unattractive hidalgo from Vizcaya (one of the regions that recognised all of its natural inhabitants as hidalgos) to become her husband. In stating her ambition to acquire nobility, Justina feminises the words caballero and hidalgo. ‘I was determined’, she says, to fashion herself as ‘a caballera and a mujer de algo.’75 But caballera and mujer de algo are non-existent titles in the Spanish lexicon – Justina’s ludicrous choice of words immediately conveys the infeasibility of her goal. In the end, Justina discovers this on her own, learning that no special social status is conferred upon her as a result of her marriage to a presumed hidalgo who is financially destitute. She abandons her dream of hidalguía and instead aims to achieve fame in the world of rogues, which she accomplishes when she marries the pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache. In the same vein as Justina, Salas Barbardillo’s Elena and Castillo Solórzano’s Rufina recognise the social restrictions defined by their low birth and shameful parentage and avoid trespassing into nobler social spaces. If they pose as Doñas or hidalgas, it is only in the context of carrying out a hoax or embezzling money from gullible noblemen, not because they intend to permanently reside in higher social spaces. An exception to this characterisation of female tricksters is the eponymous protagonist of Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares. Like the pícaros Luzmán or Pablos, Teresa de Manzanares possesses the fantasy of true social mobility.76 She is as amoral as the male pícaros and autonomous in her pursuit of nobility. Teresa justifies her fraudulent tricks by invoking her

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‘yearning to be more’; she suggests that ‘one is condemnable if he or she gives in to things that are lower in quality and nobility than what is deserved’.77 I argue that despite her gender, her actions and thirst for upward mobility make her a figure that is closer to that of the typical male pícaro. From the outset the story, it is clear that Teresa wishes to cut ties with her family and fashion a new identity that will allow her to metamorphose into a Doña.78 Once she leaves her home, she will conceal her true origins. She concocts a new family history, hiding the fact that her mother was an innkeeper and her father a French rogue. Through the depictions of Teresa, Castillo Solórzano, just as Lope had done in his play, conveys the notion that being the legitimate child of low-born parents is less desirable than being the bastard child of a rich nobleman. In her pseudo-autobiography Teresa lets her readers know that she seeks a desirable noble family that will provide the honour and material benefits to which she feels entitled. Teresa is skilled in inventing noble identities for herself, but in each instance she is unable to sustain the deceit. Out of her four marriages, the only one not motivated by the goal of achieving upward social mobility is the union with Sarabia, an actor. Through Sarabia’s connections Teresa becomes a famous actress, so that even without access to elite circles she is able to play out her imagined noble self on stage. Sarabia is also the only man Teresa loves, albeit briefly. Her interest in him subsides the moment he attempts to prostitute her. The indignant Teresa remembers the event in the following manner: ‘Finally, he let me know that he did not mind it if I was employed by the “prince” who desired me … One of the things that move women to stop loving their men is to see that they do not esteem them, and in particular, to be treated like common women and prostitutes.’79 Sarabia’s blunt articulation of their base reality is what is unforgivable for Teresa. She wishes to sustain the performance of her imagined self beyond the stage and expects her actor lover to participate. In an intertextual reference, Teresa implies – as if she had read the tales of other pícaras – that she will not accept being lowered to the ranks of whorish pícaras like Rufina (La garduña de Sevilla), Justina (La pícara Justina), or Elena (La hija de la Celestina) because, unlike them, she is a mujer principal at heart. However, Teresa’s social fantasy paradoxically leads her to act in ways that echo the behaviour of her promiscuous pícara sisters, as she does not hesitate to use each of her other marriages as a means for social climbing. Her first husband is an old hidalgo widower, Lupercio de Saldaña. When she meets Lupercio she introduces herself as the illegitimate child of a caballero from Burgos named Don Lope de Manzanedo. She explains that her father had promised to retrieve her from her mother’s humble home, but died before he had the chance to do so. Saldaña, the seventy-year-old hidalgo who marries Teresa, is so blindly smitten by the sixteen-year-old adolescent that he asks for no further proof of

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her nobility and marries her despite her lack of a dowry. The seduced old man here has the same role as the female characters in Lope’s play and Quevedo’s novel (Isabela and Doña Ana respectively); he provides the rogue with access to a social circle that would otherwise be proscribed for her. Not satisfied with being just the wife of a mere hidalgo, the pícara confidently baptises herself as Doña Teresa de Manzanedo. As if to gloat about her achievement, she even dares to point out her newly acquired status to her male reader: ‘Look here, sir reader, and see that I have become the lady of a home and a family, and that I have a resounding Don added to my name Teresa and my last name has transformed from Manzanares to Manzanedo.’80 After the initial few months of marriage, Teresa becomes increasingly distressed about having to be confined within her home. She considers divorce, but she is not willing to give up her status and decides otherwise: ‘A thousand times I thought about getting a divorce, but this wretched thing called honour prevented me from doing so.’81 Teresa’s use of the word ‘honour’ is ironic and superficial. Her understanding of honour is similar to that of Lazarillo’s hidalgo squire. To them, honour is the outward recognition that they are different from commoners. Neither Lazarillo’s squire – a true hidalgo – nor Teresa – a false one – value what others really think of them so long as they are publicly addressed according to the privileges owed to the elite. In this context, Castillo Solórzano ridicules his pícara when within moments of becoming the wife of an hidalgo, she is already speaking of the social benefits of her ‘rank’.Teresa’s life as a Doña is cut short, however, as her husband dies within the first year of marriage. Teresa continues to strive to play the role of a purer self, and despite the fact that she loses all claims to her husband’s title or inheritance, she continues to refer to herself as Doña. Like Pablos and Luzmán, the higher Teresa aims, the lower she falls. She travels to Seville and seduces another older man, one who is wealthier and presumably of a higher rank than Saldaña. This caballero, Don Álvaro, has returned from Perú with a great fortune, amassed while working for the viceroy. With the help of a dishonest lawyer, Teresa convinces her suitor, Don Álvaro, that she is the widowed daughter of a Castilian caballero. She tells him that she was visiting Seville with her father when the latter passed away. Like Saldaña, Don Álvaro does not challenge Teresa’s false biography and marries her. But again, this caballero dies soon after marrying Teresa. At this point, readers might be left wondering if it is not Teresa’s figurative and literal stain – in the form of venereal disease – that causes her husbands’s deaths. Castillo Solórzano’s tale of identity usurpation is of a more extreme nature than any attempt proposed by Hermosilla, Lope, or Quevedo. In her most daring attempt at passing, Teresa impersonates the long-lost daughter of a renowned caballero named Don Sancho de Mendoza in Málaga. Teresa

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deliberately intends to steal the name and person of a specific woman, take her place, and appropriate her family and property. Having learned that Doña Leonor, the caballero’s daughter, had been kidnapped by Moorish pirates about twenty years earlier at the age of five, Teresa attempts to assume her identity. Teresa’s crime is condemnable because she is fully aware of its magnitude. She tells the reader: ‘I schemed one of the most extraordinary tricks a woman has plotted … in order to be happy for life.’82 Appearing at the caballero’s home dressed in Moorish garbs with her servant (who passes for a fellow captive), she tells him that she had joined other Christian captives and had successfully escaped from Algiers. She then shows Don Sancho a false certificate of identity, which is itself a parody of an ejecutoria. It reads: ‘this certificate has been signed with my signature and signed with my name, and likewise tested for accuracy by three notaries of the same city who certify my legitimacy.’83 The badly forged certificate of identity is a clear indication of Teresa’s fraud, but the elderly caballero willingly ignores the detail. He would rather blindly believe that he has been reunited with his lost daughter, welcoming Teresa and making her the mistress of his house. Castillo Solórzano implies here that if low-borns and lowlifers successfully infiltrate elite circles, it is due to the betrayal of supposed better-born who serve as their accomplices. But Castillo Solórzano’s conclusion to this episode does not deviate from that of the picaresque narratives devised by his contemporaries. As in Pablos’s life, Fortune does not take long to reveal Teresa’s fraud to her adoptive caballero father. A woman purporting to be the real Doña Leonor arrives in Málaga with more convincing evidence that she is the true long-lost daughter. She brings with her a golden cross pendant that the old caballero immediately recognises as a gift that he had given to her when she was just an infant. Don Sancho confronts Teresa and she confesses that she is not his daughter. Regardless of the evidence, however, Teresa cannot bring herself to reveal the full truth of her identity and maintains the fiction of her noble ancestry: ‘I am from Madrid, the daughter of an hidalgo from the mountains who has had to work to survive.’84 Castillo Solórzano evinces here that Teresa, in a Quixotic manner, can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality; her obsession for nobility is so deep that she fails to recognise her lowly origins, even when she has nothing to gain from continuing the deceit. As with all picaresque novels in which the low-born attempts to pass as a person with higher status, readers are assured at the end of Teresa’s pseudo-autobiography that the status quo is restored. Without any further options for marrying into the nobility, Teresa takes a fourth husband, who, although a fifty-year-old merchant, she believes will at least provide her with a comfortable life. But this merchant – the suggestion is that he is a Converso – is

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revealed to be excessively thrifty and, contrary to her expectations, Teresa returns to a life of misery and wanting. Like Luzmán or Pablos, Teresa is back in the symbolic space where she began, a space from which she enviously observes the lives of her social superiors. The gender of Castillo Solórzano’s pícara does not prevent her from acting like male pícaros. She alone commands her life and is willing to sacrifice her colleagues in crime if needed. She exploits her physical attributes to seduce men she considers will help her move socially upwards, but she does not view her female body as a site for victimhood and her sexuality is never to be subjected to the authority of another male. The only man she genuinely loves is Sarabia, but she abandons him partly because he attempts to take control of her sexuality.85 In the company of her male servants, Teresa navigates the Spanish landscape with the freedom of other pícaros. Don Sancho de Mendoza, who is almost tricked by Teresa into believing that she is his long-lost daughter, expresses astonishment at her undaunted attempts at social mobility, expecting such behaviour only from men.86 Indeed, Teresa’s ambitions, aggressiveness, and autonomy over her body compel us to view her as a figurative male social passer, but one who is constrained by the body of the weaker sex. Although most of the details of Castillo Solórzano’s life are unknown, we do know that – like his father – he was a highly ranked courtier for a number of important titled noblemen. Among others, he served the Count of Benavente, the Marquis of Villar, and the Marquis of Los Velez. We also know that, unlike Quevedo, he was financially secure due to the sizable real estate he inherited from his mother’s family and to his wife’s substantial dowry. It is not surprising, then, that his portrayal of the socially mobile is unforgivingly negative and, unlike Quevedo’s Buscón, more congruous in its message. Castillo Solórzano designates a member of the aristocracy as his ideal reader, the knight of the order of Santiago and treasurer of Alicante, Juan Alonso Martínez de Vera.87 His protagonist, Teresa, reasserts the notion that the reader of this picaresque novel is male and belongs to the upper echelons of society when she addresses him as ‘señor lector’. In her pseudo-autobiography Teresa is engaged in covering up her origins and pretending to be a member of the nobility in a manner that would be expected of male pícaros. Castillo Solórzano explains in his preface that Teresa’s ‘very soiled condition’ is unavoidable, for she had inherited it when she ‘suckled the milk [from her mother’s breast]’.88 For the aristocrat, the transgressions of his pícara are the result of her ‘natural and depraved inclination’.89 Teresa not only challenges both the social order established by lineage, but also the patriarchal control over her body. If we consider that Castillo Solórzano writes for male elite readers and desires to cater to their sense of poetic justice, we might understand the reason why he chooses a woman as his leading character for his picaresque novel. By virtue of her gender, she

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essentially embodies the lowest stratum even among pícaros, whose lives are driven by the obsessive desire to attain hidalguía. A pícaro like Luzmán or Pablos was seen as being repulsive for sure, but a pícara was certainly perceived as the most contemptuous embodiment of impurity. We could then say that, in a way that accentuates the ultimate rigidity of the social order, Castillo Solórzano dresses up his aspiring passer, the usurper of true nobility, and the perpetrator of pure lineages in the humiliating garb of a tramp. Envisioning the worst: passing downwards in Marcos de Obregón The texts analysed up to this point have examined the multiple ways in which authors address or express the fears of their target audience by conjuring up the worst-case scenarios of break-ins and veiled assaults by lowlifes, and by sensationally resolving the relevant tensions in favour of the elite.Vicente Espinel’s novel Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (Tales of the Life of the Squire Marcos de Obregón) (1618) explores the expression of the anxiety of sameness in a different and unique kind of narrative, less satirical than the picaresque, but also written for the elite and their sympathisers.90 The case presented in Espinel’s novel concerns its eponymous protagonist, a nobleman of the lowest rank, whose poverty forces him to live as a servant of individuals with questionable or shameful backgrounds. Espinel’s Obregón might have represented for his public what would have been considered to be the extreme example of social demotion suffered by a virtuous hidalgo. The story of Obregón certainly played out one of the most frightening cases for financially insecure nobles. It imagines the nightmarish scenario in which an hidalgo has been stripped of the external markers of his class – dress and other signs of wealth – and lives without the social respect that is guaranteed to his class. Espinel furthermore emphasises the unwarranted degradation of his protagonist in having his hidalgo follow the expected life course of a low-born. Like the pícaros Guzmán de Alfarache or Pablos, Obregón leads an itinerant life in search of a livelihood, without forging lasting relationships with others. But despite surface similarities, Espinel’s Obregón is the figurative opposite of Alemán’s or Quevedo’s pícaros. From the beginning of his autobiography, Obregón demonstrates that he is morally superior to everyone he meets in his journeys throughout Spain. It is hard to dispute, as pointed out by Rey Hazas, that Obregón has been fashioned to stand for the ideal nobleman: a man whose nobility in conduct reveals the nobility of his blood regardless of his fortune.91 Espinel establishes Obregón’s hidalguía when he identifies his hero as a ‘squire’ (escudero). ‘Squire’ was a euphemistic term used to designate an hidalgo

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without a landed estate, and one who worked as a high-level attendant for a wealthier nobleman or his female subjects.92 Contrary to the common stereotype of the arrogant hidalgo, who is too quick to point out to others his superior lineage, Obregón’s humility is such that he refuses to volunteer information regarding his nobility. Obregón’s modesty is shown later in an episode in which a judge, who does not recognise him, narrates the life story of the famous ‘Marcos de Obregón’ and presents it as the paragon of Christian life. In the many hours he and the judge spend together, Obregón does not reveal that he is the subject the judge so admires. He resists all temptations to boast, and it is only when the judge and Obregón part ways that he assuages the reader’s expectation with the statement: ‘I am Marcos de Obregón.’93 Obregón finally reveals his full identity after his exemplarity has been fully established. Having been captured by a Spanish renegade, he is asked about his identity, and he has no choice but to disclose it:  ‘I am a mountain person from near Santander, from the Valley of Cayon, although I was born in Andalucía; my name is Marcos de Obregón.’94 While the reader is aware of Obregón’s high birth, most of the characters with whom he interacts in his autobiography are not. For George Haley, much of Obregón’s life story reflects that of Espinel, and the conspicuous veiling of Obregón’s identity is the author’s unconscious way of pointing it out to the reader.95 Haley has convincingly shown in his investigation of Espinel’s life that there is little doubt that the author used his own experiences as a struggling hidalgo to draft the life story of Obregón. But it is possible that, in addition to the autobiographical hypothesis, Espinel had a narrative objective in having his hero refuse to flaunt his ancestry – to make his hero likeable to his readers, appealing to their empathy by fashioning him with extraordinary humility. It would be hard to dispute that the hero’s almost superhuman modesty and patience in the face of the maltreatment and disrespect he receives from the lower classes is also meant to rouse the indignation of his readers. Obregón’s unwillingness to identify himself as an hidalgo is also a way for the hero to cope with the devaluation of his rank. Obregón is convinced that he should work to earn a living. He does not want to be seen as the type of hidalgo who uses it as an excuse ‘to eat without having to work’.96 Through the anti-picaresque narrative of Obregón, Espinel dreams up a fictional world in which there is a true, virtuous social hierarchy given by the order of nature, and by its intrinsic superiority prevails against the forces of money and deception. The introductory episode in Marcos de Obregón’s autobiography epitomises the kinds of assaults on his dignity that honest hidalgos were thought to endure on a daily basis. Obregón is first addressed by a stranger who calls him a trickster (embustero) as Obregón is reciting a charm for a dying patient at a hospital where he resides. Obregón’s interlocutor reacts with anger, but Obregón

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does not even bother to acknowledge the slur. To call somebody an embustero was to say that he was a pícaro. In the second edition of Don Quijote, Cervantes refers to the runaway galley slave Ginés de Pasamonte as ‘a famous embustero and a thief’ and Castillo Solórzano dubs his pícara as ‘the girl of embustes’.97 To call somebody by the lowly name of embustero was to imply that the person was innately immoral and incapable or controlling their lowest base urges. There was little else more degrading than to be labelled as a trickster, which in essence was equivalent to labelling somebody as human filth. This was a recognised form of aggression toward anybody, but it was considered a grave sign of impudence, if not libel, when directed to a person of good birth. The undeserved insult triggers Obregón’s recounting of his life-long struggle to avoid being mistakenly taken for a pícaro. He explains that at an age when men seek to find some respite from work, he was forced to work as a squire to avoid being taken by the authorities to prison for vagrancy. He explains: ‘after many misfortunes, which I have suffered all of my life, I ended up destitute well into my old age; and in order to prevent being taken to jail for vagrancy, I entrusted myself in a friend … and he set me up [with a job] as squire and teacher of a physician and of his wife.’98 More humiliating for him than having to work in the service of a woman, however, is to have to do so for a vacuous and uncultured one, as is Doña Mergelina, the physician’s wife. Obregón mentions, for instance, that she is unable to keep her thoughts to herself. For instance, she reponds to the compliment, ‘I wished the fleas in my bed were so [beautiful]’, with ‘you must sleep in a pigpen’.99 Obregón laments that all of his efforts to teach her about the subtleties of language are in vain. Worse than her uncivilised manners was her proclivity for deception. Obregón finds himself in the position of spending much of his working time sabotaging his mistress’s attempts to pair up with other men. Through Obregón, Espinel conveys the very same point made by the other works examined here: the natural features of a low-born cannot be rectified or covered up. Guzmán de Alfarache, after realising that he needs to accept his low place in life, had put it so: ‘They commonly say that a monkey dressed in silk continues to be a monkey. One may be dressed in fine clothes, but he cannot change his evil character.’100 Although Dona Mergelina refers to herself as Doña, Obregón’s intimation of her low lineage is implicit in his description of her duplicitous personality and vulgar manners. Obregón’s degradation is also manifested in his forced coexistence with figurative and literal filth. He is thrown into prison with foul-smelling criminals and in bed with grimy prostitutes. He endures having to sleep in worm-infested beds, next to mounds of animal feces, and having to walk through swamps. Whereas the pícaro’s dousing with filth is expected, it is deeply disturbing for a highborn man whose integrity is nothing less than upright.

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In spite of his social debasement, Obregón insists on being able to move forth in his life because of his conviction that he is superior to the low-borns he encounters on a daily basis. Included in Obregón’s autobiography is the episode in which he is taken as a captive to Algiers by a renegade Morisco. The unnamed Morisco is the descendant of Valencian mudéjares. He decides to abandon Spain because he cannot withstand the social humiliation he suffers at the hands of common Old Christians. Unlike Obregón, he refuses to accept social demotion and chooses instead to abandon Spain in order to live in Algiers, where his noble status commands honour. The Morisco explains: I could not suffer the daily injuries I received from people who were quite inferior to me, the deceitful ways with which they treated me, and my property … I was hurt, like every body else, because I could not be appointed to the office of a magistrate or to another dignified position. And I understood that such infamy was permanent, and that to counter the harm it was not enough to perform private or public Christian acts. Because any man … who could not rise two inches above the ground, dared to call me – a very Christian and noble man – with insulting names.101

The renegade’s grievances revolve entirely around the point that Old Christians refused to recognise him as being of a superior kind. Nowhere in his speech is there a defence of Christian Moriscos as a group, nor is he concerned with any injustice in exiling Spanish Christians because of their Arab ancestry. The renegade’s fixation is solely on class and on his indignation at not being recognised for his noble birth. Like Hermosilla’s pages – and the hidalgo population they represent – what fundamentally pains the renegade is the anxiety of being confused with any other Morisco. Not only is he not the typical Morisco peasant, but he sees himself as being of higher status than most Christians. His nobility, in other words, transcends his religious origins. It is the Morisco’s inability to accept his ‘demoted’ public state that drives him to move to Algiers and practise Islam, even though he secretly remains a Christian. Upon hearing the renegade’s reason for abandoning his fatherland, Obregón tells his Morisco master that true Christians should never renounce their faith regardless of the hardships. In response to the injustices a noble Morisco might have to suffer, he replies that tolerating the unjust status quo would be rewarded either in his lifetime or in the afterworld. Obregón is indeed the champion of the status quo and of obeisance to established institutions, even in an unjust and oppressive regime. He himself demonstrates this stance in his stoic approach to his enslaved state in Algiers. He hopes that by showing acceptance of his newly found bondage, patience in enduring humiliation, and respect for authority, he will gain his master’s respect and recognition of his

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noble roots. He advises his fellow captive-slaves to accept their fate without thinking of resistance or rebellion: There is only one remedy to gain some freedom [as slaves], that is, to exercise patience and humility, and not to expect to accomplish anything by force … Just as humility engenders love, hubris engenders hatred. The slave’s esteem comes from the master’s good will and the latter can be acquired with gentle humility.102

Obregón follows his own advice and serves his master earnestly, even when he is forced to carry out humiliating tasks, such as going to fetch water, a chore reserved for the lowest ranked servants and women. Unlike the Morisco who abandoned Spain because of his excessive arrogance, Obregón is intent on proving that true blood nobility emanates from within. In the end, Obregón’s acceptance of his enslaved state wins him his liberty. His master esteems him to the extent that he allows him to return to Spain as a free man in one of his galleons. Through Obregón’s example Espinel conveys the notion that one’s humble acceptance of their given fate, not rebellion, is to be rewarded. The Morisco had rebelled against his fate and the social hierarchy, and, as a result, he became a ‘Moor’. Obregón accepted his own fate, showing humility in all of his deeds, and as a result he is restored to his place in the Christian world. Moreover, Espinel assures his reader that if a nobleman acts according to his natural inclination for goodness, the perceived threat of sameness – of one’s higher self becoming confused and by implication interchangeable with a low-born – is illusory. Obregón’s identity reveals itself for the reader through his natural predisposition for virtue even if he cannot prove his status through superficial codes. At one point in his journey, Obregón encounters an old hidalgo friend, and the two begin to talk about the difficulty with relationships with low-borns. Obregón’s unidentified hidalgo friend laments the fact that he had been betrayed by a commoner whom he had helped financially in a moment of crisis. Once the commoner recovered from his setback, he not only failed to show gratitude to the hidalgo for the favour, but also downplayed the deed. For Obregón, the behaviour of the ingrate proves his belief that low-borns cannot be expected to rise above their natural state of baseness. Obregón prods his friend with the following rhetorical question: why do you think – I said – that they commonly say that there is always a ‘Gil’ tormenting me, not a ‘Don Francisco’ or a ‘Don Pedro’, but a ‘Gil’? This is because they [Don Francisco or Don Pedro] are never hounding anybody. In contrast, men with names like Gil Manzano, Gil Pérez … abominable and low men, enemies of compassion, cruel beasts, disrespectful and shameful, inclined to victimise people who strive to behave with virtue, as is this miserable man of whom you speak.103

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Obregón deliberately chooses ‘Gil’ to designate his tormentor because Gil is the stereotypical name of peasants and shepherds. In his entry for ‘Gil’, Sebastián de Covarrubias adds the popular saying: ‘There is never a Gil who does not persecute us’.104 The implication of the aphorism is that men of common origin are inclined to persecute more honourable men. Echoing official discourses and Salas Barbadillo, Espinel voices through Obregón the notion that low-borns persecute the higher minded because of the envy they harbour against them. According to Obregón, envy torments those who ‘shine’ through virtue.105 That Marcos de Obregón was assigned as required reading for school children until about the mid-eighteenth century may serve as an example that illustrates the persistence of the elitist stance that gave birth to the novel in the first place.106 It also hints at the general preoccupation with status and the anxiety of sameness in Spanish society in general. Through narratives like Obregón’s, elementary school teachers taught their students that morality required the patient performance of one’s given role and conditions in life. Social trespassers would not cause a problem for the truly noble, like Obregón, who possessed a visionary ability to distinguish between the genuinely superior and the impersonator. But while Obregón would have been recognised by readers as the ideal hidalgo hero of their times, he would also have been taken as an impractical example to follow in real life. The lack of subsequent protagonists like Obregón is representative of the disinterest in the general readership in imagining a hero who chooses self-effacement over entitlement, and submission to inferiors over authorised retribution. The anxiety of sameness conquered in Don Quijote de la Mancha The texts examined so far are concerned in voicing the elite’s preoccupation with low-borns suspected of blurring the ‘natural’ structure and order of society. As noted above, however, pro-establishment discourses were not monolithic and inspired scarce – but appreciable – opposing voices. In a sea of intellectuals and government officials depicting low-borns as innately less valuable than hidalgos, we find progressive thinkers such as Bernabé Moreno de Vargas and Benito Peñalosa y Mondragón, who uphold the parity of the condition of all humans and the belief that hidalguía should be attainable through the demonstration of one’s inner virtue.107 It might even be argued that the process by which a person’s nobility was determined – largely dependent on their reputation – was in itself proof of the subjectivity of hidalguía.108 The aristocrat María de Zayas does not overtly challenge the notion of nobility by birth, but

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through the example of the fictional Don Pedro she does hint at the incompatibility between the social system that the intolerant elite wished to maintain and the actual world of social mobility in which they lived. And even in the most grotesque depictions of low-borns figured in the picaresque characters of rogues and prostitutes, we may find isolated moments in which readers might have been compelled to see them in a more sympathetic light. It is possible, especially, that readers might have experienced some isolated moments of empathy for pícaros like Pablos and Teresa de Manzanares, whose initial path onto identity fraud appears to be wholly predetermined by their pitiful genesis and by the unavailability of social protection that would have channelled their lives in a more positive way. For elite readers, nonetheless, a low-born’s attempt to pass for a better kind found no justification in misfortune. Supporters of the social order promoted the idea that low-borns had to accept their positions in the lower spaces of the body politic and apply their efforts to fulfilling their given marginal roles. Salas Barbadillo and Espinel, for example, maintain that the virtuousness of true high-borns is unaffected by changes of fortune. In El caballero puntual, we see a foundling who decides to lead a life of fraud despite being adopted by a nobleman and given plenty of opportunities for moral growth. On the other hand, the hidalgo protagonist of Marcos de Obregón does not allow his poverty to inhibit him from leading the most exemplary moral life. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha is another literary text that provides us with an exploration of the impoverished hidalgo’s sense of social insecurity and need to set himself apart from the rising underclass as a response to his fears of social demotion. But in stark contrast to the protagonists of Hermosilla, Salas Barbadillo, Espinel, Quevedo, Castillo Solórzano, and Lope de Vega, Cervantes’s hero deviates from expectations by relinquishing his former belief in the ideology of blood and adopting one that approaches inner virtue as the determinant of a person’s place in society. Furthermore, Don Quijote’s renunciation of his exclusivist notion of nobility might have encouraged readers to reflect on the destructive aspects of the lineage-based ideology that ruled their social world. Cervantes himself might have witnessed the detrimental effects that were brought about by a fixation on rank and social honour from watching his father, an impoverished hidalgo (and, possibly, a secret Converso), struggle to distinguish himself among the commoners with whom he coexisted in his life as an itinerant surgeon.109 Scholars who value the socio-historical insights encompassed in Cervantes’s novel have generally agreed with Francisco Márquez Villanueva’s view that Don Quijote’s madness may be interpreted as the hidalgo’s reaction to his irrelevant role in Spanish society and as an expression of his aspiration to transcend what he calls ‘the limits of hidalguía’.110 More recently, David Quint

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has demonstrated that Don Quijote gains sanity when he transforms himself (in the first part) from a staunch supporter of a lineage-based socio-economic order to a kinder character (in the second part) who accepts the values promoted by a socially mobile middle class.111 To further develop the views presented by Márquez Villanueva and Quint, I  suggest that Don Quijote sallies forth to counteract the anxiety he experiences in his daily life due to his precarious social condition. I  argue that Cervantes exposes the shaky foundation of Don Quijote’s anxiety of sameness by transforming the hidalgo from a staunch elitist in the first part of the novel to a promoter of virtue-based social mobility. By having the aristocrats in the novel – the infamous dukes – behave in the stereotypical envious manner of low-borns, and Sancho – who makes no attempt to hide his low birth – behave in the virtuous ways traditionally warranted to high-borns, Cervantes makes the point that the welfare of society does not rely on an unequivocal system that separates nobles from low-borns. Ultimately, he establishes in his novel that the appearance of sameness is as untrustworthy as that of difference. Don Quijote begins his journey romanticising the social order of the past and, like Marcos de Obregón, views himself as a casualty of its breakdown. In the first part and for almost a third of the second part of the novel, Don Quijote’s goal is to assert his superior status as a knight-errant and to subdue any indication that might disprove such claim, even if it is through force. Cervantes’s narrator suggests that, prior to his transformation into a knight-errant, the hidalgo’s life had been so undistinguished that there is no clear documentation establishing his given name. It could have been ‘Quixada, or Quexada’, the narrator says, ‘although reliable conjecture seems to indicate that his name was Quexana’.112 Don Quijote’s attempts to restore his ancestral armour, which his ancestors would have worn during the Reconquest, signals his desire to turn back time and reclaim for himself the more respectable social condition his forefathers might have possessed. His fantasies about having his fate suddenly changed by the discovery that he is of royal descent or by marrying a princess further highlight his anxiety about his social situation. The protagonist’s frustration with his status might be also be evidenced by the fact he gives himself the title of Don in his madness, a title that his low gentry status and poverty did not afford him.This self-promotion is brought up in the second part as one of the inaccuracies that had bothered the elite fictionalised readers of the first part. According to these fictionalised caballeros, Don Quijote represents an overreaching hidalgo on the verge of social demotion with whom they would find it shameful to associate.113 Don Quijote blames his precarious social condition and his inability to perform the proper duties of a knight errant on contemptible enchanters wishing to destroy him. He believes that if others cannot see him for who he really

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is – a knight-errant – and accept his view of the world, it is because they are under the spell of ‘envious’ enchanters seeking to discredit his reputation and sabotage his efforts to fight against evil.114 Don Quijote believes that these base enchanters belong to a ‘cursed race, born into the world to taint and annihilate the feats of virtuous men’.115 The enchanters allegorize the conniving low-borns despised by Juan Bautista Valenzuela Velázquez, Hermosilla, and Quevedo, who are believed to use the special powers of money as a means to change the natural appearance of people and things.116 We may also recall that the pícaros Pablos, Luzmán, and Teresa de Manzanares attempt to impersonate noble identities because they desperately wish to quench their envy of their social superiors. For Don Quijote, his enemy enchanters behave essentially in the typical manner of plebeians. Analogous to the envy that in the mind of the elite impelled low-borns to persecute the high-born, envy prompts the low-born enchanters who oppose Don Quijote to ‘alter and falsify things’.117 He believes that the sudden transformations of a troop of soldiers into sheep, his imprisonment in a cage, and the appearance of Dulcinea in the shape of a poor peasant are motivated by the envy that his enemy enchanters feel towards him.118 For Don Quijote, envy is ‘the root of all countless evils, and cankerworm of the virtues!’119 In defining envy – or invidia – effectively, Covarrubias reiterates Aristotle’s statement that ‘envy is pain at the good fortune of others’.120 One of the seven cardinal sins, envy was a dangerous emotion because of its ability to destroy all positive aspects of humanity. In fact, a common belief – theologically unsupported – was that Christ fell prey to the envy that had infiltrated the Jews.121 During the medieval and early modern period envy was consistently allegorised as a female of base extraction, and often referred to as ‘villainous envy’ (‘villana envidia’). This figuration of envy was widely accepted, as Lope de Vega presents her in one of his religious dramas holding a heart in her hands and with a snake on her shoulder.122 In the visual arts, an early model of invidia appears in Giotto’s eponymous fresco (1300s). Giotto imagines invidia to be an ugly old woman with unbound hair and sagging breasts, and with snakes coming out of her hair and/or her mouth. She has the ears of an ass, which connotes her low birth and stubbornness, and holds onto a bag of money, which hints at her Jewishness and impure blood. Subsequent early modern renditions, such as in the engraving included in the Spanish translation of Andreas Alciato’s Emblemata (1549), underline her damned nature by showing her literally eating her heart out of her left hand.Variants of this archetype of envy were widely transmitted, as we observe in the engravings by Jacob Matham (c.1587) (Figure 2.1) and Jacques Callot (1610) (Figure 2.2). In these two depictions she appears holding a snake and is standing next to a street dog, which evokes Giotto’s association of envy with low birth and illegitimacy. Another version of Envy may be seen

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Figure 2.1  Jacob Matham, Envy (c.1587).

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Figure 2.2  Jacques Callot, Envy, from the Seven Capital Sins (c.1610).

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in the frontispiece of the Sevillian edition of Lope de Vega’s Peregrino de su patria (1604). In this version, Envy holds a dagger instead of a snake, with which she intends to pierce a heart she is holding with her other hand.123 The potential of the envier to devastate the morally upright is even better conveyed in a drawing by Lodovico Cigoli, known as Allegory of Envy (c.1600s). In Cigoli’s rendition, envy appears sneaking up from a boulder on the figure of virtue – its opponent – rendered as a beautiful young woman who is being transformed into a laurel tree in the like of Ovid’s Daphne.124 Don Quijote, until his arrival at the castle of the dukes, perceives himself as the embodiment of virtue and believes that, like Cigoli’s Virtue, he will be rewarded with fame and immortality. Don Quijote brings to mind Arce de Otálora’s view of birth nobility in his understanding of virtuousness and nobility as corresponding attributes. His desire to be crowned emperor, to figuratively bear a laurel wreath, captures his sense of self-entitlement for glory. Furthermore, Don Quijote blames malicious enchanters for his own inability to act in the expected ways of a knight errant, but he readily accepts the supposed enchanters’s interventions. Don Quijote’s embrace of enchantment – and, by extension, the envy that causes the respective enchantment – in the first part of the novel certainly evokes the attitude of Hermosilla’s Godoy, who wishes to be envied in order to prove his superiority. The eagerness with which Don Quijote explains to the Canon that enchanters had trapped him in an animal cage epitomises his amenability to self-victimisation. Quite unperturbed by his condition, Don Quijote tells the Canon, ‘I should like you to know, Señor, that I am in this cage because I have been enchanted through the envy and fraud of evil enchanters, for virtue is persecuted by evildoers more than it is loved by good people.’125 Much more adverse is Don Quijote’s approach towards enchantment in the second part of the novel, when enchantment is unhinged from Don Quijote’s specific chivalric paradigm to be seized by other characters who exploit the notion to their advantage. In contrast to the first part of the novel, Don Quijote becomes obsessed with nullifying the power he believes enchanters have over his person and his affairs, particularly in regard to Dulcinea’s enchantment. He refers to the ‘enchanters who persecute me’ or some variant of that pronouncement on at least twenty separate occasions in the second part of the novel, as opposed to only once in the first part.126 Don Quijote is undoubtedly plagued by other characters in the second part who deliberately play the role of enchanters. His first hostile reaction against enchantment occurs after Sancho presents to Don Quijote a boorish peasant woman on a jackass and tells him that she is Dulcinea under the spell of an enchanter (all a lie concocted by Sancho to justify his failure in the first part of the novel to deliver a letter to Dulcinea). Without being able to contain his utter devastation at the inability

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to undo ‘the clouds and cataracts’ that ‘the malignant enchanter’ placed on him, Don Quijote declares, ‘I am the most unfortunate of men.’127 It could be said that Sancho ‘enchants’ Dulcinea in an attempt to avoid being exposed for lying about his supposed visit to her. But Sancho’s intentions are more infantile than ‘malignant’, and he himself becomes a victim of the dukes’s appropriation of his initial enchantment when, later in the novel, he is ordered to lash himself as a means of disenchanting Dulcinea. It is, however, after entering the dukes’s palace that Don Quijote reiterates his conviction that ‘enchanters have persecuted me, enchanters persecute me, and enchanters will persecute me until they throw me and my chivalric pursuits into the deep abyss of oblivion’.128 The dukes may be seen as the unmistakable malignant enchanters who literally persecute Don Quijote. These abusive and cruel aristocrats seize the idea of Sancho’s enchantment in order to turn it into a farce in which Don Quijote and Sancho are cast as the unwilling buffoons. The knight-errant is first lured into the dukes’s castle because their appearance and lifestyle seem to project for him the idealised image of the elite and because he believes that he will finally reach his social dream of being recognised as a knight. The first impression given by the duchess is that she is ‘the very embodiment of elegance’.129 Quint perceptively observes that with a hawk in hand and mounted on a white palfrey, the richly dressed duchess ‘seems to have stepped out of a Burgundian tapestry or out of one of Don Quijote’s romances’.130 He is then welcomed into the lavish ducal palace by an entourage of pages, beautiful maidens, and servants who drizzle him with perfumes and prepare sumptuous meals for him. Stupefied by the presence of flesh and blood dukes, Don Quijote and Sancho allow themselves to be psychologically manipulated. The ‘true’ identity of the dukes is never questioned, as occurs in the cases of Micomicona, Melisendra, Don Gaiferos, Montesinos, Durandarte, Belerma, and others Don Quijote encounters earlier in his adventures. As readers learn, however, the dukes are far removed from embodying the virtuousness they are meant to represent. In fact, their corrupt and sadist behaviour make them a case in point for the proverb ‘the devil hides behind the cross’, a proverb Sancho obliviously relates to the duchess.131 The dukes are described as only enjoying staged situations in which they witness their victims under emotional anguish. Among other examples, they chase Sancho in an attempt to ‘wash’ him with dirty dishwater, shame Don Quijote by having him cleaned and undressed publicly, force Don Quijote and Sancho to ride on a wooden horse in distressing physical conditions, emasculate Don Quijote by attacking him with scores of cats, nearly starve Sancho and then terrorise him by making him believe that he is being overthrown from his governorship, and, worst of all, sow dissension between knight-errant and squire – without success  – by setting the impossible condition that Sancho strike himself on

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the buttocks 3,300 times in order to undo Dulcinea’s enchantment. It might be argued that the dukes behave precisely in the way that Espinel’s Obregón claims low-borns do. They are the ‘enemies of compassion, cruel beasts, disrespectful and shameful, inclined to victimise people who strive to behave with virtue’.132 The dukes’s vicious attack on lower ranked characters (i.e., Don Quijote, Sancho, Doña Rodríguez, Tosilos) also directly opposes the statement made by the narrator of the intercalated story in Guzmán de Alfarache (mentioned above) in which he declares that low-borns instinctually wish to harm those who are superior in birth. Cervantes further disassociates birth and morality when he highlights the evil that plagues the duchess’s body. The duchess’s companion, Doña Rodríguez, reveals to Don Quijote the secret that the duchess’s body is so filled with ‘bad humours’ that she must have sores in her legs from which to drain them.133 It becomes quite clear in the episodes that concern the dukes – and the analogous aristocrats in Barcelona – in the second part that this, as pointed out by Quint, suggests that ‘noble is as noble does’.134 Don Quijote’s entry into the dukes’s castle coincides with a noticeable change in his view of virtue. He no longer sees himself as the exclusive proprietor of virtue and shows a genuine desire to have Sancho partake in its rewards. He also seems to relinquish his own desire for social mobility, and instead helps Sancho to acquire it. The advice Don Quijote gives Sancho before he embarks on his mock-governorship may be read as a reflection of Cervantes’s efforts in disengaging the traditional connection between virtue and nobility, and between vice/envy and low birth in the second part of the novel. He counsels his squire to be proud of his heritage and never to attempt to pass for a subject of higher birth. He tells him, instead, to put his efforts into cultivating virtue through actions. ‘Consider, Sancho’, Don Quijote advises, ‘if you take virtue as your means, and pride in performing virtuous deeds, there is no reason to envy the means of princes and lords, because blood is inherited, and virtue is acquired, and virtue in and of itself has a value that blood does not.’135 Don Quijote’s line of thinking coincides with Covarrubias’s definition of virtue as proper reasoning (recta ratio) and, further, implies that virtue can only flourish if one can put reason into practice. In addition to associating virtue with reason, Autoridades relates it to integrity of spirit and generosity.136 Don Quijote’s advice to Sancho would have been perceived by his readers as oxymoronic, for they would have taken for granted that commoners – especially illiterate ones like Sancho – lacked reason, and thus were unfit to hold leadership positions within the government (with the exception of the post of village mayor).137 Challenging the prevailing view, however, Don Quijote argues for the cultivation and acquisition of virtue – and by extension, reason – through moral actions. He insinuates that envy is not an indication of one’s common heritage, but the reflection of a subject’s lack of virtue (whether he be a peasant or a

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‘prince’). I agree with Mariscal that Don Quijote’s dismissal of the significance of blood verges on the subversive, for it goes against the ideology on which Spain’s socio-political system was sustained.138 The idea that Sancho can embody virtue during his tenure as governor of Barataria illustrates this point. He is able to rule with neutrality, morality, and mercy. Furthermore, as multiple scholars have pointed out, his experience living with the ‘people’ and his uncompromised folk wisdom allows him to understand human behaviour at its core. Sancho is able to identify fraud, because his vision is not clouded by his own fraudulent behaviour. On his first day as governor, he detects a tailor’s lie when he purports to have made five hoods out of an insufficient piece of cloth and the covetousness of the peasant who believed it was possible. He immediately recognises that an old man is trying to get away without paying a debt by hiding the borrowed money in a walking cane. He asks the unsuspecting lender to hold on to the cane with the money inside, and then swearing in the name of God that ‘he had put in his hands’ the owed money. He sides with the defendant in a rape case when he realises that the purported victim is only to benefit financially.139 He dismisses groundless requests for financial aid from idle subjects. He proposes that gambled money should be donated to incarcerated indigents. He gives a second chance to a foolhardy young man and to a cross-dressing brother–sister pair when he realises that they acted out of naivety and not malice. Lastly, he passes legislation meant to weed out fraudulent behaviour, such as punishments for merchants who water down wine, false cripples, and merchants who overprice their goods. Sancho, who is hailed by his subjects as a ‘second Solomon’, could be visualised as metamorphosing into a figure reminiscent of the allegory of Cigoli’s Virtue; that is, worthy of wearing a laurel crown.140 A previously materialistic Sancho overcomes his baser instincts – something that the dukes are never able to do – and proves to be a moral and efficacious judge once he arrives on his supposed island. As Luis Corteguera points out – following Maravall – Sancho represents Cervantes’s model of the ideal governor because, despite his fear of danger and pain, his objective is solely to implement justice by privileging Christian morality over the kind of ‘ruthless pursuit of power’ that motivated European rulers of early modernity.141 Moreover, he can learn to govern others because he can govern himself. In his words, ‘if a man cannot govern himself, how will he govern others?’142 He is an effective governor because he is indifferent to how his ruling affects his own personal position. He proves that he had been selflessly devoted to governing when, upon renouncing his post, he leaves the island with nothing other than his donkey. During his governorship, he refuses to be addressed as ‘Don Sancho’ when one of his servants refers to him by the title and responds: ‘my name is Sancho Panza, plain and simple …

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without any additions of Don or Doña’.143 As he prizes his own individuality, he also appreciates the individuality of each one of his subjects and avoids prejudging the cases that are presented before him. It could be argued, then, that Governor Sancho’s recipe for success is his unconcern for social difference and his embrace of sameness. Unlike the dukes, Don Quijote and Sancho are increasingly able to transcend the limitations of the polarised social order that rules their world. Don Quijote and Sancho’s openness to accepting their essential resemblance with the rest of mankind is the variable that, ironically, develops them into more autonomous individuals and brings them closer to modern subjects. Don Quijote begins his journey with the objective of proving his superior birth and, by extension, his exclusive notion of virtuousness. Sancho, in comparison, initially joins his master because of a naive wish to acquire power and material wealth. Both of Don Quijote’s and Sancho’s objectives are taken over their desire to assert their unique and individual identities in the second part of the novel. Mariscal has argued that Cervantes strips his hero of his individuality in the second part and, in the end, repositions his hero ‘within the social order … the master discourse of seventeenth-century Spanish society – Catholicism’.144 It is indeed likely that Cervantes might have intended his more conservative readers to interpret his hero’s final confession and self-demotion in this way. Cervantes understood, probably better than any other author discussed in this chapter, that only exceptional readers could grasp the social implications of Don Quijote’s last transformation. But at the same time, we may follow Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce and E. C. Riley’s view that Cervantes does not convey in any way that Don Quijote gives up his autonomy at the end of the novel. The fact that his protagonist takes on a wholly different name ‘Alonso Quijano’ instead of the other possible names – Quixada, Quexada, or Quixana – listed by the narrator at the beginning of the first part, suggests a refusal by the character to insert himself in the predetermined discourse that had launched his career in the first part.145 Neither does Cervantes equate Don Quijote and Sancho’s Christian morality with the acceptance of social hegemony. Individuality and Christianity are fully compatible for Cervantes. It is in madness that Don Quijote takes on the title of Don, and it is after recovering his sanity that he renounces this title to call himself ‘Alonso Quijano, el Bueno’, a much humbler identity than the pretentious one he had invented for himself. Upon returning back home after experiencing life in the highest circles as well as the lowest, having met titled noblemen as well as pícaros and prostitutes, Cervantes’s hero prizes the internal goodness of man over the superficiality of titles. As Quint has observed, Don Quijote is no longer nostalgic for the feudal times at the outset of the novel, nor does he now desire

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to join the aristocracy. One could further argue that Cervantes alludes here to the irrationality of titles altogether. He might have hinted at the collective ‘madness’ of attempting to segregate individuals according to contingencies rather than conduct. In this context, Cervantes opposes the standard definition of sanity as the acceptance of the status quo and a predetermined identity and redefines it as a condition that harbours the continuous discovery of one’s subjectivity. At the end of his life, Cervantes’s hero is content to die as an average man, but an average man of virtue. This is what Cervantes’s narrator might mean when he says that his hero died ‘wisely’ and lived ‘foolishly’.146 At the same time it might seem contradictory that on his deathbed Alonso Quijano refers to his plebeian friend, Sancho Panza, as his ‘squire’, since this was a title that was reserved for hidalgos only. But in the context of the knight-errant’s obsession with status, it might be interpreted as Alonso Quijano’s acceptance of his innate equality with the rest of mankind. Or put differently, Don Quijote de la Mancha accepts being on an equal footing with the simple hidalgo Alonso Quijano, and Alonso Quijano accepts being on equal footing with the common man Sancho Panza. For the author of Don Quijote, the secret of virtuousness might have ironically hinged on one’s recognition of his or her commonness. It is when Don Quijote stops obsessing about his imagined birthright that he is released from his paranoid anxieties and discovers his essential virtuousness as ‘el Bueno’. It is when Don Quijote becomes Alonso, el Bueno, that he is finally a peaceful man, unperturbed, and freed from the anxiety of sameness. Notes

1 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:  An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 200. 2 According to Douglas, the ‘final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction’ (Purity and Danger, 200). 3 Salas Barbadillo intended the novel to be read by an exclusive aristocratic circle, as he dedicated it to the Duke of Sessa and the Duke of Cea. 4 ‘Levantóse con aquel furor de la cama, medio frenético, y puesto un ferreruelo viejo, sacó de sus calzones un papel, no muy limpio, y buscando un tintero y pluma … pudo acabar con él tanto su imaginación, que como si verdaderamente lo fuera, comenzó á firmar “don Juan de Toledo, D. Juan de Toledo … A D. Juan de Toledo guarde nuestro Señor muchos años” ’ (Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, El caballero puntual y Los prodigios de amor (Madrid: Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, 1909), 5–314, at 23). 5 ‘Todas las cosas que no están en el lugar que naturaleza les destinó son violentas y corren peligro de perecer con brevedad’ (Salas Barbadillo, El caballero puntual, 51). 6 In the second book, Juan moves to Seville, where noblemen entertain themselves by using Juan as their jester. 7 See James Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, 2 vols (London:  Tamesis, 1978–1982), Vol. 2, 220. 8 Henry Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo and the Neostoic Movement (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1972), 133; Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, Vol. 2, 219.

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The forgery of nobility in literary texts  9 See George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (New  York:  Cornell University Press, 1991), 99–149; Anne Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 119. 10 Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, Vol. 2, 202. 11 Iffland and Ignacio Arellano define the ‘grotesque’ as a style that attempts to express the unresolved clash of incompatibles (i.e., the disagreeable and the comic). See Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, Vol. 1, 56; Ignacio Arellano, Poesía satírico burlesca de Quevedo (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003), 37–40. 12 Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, Vol. 1, 58. 13 ‘Para ser caballero ó hidalgo, aunque seas judío y moro, haz mala letra, habla despacio y recio, y anda á caballo, bebe mucho y vete donde no te conozcan, y lo serás’ (Francisco de Quevedo, Quevedo, Libro de todas las cosas (Barcelona:  Biblioteca Amena é Instructiva, 1881), 221). 14 The entire discourse ponders the fraudulent forces that shape Quevedo’s social world: ‘¿Y ves aquel que gana de comer como sastre, y se viste como hidalgo? Es hipócrita; y el día de fiesta con el raso, el terciopelo, el cintillo y la cadena de oro se desfigura de tal suerte, que no le conocerán las tijeras y agujas y jabón, y parece tan poco a sastre, que aún para que dice verdad’ (Francisco de Quevedo, ‘El mundo por de dentro’, Los sueños. Ed. Ignacio Arellano (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991), 270–306, at 276–277). 15 ‘Muchas veces te ha sido enfado, enojoso hasta vencerte en la murmuración, la modestia y la paciencia, el ver en las cortes un hombre bajo, rodeado de pajes y escondido en familia y muy lucida, vivir en la casa en que conociste algún señor de gran porte … Y con estas y otras acciones, advirtiendo tú que se desemeja de lo que es … te admiras, y preguntas de dónde le viene a este hombre ordinario esta grandeza y gravedad. Respondérante es nieto de un tendero muy poderoso, desde niño dio en andar y tratar con grandes señores y hánsele pegado las costumbres de príncipe, y añádase con el gasto y ornato lo que le falta en la calidad’ (Francisco de Quevedo, ‘Providencia de Dios, Padecida de los que la niegan, y gozada de los que la confiesan’, Obras de Francisco de QuevedoVillegas. Ed. Aureliano Fernández-Guerra y Orbe, Vol. 2 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1876), 165–211, at 174). 16 ‘Son sus padres principales, / y es de noble descendiente, / porque en las venas de oriente / todas las sangres son reales; / y pues es quien hace iguales / al duque y al ganadero, / poderoso caballero / es don Dinero’ (Francisco de Quevedo, Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Trans. Christopher Johnson (Chicago:  University of Chicago, 2009), 157; Spanish version, 156, original emphasis). 17 ‘Y es tanta su majestad, / aunque son sus duelos hartos, / que con haberle hecho cuartos,/ no pierde su autoridad; / pero, pues da calidad / al noble y al pordiosero, / poderoso caballero / es don Dinero’ (Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Trans. Johnson, 159; Spanish version, 158, original emphasis). 18 ‘Sólo el tener / es la perfecta hidalguía’ (Lope de Vega Carpio, ‘La prueba de los amigos’, Comedias inéditas de Frey Lope deVega Carpio, Vol. 1 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1873), 237–260, at 319). 19 ‘No dudes que el dinero es todo en todo / Es príncipe, es hidalgo, es caballero, / Es alta sangre, es descendiente godo’ (Vega Carpio, ‘La prueba de los amigos’, 282). 20 Patricia Marshall, ‘When Money Talks:  Material Culture and the Creation of Meaning in Quevedo’, The South Atlantic Review 72.1 (2007): 172–190, at 181–182. 21 The dialogue is as critical of ‘passing’ commoners as it is of the titled nobility. The main point Hermosilla makes is that hidalgos are harmed by commoners from below and exploited by titled nobility from above. 22 ‘Un seruicio, aunque pequeño hecho en coyuntura, tienese en mucho’ (Diego de Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio. Ed. Donald Mackenzie (Valladolid: Viuda de Montero, 1916), 13).

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23 ‘Los señores deste tiempo ya no se veen en esas necesidades y nunca salen destas otras donde yo socorrí al señor duke, que lo precio en mas que el servicio de vuestro abuelo’ (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 14). 24 Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 54. 25 ‘Y en dos credos se haçen hidalgos y avn caualleros, por más que el fiscal de Su Magestad les espulg[u]‌e’ (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 61). 26 ‘porque de aquí a cinquenta o ochenta años querrán ser todos unos, o hará alguno de ellos o de sus descendientes alguna vileza y tacañería, porque … an de saver a la pega y tornar a sus natural; y no diran, ni se soñará, sino que fulano de Narvaez o de Sabedra lo hiço, de que aquel linaxe se le seguirá ynfamia … (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 61). 27 ‘Pajes, poned ay vna silla a Juan de Lorca’ (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 79). 28 ‘¿Qué os parece, Guzman, del rreçiuimiento del Duque a Joan de Lorca? ¿Hizo nunca otro tal a vuestro padre, ni a otros cavalleros que se preçian de parientes de su casa y lo son?’ (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 79). 29 ‘Es yr contra la justiçia distributiva’ (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 80). 30 Thomas Aquinas, BasicWritings of Saint Thomas Aquinas: God and the Order of Creation. Ed. Anton Charles Pegis, Vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 223–224. 31 Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 44. 32 Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 43. See reference to Arce de Otálora’s work in Chapter 1. 33 ‘Se querrán poner con qualquiera otro hijo de algo a tú por tú, especialmente si el hijo de algo es pobre, y esotro rico, como se vsa’ (Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 61). 34 Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, 78. 35 The idea that low-borns are naturally envious of Spaniards of higher births and need to be restrained socially evokes Douglas’s discussion of the Mandari landowners and their fear that their landless clients threaten their livelihood. Douglas mentions that Mandari landowners believe that their clients are jealous of their higher status and are involuntarily inclined to harm them. When the Mandari sense that their clients exude the specific type of anger that is threatening, they charge them with witchcraft and ritually kill them or expel them from their society. Douglas observes: ‘[s]‌ince they are credited with dangerous, involuntary powers, an excuse is given for suppressing them’ (Purity and Danger, 129). 36 I follow Claudio Guillén’s more inclusive definition of the picaresque (‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’, Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 71–106, at 93–99). 37 Américo Castro, La realidad histórica de España (Mexico: Porrúa, 1954), 572; Hacia Cervantes (Madrid: Taurus, 1957), 108–109. 38 As literary historian Peter Dunn has argued, quite convincingly, there is no definitive evidence that Mateo Alemán was a Converso (Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 59–60). See also Michel Cavillac, Pícaros y mercaderes en el Guzmán de Alfarache: reformismo burgués y mentalidad aristocrática en la España del Siglo de Oro. Trans. Juan M. Azpitarte Almagro (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1994), 149–201. 39 Marcel Bataillon, Pícaros y picaresca: La pícara Justina (Madrid: Taurus, 1969), 211. 40 Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, 139 and 149. 41 Quoted in Bataillon, Pícaros y picaresca, 189, n. 17. 42 See José Antonio Maravall, La picaresca desde la historia social (Madrid: Taurus, 1986), 103; Francisco Rico, taking a more structural approach, sees in the pícaro a sympathetic character who personified a non-noble Spaniard’s desire to improve their social reality (Francisco Rico, The Spanish Picaresque and the Point of View. Trans. Charles Davis with Harry Sieber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 62).

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The forgery of nobility in literary texts 43 Maravall, La picaresca desde la historia social, 305. I agree with Thompson that what Maravall calls the closure of nobility is ‘an expression of the vulgar’ concern to prevent the ennoblement of rich tax-payers, and not a statement of the conscious closing of ranks by the nobility itself (I. A. A. Thompson, ‘The Nobility in Spain, 1600–1800’, The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Ed. H. M. Scott (New York: Palgrave, 1995), 202). 44 See Benito Brancaforte, ‘Introducción’, Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache. Ed. Benito Brancaforte (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1996), 13–64, at 38–39. 45 Harry Vélez-Quiñones is the only scholar, to my knowledge, who has studied the play in detail. His basic point is that the depiction of the protagonist, Luzmán, and his actions may be seen as representative of early modern ‘queerness’ (Harry Vélez-Quiñones, ‘Miracles of Performance: Lope de Vega’s El caballero del milagro and Guillén de Castro’s El Narciso en su opinión’, Calíope 6.1–2 [2000]: 71–84). Others have made passing observations about the play. Joan Oleza suggests that El caballero de milagro along with El anzuelo de Fenisa, El caballero de Illescas, and El rufián Castrucho are examples of a subgenre of Lope’s comedia, which he believes were composed between 1596 and 1606 (Joan Oleza, ‘Las comedias de pícaro de Lope de Vega: Una propuesta de subgénero’. Ed. Manuel Diago and Teresa Ferrer, Comedia y comediantes (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 1991), 165–188). Jesús Cañas Murillo sees Luzmán as a character with some characteristics of the figurón, mainly his hyperbolic personality and the disparity between his self-perception and the perception of the audience (Jesús Cañas Murillo, ‘En los orígenes del tipo del figurón: El caballero del milagro (1593), comedia del destierro del primer Lope de Vega’, Buena Compañía: Estudios en Honor de Luciano García Lorenzo. Ed. Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009), 159–169). S. Griswold Morley and Courtney Bruerton suggested that the play was written between 1593 and 1598 (The Chronology of Lope de Vega’s Comedias (New York: The Modern Language Association, 1940), 660). 46 ‘Un Duque o Conde … amores tuuo con mi hermosa madre’ (Lope de Vega Carpio, ‘El cauallero del milagro’, Décima quinta parte de las comedias de Lope deVega (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martin, a costa de Alonso Pérez, 1621), 294r). 47 ‘Que sagaz, que fingido, que doblado, / … / como muda el color, como le finge, / que presto esta colerico y turbado, / y en que momento afable, manso y blando’ (Vega Carpio, El cauallero del milagro, 291r). 48 ‘Pues verle andar con Principes, y Grandes, / es cosa de locura lo que estiman, que hable, escriua, o cuente alguna cosa, / danle su mesa, asientanle a su lado, / honralle mas que a vn ygual suyo pueden’ (Vega Carpio, El cauallero del milagro, 293v). 49 Vega Carpio, El cauallero del milagro, 294v. 50 ‘Podré viuir, sin embidiar al Principe / en seruicio de Dios, que es lo que importa’ (Vega Carpio, El cauallero del milagro, 301v). 51 Góngora mocked him in a sonnet titled ‘A la Arcadia de Lope de Vega Carpio’, whose first four verses read: ‘Por tu villa, Lopillo, que me borres / las diez y nueve torres del escudo, / porque, aunque todas son de viento, dudo / que tengas viento para tantas torres’ (Luis de Góngora y Argote, Los sonetos de Góngora:  Antología comentada. Ed. José Lara Garrido (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2002), 159). 52 As Cruz has remarked, Quevedo ‘does not fail to disclose the anxieties and fears of that same class to which he owes allegiance’ (Discourses of Poverty, 121). 53 Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, 118. 54 Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, 124–133. 55 Edmond Cros, El buscón como sociodrama (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2006), 138–139; Paul J. Smith, Quevedo, El buscón (London: Tamesis, 1991), 16; Barry W. Ife, ‘Introduction’, La vida del buscón llamado Pablos (Oxford: Pergamon, 1977), 1–30, at 15. 56 ‘Quedé como muerto, y dime por novillo de legítimo matrimonio, determinado de coger lo que pudiese en breves días, y salirme de en casa de mi padre, tanto pudo conmigo la verguenza’ (Francisco de Quevedo, El buscón (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007), 109, emphasis added).

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57 William Clamurro, Language and Ideology in the Prose of Quevedo (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1991), 87 and 181–182. 58 Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, 139. 59 ‘A constant feature of the whole work, in fact, is the way in which the Buscón is forced, inexplicably, to denounce himself out of his own mouth, just to provide an opportunity for a joke – Quevedo’s joke’ (Rico, The Spanish Picaresque, 80). 60 Quevedo, El buscón, 232. 61 ‘Hubo grandes diferencias entre mis padres sobre a quién había de imitar en el oficio, mas yo, que siempre tuve pensamiento de caballero desde chiquito, nunca me apliqué a uno ni a otro’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 106). There are four competing seventeenth-century versions of Quevedo’s novel. I have used Edmond Cros’s edition, which is based on Juan José Bueno’s version or manuscript B. Cros believes that manuscript B was produced early in Quevedo’s career, between 1603 and 1604. See Alfonso Rey, El buscón: Edición crítica de las cuatro versiones (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007). 62 ‘Determinéme de no volver más a la escuela ni a casa de mis padres, sino de quedarme a servir a Don Diego o, por mejor decir, en su compañía’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 112, emphasis added). 63 ‘Goce las preminencias de antiguo’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 128). 64 ‘Zufaina de viejo’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 128). 65 ‘Mira por ti, que aquí no tienes otro padre ni madre’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 129). 66 ‘Señor, ya soy otro, y otros mis pensamientos; más alto pico, y más autoridad me importa tener. Porque, si hasta agora tenía como cada cual mi piedra en el rollo, agora tengo mi padre’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 141–142); see Alexander Parker, ‘The Psychology of the “Pícaro” in “El Buscón” ’, The Modern Language Review 42.1 (1947): 58–69, at 68. 67 ‘Es importante negar la sangre que tenemos’ (Quevedo, El buscón, 168). 68 Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, 133. 69 Henry Ettinghausen, Carroll Johnson, and Augustin Redondo believe that Pablos is attracted to Don Diego because the latter represents for Pablos the image of the successful Converso. There is no evidence in the novel, however, that supports this assertion (see Henry Ettinghausen, ‘Quevedo’s Converso Pícaro’, Modern Languages Notes 102.2 (1987): 241–254, at 245; Carroll Johnson, ‘El Buscón:  D.  Pablos, D.  Diego y D.  Francisco’, Hispanófila 51 (1974):  1–26; Augustin Redondo, ‘Del personaje de Don Diego Coronel a una nueva interpretación de El buscón,” Actas del Quinto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 699–711, at 704). 70 Johnson, ‘El Buscón’, 9. 71 La pícara Justina and Teresa de Manzanares are written in the first person; La hija de la Celestina and La garduña de Sevilla are written in the third person. 72 Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction, 249. 73 Maravall states that the wish of the pícaro is essentially ‘obtener y manifestar un estilo de vida que comforte la respetuosa deferencia por parte de los demás’ (La picaresca desde la historia social, 528–529). Although I do not agree that all pícaros have a genuine yearning for receiving public deference, it is pertinent to the passing pícaros I examine here. 74 ‘Que honre a mi linaje y sea nuestro mesón casa solariega’ (Francisco López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina. Ed. Bruno Mario Damiani (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1982), 388). 75 López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 456. 76 Dunn (Spanish Picaresque Fiction, 250) and María de los Reyes Coll-Tellechea (‘Subjetividad, mujer y novela picaresca: El caso de las pícaras’. Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 6.2 (1994):  131–149) argue that pícaras act solely in order attain money and material goods while pícaros are motivated by the hope of attaining a higher social rank. Teresa de Manzanares, however, contradicts this view, for this pícara’s goal in life in this work is to permanently impersonate a noblewoman. 77 ‘Anhelar a ser más’; ‘vituperar el que se abate a cosas inferiores a su calidad y nobleza’ (Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares, in Picaresca

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The forgery of nobility in literary texts femenina:  La hija de Celestina; La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares. Ed. Antonio Rey Hazas (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1986), 209–413, at 342, 385). 78 Symbolic of her interest in fashioning ‘improved’ personas is her early interest in the crafting of fake hairpieces. 79 ‘Finalmente, él me dio a entender que no le pesaría de verme empleada en el príncipe que me pretendía … Una de la cosas que más hacer perder el amor que tienen las mujeres a los hombres es el verse desestimadas de ellos, y en particular ser tratadas como mujeres comunes y de precio’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 349). 80 ‘Veme aquí el señor lector mujer de casa y familia, y con un retumbante don añadido a la Teresa y un apellido de Manzanedo al Manzanares’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 266). 81 ‘Mil veces estuve dispuesta a pedir divorcio en la mala vida que me daba; mas esta negra honra me lo estorbó’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 268). 82 ‘Maquiné uno de los mayores embustes que ha trazado mujer … para quedar dichosa toda mi vida’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 331). 83 ‘Esta certificatoria signada de mi signo y firmada de mi nombre, y asimismo comprobada por tres notarios de la misma ciudad, en que certifican mi legalidad’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 334). 84 ‘Soy de Madrid, hija de un hidalgo de montaña; hasta ahora me he sustentado del trabajo de mis manos’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 343). 85 I agree with Cruz that most pícaras are presented as sexual objects subjugated to males (Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, 134–159). Teresa is clearly an aberration among them. 86 ‘No me admira que un hombre de mediano porte, por sus trazas llegue a verse en mayor altura’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 342). 87 See Peter Dunn, Castillo Solórzano and the Decline of the Spanish Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952) at vii–xvi. 88 ‘Condición tan oscura … mamó en la leche’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 215). 89 ‘Natural y depravada inclinación’ (Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, 215). 90 Vicente Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón. Ed. Samuel Gili Gaya. 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1951). 91 Antonio Rey Hazas, ‘El Quijote y la picaresca: la figura del hidalgo en el nacimiento de la novela moderna’, Edad de Oro 15 (1996): 141–160, at 155–6. 92 Covarrubias’s definition of escudero reads:  ‘El hidalgo que lleva el escudo al cavallero, en tanto que no pelea … En la paz, los escuderos sirven a los señores de acompañar delante sus personas, asistir en la antecámara o sala … Oy día más se sirven dellos las señoras; y los que tienen alguna passada huelgan más estar en sus casas que de servir, por lo poco que medran y lo mucho que les ocupan’ (Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. (Barcelona: Editorial Alta Fulla, 1998), 543). 93 ‘Yo soy Marcos de Obregón’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 2, 245). 94 ‘Yo soy montañés de junto á Santander, del valle de Cayon, aunque nací en Andalucía, llámome Marcos de Obregón’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 2, 63). 95 George Haley, Vicente Espinel and Marcos de Obregón (Providence: Brown University Press, 1959), 74. 96 Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 2, 64. 97 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Enrique Suárez Figaredo (Barcelona: Ediciones Carena, 2005), 590. 98 ‘Tras de muchos infortunios que toda mi vida he sufrido, me vine a hallar desacomodado al cabo de mi vejez; de manera, que porque no me prendiesen por vagamundo, hube de encomendarme á un amigo mio … y él me acomodó por escudero y ayo de un médico y su mujer’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 1, 52). 99 ‘Así se me tornen las pulgas de la cama’; ‘debe dormir en alguna zahurda de lechón’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 1, 13).

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100 ‘Suelen decir vulgarmente que aunque vistan a la mona de seda, mona se queda. Bien podrá uno vestirse un buen hábito, pero no por él mudar el malo que tiene’ (Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache. Ed. Benito Brancaforte (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1996), 325). 101 ‘No pude sufrir los agravios que cada dia recibia de gente muy inferior á mi persona, las supercherías que usaban con mi persona, con mi hacienda … Lastimábame mucho, como los demas, de no ser recibido á las dignidades y oficios de Magistrados y de honras superiores, y ver que durase aquella infamia para siempre, y que para deshacer esta injuria, no bastase tener obras exteriores y interiores de christiano. Que un hombre … se levantaba del suelo dos dedos, se atreviese á llamar con nombres infames á un hombre muy christiano y muy caballero’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 2, 61). 102 ‘Solo un remedio puede haber para ser un poco libre; que es exercitar la paciencia y humildad, y no esperar a hacer por fuerza lo que por fuerza se ha de hacer … Como la humildad engendra amor, así la soberbia engendra odio. La estimación del esclavo ha de nacer del gusto del señor, y este se adquiere con apacible humildad’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 2, 65). 103 ‘¿Por qué pensais – le dije – que dicen ordinariamente: Nunca falta un Gil que me persiga, que no dicen un Don Francisco, ni un Don Pedro, si no un Gil? Es porque nunca son perseguidores sino hombres bajos, como Gil Manzano, Gil Pérez … hombres infames y bajos, enemigos de piedad, bestias crueles, sin respeto ni vergüenza, inclinados a perseguir a la gente que ven levantarse en actos de virtud, como este miserable de quien os quejais’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 1, 258). 104 ‘Que nunca falta un Gil que nos persiga’ (Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 639). 105 Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 1, 256. 106 Juan Pérez de Guzmán, ‘Vicente Espinel y su obra’, Vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón. Ed. José Luis Pelicer (Barcelona: Biblioteca Arte y Letras, 1881), x–xxxii, at xi. 107 See discussion of the treatises by Bernabé Moreno de Vargas and Benito Peñalosa y Mondragón in Chapter 1. 108 Another supporter of social mobility was Mateo López Bravo, who in Discurso político del rey y razón de governar (1616) commends men who move up in the economic ladder through success in a form of honest trade. He argues, ‘pienso ser digno de alabanza quien, desde un origen humilde, se eleva por la escalera del ahorro hasta las riquezas y el bienestar con su honesto (honesto, cuando ha sido hecho sin fraude ni engaño) trabajo. Y, por el contrario, hay que hacer sentir el peso de la verguenza y del deshonor a quien, nacido en la riqueza, por haberse sumido en los precipicios de la pereza o de la vileza, ha venido a parar a una pobreza triste y culpable.Y no es que yo prefiera la suciedad opulenta de las mercaderías a la virtud y a la nobleza, sino que antepongo el trabajo humilde, padre del bienestar y de la virtud, a la ociosidad soberbia, procreadora de la miseria y del vicio’ (Mateo López Bravo, Mateo López Bravo, Un socialista español del siglo xvii. Ed. Henry Mechoulan (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1977), 254). 109 Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 22–25. It has also been conjectured that Cervantes was a secret Converso and that his stained ancestry was the reason why his applications to immigrate to the New World (one in 1582, another in 1590)  and to serve as secretary of the Count of Lemos  – his literary patron  – were all rejected. See Michael McGaha, ‘Is there a Hidden Jewish Meaning to Don Quixote?’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 24.1 (2004): 173–188). I come back to Cervantes’s possible Jewish ancestry in my discussion of ‘El retablo de las maravillas’, at the end of Chapter 2. 110 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del Quijote. Madrid:  Taurus, 1975, 202. Among major dissenters of this view, we find followers of the late Carroll Johnson and Anthony Close. My objections to their readings are primarily methodological. Johnson’s psychoanalysis of the character leads him to conjecture that Quijote’s madness, anchored on the image of Dulcinea, is the result of his repressed sexual urges and – more specifically – his

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The forgery of nobility in literary texts sexual attraction towards his niece (Carroll Johnson, Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quijote. (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1983), 116–118, 144–152, 187–196). Close asserts that all attempts to read the novel as anything else other than a burlesque comedy and its hero as the comic relief betrays Cervantes’s intention of parodying the chivalric genre. For Close, Don Quijote’s madness should not be subjected to interpretations that engage the social world in which the hidalgo lived. It is only a literary device designed to satirise the lack of verisimilarity in chivalric romances (Anthony Close, ‘Don Quixote as a Burlesque Novel’, The Romantic Approach to ‘Don Quixote’ (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1977), 15–28). 111 David Quint, Cervantes’ Novel of Modern Times (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2005). Don Quijote’s transformation is discussed in detail in the second part of Quint’s book, 91–162. 112 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote,Trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005), 20; ‘tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada … aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quejana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento’ (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. 2 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 1978), Vol. 1, 71). 113 ‘Los hidalgos dicen que no conteniéndose vuestra merced en los límites de la hidalguía, se ha puesto don y se ha arremetido a caballero con cuatro cepas y dos yugadas de tierra y con un trapo atrás y otro adelante. Dicen los caballeros que no querrían que los hidalgos se opusiesen a ellos, especialmente aquellos hidalgos escuderiles que dan humo a los zapatos y toman los puntos de las medias negras con seda verde’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 56). 114 A number of critics have analysed Don Quijote’s obsession with enchanters at length. Richard Predmore conjectures that Don Quijote finds in the idea of enchantment a way to deal with situations in which the world opposes his chivalric vision (Richard Predmore, ‘La función del encantamiento en el mundo del “Quijote” ’, Anales Cervantinos 5 (1955–1956): 63–78). Bryant L. Creel suggests that enchantment in the novel should be understood as Don Quijote’s incarnation of the Platonist concept of the mind’s capacity to remake reality (‘Theoretical Implications in Don Quijote’s Idea of Enchantment’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 12.1 (1992): 19–44). Hillaire Kallendorf sees Don Quijote’s enchanters as devils from whom the hero manages to exorcise himself (‘The Diabolical Adventures of Don Quixote, or self-exorcism and the rise of the novel’, Renaissance Quarterly 55.1 (Spring 2002): 192–223). 115 ‘¿Quién puede ser sino algún maligno encantador de los muchos invidiosos que me persiguen? Esta raza maldita, nacida en el mundo para escurecer y aniquilar las hazañas de los buenos, y para dar luz y levantar los fechos de los malos’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 289–290). 116 See reference to Juan Bautista Valenzuela Velázquez in Chapter 1. 117 ‘Que la envidia que algún mal encantador debe de tener a mis cosas, todas las que me han de dar gusto trueca y vuelve en diferentes figuras que ellas tienen’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 1, 94). 118 ‘Puede desaparecer y contrahacer aquel ladrón del sabio mi enemigo. Sábete, Sancho, que es muy fácil cosa a los tales hacernos parecer lo que quieren, y este maligno que me persigue, envidioso de la gloria que vio que yo había de alcanzar desta batalla, ha vuelto los escuadrones de enemigos en manadas de ovejas’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 1, 224); ‘ –A la mano de Dios – replicó don Quijote. – Pues así es, quiero, señor caballero, que sepades que yo voy encantado en esta jaula, por envidia y fraude de malos encantadores; que la virtud más es perseguida de los malos que amada de los buenos’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 1, 561); ‘¿Quién puede ser sino algún maligno encantador de los muchos invidiosos que me persiguen? Esta raza maldita, nacida en el mundo para escurecer y aniquilar las hazañas de los buenos, y para dar luz y levantar los fechos de los malos’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 289–290).

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119 ‘Y desta manera debía de ser el de mi señora cuando tú la viste; sino que la envidia que algún mal encantador debe de tener a mis cosas, todas las que me han de dar gusto trueca y vuelve en diferentes figuras que ellas tiene … ¡Oh envidia, raíz de infinitos males y carcoma de las virtudes! Todos los vicios, Sancho, traen u no sé qué de deleite consigo; pero el de la envidia no trae sino disgustos, rancores y rabias’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 94). 120 ‘Dolor conceptus ex aliena prosperitate’ (Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 740). 121 In San Nicolás de Tolentino, a character moralises: ‘La envidia, por quien la muerte / Entró en el mundo tan fiera, / Se metió en unos judíos / Contra su pura inocencia / Que trazaron de matarle’ (Lope de Vega Carpio, ‘San Nicolás de Tolentino’, Obras de Lope de Vega. Ed. Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado (Madrid:  Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1894) 315–357, at 348). The belief that the Jews murdered Jesus is a misreading of Mark 15:11 and Matthew 27:18. 122 Lope de Vega Carpio, ‘San Isidro Labrador’, Obras de Lope de Vega. Ed. Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1894), 554–591, at 562. 123 Lope de Vega Carpio, El peregrino en su patria de Lope de Vega Carpio. Dedicada a don Pedro Fernández de Córdova (Sevilla: Clemente Hidalgo, 1604). 124 According to Miles Chappell, this idyllic maiden personifies virtue, who, upon being persecuted by envy, ultimately triumphs in her metamorphosis into a noble tree (Miles Chappell, ‘Cigoli, Galileo, and “Invidia” ’, The Art Bulletin 57.1 (1975):  91–98, at 97). Chappell believes that Cigoli used the allegory to represent Galileo’s persecution at the hands of his enemies. 125 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Grossman, 409; ‘Pues así es, señor caballero, que sépades que yo voy encantado en esta jaula, por envidia y fraude de malos encantadores; que la virtud más es perseguida de los malos que amada de los buenos’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 1, 561). 126 ‘Encantadores que me persiguen’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 159). 127 The passage reads: ‘el maligno encantador me persigue, y ha puesto nubes y cataratas en mis ojos … soy el más desdichado de los hombres’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 110, 113). 128 ‘Perseguido me han encantadores, encantadores me persiguen y encantadores me persiguirán hasta dar conmigo y con mis altas caballerías en el profundo abismo del olvido’, and becomes increasingly frustrated at his inability to subdue them (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 290). 129 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Grossman, 653; ‘la misma bizarría venía transformada en ella’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 268). 130 Quint, Cervantes’ Novel of Modern Times, 131. 131 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Grossman, 679; ‘detrás de la cruz está el diablo’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 299) and Sancho’s doctor in Barataria repeats it  – this time deliberately  – to the duke (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 391). 132 ‘Enemigos de piedad, bestias crueles, sin respeto ni vergüenza, inclinados a perseguir a la gente que ven levantarse en actos de virtud’ (Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, Vol. 1, 258). 133 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 402–403. 134 Quint, Cervantes’ Novel of Modern Times, 146. 135 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Grossman, 730–731; ‘Haz gala, Sancho, de la humildad de tu linaje, y no te desprecies de decir que vienes de labradores; porque viendo que no te corres, ninguno se pondrá a correrte; y précite más de ser humilde virtuoso que pecador soberbio. Inumerables son aquellos que de baja estirpe nacidos, han subido a la suma dignidad pontificia e imperatoria; y desta verdad te pudiera traer tantos ejemplos, que te cansaran. Mira, Sancho: si tomas por medio a la virtud, y te precias de hacer hechos

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The forgery of nobility in literary texts virtuosos, no hay para qué tener envidia a los que los tienen príncipes y señores; porque la sangre se hereda, y la virtud se aquista, y la virtud vale por sí sola lo que la sangre no vale’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 358). 136 ‘La disposición del alma, o habito honesto operativo de las acciones conformes a la recta razon, por las quales se hace laudable el que las executa’’; ‘integridad de ánimo, y bondad de vida’ (‘Virtud’, Real Academia Española, Autoridades, 1739, www.rae.es, accessed on 4 March 2013). 137 ‘Es bestia de muchas cabezas un vulgo, y no tienen buena cabeza entre tantas para formar juyzio cabal de las acciones’ (quoted in Luis Corteguera, ‘Sancho Panza Wants an Island:  Cervantes and the Politics of Peasant Rulers’, Romance Quarterly 52. 4 (2005): 261–270, at 263). 138 Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, 159. 139 ‘Se los había vuelvo de su mano a la suya’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 378). 140 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 379. 141 Corteguera, ‘Sancho Panza Wants an Island’, 264; Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, 164–165 and 217–218. 142 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Grossman, 678; ‘El que no sabe gobernarse a sí, como sabra gobernar a otros?’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 298). 143 ‘Sancho Panza me llaman a secas … sin añadiduras de dones o donas’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 376, original emphasis). 144 Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, 199. Ellen Anderson and Ryan Prendergast come to the same conclusion but through a structural and historical analysis as opposed to Mariscal’s Marxist approach. For Anderson, Don Quijote’s conversion is disingenuous because the historian of his story, Cide Hamete Benengeli, is a Muslim (Ellen Anderson, ‘His Pen’s Christian Profession: Cide Hamete Writes the End of Don Quixote’, Romance Languages Annual 6 (1994): 406–412). For Prendergast, Don Quijote’s sudden false transformation is obliged by Inquisitorial and censorial pressures (Ryan Prendergast, Reading,Writing, and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 4). 145 Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce and E. C. Riley, ‘Don Quijote’, Suma cervantina. Ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce and E. C. Riley (London: Tamesis, 1973), 147–179, at 148. 146 ‘Acreditó su ventura / morir cuerdo y vivir loco’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 592).

II Conversos and the threat of sameness

There are hundreds of caballeros only in name, but not by lineage in this city: because let me tell you that there are very few who do not suffer from flank pain. Because they [true noblemen] have taken the unclean women of recently baptized merchants and their vile money and have stained the pre-existing noblemen to such extent that even among the ones [caballeros] who vainly flaunt their Goth lineages, you can easily find dirty water. But let me tell you that these people who presume to be clean suffer from haemorrhoids and discharge showers of blood, and have other terrible female illnesses that kill them at every hour. Anonymous, Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura (1570)1

Note

1 ‘Caualleros, ailos en esta ciudad a centenares en solo el nombre, pero no en la sangre: porque te hago saber que en Castilla mui pocos escapan que no tengan grandes dolores de costado. Porque con este vil dinero an ensuçiado su sangre los nobles que abia, tomando por mugeres por los millares de ducados a una suçia muger de vn merchante reçien bautiçado, atanto, que a dos açadadas en los mas estirados que presumen ser de los godos hallarias agua turbia. Pero de los de esta ciudad, te hago saber que de los que ai y presumen ser de los de cabo, esos tienen almorranas i hechan sangre lluuia, y otros tienen terribles males de madré que cada hora los mata’ (Anonymous, Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura. Ed. José López Romero (Jerez de la Frontera: Centro de Estudios Históricos Jerezanos, 2004), 18).

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3 Spotting Converso blood in official and unofficial discourses

Limpieza de sangre statutes were first founded on the principle that only people of unsullied Christian ancestry – that is, untouched by Jewish and/or heretical blood – had the innate capability to be truly faithful to the Christian religion and the Crowns of Castile and Aragón. They were enacted as a proscription targeted specifically toward Conversos who, in the minds of their advocates, had taken over royal, municipal, and ecclesiastical positions that should have gone to Old Christians. Government and church posts were highly desired because of the social honour these positions brought to the respective administrator and his family, the potential impact he could have in policy-making, and because of the exclusive social network he was able to access. Mid to high-level administrative professions were also transmissible to one’s descendants as a form of patrimony.1 As mentioned in the Introduction, in the century after Pero Sarmiento’s formulation of the sentencia-estatuto, a number of universities, military orders, and religious institutions passed statutes prohibiting Conversos or Conversos with a history of heresy from gaining membership to their respective organisations. These early statutes were irregularly implemented and received sporadic backing from the Pope and the Spanish Crown.2 Limpieza statutes were only widely adopted after Pope Paul IV and King Philip II validated the anti-Converso decree passed by the Cathedral of Toledo (in 1547) under the leadership of its Archbishop Juan Martínez de Siliceo (in 1555 and 1556 respectively).3 The impact of these endorsements has been emphatically noted by María Elena Martínez: ‘By publicly condoning the cathedral’s exclusionary policy, the crown and the Holy See essentially encouraged other institutions, religious and secular, to pass their own requirements of limpieza de sangre.’4 For Archbishop Siliceo, the Cathedral’s limpieza statute was a necessary remedy to preserve the livelihood and dignity of Old Christians. In Sarmiento’s footsteps, Siliceo declares in a statement he wrote to Charles V that New Christians could not be trusted to assume positions of leadership because their

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Jewish blood predisposed them to commit crimes against the Church. He argues that Conversos, who were likely to be hidden Jews, had taken over the most important posts in Spain and appropriated the property of Old Christians. He also alerts his audience to the danger the Church of Spain is under due to the fact that Conversos are taking charge of its leadership. He observes that ‘[o]‌ne rarely finds in this Church, and in the entire Spanish Church, a priest who does not belong to them’.5 He cites the example of a parish in Toledo in which thirteen of fourteen priests were Conversos, suggesting that many churches were becoming synagogues in the guise of churches. According to Siliceo, ‘the men of this lineage have the habit of turning fleas into horses’, and are able to disguise themselves as Old Christians.6 Like Andrés Bernáldez, Siliceo also points out that Conversos habitually marry Old Christians in hopes of eventually hiding their origin.7 Given their success in camouflaging their ancestry, Siliceo suggests that all persons of Jewish ancestry should be kept away from acquiring government and church positions.8 He lastly appeals to his audience’s fear of shame when he argues that preventing Conversos from prominent positions would restore the reputation of Spain abroad, which had become known as a nation of marranos.9 Siliceo’s campaign against passing Jews might be interpreted as being fuelled, at least in part, by the class discrimination he experienced from Converso nobles. One could even imagine Siliceo as somebody who would have liked to pass for a nobleman himself. Born with the surname Guijarro, he was from a poor peasant family from a small village in Extremadura. He defeated the expectations of his lowly rank by attending university at the Sorbonne and by later becoming the Latin teacher of Philip II. In an effort to distract attention from his humble origins he changed his name to Siliceo, which was the Latinised form of Guijarro.10 Siliceo’s efforts to downplay his common heritage, however, were spurned by elitist Conversos (led by Charles V’s royal secretary Francisco de Cobos y Molina) when he was presented as a feasible candidate for the office of Archbishop of Toledo. Siliceo was eventually confirmed for the post, but he did not forget the humiliation he suffered under his Converso enemies. Once in power, Siliceo appears to have been intent on proving to his noble but ‘unclean’ enemies that purity of blood trumped any title of ‘tainted’ nobility. Pedro del Castillo, a probable Converso and one of Siliceo’s notable enemies, in his response to the limpieza statute Siliceo promoted, alludes to the fact that Siliceo’s project of barring Conversos from posts of authority was actually motivated by the archbishop’s own failure in covering up his low-born heritage. Castillo suggests that a more beneficial policy would be to prevent admittance to the Toledo parish by the ‘low and plebeian people under the pretext of being Old Christians’s who destroy the greatness and authority of the Church, instead of targeting the faithful and noble

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Conversos.11 Castillo insinuates here that one is either born a nobleman or not, just as Siliceo had implied that one was either born Old Christian or not. Not having been as successful as the Conversos in being admitted into noble circles, Siliceo appears to have launched a mission to prevent Conversos from further acculturation into Old Christian elite society. As Yirmiyahu Yovel observes, ‘[b]‌lood purity thus became a principle in the popular struggle for identity and recognition, and a weapon in the urban class conflict’.12 We could interpret the limpieza statutes as the result of a battle between two groups composed of potential passers: the Converso nobility and the Old Christian commoners with aspirations of social mobility. Siliceo’s limpieza clause was pivotal in determining the form of subsequent purity statutes to be adopted by universities, confraternities, some guilds, military orders, and government and ecclesiastical institutions throughout Iberia. After the example of the Church of Toledo, institutional decrees stipulated that limpieza entailed the absence of Jewish, Moorish, or heretical blood. Even if they had fulfilled other requirements, all canons, chaplains, prebendaries, and choirboys had to have Old Christian ancestry.13 As limpieza requirements began to be more widely implemented in the first two decades following Siliceo’s statute, Old Christians appeared to be winning their argument for status.14 Even the most outspoken critics of the limpieza statutes, such as the Dominican theologian Agustín Salucio, recognised this new reality when he reasoned, ‘in Spain there are two types of nobility. The superior kind is hidalguía and the lesser kind is blood purity, which we attribute to Old Christians. Despite the fact that it is a greater honour to have the first kind, a commoner of clean lineage is much more esteemed than an hidalgo who is not clean.’15 In order to avoid deflating the value of his hidalguía, no nobleman would publicly acknowledge having New Christian ancestry. Determined as ever to enter or retain honourable professions and inhabit elite social spaces, most Conversos camouflaged their ancestry. Some took extreme measures to intermarry with Old Christians and to erase the Converso taint from the family history. Members of the nobility or aspiring hidalgos learned that strategic social performance and networking were paramount for getting through investigations of blood purity. Ironically, the more Conversos looked like Old Christians, the more physically and culturally ‘different’ they became according to the textual productions of the time. Officially sanctioned discourses, as well as more informal narratives, emphasised the notion that under the veneer of superficial similitude Conversos were inherently different and had to be kept from secretly and indiscriminately melding their stained blood with the pure blood of Old Christians. Limpieza statutes served as a formalised way of raising awareness of hidden Conversos in religious, educational, and government institutions. Just

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as effective in rousing an anxiety of sameness among Old Christians was the transmission of myths about hidden Conversos/Jews through medical, theological, literary, and popular discourses. These myths addressed two key questions on the minds of those seeking a well-defined social order: what were the unique physical and behavioural features that distinguish Conversos, and how could they be stopped from tainting the purer members of society? As we shall see, a diverse body of texts – ranging from those authored by religious professionals to those meant to be orally transmitted – construct the Converso body as essentially inferior and undesirable. Bleeding Conversos The fact that the most vicious discourses about the Converso’s ‘defective’ physiognomy were produced in the century following the proliferation of limpieza statutes in Castile compels us to surmise that there was a demand for rationalising the blatantly anti-Semitic practices taking place throughout Castile. Court bureaucrats, medical doctors, and religious leaders promoted the myth that Conversos were physically distinct because tainted blood literally flowed within their bodies. They liberally referred to these New Christians as infectos (infected), sucios (unclean), or manchados (stained or tainted), and to the limpieza de sangre statutes as the ‘medicine’ they had to take in order to pre-empt their inclination to the imitate sins of their Jewish forefathers.16 Theologians Pedro Aznar Cardona in Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles (Justified Expulsion of the Spanish Moriscos) (1612), Vicente da Costa Matos in ‘Discurso contra los judíos’ (‘Discourse Against Jews’) (1631), Francisco de Torrejoncillo, in the treatise Centinela contra judíos, puesta en la torre de la Iglesia de Dios (Sentinel Against Jews, Stationed in the Tower of God’s Church) (1673), and Juan de Quiñones in Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua de los Judíos (Discourse on Jewish Menstrual Bleeding) (1632) assert that these signs – some monstrous and supernatural – are God’s way of punishing the Jews for having murdered Christ.17 For these elite writers, God had marked the caste of the Jews with special physical signs of their curse. Citing from the Old Testament, they misappropriate Moses’s prophecy to the disobeying Israelites (‘and they shall be on you for a sign and for a wonder, and on your seed for ever’) and state it as God’s curse to all Jews.18 Some of the signs are said to be apparent to the naked eye. Jews and Conversos, for instance, could be recognised by their beaked noses, reddish hair, the marks of scabies on their skin, and their elongated rears or ‘tails’. Some were also believed to exude the unbearable stench of faeces.19 When conspicuous signs were not present, Old Christians were encouraged to seek out the signs hidden on the body.20 One of the hidden yet uncontroverted

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sign of Jewishness, according to Aznar Cardona, Costa Matos, Quiñones, and Torrejoncillo, is severe haemorrhoids. They reiterate the belief that when Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus, all the Jews clamoured and said: ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’21 They also curiously describe Jewish haemorrhoids as a form of male menstruation. As John Beusterien reminds us in an article on the subject, the accusation that Jewish men ‘leaked impure blood’ like women could be seen as an early attempt to discursively produce a notion of racial impurity.22 The myth of menstruating Jews is thoroughly exploited in Quiñones’s forty-four folio treatise. Quiñones’s work deserves special attention because it stands out for being the only published text purporting to deal with this imagined condition in monographic form. It allows us to glimpse at the extraordinary lengths taken by nominal Old Christians in power to sensationalise and shame the Jewish body. Quiñones was not a medical doctor, as some scholars suppose, but a jurist for the Court of Philip IV. The treatise was dedicated to a higher-standing member of the king’s court, Friar Antonio de Sotomayor. Sotomayor was the king’s confessor and, prior to that, a highly ranked officer for the Inquisition. It is safe to assume that Quiñones wrote it as a means of courting Sotomayor, who must have been known for his passionate hatred towards Conversos. Quiñones alludes to Sotomayor’s anti-Semitic inclinations as well as his own when he tells Sotomayor at the beginning of his text that he has written the treatise as a form of entertainment for the Friar. Quiñones assures Sotomayor, ‘this discourse will be useful to you at some point, especially in these holidays in which Your Lordship may find some moments of entertainment while reading it.’23 The notion that speaking at length about a supposed medical condition that inflicts unbearable pain and anguish on a particular group of people just for one’s amusement hints at the sadism that might have motivated some officials at court in propagating such narratives. Although Quiñones maintains at the beginning of his discourse that he will prove that male Jews menstruate by examining authoritative texts on the subject, he clearly falls short of his intention. What Quiñones deems to serve for evidence for understanding male Jewish menstruation comprises misconstrued references to theological and medical texts, and to anti-Semitic stories that were widely known. This is probably due to the fact that concept of Jewish menses had rarely been discussed before Quiñones published his text in canonical literature as a valid condition. Aznar Cardona is, to my knowledge, the first author to explicitly attribute the female affliction to Jewish men. In one of his chapters, ‘Of the shameful punishments of the enemies of Christ, including the suffering of menstruation’, Aznar Cardona points to the female-like function of the Converso body when he emphasises that Jews (whom he melds with Conversos) experience ‘menstrual cycles, or monthly blood purgings,

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like women’.24 Costa Matos follows him when he describes that the direct descendants of the Jews who condemned Christ ‘without any doubt suffer from blood flows, purgations, and menstruation’.25 The confusion between haemorrhoids and menses appears to have been purposeful, especially if we consider that the term ‘menstruo’ was strictly used at the time to describe the specific monthly bleeding that affects women.26 Gossip about Jewish menstruation, nonetheless, had been widely spread for generations prior to the composition of Aznar Cardona’s work. For instance, in the anonymous Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura (Dialogue between Laín Calvo and Nuño Rasura) (1570), which I will discuss later, one of the characters makes the assumption that his listener is well-acquainted with the ‘fact’ that people of Jewish ancestry suffer from haemorrhoids ‘and other terrible female illnesses’.27 Quiñones attempts to stigmatise the Jews for being tormented with the same divine affliction imposed on Eve for leading humanity to its Fall.28 Quiñones further observes that God’s punishment for the Jews killing his son fitted the crime. The Jews asked for blood and they were literally given blood.29 The number of times that Quiñones speaks of ‘the stream of blood; (fluxo de sangre) that runs through the Jew’s ‘posterior parts’ (partes posteriores) is remarkable. Quiñones begins his text with the example of Francisco Andrada, a judaiser who was publicly penanced by the Inquisition in 1632 and who ‘suffered every month from the stream of blood that nature imposed on women called Menstruation’.30 He reminds the reader that God marked the posterior parts of many of the Jews ‘from where excrements are let out’ with streams of blood in order to seal them with a ‘perpetual mark of shame’.31 He then reiterates that God ‘hurt’ his enemies and all of their descendants in their posterior parts and placed the stain of monthly blood flows, which they share with women.32 The recurrent mention that the body of a Jewish man functions ‘like a woman’s’ and the multiple observations about the fissures in the lower parts of his subject may be read as Quiñones’s attempt to compel his reader to join him in gazing at the humiliating emasculation of the Jewish body. Most of the references Quiñones cites to prove that Jews menstruate are misleading, for they speak of haemorrhoids and not of male menstruation. There is no question that writings on Jewish haemorrhoids are as speculative as the ones on menstruation, but the difference is that while the first were believed to be the effect of digestive problems that could afflict any individual, the latter was attributed to only Semitic people. Menstruation not only feminised the Jewish body, but its presumed rhythmic pattern also allowed others to identify it in men as a sign of spiritual pollution. Quiñones cites Bernardo Gordonio’s medical treatise Lilio de Medicina (1495) as one of his authoritative sources. Gordonio does mention that Jews are afflicted by haemorrhoids, but he does not mention menstruation. Gordonio maintains that Jews suffer

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from haemorrhoids because they tend to suffer from melancholia, a condition that thickens their blood, and because God ‘injured them on the back of the hindmost part of their spine and cursed them in perpetuity’.33 Quiñones also makes reference to Jerónimo de Huerta, Philip IV’s personal physician, who does state in a passing remark about Jews in Problemas filosóficos (Philosophical Problems) (1618) that in order to stall the curse of haemorrhoids, the Jews seek to shed Christian blood.34 Nonetheless, it is important to note that Huerta does not equate male haemorrhoids with menstruation in the way that Quiñones does.35 With the exception of the case of Francisco Andrada, the examples Quiñones provides are unrelated to the concept of male Jewish menstruation. According to Quiñones, the Jesuits Alfonso Salmerón and Jean de Lorin mention in their works that both Jewish males and females menstruate on Good Friday.36 Salmerón and Lorin do reinforce the stereotype that Jews suffer from physical ailments, such as increased bleedings, but they do not refer to them as menses and do not suggest that the bleedings are cyclical.37 Furthermore, when citing legendary cases of blood libels – the accusations that Jews murdered children as part of their religious rituals – he asserts that Jews utilised the children’s blood as an antidote to their uncontrollable bleedings. He brings up the often-repeated blood libel case of Fulda during the time of Frederick II, which was believed to involve the use of the blood of five children who were viciously murdered in order to bake medicinal matzos to treat a range of Jewish ailments. He makes references to renowned authors, such as Thomas of Cantimpré and Friar Alonso de Espina (one of Enrique IV’s advisors), who hypothesise in their works that Jews drank the blood of the Christian children they murdered in hopes of curing themselves from the curse of haemorrhoids (not menstruation).38 It is conspicuous, however, that Quiñones – as well as many of the authors he cites – leaves out of his narration the fact that an investigative committee set up by Frederick II definitively concluded that the allegations of the Fulda blood libel were false. Neither does he mention that Pope Innocent IV condemned the libel of the Jews of Fulda in 1247.39 Quiñones also reminds his reader of the legend known as ‘El niño inocente de La Guardia’ (‘The Innocent Child of La Guardia’), the most famous Spanish blood libel case. The story of the child of La Guardia had been incorporated into Spanish folklore since its alleged occurrence in 1488 and was dramatised by Lope de Vega (c.1604).40 According to Rodrigo deYepes, Quiñones’s purported source, a group of Jews and passing Conversos kidnapped a poor Christian boy from the town of La Guardia, tortured him, and killed him in an enactment of Christ’s passion. But Yepes does not associate the motivation of the murderers of the child with any kind of Jewish bleedings.41 The fact that this reference, as most of Quiñones’s other ones, is erroneous might be read as confirmation that Quiñones believed that his text would be read by members of the Court who

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sought to reinforce their prejudices against Jews, and not critically scrutinised for accuracy by other scholars. Quiñones suggests that all men who are discovered to have blood flows should be brought to the Inquisition, because these men are secret Jews whom God has marked to be punished. There cannot be any doubt that Quiñones is overly preoccupied with the lack of external signs that mark the potential Jew. He nostalgically reminds the reader that Enrique II had rightly ordered the Jews to wear a red piece of cloth in circular shape on their shoulders, so that he could recognise his enemies.42 Quiñones might have seen the colour red to be convenient and desirable because it was an obvious metonymy for blood. Quiñones might have also found the circular shape of the Jewish mark appealing because it alluded to the presumed cyclical nature of Jewish bleedings. Male menses were, for Quiñones, God’s chosen means for assuring that the false Christians would not be ‘confused’ with his true children.43 Since menstruation could not be detected from a person’s outward appearance, Quiñones suggests that readers ‘confirm’ Jewish menstruation through body odour.44 He believes that their foetor judaicus (Jewish fetid smell) is comparable to that of billy goats.45 Melding the literal and the figurative, he claims that all Jews bear the stench of blood because they were bathed in it when they crucified Christ. Quiñones further argues that during the time when the Jews experience the monthly ‘revolting spring’ of blood, their stench increases considerably.46 Given the difficulty of distinguishing secret Jews, anti-Semites like Quiñones sought to figure them textually according to the characteristics of subjects who can be distinguished by bodily functions. It is not a coincidence that Quiñones (in line with Aznar Cardona, Costa Matos, and Torrejoncillo) did not mention the most prosaic stereotype attributed to Jews and Conversos: their aversion to pork. Quiñones was focused rather on the inherently distinct functioning of the Jewish/Converso body. He might not have been interested in mentioning Jewish features that could be changed or camouflaged. Through the conflation of theological and biological explanations, Quiñones presents the body of the Converso or Jew as the distinct bearer of his spiritual taint. He claims that Jewish and Converso men expressed their inferiority corporeally, as did women. The analogy he posed, female–male to Converso–Old Christian was a convenient means to establish the disloyalty of the physically and morally weaker New Christian. It also suggests that, like women, Conversos often needed to be contained and physically separated from the rest of the population. Quiñones’s obsession with discovering the hidden signs of Jewishness blinded him from acknowledging the fact that, theologically, Christian baptism warranted the spiritual sameness among all Christians regardless of their family history. Quiñones and other elite intellectuals, however, might have found the condition of male Jewish menstruation to be a convenient reality because

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for them it was the perfect literalisation of the metaphor of Jewish/Converso blood impurity. Cataloguing Conversos Socially insecure Old Christians sought to prevent the impure-blooded from encroaching upon their familial and social circles by examining other people’s reputations, as well as systematising genealogies dedicated to exposing the names of presumed judaisers and Conversos. The Inquisition in Toledo, in the 1520s and 1530s, began the production of a three-volume manuscript with the genealogical history of the descendants of individuals who had been previously condemned by its office. According to historian Linda Martz, this manuscript had an index of ‘infected surnames’.47 Many of the names of the punished judaisers and heretics had been gathered from the sambenitos or mantas (mantles) that were displayed in the Cathedral and parish churches. The term sambenito, derived from saco benito or sackcloth, was used in reference to the robes worn by the condemned in autos de fe. When the sambenitos were displayed, they had the name of the condemned written on them and, in some cases, a caption of the specific heresy for which they were penanced.48 There were cases in which a name was displayed along with a pictorial illustration of the supposed heretic surrounded by flames, as can be seen in Figure 3.1. Sebastián de Orosco, a Toledan poet and jurist, describes as late as 1538 how the Holy Office decided to renew all the old sambenitos that ‘were already torn and worn out and could not be read’, and re-exhibited them in the parishes to which each one of the condemned had belonged.49 The names of stained lineages were also exhibited on mantas. Mantas were large pieces of linen cloth cataloguing the names of presumed judaisers and Conversos. In Tudela (Navarra), a manta was hung in the most visible place in the cathedral in 1610 with the names of the residents who were suspected of being Conversos, regardless of whether the Inquisition had investigated them or not. The municipal representatives of Tudela explained in a document the reason they needed to be reminded of the identities of their Converso neighbours: ‘so that purity would be conserved in the city and other parts, and the people who descend from such [Conversos] may be distinguished in order that the memory of the ancestors may not be obscured and extinguished, and the quality of noblemen may be distinguished.’50 With the inscription and exhibition of Converso names,Tudela leaders attempted to thwart the further integration of Conversos into desirable social circles. The initial exhibition of stained names was irreversible, as they remained in the collective memory for generations to come, whether or not the mantas or sambenitos continued to be on display.

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Figure 3.1  Photograph of a Sambenito in the Cathedral of Tuy (Galicia) with the name and image of a judaiser condemned by the Inquisition in 1619. In some cities and towns there were self-assigned professionals known as linajudos (keepers of lineages) who took on the responsibility of keeping a record of sambenitos, mantas, and all the pertinent gossip regarding the blood purity of their neighbours.51 Linajudos also had the reputation of liberally embellishing genealogies for the purpose of defaming certain individuals and their families. Linajudos served as natural witnesses when limpieza de sangre investigations were carried out in the locality. In records of limpieza investigations, these witnesses commonly flaunted their proficiency in the genealogical secrets of their neighbours. In the investigation of Don Lorenzo de Córdoba y Carjaval in 1563, for instance, a church chaplain from Plasencia prided himself on being the expert of the town to whom ‘many people came [to] ask for information on things and to know about lineages’.52 In another case from 1546, the investigator asserted that his source from Ocaña ‘knows other people who are not pure and keeps track of lineages … and he knows who are the confesos and the Old Christians and the Moriscos’.53 In a different ejecutoria case from Zalamea in 1569, a witness claimed to possess exclusive insights into the identity of secret Conversos, which he alleged had been handed down to him by his centenarian father. Linajudos were generally males with long family histories in the areas where they resided. They were often hidalgos and/or clergymen with access to expansive social networks. Many of these individuals had modest resources

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and probably found social and financial benefits to being their towns’s linajudos. Besides having the social distinction of being the record keepers of the ‘blemished’ residents of their towns, linajudos enjoyed the additional benefit of often receiving monetary compensation from individuals seeking to produce the most favourable genealogies for their limpieza investigations. Other financial incentives and/or gifts might also have come from officials from religious or government institutions and private residents seeking to check the background of particular individuals for the purpose of admission into their institutions or for other types of social contracts, such as marriage and business partnerships. A fictionalised portrait of a linajudo appears in one of fourteen brief chapters in Juan de Zabaleta’s prose work, El día de fiesta por la mañana (A Day of Religious Celebration, in the Morning) (1654).54 The linajudo represents for Zabaleta – along with ‘the gallant’, ‘the lady’, ‘the adulterer’, ‘the lover’, ‘the hypocrite’, etc. – one of the lamentable types of people who take advantage of the respite provided by holy days for advancing their unchristian activities. Before Zabaleta’s narrator begins to describe how a linajudo spends his morning on a holy day, he makes it clear to his reader that he does not share the prevailing view on nobility or limpieza. More specifically, he mourns the fact that ‘the world … does not see that virtue is a better attribute than nobility by lineage, but [for the world] this attribute [virtue] comes only through the unclouded blood of ancestors’.55 Zabaleta portrays the linajudo as a pathetic figure whose function is founded solely on his ability to defame his neighbours. His narrator describes the relish with which the linajudo recalls the nobility and pure blood of some famed ancestors. He is also said to wonder how common people are able to live with the knowledge that they have been born to serve the nobility. Zabaleta’s narrator comments that the linajudo’s sense of judgement is foolish because the details of the history of human beings can never be fully recorded, and, by implication, it is unreasonable to make absolute statements about the cleanliness of anybody’s lineage. In other words, the narrator might be turning the linajudo’s words back against himself, for the linajudo might unknowingly himself be a commoner or of New Christian lineage. Zabaleta imagines his linajudo making his way to the church on a holy day with the sole interest of identifying the blemishes of his peers. He passes by a young man attired in wealthy clothing and sarcastically comments to a friend that the well-dressed man is ‘no more than a quarter Jew’.56 Zabaleta’s narrator interprets the linajudo’s comment as a reflection of envy, as he moralises: ‘Because he is well-dressed you have dishevelled his honour, and because you cannot rob him from his dress you rob him from enjoying his reputation.’57 When the linajudo arrives at the church, he notices on a coat of arms belonging to one of the church benefactors, scrutinises it, and deems it to be partially spurious. He moves on to an area in the church where a sambenito is displayed.

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He studies the list carefully and memorises the information he needs to add to his own inventory of New Christians. He explains at this point that the linajudo will manipulate the information from the sambenito to ‘concoct other offenses that will stain the honour of innocent people’.58 Zabaleta suggests that the linajudo’s activities are solely driven by self-interest, are unreliable, and detract from the welfare of the Christian community.59 A year after Zabaleta’s text was published, a flesh and blood linajudo with an uncanny resemblance to the personality of Zabaleta’s character – Don Fernando de Leiba – was sentenced to permanent exile from Seville. His crime was to have tampered with the genealogies of many families. He was also accused of falsely staining the lineages of otherwise ‘clean’ people. That same year, a group of up to forty linajudos was sentenced to the galleys and some to death for falsification of genealogies. These linajudos were found to have taken revenge on the people who refused to use their services in limpieza cases by defaming them with false genealogies.60 Although there are no extant copies of actual records of recognisable linajudos, we do have a few surviving samples of analogous records of lineages, known as libros verdes (green books). Libros verdes were descriptive catalogues of families and individuals with presumed raza (unclean or defective lineage).61 They were handwritten and clandestinely produced. They were probably called libros verdes because they were traditionally bound in green, a colour that was used in the production of Inquisitorial documents and books, despite the fact that their authors were not necessarily officers of the Inquisition.62 Like sambenitos and mantas, they exposed the purported stains of chosen genealogies. What made them unique and dangerous, however, was that they targeted the highest levels of the local elite: residents who were recognised for their high birth and were, for the most part, presumed by their neighbours and subjects to be untarnished.63 They targeted subjects who had already successfully passed and had become part of the ruling circles in their respective localities and at Court.64 The only extant versions of libros verdes are the anonymous El libro verde de Aragón (The Green Book of Aragón) (1507) and El tizón de la nobleza española (The Stain of the Spanish Nobility) (published in 1560 by Cardinal Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla).65 Both El libro verde de Aragón and El tizón reveal a clear, even if implied, aim: to unyoke the notion that hidalguía implied limpieza. The author of El libro verde de Aragón portrays himself as a former inquisitor in Huesca and Lérida. He tells his readers in the prologue that he wrote his book in order to help his fellows in Aragón keep their lineage free from taint, ‘to enlighten those who do not wish to mix their purity with them [the Conversos], that they may know the ancestries of the Jews from whom they descend’.66 As Monique Combescure’s archival research has shown, El libro verde de Aragón was distributed widely and in slightly divergent versions.67 The variant I have examined is

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the transcription of a manuscript published in 1623 in Zaragoza by an anonymous editor. The seventeenth-century editor organised the book according to his own assessment of the needs of his readers. Addenda and changes to green books by various compilers and editors were common and expected. In addition to containing genealogical lists and descriptions of Conversos, the 1623 text includes the narration of the legend of the assassination of Inquisitor Pedro Arbués de Épila in 1485 by Conversos, the transcription of ostensible correspondence between the Jews of Constantinople and the hidden Jews of Spain, and the lists of individuals burned (in effigy or in person) by the Inquisition. Although Beusterien deems El libro verde de Aragón to be a miscellaneous collection of unstructured anti-Semitic fragments, a closer examination of its content shows that the volume is much more coherent in motifs and content than appears at first glance.68 The introductory section of the 1623 version of El libro verde de Aragón is composed of a table exposing how ruling Aragonese families had changed their Jewish surnames into Christian surnames upon conversion. It presents a column of Jewish surnames and in another column to its right their equivalent Converso surnames, as in the following excerpt: Azachauednio Alazar Vluf Azarias Gemillo Agoas Truchas Jacob Alazar Rabi vsualuz gunix Chamorro Aviatar Xamos Simuel altordox Paçagon Acab genillo Cruillas Aslor Asachauiauit Abraham Simuel viton Nadasan malmerca Assora

Sanchez Cavalleria Santangel Rio Ruiz Santaffe Clemente Barrachina Rivas Lopez Lassa Maluenda Esteban Ortigas Cruillas Moros Cabra Vidal

It is puzzling that no study has noted what is obvious about this list. First of all, it is feasible that the 1623 editor of the text might have purposely fashioned the Jewish surnames in a way that made them sound very foreign; second, the

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surnames in the right column contain surnames that were common among Spaniards and traversed ethnic boundaries. The effect of the contrast between the alienness of the presented Jewish surname and the familiarity of the corresponding Christian surname might have been jarring. Indeed, the commonness of the surnames on the right renders the list somewhat useless for its original purpose of uncovering hidden Jews by name. Instead, the list appears only to reinforce the anxiety that the Christian surname of a person is unreliable as a marker of ancestry. In the next section of El libro verde de Aragón, the author lists the family names of individuals punished by the Inquisition, and, not surprisingly, it includes all of the names – or variants – from the second column. This list contains a wider range of names – names that sound stereotypically Converso, such as Besalu, to names that sound stereotypically Old Christian, like Urrea. The next section, a descriptive genealogy, is the longest one in the book. It explains in considerable detail the ancestries of eleven Aragonese grandees over about six generations. First, it begins with the earliest traceable member of the family, Amiatar Conejo. Conejo was a Jew from Zaragoza, whose daughter Estenga Conejo became the mistress of Don Alonso de Aragón, the bastard son of King Juan, and whose children became powerful members of the aristocracy in Aragón. The first son, Don Juan de Aragón, was given the title of Count of Ribagorza, the second son became Archbishop of Tarragona, the third son, Don Fernando, was comendador of Sant Joan and Prior of Cataluña, and the sole daughter, Doña Leonor, married the count of Alvayda in Valencia. As the author continues to list four more generations of descendants, among which there were dukes, counts, and heads of military orders, he reminds the reader on three separate occasions that all of these noblemen were direct descendants of Estenga Conejo ‘the Jew’. The other ten descriptive genealogies follow this structure and the pattern of repeatedly accentuating the indigenous Jewishness of the family name. The author cites over a hundred more family names with shorter entries that contain, for the most part, vague information of the patriarch’s background. One prototypical entry is Juan de Malvenda’s, which reads: ‘Juan de Malvenda, merchant of Zaragoza descends from the Malvendas of Cataluña, which are Jews of the Truchas lineage and their grandfather, Juan de Malvenda, who is still alive, and used to be called Truchas, the Jew of Cali.’69 The inclusion of the legend of the assassination of Inquisitor Pedro Arbués de Épila in Zaragoza by the Converso elite of the city appears to be incongruous at first glance, but its purpose becomes evident when attention is paid to the names of the Conversos who appear in the narrative. The inquisitor turns out to have been brutally murdered by none other than the progeny of the highlighted Conversos of the first and second sections, that is, by the

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descendants of the Sánchez, Santaffé, Santángel, and Moros families, among others. The legend ends with the account of how God performed a miracle to allow the authorities to discover the criminals. According to the author, ‘when they were brought to be questioned in front of the Inquisitors, they could not speak because their mouths turned black and their tongues were swollen’.70 We might say, then, that the inquisitors were able to literally see the monstrous physiognomy of false Christians, for God endowed them with a miraculous vision of Jewishness. The purported record of the confession of Sancho de Paternoy, in which he denounces all of the murderers of Inquisitor Épila, is placed as an appendix to the legend. In the section that follows, the author reproduces an exchange of letters supposedly found in the archives of Toledo by Inquisitor Siliceo, between the Jews of the East and the hidden Jews of Spain in the aftermath of the edict of expulsion of 1492. The first letter carries the heading ‘Carta de los Judíos de España a los Judíos de Constantinopla’ (‘Letter of the Jews of Spain to the Jews of Constantinople’). In it, the Jews of Spain consult the Jews of Constantinople on whether or not they should convert to Christianity. The letter is signed by ‘Chamorro, Prince of the Jews of Spain’, which is one of the names presented in the genealogical parts of the book.71 The ‘Respuesta de los judíos de Constantinopla a la carta de los de España’ (‘Response of the Jews of Constantinople to the Letter from the ones of Spain’) suggests to the Jews of Spain to outwardly convert and then to proceed to destroy Christians from within. According to the Prince of the Jews of Constantinople, Vluff – a name that also appeared in the first and second sections of the book – they should encourage their children to become merchants, doctors, and clerics so that they can rob, kill, and poison Old Christians while pretending to be Christians. The inclusion of these two spurious letters might have been read as proof that the death of Épila is only one element of a larger scheme of murders that false Jews were planning to carry out. El libro verde de Aragón ends with the list of judaisers burned by the Inquisition in Zaragoza between 1482 and 1499, and of the judaisers penanced between 1486 and 1504. Again, among the condemned we see familiar surnames, such as Santa Cruz, Santángel, Cavallería, and Sánchez. This last list conveys the sense that regardless of the wealth and status gained by Conversos, their destiny is irreversibly doomed. The writer maintains that, with patience and time, all false Christians will be identified and punished. Another green book, Cardinal Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla’s El tizón de la nobleza, is uniformly structured and unswerving in its intention to expose the ‘stains of the highest lineages’.72 This compendious text contains a descriptive list of sixty-two of the most powerful houses of Spain, including the houses of Osuna, Medina Sidonia, and Béjar, among many others. But despite

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the fact that the thematic content echoes the genealogies of El libro verde, El tizón de la nobleza was written with the opposite intention. It was composed as a memorial directed by the author to King Philip II in hopes that he would relax the blood purity statutes. In the prologue, Mendoza y Bobadilla explains that his nephew, the Count of Chinchón, had requested acceptance by a military order and his case had been protracted because his limpieza investigation remained pending.73 Mendoza y Bobadilla was exasperated at the delay and wrote El tizón de la nobleza.74 As articulated at the beginning and again at the end of his text, his intention is to demonstrate that the obsession with blood purity among the nobility is preposterous due to historical facts. He points out that mixed marriages between Conversos and Old Christians had been deeply rooted in the culture of the elite in the Iberian Peninsula since the high middle ages and that most members of the high nobility had Jewish ancestors. The first of two parts of the memorial is titled ‘Blots in the highest lineages’ (‘Máculas de los mas altos linajes’), and it catalogues the names of dozens of the grandees who descend from ‘Ruy Capón [castrated man], converted Jew’, ‘Inés Hernández Estévez, daughter of a shoemaker Jewish convert’, ‘the house of Tordesillas, of low-birth’ and ‘a slave’.75 The second part, ‘Sambenitos’, contains the histories of families whose relatives were tried and condemned by the Inquisition of Aragón and Castile. The only element in the second part that stands out thematically is the retelling of the legend of the Arias family. According to Mendoza y Bobadilla, Don Pedro Arias’s mother – an innkeeper in Madrid – had been convicted as a judaiser and burned by the Inquisition. His brother Juan Arias, Bishop of Segovia, attempted to remove the evidence of his mother’s judaising by disinterring her bones and switching his residence to Rome.76 Juan Arias’s attempt, was not successful, however because his fellows in Segovia made sure to compose a song that preserved the memory of his stain.77 As a result, the stain of the Arias family could not be removed. After the retelling of the legend and the insertion of the popular song, the memorial continues its cataloguing of the bastardies, Jewish, or Moorish elements among famed Spanish families. To conclude the memorial, Mendoza y Bobadilla articulates his hope that the aristocrats who presume blood purity and demand it in others will be humbled by the knowledge that they might not be as pure as they believe they are or as they pretend to be. He reminds the king that the powerful elite members of his court: are forgetting their blood blots and erase them, as if they were in fact [non-existent]. But it is by Divine Providence that they [the stains] should be remembered, so that the Lords of the great noble houses and their [purported] unblemished names carry this mark of ash on their foreheads and do not scorn with arrogance the humbler hidalgos – faithful servants of Your Majesty – and no less deserving of having their [high professional] aspirations taken into account.78

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The cardinal’s purpose was to convince the king, his court, and the Spanish aristocrats that blood purity statutes had become too rigorous. More concretely, Mendoza y Bobadilla’s appeal to the king to acknowledge the loyalty of humbler hidalgos might be interpreted as a veiled request to the Crown to intervene in clearing his nephew’s limpieza investigation in the tribunal of military orders. He attempted to demonstrate that absolutely pure lineages were extremely rare and that the aristocrats who supported blood purity requirements would not be able to withstand the same scrutiny that lesser hidalgos had to undergo. It is less probable that his intent was to point out that blood purity was a construct, as other scholars have argued.79 Neither was he opposed to the idea that individuals in leadership positions should be of high birth and of Old Christian lineage. Regardless of his stated intention, however, Mendoza y Bobadilla’s text was utilised almost exclusively as a handbook of stained lineages. It became, like the other green books, a book of ‘shame’, a handy resource for attacking the reputation of a given family and limiting their social capital.80 Old Christian authorities used it as confirmation that further scrutiny of the ancestry of all individuals, regardless of social status, was absolutely necessary. The green books were feared and attacked, understandably, by the aristocracy and members of elite circles in Madrid. While they pointed out the indisputable fact that the Spanish high nobility had descended partly from Jews and Conversos, they were highly unreliable and manipulable.81 Philip III responded to the pressure from some courtiers and banned El libro verde de Aragón in 1606 and 1615, with little success. A few years later, in 1623, the king’s father passed an edict against all green books, and reinforced his decision by asking the General Inquisitor to take the necessary measures to completely eradicate them. These books, according to the king, were the cause of scandals and social instability:  ‘They cause irreparable and unjust injuries to nobility and limpieza, as well as to the government and public stability.’82 In Zaragoza the books were burned in the manner heretics or their effigies were burned in the public plaza.83 Despite the efforts of institutions and individuals at the highest levels of government, green books could not be completely eradicated. Their popularity among the literate masses was a cause of concern among the authorities, who feared a loss of legitimacy if commoners questioned their blood purity. One concerned counsellor informed the king in 1602:  ‘The account contained in such libelous book is so well received by the common man, who believes it to be an oracle and truth beyond doubt.’84 For the ‘common man’, in contrast, the ‘truth’ of the green books might have been convenient and welcomed. Socially competitive individuals could use the knowledge contained in the green books as a powerful weapon against the Conversos who surpassed them in social status. The green books also reinforced the emerging

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idea – as manifested in Salucio – that blood purity was the more honourable form of nobility. The message that the lowest ranked Old Christian stood above the highest ranked New Christian nobleman could not have been more compelling to people of modest means who blamed Conversos for their financial insecurity. Old Christians were also conflicted, however, about having passing Conversos among them. On one hand, they may well have derived a sense of satisfaction from the thought that wealthy stained noblemen could never truly ‘purchase’ a clean lineage. On the other, Old Christians appear to have remained highly resentful of New Christians who could successfully pass for one of their own.85 Notes

 1 Albert A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, trans. Mauro Armiño (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1985), 47 n. 26, 326–329.  2 See observations on the sentencia-estatuto in the Introduction to this book. Also see discussion of Jews as servi camarae regis in Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 45–51.  3 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en la España Moderna (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992), 146.The statute had been opposed by some of the leadership of the Cathedral (which included some Old Christians) and the city council of Toledo, and suspended by the government of Charles V soon after its enactment (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 236–238).  4 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 44. Kamen argues that the papacy and the king were inconsistent in their approach to limpieza clauses. He observes that Paul IV did not approve the limpieza statute for the Cathedral of Seville in 1565 and that Phillip II attempted to pass legislation that would restrict the application of purity statutes (Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 239). Ann Twinam supports the view that the Crown was unsteady in its approach to limpieza clauses. As a notable example, she points out that Philip III granted one of the descendants of Pablo de Santa María, Pedro de Ossorio de Velasco, a statement of limpieza de sangre in 1604. The exceptional grant was offered because Santa María’s preaching had converted 40,000 Jews (Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets. Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43, n. 36, 373).  5 ‘Apenas se halla cura en esta Yglesia que no sea dellos y toda la Yglesia de España’ (quoted in Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 160).   6 ‘Que este linage de hombres acostumbran hacer haciendo de una pulga un caballo’ (Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 177).  7 See the reference to Bernáldez in the Introduction.  8 Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 177.  9 Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 179. 10 Domínguez Ortiz, Los judioConversos en la España Moderna, 144–145; Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 236–237. 11 ‘Gente baja y popular so color de ser critianos viejos’ (quoted in Domínguez Ortiz, Los judioconversos en la España Moderna, 146). 12 Yirmiyahu Yovel, The OtherWithin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 74. 13 Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 144. 14 See Domínguez Ortíz, La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la edad moderna (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1991), 62–65; Juan Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española (Madrid: Cátedra, 2011), 163–165. Given the popular support of the limpieza

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statutes, the Courts of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV did not seriously consider reversing them, but they seem to have tried to limit the investigations to three or four generations of ancestors. The Dominican friar Agustín Salucio was one of the most influential proponents of limpieza reform. In his Discursos acerca de la justicia y buen gobierno de España, en los estatutos de limpieza de sangre y si conviene, o no alguna limitación de ellos (1599), Salucio argues that the absence of generational limits only affects the established nobility, because their ancestries are traceable, whereas the ancestries of low-borns are generally unknown. Salucio’s treatise was endorsed by the Duke of Lerma, Archbishop Juan de Ribera, and the Grand Inquisitor Fernando Niño de Guevara (in opposition to the leading view of the Suprema), but had no impact on the implementation of limpieza investigations (Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española, 170–182). A few arbitristras, such as Jerónimo de Ceballos and others in the circle of the Count-Duke of Olivares, wrote discourses arguing that limpieza investigations had to be restricted to reliable sources and to generational limits (Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española, 216–242). The Jesuits (i.e., Pedro de Rivadeneira, Antonio Possevino, Diego de Guzmán, Juan de Mariana, Fernando de Valdés) were exceptional among religious orders in their opposition to using limpieza as an entry requirement until 1593, at which time the Society of Jesus also adopted a purity clause (Robert A. Maryks in The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 159–213). 15 ‘En España hay dos géneros de noblezas. Una mayor que es hidalguía y otra menor, que es la limpieza, que llamamos cristianos viejos, y aunque la primera es más honrrado de tenerla, pero muy más estimamos a un hombre pechero y limpio que a un hidalgo que no es limpio’ (Agustín Salucio, ‘Aprobaciones del discurso del Maestro Salucio’, Hidalguía: La revista de genealogía, nobleza y armas 20.5 (1957): 9–20, 12). 16 Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 241. 17 Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles (Huesca: Pedro Cabarte, 1612); Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos puesta en la torre de la iglesia de Dios (Madrid:  Andrés Blanco, 1679); Juan de Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua de los Judíos a proposito del Auto de Fe celebrado el 4 de Julio de 1632, en el que entre otros reos lo fué el judio Francisco de Andrada, aquejado de este mal (Madrid, 1632). Torrejoncillo’s text was first printed anonymously in 1673. Vicente da Costa Matos’s text was translated by Friar Diego Gavilán Vela. The title of the Spanish version is Discurso contra judios traducido de la lengua portuguesa al castellano, por el P. Fr. Diego Gavilan Vela Canónigo Reglar de la Orden de S. Norberto, del Monasterio de Santa Maria de la Charidad de Ciudad-Rodrigo (Salamanca: Casa de Antonia Rodríguez, 1631). There is no evidence that Spaniards knew of the text in its Portuguese format, Breve discurso contra a herética perfídia do Judaismo (Lisbon, 1622). 18 ‘Et erunt in te signa atque prodigia et in semine tuo usque in sempiternum’ (Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos, 168). The verse comes from the Vulgate Bible, Deuteronomy 28:46. Gavilán Vela’s translation of Costa Matos’s text reads: ‘Abrá entre vosotros, y vuestra posteridad prodigios, y señales perpetuas’ (Discurso contra judios, 169); ‘por haber perseguido al verdadero Messias Christo nuestro Redenptor, hasta ponerlo en una Cruz, es que todos los meses muchos dellos padecen fluxo de sangre por las partes posteriores en señal perpetua de ignominia y oprobrio’ (Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 2). 19 Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura. Ed. José López Romero. Jerez de la Frontera: Centro de Estudios Históricos Jerezanos, 2004, 16, 23, and 25; Costa Matos, Discurso contra judios, 189; Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 8; Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos, 169–170. Philip IV’s personal physician explains in more detail: ‘perderan (como si dixera) el suave olor de Iacob, con que Isac su padre le bendixo, y en el a sus decendientes, y convertirse ha en olor hidiondo’ (Jerónimo de Huerta, Problemas filosóficos, del Licenciado Hieronimo de Huerta, Medico del Grande y Católico Rey D. Felipe Quarto (Madrid: Juan Gonçalez, 1618), 12). 20 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 20; Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos, 167. 21 ‘Sanguis eius super nos, & super filios nostros’ (Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles, 180); ‘clamaron, y dixeron, que la sangre del fuesse sobre elllos, y sobre sus

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hijos, quedaron con esta macula, plaga, y señal perpetua, y todos sus descendientes afectos a ella, que cada mes padeciessen fluxo de sangre, como las mujeres’ (Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 3); ‘los que en la muerte de Jesu Christo Mesías verdadero tomaron la sangre … los cuales no hay duda que padecen flujo de sangre, purgación, y menstruo como algunos santos lo testifican, y muchos autores graves, y algunos tratando sobre las palabras de San Mateo donde consta esta verdad’ (Costa Matos, Discurso contra judios, 167); ‘señalados por la mano de Dios … derraman sangre por sus partes vergonzosas cada mes’ (Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos, 168). 22 John Beusterien ‘Jewish Male Menstruation in Seventeenth-century Spain’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73.3 (1999): 447–456, at 447. 23 ‘Es cosa, que pudiera escusar dezirla, entiendo que servirá en alguna ocasión este papel, y la dará en estos dias feriados, para que se entretenga un rato en leerle V.S. Illustrissima’ (Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 1v). 24 ‘De los ignonimiosos castigos de los enemigos de Christo, hasta padecer el menstruo’; ‘cursos de menstruos, o purgacion de cada mes, como las mugeres’ (Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles, 181). 25 ‘De las cuales es bien notable una [señal] que la tradición averigua en los descendiente por línea recta de los que en la muerte de Jesu Christo Mesías verdadero tomaron la sangre … los cuales no hay duda que padecen flujo de sangre, purgación, y menstruo como algunos santos lo testifican, y muchos autores graves, y algunos tratando sobre las palabras de San Mateo donde consta esta verdad’ (Costa Matos, Discurso contra judios, 167). 26 Autoridades’ definition of ‘menstruo’ reads: ‘La sangre supérflua, que todos los meses evacuan las mugéres naturalmente, quando la naturaliza no la gasta en nutrir y alimentar el feto (Real Academia Española, Autoridades, 1734, www.rae.es, accessed on 17 November 2011). 27 ‘Y otros tienen terribles males de madre’ (Anonymous, Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 18). 28 For further discussion of Jewish bleeding in connection to Eve’s ‘affliction’, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 29 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 8. 30 ‘Padecia todos los meses el fluxo de sangre, que naturaleza dio a las mugeres, que llaman, Menstruo’ (Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 1v). 31 ‘En señal perpetua de ignominia y oprobio’; ‘por donde salen los excrementos’ (Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 2r). 32 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 2v–3r. 33 Bernardo Gordonio, ‘Los siete libros de la práctica, o Lilio de la Medicina’, Obras de Bernardo Gordonio, insigne maestro y doctor de medicina (Madrid: Gonzalo de los Reyes, 1697), 1–292, at 225. 34 Huerta, Problemas filosóficos. 35 The only passage that deals with this subject in Huerta’s text reads: ‘los Iudios a donde quiera que pueden, procuran derramar sangre de Christianos, por ser desseado remedio para detener y atajar las fluxiones que padecen de sangre, que es otra de las señales del castigo de su culpa’ (Huerta, Problemas filosóficos, 14). See Beusterien,‘Jewish Male Menstruation’, 448 and 453–454. 36 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 4v. 37 Alfonso Salmerón, Alfonsi Salmeronis Toletani Commentarii in evangelicam historiam, et in Acta Apostolorum, Vol. 10 (Cologne:  Hierat & Gymnicus, 1604), 275–276; Jean de Lorin, Commentarii In Librum Psalmorum: Complectens quinquagenam secundam, Vol. 2 (Lyon: Cardon, 1614), 625–627. 38 Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum Universale de Apibus, Vol. 2 (Douai: ex typographia Baltazaris Belleri, 1627), 304–305; Alonso de Espina, Fortalicium fidei contra iudeos saracenos aliisque christiane fidei inimicos (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1494), 141r–151r. 39 Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 19.

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40 See Barbara Weissberger, ‘Blindness and Anti-Semitism in Lope’s El niño inocente de la Guardia’, The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, Vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 203–217. 41 Rodrigo de Yepes, Historia de la muerte y glorioso martyrio del sancto Innocente, que llaman de la Guardia (Madrid: Juan Yñiguez de Lequerica, 1583). 42 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 14r. 43 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 18 and 21. 44 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 7v. 45 Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 8r. 46 ‘Manantial asqueroso’ (Quiñones, Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua, 7r). 47 Linda Martz, Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2003), 135. 48 The custom of hanging the actual sambenitos was rare in the 1500s. Zabaleta describes the sambenitos in the following way: ‘unos lienzos con unos letreros que vulgarmente llaman los sambenitos’ (Juan de Zabaleta, El día de fiesta por la mañana y por la tarde. Ed. Ángel R. Chaves (Madrid: Tipografía de Diego Pacheco y Latorre, 1885), 95). 49 Orosco’s description of the sambenitos reads: ‘Año 1538. Pasan los sambenitos, que estaban colgados en el cláustro de la catedral, á las diferentes parroquias. Es de notar que los sambenitos de todos estos quemados se ponían é pusieron colgadosen la claustra de la sancta iglesia de toledo á la parte del güerto en unos maderos colgados; é yo los ví allí. Mas porque, andando el tiempo, con los aires, soles y aguas los dichos sambenitos, estavan ya rotos y gastados y no se podían leer, y por las razones y causas que á los señores inquisidores movió, fueron mandados renovar y poner en cada perrocha desta çibdad, donde los tales quemados ó reconçiliados eran perrochanos, y en las iglesias de loslugares de donde eran naturales. Lo qual se hizo en el año de mil y quinientos y treynta y ocho años, siendo en esta çibdad inquisidor el liçençiado Johán yáñez, que después fue obispo de Calahorra, y el doctor diego girón de loaysa, y así se pusieron en esta çibdad los dichos sambenitos en las perrochas donde están, é yo lo ví’ (Fidel Fita, ‘La inquisición toledana’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 11 (1887): 289–322, at 309, emphasis added). 50 ‘Para que la limpieza se conservase en la ciudad y otras partes, y se sepa distinguir los que descienden de los tales, para que con el tiempo no se oscurezca y extinga la memoria de los antepasados, y se sepa y pueda distinguir la calidad de los hombres nobles’ (quoted in Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España contemporánea y moderna, Vol. 3 (Madrid: Istmo, 2000), 30). Most sambenitos and mantas were vandalised, stolen, or voluntarily removed due to public dissent by the end of the seventeenth century (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la edad moderna (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1991), 153). 51 On linajudos, see Ruth Pike, Linajudos and Conversos in Seville (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos, 204–206. 52 ‘Muchas gentes vienen a preguntarle cosas y deslindar linajes’ (quoted in Baltasar Cuart Moner, ‘La sombra del arcediano. El linaje oculto de don Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal’, Studia Historia 15 (1996): 135–178, at 153). 53 ‘Conosce a otras personas que no son limpias e tiene cuenta con los linages … e conoce quáles son confesos e cristianos viejos e moriscos’ (Cuart Moner, ‘La sombra del arcediano’, 153). 54 Juan de Zabaleta, ‘El linajudo’, El día de fiesta por la mañana y por la tarde. Ed. Ángel R. Chaves (Madrid: Tipografía de Diego Pacheco y Latorre, 1885), 91–96. Among the few studies of this work, we find James R. Stevens, ‘The Costumbrismo and Ideas of Juan de Zabaleta’ (PMLA 81.7 (1966): 512–520) and Enrique García Santo Tomás, ‘Mucho ofrece quien ofrece un libro: escritura y carnavalización en el día de fiesta por la mañana y por la tarde (1660) de Juan de Zabaleta’ (Revista de filología española 78.3–4 [1998]: 309–325). 55 ‘El mundo no vea que la virtud es atributo mejor que la nobleza de sangre; pero este atributo tiene diferente nombre. La claridad de los abuelos solamente tiene por nombre nobleza’ (Zabaleta, ‘El linajudo’, 91). 56 ‘No tiene más de un cuarto de judío’ (Zabaleta, ‘El linajudo’, 93).

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57 ‘Porque iba bien ataviado le desaliñas la honra, y ya que no puedes quitarle el vestido le quitas la estimación’ (Zabaleta, ‘El linajudo’, 94). 58 ‘Tejer … la máquina de otras afrentas que mancillan honras que están sin culpa’ (Juan de Zabaleta, ‘El linajudo’, 95). 59 Linajudos also appear in a similarly negative light in Diego Jiménez de Enciso’s La mayor hazaña de Carlos V (1652) and in Gaspar Caldera de Heredia’s Historia arcana de lo sucedido en nuestra edad (1660). 60 Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos, 209. 61 See Hering Torres for how raza, which denoted linage or defect in the fifteenth century, began to be used as a signifier for both (Max S. Hering Torres, ‘Purity of Blood. Problems of Interpretation’. Race and Blood in the Iberian World. Ed. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 18–19). 62 In contrast to this view, Beusterien conjectures that the libros verdes were most likely associated with certain government manuscripts that were bound in green and were circulated unofficially (John Beusterien, ‘Blotted Genealogies: A Survey of the Libros Verdes’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78.2 (2001):  183–194, 189). These books were also known as libros de becerro because they were bound in calf leather (Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los ­conversos, 107). Llibre verds were collections of municipal privileges in medieval and early modern Catalonia. The best known of this type is the Llibre verd de Barcelona (Llibre Verd de Barcelona. Facsimile. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2004). 63 Ruth Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America (Nashville:  Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 301. 64 Less socio-economically advantaged Conversos and Moriscos appear to have had the advantage of passing without being targets of genealogical catalogues or being subjected to limpieza investigations (since they did not try to enter institutions with purity requirements). 65 Some have attributed El libro verde de Aragón to Juan de Anchías, but the biography of Anchías contradicts some of the personal information the author reveals in his introduction (see José Cabezudo Astrain, “Nuevos datos sobre la paternidad del llamado Libro Verde de Aragón,” Archivo de Filología Aragonesa 6 (1955): 75–85). The full title is El tizón de la nobleza española o máculas y sambenitos de sus linajes, ed. anonymous (Barcelona: La Selecta, 1880). 66 ‘Por dar luz a los que tuvieran voluntad de no mezclar su limpieza con ellos que sepa de que generaciones de judios descienden los siguientes’ (El libro verde de Aragón. Ed. Isidro de Cacigas (Madrid: Compañía Ibero-americana de Publicaciones, 1929), 14). This version was transcribed by Isidro de Cacigas in 1929 from a manuscript found in the Colegio de Abogados in Zaragoza. 67 There are four different manuscript versions of the book available today, but there were probably more variants circulating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Monique Combescure Thiry published the transcription of all four manuscripts and shows that, despite some discrepancies in the content and in the apparatus, the bulk of the information contained in the manuscripts is compatible. According to Combescure Thiry, the manuscript in Zaragoza is a copy of Ms 56-5-15 of the Biblioteca Colombina in Sevilla, which is the oldest surviving version of El libro verde de Aragón (Zaragoza: Certeza, 2003). José Amador de los Ríos’s edition is also a variant of the same manuscript in the Biblioteca Colombina (‘El libro verde de España’, Revista de España 106 (1885): 249–288, 567–603). 68 John Beusterien, An Eye on Race (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 85. 69 ‘Joan de Malvenda mercader de çaragoza desciende de los malvendas de Calatayud los quales judios eran de linaje de los truchas y el aguelo de este Joan de Malvenda que vive de presente le dezian mossen Truchas judio de caly’ (El libro verde de Aragón. Ed. Cacigas, 55). 70 ‘Al tiempo que los sacaban a interrogar delante los inquisidores no podian hablar por que las bocas se les hacia negras y las lenguas hinchadas’ (El libro verde de Aragón. Ed. Cacigas, 87). 71 El libro verde de Aragón. Ed. Cacigas, 107. 72 Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza, 59.

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73 Rafael Gil Gómez believes that the Condes de Chinchón were Conversos. He states:  ‘El Memorial del Cardenal Mendoza y Bobadilla fue hecho para demostrar que no solamente sus parientes los Condes de Chinchón, que eran acusados de sangre poco limpia, tenían antepasados hebreos, sino que también sucedía así con casi toda la aristocracia de aquella época’ (Los hispano-hebreos conversos en la genealogía y en la nobiliaria (Madrid: Hidalguía, 1962), 9). 74 The genealogy of Mendoza y Bobadilla was added by the editor as an afterword to that edition of El tizón de la nobleza (183–192). 75 ‘De Ruy Capón, judío convertido’; ‘Inés Hernández Estevez, hija de un zapatero judío convertido’; ‘la casa de Tordesillas, de baja casta’; ‘una esclava’ (Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza, 63, 77, 83, and 84). 76 ‘Juan Arias, su hermano, fué obispo de Segovia y procediendo la Inquisición contra su madre, sacó los huesos de su sepultura y se fue con ellos’ (Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza, 96). 77 Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza, 97. 78 ‘Se van olvidando de sus máculas, y como en hecho de verdad se van borrando todas ellas. Pero es providencia divina que siquier quede el recuerdo dellas, para que tan grandes señores de casas tan nobles y tan claros apellidos lleven esta ceniza en la frente y no desprecien con soberbia á los humildes hidalgos, fieles vasallos de V.M., no indignos de que selles atienda en sus pretensiones’ (Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza, 173). 79 See Domínguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en la España Moderna, 193. 80 Hill suggests that a fitting translation for the green books would be ‘catalogues of shame’ (Hierarchy, Commerce and Fraud, 301). 81 Domínguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en la España Moderna, 156–158; La clase social de los conversos, 108–109. 82 ‘Resultan irreparables y injustos daños así de la nobleza y limpieza como del gobierno y quietud pública’ (quoted in Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 292 n. 142). 83 See Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España contemporánea y moderna, 256. 84 ‘Esta tan recibida del vulgo la relación que se saca y hace por el dicho libello, que la tienen por oraculo y verdad certisima’ (Consultationis resolutio grauissimorum doctorum … condemnans Auctorem libelli famosi nuncupati el Verde (Zaragoza, 1623), quoted in Beusterien, An Eye on Race, 13). 85 The arguments against limpieza statutes conducted, for the most part, in exclusive government, academic, and religious circles, appear not to have interested the general public. See the discourses against limpieza by Agustín Salucio, ‘Aprobaciones del discurso del Maestro Salucio’, Hidalguía:  La revista de genealogía, nobleza y armas 20.5 (1957):  9–20, Pedro de Villamizar (Domínguez Ortiz, Los Judeoconversos en la España Moderna, 72), Diego Serrano de Sylva, Enrique Pimentel, Gerónimo de Cevallos, and Francisco López de Villalobos (Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos, 242–253).

4 The unmasking of Conversos in popular and literary texts

Socially insecure Old Christians were inclined to utilise passive methods of ‘outing’ hidden Conversos. Evident from the unknown authorship of El libro verde de Aragón is that anonymity may have allowed more vulnerable Spaniards to vilify and condemn enviable Conversos without exposing themselves to the possibility of being targets of lawsuits or personal revenge. The author of El libro verde, for instance, warns his reader that Old Christians who allow their children to marry Conversos over Old Christians will unavoidably produce ‘bitter’ fruit, regardless of the wealth and physical attractiveness of the former.1 A similar warning appears in an anonymous memorandum sent to Philip IV, in which the writer states that the marriage between an Old Christian and a person with a blemished bloodline is a formula for self-destruction, for it destabilises the familial order. He writes: ‘I do not mention the disasters caused here [as the result of mixed marriages], the violent deaths of people in the hands of the family of their spouses, a recourse to escape the infamy of being related and to avoid having one’s family line infected.’2 The anonymous warning may be more than an expression of concern for the well-being of the community. As James Scott suggests in his study of the arts of political disguise, anonymous attacks on a person or people may be read as ‘threats’ intended to modify their opponent’s behaviour.3 The seemingly harmless warning from the author of El libro verde author might indeed belie the threat of violence to those who opt for miscegenation. Scott argues that these embryonic types of sanctions need to be taken seriously because they might point to brewing resentments that often lead to concrete forms of aggression. Another powerful medium of safe social sanction, according to Scott, is gossip. Gossip is a compelling source of passive aggression because it is produced collectively and, thus, is for all intents and purposes is also anonymous. Gossipers can ruin a person’s or group’s honour without taking responsibility for their actions. Furthermore, the more gossip propagates, the more it reinforces normative standards of behaviour ‘by teaching anyone who gossips

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precisely what kinds of conduct are likely to be mocked or despised’.4 In early modern Spain, gossip was often passed on through popular songs, anecdotes, aphorisms, and jokes. These forms are powerful and potentially devastating because it could be virtually impossible to suppress their circulation. A song, edited in the 1570s by Sebastián de Horosco, echoes the sentiment expressed in El libro de Aragón that good moral living entails endogamous relationships. ‘And it is considered good advice’, it says: that in order to live happily Christians must marry Christians Marranos must marry Marranos and should try to propagate. And one who’s an Old Christian and acts to fulfil his greed should not take bad advice and trade his own skin to conceive blemished children.5

In these verses, the narrator reiterates the common wisdom of the irreversibility of a stain once it has entered the family line. He adds that financial benefits are never a sufficient excuse for the selling of one’s honour. Old Christians who allow their children to marry New Christians are described as being no different than Jews without ‘skin’, a term the author of the poem might have conceivably used as a euphemism for foreskin. Another anti-Converso copla (popular song) that became part of the oral tradition in Segovia is cited by Mendoza y Bobadilla in his libro verde. The song concerns Juan Arias’s attempt to hide the bones of his judaising mother. Most residents of Segovia might have been unable to directly influence the affairs of the powerful Arias family, but they could gossip and sing songs about their Jewishness. The song was the collective effort of Segovians to respond to the attempts by Arias and his descendants to cover up their supposed taint. The fact that Mendoza y Bobadilla was aware of the song testifies to its effectiveness even about a century after the events. What is striking about the song is that it makes no mention of the low birth of the mother, of her judaising and burning, or even of the illegitimacy of Archbishop Arias and his brother Pedro Arias, who had been treasurer for Enrique IV. It is focused rather on mocking Archbishop Arias for his failed endeavours to cover up his stains with false titles of nobility. The copla, as recorded by Mendoza y Bobadilla, reads: To you, don Fra Arias, faggot you are and were a Jew, I no longer argue with you, because you own a great title.

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Eagle, castle, and cross. Tell me, where did you get them? Because your father a foreskin never had or has. Eagle, castle, and cross Jew, where did you get them? The eagle is a bird of prey The castle is of Emmaus, and the cross, where you placed my Jesus the redeemer.6

The speaker in the copla addresses Arias as if the latter were a subordinate. He belittles the archbishop by calling him ‘friar’, and then by insulting him with stereotypical anti-Semitic jibes. He is determined to expose the deceitful identity of the Arias family. He discredits each element of the Arias coat of arms as a fraud. What appears to be the lofty sable eagle is a squalid bird of prey, the distinguished feudal castle is none other than the castle of evil, and the honourable cross of Calatrava is the cross on which Arias crucified Christ. In exhibiting the true meanings of each one of the figures that make up the Arias coat of arms, the speaker implies that Jewishness is an immutable condition and impossible to cover up. The motivation for the outspokenness of the poet is suggested from the outset. While insulting Arias as a Jew and a homosexual, he states that he would not be able to directly approach Arias in real life because of the disparity in their social ranks. The copla is an example where the anonymity of the speaker allows a closing of the real-life social disparity between the speaker and the subject; in this case, one might say it reveals a reversal of the conventional social order. Except when popular songs and narratives target specific individuals, they tend to reiterate generalised stereotypes of Jews, referring to an aversion to bacon and wine, and to an uncontrollable greed. The folklore of anti-Semitic tales and jokes has been preserved in Melchor de Santa Cruz’s Floresta española de apotegmas o sentencias (A Forestal Compilation of Apothegms or Maxims) (1574),7 Luis de Pinedo’s Libro de chistes (Book of Jokes) (c.1550), and Luis Zapata’s Miscelánea (1592), among other texts. Narrative permutations of these tales also appear scattered in comedias, collections of stylised short novels, poetry, dialogues, and other miscellaneous writings.8 These popular narratives are epigrammatic in style and presume to be either historical, or a hypothetical yet feasible occurrence. The views presented in the tales do not belong to a particular individual, but are rather meant to represent the voice of the group of Old Christians to which the storyteller belongs. The tales typically follow a similar structure, provide a stereotypical depiction of the Converso/Jew, and feature a final revelation of the Jew/Converso’s

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identity. Repetitiveness is indeed a pervasive feature in the tales and has the function of reinforcing and conveying the basic messages in the tales: that the collective memory of Old Christians will not let Conversos/Jews hide their indelible blood stains, and that the Conversos/Jews will be punished for their hubris and for their economic success. They generally set up a situation from daily life in which a passing Converso encounters an Old Christian. In a few exceptional cases, the presumed Old Christian is also exposed as being a Converso. A  common scenario of an anecdote presents the Converso as trespassing social boundaries and acting in a way that the Old Christian finds offensive. Overreaching for assimilation, as we see in the following example, counts as trespassing: As a man was showing his house to a caballero, he took him to a room that had two hundred pieces of ham [hung with their harnesses from the rafters]. [The man asked the caballero]: – What does your honour say about such a roomful of harnesses? The caballero noticing that none of the ham had been touched responded: – Looks good, and not even a buckle is missing.9

The ‘man’ is keen on demonstrating to the caballero that he is an Old Christian by making a pretentious display of his bountiful collection of ham. But against the man’s expectations, the caballero points out that all of the hams are intact and unconsumed (‘not even a buckle is missing’) and, hence, suggests that he must be a Converso. In other words, the caballero turns the Converso’s false evidence against itself. In another joke, a Converso is mocked for his attempt to cover up his lineage by his overstated eagerness to show to Old Christians that he eats pork: When an hidalgo saw a visitor [he knew] come into his house, he ordered [his servants] to hide the bacon that was drying on the ground. The visitor entering the house said: – Why are you putting them away? I was raised eating them. The hidalgo responded: – It must be true, because they probably put them on the breast of your nurse to wean you.10

As it is the case in these examples, exposing the Converso is done euphemistically and in a manner that humiliates the Converso while entertaining the target audience with sarcasm and ironic humour. The jokes consistently use the motif of the Converso/Jew, perhaps because it is the most widespread and understood stereotype. The association between Conversos/Jews and pigs also has the effect of reinforcing the common use of the word ‘pig’ to describe a Jew. A comparable point is made, though more bluntly, by the proverb, ‘[d]‌o not let the Jew and the pig into your orchard’.11

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A common theme of the anecdotes is the Old Christian resentment of the economic prosperity of New Christians. The following anonymous epigram attacks a wealthy Converso for his impudence: ‘A man of the race of Jews built a great house and placed a cross at its gate where the following lampoon was posted: It is customary for hunters / to post at their gate / the skin of their prey.’12 Not only does the rich Converso dare to build a pretentious home for himself, he flaunts a false Christianity by hanging a massive cross at the gate. The epigram uncovers the wealthy man as a Jew by stripping the cross of its redemptive meaning and reconfiguring it as a symbol of Jewish damnation. Other stories express similar frustrations at the economic inequality between Old Christians and New Christians. Depictions of New Christians dressed in luxurious clothes and purporting nobility are ridiculed for attempting to falsify their true selves in stories such as one included in Santa Cruz’s collection that reads: ‘A man who was not an hidalgo was having difficulty putting on a velvet coat, and said that he did not know what the problem was. A squire [a presumed impoverished Old Christian] said: – You should try the coat made of bristle.’13 The conclusion takes place as the Old Christian unmasks the passing hidalgo by hinting to him that he should settle for wearing a coat worthy of his nature, that is, a hog’s coat. Another expression of the indignation felt by impoverished Old Christians upon encountering prosperous New Christians is found in the following joke. It involves a poor Old Christian who is disparaged or humiliated by a Converso impersonating an Old Christian nobleman. The following tale, from Pinedo’s collection of jokes, dramatises a situation in which a ravenous page – an implied Old Christian hidalgo – is forced to watch a Converso eat a sumptuous dish: The Bishop of Jaén had a banquet with many caballeros from Court. A  page served a caballero a bowl of manjar blanco [a delicate dish made of rice flour, poultry, milk, and sugar]. The page waited to see if the caballero saved some for him. The caballero, though aware of the affliction of the page, ate the entire dish, and giving the empty bowl to the page said: – Page, ‘check’ here [referring to the terminology used in the game of chess]. The page pretended not to care, went to the side table, and bringing a pork dish to the caballero said: – Caballero ‘mate’, [in Spanish it also means ‘kill’ in the imperative form] thereby accusing him of being a Converso. The caballero responded: – You are right, you got me.14

In narratives such as the one above, the speaker hints at the unnaturalness of the social setting, for the Old Christian protagonist is in a position of servitude – that is, a page or squire  – whereas the New Christian is wealthy, presumes nobility, and dwells in exclusive social spaces. The Old Christian’s uncovering of the Converso at the end of the story may be seen as a form of verbal

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subversion in which the Old Christian ‘checkmates’ or symbolically eliminates the undeserving Converso.15 Moreover, in the references to the Bishop of Jaén and the Court, the speaker alludes to the complicity of the Church and the Spanish government in the passing of the Converso/Jew, and, by extension, in the poverty of the Old Christian. While elite anti-Converso writers  – for example, Francisco de Quevedo, Juan Adam de la Parra, Diego Gavilán Vela  – produced treatises that could be seen as criticising the Crown’s financial dealings with powerful Conversos/Jews, the general Old Christian public transmitted analogous ideas of social justice through seemingly harmless jokes.16 The wider reach of these popular tales, however, may well have been as effective in opposing the acculturation of Conversos. One significant feature of all of these jokes is that the narrators and/or the Old Christian characters always know the identity of a hidden Converso/Jew. In some of the stories, the narrator begins by telling the listener/reader that the concerned character had the ‘reputation of being a Jew’ (‘fama de judío’). Furthermore, the narrators and characters of popular tales state the Jewishness of a person as an undisputed fact and leave no room for questioning it. The absence of elaboration might have been purposeful, however, for it contributed to the notion that the authority implied in anonymity ultimately could determine who was a true Christian and who was a Jew. The Converso body identified through disgust in imaginative literature While popular discourses emphasised the idea that Conversos were recognisable regardless of their attempts to cover up their identities, imaginative literature for literate audiences shows greater efforts to justify an aversion to the Converso body by pointing out specific physical features and attributes that liken them to diseased and subhuman creatures. Although on occasion they allude to anti-Converso medical and theological rhetoric, fictional narratives are more interested in rousing feelings of repellence towards Conversos rather than rationalising their anti-Semitic stance. Non-dramatic texts, in particular, stand out for their blatant language and crude tone. A text that is virtually unknown to scholars, the anonymous Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura (1570), imagines the conversation that would have taken place between the two famed judges of ninth-century Castile if they could incarnate their statues in the arc of Santa María in Burgos at that time (mid-sixteenth century). Within this fiction, Laín describes himself as the watchtower or atalaya who can see with unusual clarity the extent to which Conversos have infiltrated his city and is compelled to reveal the conniving ways in which Jews deceive Old Christians and oppress them. As

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Carroll Johnson reminds us, the term atalaya was used at this time to make reference to an elevated tower or platform from which a sentinel could alert his community about approaching enemies.17 Judge Laín Calvo’s self-assigned role is hence to help his partner Nuño Rasura – and, by extension, the readers of the dialogue – discern the signs that mark passing Conversos. In this dialogue Nuño represents the ingenuous Spaniard who needs to be literally and figuratively woken up by Laín to the Jewish invasion of his land. Laín follows the typical anti-Semitic stance and does not distinguish between Jews and Conversos. Laín first appears in the text grieving for the demise of chivalric and moral noblemen, who have been replaced in Castile by the Hebrew people whom he introduces as ‘the filthy dandruffy men of base linage’.18 Nuño responds to Laín by insinuating that there is little cause to overreact, for he believes that Spain is still populated by countless Christians of honourable pure extraction. If not, he asks, what are the coat of arms and crests displayed at the doors of so many houses in Burgos? But Laín informs Nuño that the symbols of nobility were meaninglessly fabricated and that most of the men who purport to be caballeros in the city are masked Conversos. Once Nuño becomes fully convinced by Laín’s argument that his people have been surrounded by Conversos passing as honourable noblemen, he allows Laín to speak at length about his impressions of the Converso takeover of the social elites in Spain. At interspersed instances, Nuño himself reinforces some of Laín’s anti-Converso depictions with comments of his own. Although Laín’s report might strike us as rambling protestations, upon closer scrutiny it becomes transparent that his narrative revolves around the distress he feels about the lack of discernment about who is a true pure-blooded nobleman and who is impersonating one. Laín reiterates throughout the dialogue that unsuspecting Spaniards eat, congregate, and enter into marriage with Conversos because they cannot see through the masks the latter so convincingly wear. Old Christians take the outward appearance of these Conversos at face value. For instance, when these deceivers claim to come from the ‘mountains’, they do not mean the northern mountains of Spain, but the mountains of Bethlehem and Palestine.19 If they say they are caballeros, they might really mean that they are ‘Knights of Judaea’.20 According to Laín, Conversos seek to amass as much wealth as possible by selling dirty goods so that they can purchase titles of nobility and call themselves by the honorific title of Don. Nuño subtly corrects Laín by arguing that the Conversos wish to take the title of Don because they want to copy their Jewish forefathers, who acted upon their desire for status by astutely inventing the title Don. Nuño adds: Don’t be surprised that they want to call themselves caballeros and the title of ‘Don This’ ‘Don That’ because that’s how their grandparents wanted to be called, or Don Samuel, Don Rabí, Don Joseph, because the Dons of Spain came

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from the Jews, and out of their astuteness invented it.You already know that in our times nobody knew what Don was but rather [noblemen were known] as Count Fernán Gonçález, y Rui Díaz de Vibar.21

Nuño’s anachronistic references to Fernán González and El Cid as belonging to ‘our times’ (and, needless to mention, the unsophisticated prose) point to the possibility that the author of this dialogue was not highly educated. Nuño’s debatable assertion that the title Don is of Jewish origin also suggests that the author of the text did not carry the title in his name and was probably of common extraction.22 The implication is that Old Christians should refrain from using Don, in order to disassociate themselves from the Jews, as some Christians were known to do in the high middle ages.23 Although Nuño and Laín argue that Jews and Conversos are physically distinct from Old Christians, they strain to identify the distinguishing factors. Thus, he seems to rely on hyperbole that appeals to the listener’s sense of disgust and outrage towards Conversos: I can assure you that it is true that around here you will see each of these mosquitoes – these little merchant caballeros – come and go on muleback or horseback. [You will see] a so and so Ávila, a so and so Sorico another so and so Segovia … and other names of Saints and cities inserted into the bodies of these caballeros of the Tusón [an exclusive military order for the aristocracy].24

According to Laín, such fake caballeros are ‘mosquitoes’, brazen and stealthy bloodsucking insects that furtively pass on diseased blood. He focuses on the image of a supposed pure-blooded caballero and discovers the image of the grotesque parasitic creature that lies within. Laín also explains that Conversos suffer when they see a young pig – a marrano – in distress, implying that Conversos belong to the same animal category.25 Laín seems to use the term marrano, the derogatory name for Conversos, intentionally instead of the more commonly used cochino or puerco for pig. Elaborating on this rhetorical association, Laín adds that Conversos have a peculiar stench, which to Conversos resembles the smell of burned bacon. Even though Old Christians might fail to recognise hidden Conversos, the latter are able to spot each other by this peculiar odour. Laín explains: ‘[t]‌hey smell like bacon cooking; by this smell they recognise each other.’26 Through Laín, the author of the Diálogo encourages his listener to imagine the beastly creatures that hide beneath the false noblemen’s sumptuous robes. It is in this context that Laín mentions the incontrollable blood flows from which Converso men suffer. Unlike subsequent treatise writers, such as Aznar Cardona and his followers, who focus on feminising the Converso body along pseudo-scientific and theological lines, the intention of author of the Diálogo is much more elementary. He seeks to simply elaborate further on the trope of

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the Converso as a repulsive animalistic creature. According to Laín, the leaking of blood from their tail-like rears and pus from the wounds of scabies is the result of their depraved sexual behaviour, which includes the practice of sodomy. Laín insists on the inferiority of the Jewish/Converso physical make-up, but lacking the intellectual resources to make his case, he merely relies on sensationalistic images meant to instantly indulge the basest Old Christian prejudices towards Conversos and to appeal to the sensory reflexes of his audience. Not quite able to isolate the specific Converso qualities that make him/her externally identifiable, the author of the Diálogo thus constructs a series of disparate images that fail to present a coherent portrayal of the Converso body. The average reader or listener of the Diálogo, however, might have found these attempts enough to rouse a sense of disgust and aversion for the Converso body hiding inside the shell of an ostensible caballero. The anxiety that arises from the subject’s incapacity to detect the hypocritical body of the Converso is analogously represented in several of Quevedo’s fictional narratives and poems. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Quevedo was publicly unforgiving of social passers, for he vehemently believed that one’s place in the social hierarchy was determined by birth. Quevedo never stopped speaking against social mobility, for he was convinced that only true nobles, that is, the pure blooded and high-born, should be permitted to occupy positions of authority. And as much as he despised commoners climbing up into aristocratic circles, he found it even more unbearable to fathom that many of them were Conversos (to whom he refers as Jews). In his study of the grotesque in Quevedo, James Iffland shows how Quevedo exploits the grotesque style through black humour, satire, hyperbole, conceit, and a complex network of similes in order to expose the mismatch between the outward appearance and the ‘true’ nature of a figure.27 Although Iffland analyses Quevedo’s anxiety of identity fraud mainly in the context of the latter’s ontological explorations, it seems fitting to implement and develop Iffland’s approach in the context of religio-cultural passing. We could go as far as conjecturing that for Quevedo, passing Conversos were among those malevolent creatures whom he condemned for blurring the boundaries between high and low, and between good and evil. Iffland reminds us that Quevedo was fixated on revealing through satire the decay and evil that might be overlooked by the untutored eye. He was deeply perturbed by the idea that there were alienating forces deliberately masking the true essence of a person or a thing in order to confuse a subject’s sense of perception. As Iffland argues: He [Quevedo] does often refer to the shortcomings of the senses in perceiving the true nature of reality (thus bringing him to praise Reason as being the only way out of the labyrinth), but the problem would not exist at all if there were not someone or something malevolently creating the appearances, setting the traps for the senses to fall into. Mistakes committed by our own untutored

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powers of perception are one thing and those committed because appearances have been consciously manipulated are another. In the latter instance we are doubly lost, not only because of the limitations of our senses, but because there is an adversary taking advantage of them in order to bring about our downfall.28

For Iffland, the primary force of Quevedo’s grotesque style is his ‘paranoia’ about the presence of pervasive physical and moral fraud (ersatz).29 Quevedo’s contempt for passing Conversos/Jews is unguardedly expressed in a memorial he wrote to Philip IV called ‘Execración por la fe católica contra la blasfema obstinación de los judíos’ (Execration on behalf of the Catholic faith against the blasphemous obstinacy of the Jews) (1633) after a few pasquinades appeared in Madrid with the words ‘Long live the law of Moses and death to the law of Christ’.30 Quevedo states in his memorial the opinion that if he had to choose between two evils, Jews or Conversos, he would choose the first. His explanation is that ‘the Jews who publicly profess their error and dress in Jewish garbs, are content not to be Christians, but these knavish Conversos are Jews who pretend to be Christians’.31 Quevedo tells the king that he had seen men in Sicily ‘with headdress and garbs of Jews’ who in Madrid ‘he had seen dressed in ruffs and with [knightly] swords’.32 He argues that because of the impossible task of distinguishing the camouflaged Jews who are the majority from the authentic Christians, the king must expel all of the people in Spain of Jewish ancestry.33 Quevedo also imagines a type of Jewish people in a fictional narrative known as ‘La isla de los Monopantos’ (‘The Island of the Monopantos’) (posthumous, 1650).34 The peculiar name of this group, the Monopantos, might have been taken from the combination of the terms ‘one’ (mono) and ‘all’ or ‘altogether’ (pantos) in Greek. Quevedo’s chosen name suggests the idea that one single Jew bears the weight of his or her community and, vice versa, that all Jews (which includes false Conversos) are represented in each one of its members.35 He thus encourages readers to typecast all Spanish Conversos – without exception – as being participants in the Monopantos’s conspiracy of destroying all Christians. The Monopantos live somewhere between the Black Sea and Tartary and their entire existence is dedicated to perfecting the art of passing as Christians in order to secretly obliterate them from within. Echoing the global Jewish conspiracy outlined in the ‘Carta de los Judíos de España a los Judíos de Constantinopla’ (‘Letter from the Jews of Spain to the Jews of Constantinople’), the apocryphal correspondence disseminated by Siliceo and followers and included in the green books, Quevedo’s Jews in ‘La isla de los Monopantos’ avow their commitment to seizing all of Europe’s wealth and positions of power.36 The Monopantos are ‘men of four-tier malice, of perfect hypocrisy, extreme dissimulation, and of such equivocal appearance that can belong to any nation and religion’.37 The character of Rabbi Saadías, who in a covert meeting with the representatives of the Jews of Europe gloats over

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the Monopantos’s ability to change identities, subsequently validates the narrator’s assessment. Saadías explains that Monopantos can easily pretend to be from any nation they choose, because they carry physiognomies that can be easily moulded to different cultures. Their heads can turn Turkish with a turban, Christian with a hat, or Moorish with a cone-shaped cap.38 Rabbi Saadías says that in Spain the Monopantos wear Christian clothes ‘that are used to mask their circumcision’.39 Quevedo’s text gives the reader the impression that he or she is eavesdropping on a conversation in which hidden Jews openly state their commitment to obliterate Christians and substantiate the worst fears of anti-Semitic Old Christians. The tension that arises from the Converso/Jewish ability to camouflage his identity and Quevedo’s frustration at his inability to reliably see beneath their mask reappears in his poetry. In ‘Letrilla satírica’ (‘A short satirical poem’), Quevedo reiterates this frustration when he confesses that the only way he can distinguish the true from the false is through luck. The poet says: ‘There are pícaros whom / I recognize with good luck / and there are pícaros I do not.’40 One of the disturbing phenomena the poet asserts to have witnessed is the transformation of a Jewish dark (i.e. tainted) vein into a clear one (i.e. pure), with money acting as a kind of philosopher’s stone.41 A significant part of Quevedo’s anti-Semitic poetry, however, projects the poet’s anxiety of sameness about the physical body of the Converso/Jew. The Converso body in Quevedo’s poetry is consistently depicted as a grotesque, sub-human entity. Quevedo therefore imagines the Converso/Jewish other as bearing a manipulable body and as being depraved in their behaviour. A  stereotypical sign of Jewishness, a large nose, inspired him to write one of his best-known poems, ‘There once was a man attached to a nose’ (‘Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado’): There was a man stuck to a nose, It was a superlative nose, It was a half-live alembic, a badly bearded swordfish; it was a misdirected sundial, it was an elephant sitting upright, it was a scribe and a pharisee of a nose, it was Ovidius Naso badly nosed. It was a galley’s battering ram, it was an Egyptian pyramid, it was a twelve-tribe nose; it was an infinite nose, a gigantic archnose, a mask of a nose a swollen coldsore, purpley and fried.42

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The references to the Jewishness of the nose could not be more explicit in the lines that read: ‘it was a scribe and pharisee of a nose’ and ‘a twelve-tribe nose’. A less obvious attack on this stereotypical feature of the Converso/Jew is found in the poet’s comparison of his subject’s nose to that of Ovid: ‘it was Ovidius Naso badly nosed’. Quevedo playfully uses Ovid’s surname  – Naso (nose) or Nasón in Spanish – to produce an adjectival neologism meaning a big nose. That Ovid was Roman and not Jewish appears to make this line less relevant, but as Maurice Molho observes, the point that Quevedo makes here is that Jewishness might be found even among those whom we deem to be honourable and those whom we least suspect.43 The Converso/Jew with the large nose might, in fact, find it convenient to impersonate a Roman nose like Ovid’s. Nonetheless, Quevedo suggests that the Jewish nose fails in its attempt to fully replicate the Roman nose, for his nose appears like a botched version of a nose, ‘purpley and fried’. It is for all to see that the ‘gigantic archnose’ is not really a nose; it is only ‘a mask of a nose’. Through metonymy and sarcasm, Quevedo thus manages to progressively dehumanise the Jewish nose. The nose essentially functions as an allegory of Jewish/Converso monstrosity and excessiveness.44 Quevedo’s efforts to emphasise the otherness in the Jewish/Converso body nonetheless belie a paradox. The greater its apparent danger – produced by grotesquely distending and inflating its features, such as its nose – the less threatening it becomes. Quevedo’s anti-Semitic attacks were often directed at Luis de Góngora, one of his staunchest literary opponents. Góngora’s accomplishments, which included an appointment as Philip III’s honorary royal chaplain, was a reminder to Quevedo that even people at Court were either caught off guard by passing New Christians or, perhaps more troubling, were willing to overlook these transgressions.45 Quevedo took it upon himself to show the ‘true’ image of Góngora he believed many of his peers failed to see. Quevedo portrays Góngora as a false hidalgo and a fake Old Christian. Addressing Góngora directly, he censures him for his attempt at passing and tells him that he cannot hide his true identity from the public: Old Christian you are not since we don’t see you bald [i.e. old] you might be the son, without doubt, but not the son of something (hidalgo).46

That Quevedo’s insistence on Góngora’s Jewishness was motivated by the threat he felt from Góngora’s literary accomplishments is evident in another sonnet in which he expresses his fear of having his own works surpassed by Góngora, whom he calls a ‘dog’, a common insult applied to Conversos and Moriscos. Here, Quevedo ridicules Góngora’s culteranismo, an overly ornate

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Latinised poetic style that had been admired and adopted by contemporary poets. Góngora, the poet says, is ‘a rabbi of the Jewish tongue’, who pretends to ‘censure the Greek tongue’. Quevedo finally orders his opponent:  ‘Stop writing poetry, by my life’.47 Quevedo found it humiliating to have his own poetic style  – conceptismo – compared to Góngora’s culteranismo. Góngora’s poetry, Quevedo insists, is filthy, like his lineage. Quevedo’s poetic voice tells Góngora in a romance that his blood impurity is reflected in his poetry, ‘in the filth that you sing’, as well as ‘in the length of your nose’.48 Quevedo could not accept the idea that Góngora stood next to him on level ground even in the realm of aesthetics. In the end, Quevedo lived out his fantasy of purging Góngora out of his social space when he purchased the house in which Góngora lived and forced the latter to move back to his native Córdoba. To maximise his satisfaction, Quevedo flaunted this eviction in a poem, in which he states that after Góngora vacated the house, he had to get rid of the stench left by Góngora and his poetry by perfuming it with the verses of Garcilaso. Quevedo, in other words, suggests that the ill humours of Góngora’s stained body and poetry have even seeped into the house where he lived. Not even the house, drenched in Góngora’s odours, could pass as acceptable. Quevedo’s persistent reliance on hyperbole and anti-Semitic satire results in his rhetorically rendering the body of the Converso/Jew as a failed attempt to pass as human.49 Bestial and disgusting, Quevedo’s Converso/Jew is more than a stained body; he is a human stain. In this sense, Quevedo serves as an ideal subject for Mary Douglas’s thesis on the social construction of ‘dirt’, as I discussed in the Introduction to this book. Quevedo insists on marginalising and segregating the Converso because he cannot tolerate the ambiguity embodied in his identity. The Converso body is a transitional body and, as Douglas posits, ‘[d]‌anger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable’.50 While Douglas’s subjects engage in certain rituals of expulsion or reclassification in order to keep the social system safe from the threat of contagion posed by the ambiguous subject, Quevedo – and the Old Christian noblemen he represents – seek to linguistically re-categorise Góngora – and the elite Conversos he represents – as clear Jews.51 For Quevedo, it was deplorable to be upstaged by somebody like Góngora. The only way he could redefine Góngora and – by extension – all passing Converso bodies, was by extracting him into a kind of phantasmagorical dimension, away from the ordinary world, in which his surface appearance did not betray the taint in his blood. The repugnance for religio-cultural hybridity was something that Quevedo expressed in his literary production, and may be seen as reflecting a prevailing view among certain elite Old Christian circles.

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Diego de Hermosilla, the author of the Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio (Dialogue about the Life of Palace Pages), was an advocate of endogamous marriages not only between nobles, but also between Old Christians.52 The progeny of a mixed relationship, according to Hermosilla, degraded the quality of both lineages. In Hermosilla’s dialogue, the Converso interlocutor Lorza asks Godoy, an Old Christian hidalgo, who is superior: the nobleman with a strain of New Christian ancestry or a peasant of pure Old Christian blood. Godoy proudly responds by posing the rhetorical question: ‘what is believed to be worse, the offspring of a horse and a mare and of an ass and a donkey, or the offspring of a mare and an ass and a donkey and a horse?’ When Lorza replies that the mule is considered the worse offspring, Godoy considers the case closed: ‘The confusion and mix of different species create [offspring of] a different nature, which change the physiognomy and habits [of their progenitors].’53 The comparison is implied but unambiguous:  the horse–mare stands for the Old Christian and the donkey–ass represents the Converso. The Converso is inferior to the Old Christian, but he is preferable to the hybrid of the two. For Lorza any kind of miscegenation leads to degeneration of the quality of the pure breed. In other words, Conversos and Old Christians must strive for difference. They should avoid mixed marriages, which disturbingly blur the boundaries that separate them from their kinds. Lorza espouses the popular view held by Old Christian commoners that their blood purity had to be protected from New Christian defilement at all costs.54 There is little evidence that mixed marriages were the cause of murders and violent crimes.The concept, nonetheless, appears to have been entertained in the public imagination. In one of his little known comedias, El galán escarmentado (The Reproved Gallant) (1598), Lope de Vega dramatises the effects of a wrongful marriage between a secret Converso, Julio, and an Old Christian, Ricarda.55 John Silverman, the only critic who has studied the limpieza motif in the play, observes that Lope’s representation of Julio and his relationship to the Old Christian characters parallels the spectacle of the auto de fe, in which a presumed heretic – embodied here by the Converso – is eliminated for the reinforcement of dominant Old Christian values.56 A general recapitulation of the primary events that take place in the comedia manifests the appropriateness of Silverman’s analogy. The main plot involves Ricarda’s engagement to Celio, followed by her decision to marry the wealthier Julio while Celio is away at ‘The Battle of Terceira’ (1582) against the French. Subsequent to his wedding to Ricarda, Julio goes into a murderous rage upon finding a number of old letters Celio had sent to Ricarda. Fearful for her life, Ricarda flees. Julio believes that Ricarda is hiding in her father Tácito’s house and goes to find her. Julio arrives at Tácito’s house, denounces Ricarda as an adulterer, and demands that

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Tácito tell him where she is. Tácito, who is surprised by the accusation and the disappearance of his daughter, suspects that Julio might have murdered her and is trying to cover up his crime by pretending that Ricarda has run away. Without any concrete evidence to support his conjecture, Tácito suggests that Julio, a secret Converso, would want to murder his daughter because of his natural hate of Old Christians. Tácito then suggests that Julio’s ancestor must have been penanced in an auto de fe, a comment that is put to an end when Julio takes the old man’s cane and strikes him with it. Tácito falls to his knees and feigns to ask for forgiveness for injuring Julio’s name. As Julio helps him to stand up, Tácito grabs Julio’s dagger and stabs him to death. However, Tácito is pardoned for the crime when he convinces the authorities that the murder was honourable as it had avenged Julio’s unfounded killing of his daughter.The basic scheme involves taking the corpse of a peasant and deceiving the authorities into believing that the dead body is Ricarda’s. The play ends on a happy note, as Ricarda and Celio reunite. Silverman has rightly pointed out that Lope does allow Julio to show his humanity by having him express his anguish over having to live as an undercover Converso. But Julio’s fleeting sympathetic moment is overwhelmed by the other characters’s negative rendition of the Converso. As Silverman indicates, Lope caters to his pro-Old Christian audience when he allows the Old Christians in the play to murder Julio, and then to collectively cover up for the crime.57 It is indeed disturbing to come to the realisation that the happy ending of the play relies entirely on the Old Christians’s ability to deceive the authorities into believing that Tácito’s killing of Julio was mandated by Julio’s unjustified slaughter of his daughter. But such a ‘happy ending’ demonstrates to us that Lope assumed that his viewers would enjoy witnessing the symbolic execution of a Converso who dared to raise his hand against an honourable Old Christian.58 The dramatic narrative also reinforces the argument against Converso–Old Christian miscegenation. The dramatic turn of events implies that if Ricarda had chosen the pure-blooded Celio over the stained Julio as her husband, all her misfortunes, as well as those experienced by Celio and her father, could have been prevented. Her purgatorial punishment for overlooking his marks of Jewishness is to suffer in exile in the guise of a lowly house servant. She herself admits the justice of her fate as she prepares to wash soiled clothes in a nearby river in bare feet. She will ‘enter the water’, and by implication, cleanse lower extremities, so that she can learn ‘to suffer and persevere’ the effects of her sin.59 Tácito’s penalty also involves being humiliated, but in his case directly at the hands of Julio. In what is supposed to be an unsettling scene, an irate Julio robs Tácito of his báculo (staff) and beats him with it. The hypothetical viewers of Lope’s drama would have seen

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the scene – which is recalled on three separate occasions – as a savage attack by a lowly beast-like Converso on a weakened man. The báculo, Covarrubias reminds us, is not only a walking cane for the elderly. It was also used as a weapon of defence against street dogs. Taking this context into consideration, Julio (for anti-Semitic audience members, a perro judío) shows utmost insolence against the literal and figurative cristiano viejo by treating him as a ‘dog’. There is no doubt that Julio’s transgression by dishonouring an Old Christian is deemed to be punishable by death alone, whereas Tácito’s murder of Julio is regarded to be a little more than an inconvenience for the Old Christians. Indeed, Tácito, Ricarda, and friends appear to express either relief or impassivity upon learning of Julio’s death. In line with the convention of Golden Age honour dramas, the mere suspicion of adultery would have guaranteed the husband the right to kill his wife and the members of his family the right to accept the husband’s choice. Hence, when Tácito declares ‘[b]‌y God, Ricarda be abducted / rather than be bled to death / by Julio’s treacherous hand!’ and implies that he would rather have his daughter commit adultery than to have his parental honour preserved by her killing, he might appear to act in contradiction to the expected decorum of an honourable male of a comedia. But if we take into account that Tácito does not afford to Julio a claim to the honour code by virtue of his Jewishness, we realise that there is no incongruence in Tácito’s words. Tácito makes his point more clearly during his heated argument with Julio. Tácito: It is all my fault for giving my pure blood to whom has, incidentally, mixed blood. Julio: I am an hidalgo, a well-known hidalgo, in fact, of a famed ancestral house. Tácito: Ancestral house, what ancestral house? The type that they build on top of dung-heaps in Madrid?60

It is particularly significant here that Tácito uses the term ‘mixed-blood’ as a euphemism for Converso. By ‘mixed-blood’, Tácito insinuates that the inferiority of a Converso is multilayered. He hints that a Converso is doubly stained:  first by his or her Jewishness and, again, by his or her tendency to breed across social ranks and ethnicities. Tácito also implies that Julio does not command the right to make demands for the reparation of his honour when he asks: ‘Do you dare to affront an honourable man in this manner?’61 With this rhetorical question, Tácito conveys the idea that Julio cannot be dishonoured because he himself possesses no honour.

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It should furthermore be pointed out that Lope gives his audiences a glimpse of the motive behind the Old Christian antagonism towards Conversos like Julio. After Tácito kills Julio, it is the former’s servant, the Old Christian Tancredo, who takes the initiative to protect Ricarda and to come up with a scheme to cover up Tácito’s crime. Although Tancredo does not explicitly explain why he betrays his former master, we can deduce from his description of Julio as someone with a ‘scornful heart’ that he had held him to be a contemptuous individual who was not worthy of his elevated social status.62 Tancredo believes that despite his low rank, he is superior to Julio by virtue of his purer blood. He, thus, takes it upon himself to reinstate the proper social order. He takes on the de facto role of Ricarda’s guardian until she can be reunited with her father and Celio. He is also responsible for staging a sham funeral for Ricarda and for propagating the false news that Julio had savagely killed her without motive. Tancredo’s actions could be interpreted as the deeds of a resentful Old Christian who uses fraud to overcome the humiliation to which his Converso master had subjected him. The thousand ducados Tancredo receives at the very end of the comedia as reward for his brilliant ‘performance’ in deceiving the authorities might have been seen by Old Christian viewers as a fair sum to recompense his unswerving loyalty to the sustenance of limpieza. Serving as a stand-in for Lope’s Old Christian audience,Tácito announces: ‘Oh, how a faithful servant / can remedy unfortunate happenings.’63 The unfortunate happening is, of course, remedied when Ricarda chooses her husband more wisely the second time around. Lope suggests that by marrying Celio, she will marry a true hidalgo and, by implication, will have a chance to produce proper pure-blooded offspring. Seeking difference as evasion of the self The texts I have examined so far by Lope de Vega, Hermosilla, genealogists and religious professionals, and anonymous texts, convey the notion that Conversos were tolerable as long as they stayed within their assigned social spaces beneath Old Christians. Conversos became dangerous to the well-being of the social fabric when they successfully gained access to Old Christian circles through deceit and impersonation. Moreover, these texts assert that miscegenation of Conversos and Old Christians results in the procreation of degenerate progeny, and paradoxically represent the ethnically mixed Converso as a defective Jew. An aphorism recorded by Pinedo’s book of jokes could not illustrate this point more transparently. It reads: ‘It seems to be that the more the Jews distance themselves from their own, the more destructive they are.’64 The sense of helplessness and fear experienced by the Old Christian upon the realisation

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that passing Conversos not only had the ability to blur their own identities, but also the identities of Spaniards presumed to be clean is memorably parodied in Cervantes’s one-act play, El retablo de las maravillas (The Spectacle of Marvels) (1615). Cervantes is as interested as other contemporaneous writers in representing the Old Christian commoner’s fixation on blood purity, but he is extraordinary in his unconventional treatment of the topic. Rather than catering to the limpieza-fixated prejudices of the Spanish general public, Cervantes challenges them by pointing out the illusory grounds on which the principle of limpieza is founded as well as the social pressures that lead to the sustainment of such ideology. Castro first hypothesised that Cervantes’s exceptionalism was due to his probable Jewish ancestry. He surmised that the only explanation for the writer’s inability to find a reputable post, even after his heroic participation in the Battle of Lepanto and captivity in Algiers, was his Converso status.65 Cervantes did indeed apply in 1582 and 1590 to be considered for posts in the New World (more precisely, in present Colombia, Guatemala, and Bolivia), and was rejected. He was also refused an official position at Court to serve his literary patron, the Count of Lemos.66 Cervantes’s father’s request and receipt of an ejecutoria of hidalguía and limpieza to be used by his son in Italy in 1569 might also be taken as testimony that the family might have at least been suspected of carrying a mancha. For Michael McGaha, the most convincing proof of Cervantes’s ancestry lays in his work. He says: ‘I find it unbelievable that anyone other than a cristiano nuevo could have written the “Entremés del retablo de las maravillas”.’67 But as much as these pieces of biographical information are suggestive of a mancha in Cervantes’s ancestry, as Jean Canavaggio reminds us, they do not amount to any type of decisive proof that Cervantes was a Converso.68 From my point of view, whether Cervantes’s critical allusions to the obsession with limpieza was motivated by his experience as a Converso or not is inconsequential to appreciating the unprecedented manner in which he approaches the issue of limpieza in his work, especially in El retablo de las maravillas. El retablo de las maravillas satirises the destructive consequences that might arise from a society’s willing espousal of policies founded on the dubious limpieza scheme. The protagonists of the play are two tricksters – Chanfalla and Chirinos – who arrive at a village with the objective of cashing in on the residents’s fixation on their presumed blood purity. The tricksters approach the leaders of the village with the false claim that they can put on a puppet show called ‘El retablo de las maravillas’. They purport that ‘maravillas’ (marvels) describe the extraordinary component of the play, which can only be seen by those who are full Old Christians of legitimate marriages. Mauricio Molho observes that the association between bastardy and impure blood is purposeful. He cites the example of a lawsuit brought about by Don Ponce de Molina

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in the 1600s against a commoner because the latter called him a ‘Jew, son of confeso, son of another father, son of a whore’.69 The double insult ‘Jew, son of a whore’, was, of course, commonplace in literary and popular texts of the time as we have seen in the case of Diálogo de la vida de los pajes en palacio. The insult reflects the stereotype that Conversos acted promiscuously and were fixated on earning easy money like prostitutes, and, conversely, on the stereotype that prostitutes had indiscriminate sexual relations with Conversos for money. Chanfalla explains: ‘anyone with any trace of New Christian race, who is not a by-product of a legitimate marriage or who has been infected with these two common diseases should resign themselves to neither seeing nor hearing anything that comes out of my puppet show.’70 Upon hearing Chanfalla’s description of his production, the governor of the village becomes excited about the prospect that through the performance he should be able to recognise the undesirable residents who are otherwise indistinguishable, and requests that Chanfalla perform the show during the wedding festivities of his goddaughter. As soon as the show begins, the villagers are confounded by what they are told they should see and what they actually see, which is, absolutely nothing other than an empty stage. The spectators, however, play along with each other’s expectations and pretend to see whatever Chanfalla says is happening in the performance. When Chanfalla claims to see the biblical Samson in the process of demolishing the temple in which he is enchained, the Mayor rises and extols ‘Samson’ to not unleash his anger upon him. For fear of being singled out as New Christians, other members of the audience follow suit, acting as if they were witnessing Samson. Chanfalla concocts the appearance of more marvels: a bull, mice, lions, bears, a shower of water from the River Jordan, and finally a dancing Salome (incorrectly called Herodias in the text).71 At this point, the governor is aware that he cannot see the play. He says: ‘everybody sees what I cannot see [the play], but have to say that I see it [the play] for the sake of my wretched honour.’72 But rather than questioning its legitimacy, he becomes overwhelmed by the concern that he might be taken as a Converso/bastard or even by the possibility of being stained himself, and copies the behaviour of the other villagers. The more the play progresses, the harder it is to tell if the villagers are merely pretending to see the play or if they are engaged in a sort of collective hallucination of it. The bizarre behaviour of the villagers is finally noticed by a military officer – the furrier  – who is completely unaware of the supposed magical performance. When his order to make provisions of readying Benito’s home for the lodging of his soldiers is ignored, he interrupts the commotion and wonders aloud if the villagers are mad. Upon hearing that the furrier cannot see the play, the villagers become euphoric and begin chanting, ‘[h]‌e is one of them! He is one of them!’ (‘De ex illis es, de ex illis es’).73 The play ends in havoc, as the furious

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officer attacks the villagers and the satisfied tricksters move on to finding their next victims. There is little disagreement among critics that the play is Cervantes’s satirical response to the dominant culture of hypocrisy and moral corruption that was encouraged by the enforcement of a paradigm of honour based on blood purity.74 For Bruce Wardropper, the play is particularly concerned in exposing the institutionalisation of limpieza statutes as a betrayal of the spirit of Catholicism.75 He proves his point by noting that the purported puppet show is framed by references to Delilah’s betrayal of Samson in the Old Testament at the beginning and to Salome’s treacherous dance in the New Testament. He additionally observes that the choice of Latinisms in corbona – in the offering sack – by Chirinos and ex illis es – one of them – by the villagers evoke the separate moments in which Judas and Peter betrayed Jesus as related in the Vulgate Bible. According to the gospel of Matthew, Judas was filled with remorse for having sold out his master and brought the thirty pieces of silver he had received for his betrayal back to the chief priests and elders. The money, however, was rejected from being redeposited ‘in corbona’ because it was deemed to be blood money.76 The phrase ex illis es is cited by Matthew as being used against Peter when he was identified by bystanders at the courtyard of the home of the high priest as one of Jesus’s disciples. It is right after these words are said that Peter denies Jesus for the third time (after which a cock crowed).77 I would like to add to Wardropper’s insight that there is no common feature that links these four characters. Delilah, Salome, Judas, and Peter differ in their gender, religion, ethnicity, and in their incentives for their treacheries. The most notorious betrayals of Christianity, Cervantes seems to suggest, were unpredictable and caused by contingent motives. Cervantes also implies that the villagers’s fixation in spotting the hidden qualities of illegitimate subjects (i.e., Conversos and bastards) effectively blinds them from seeing their more conspicuous enemies  – Chanfalla and Chirinos  – who are standing right in front of them. Eugenio Asensio compares the village audience members to puppets and ingeniously views them as the real actors in Chanfalla’s ‘play’. He sees their obsession with limpieza as the strings with which Chanfalla makes them perform.78 Nicholas Spadaccini follows Asensio’s view of the villagers as the tricksters’s victims and analyses the ways in which the text renders them ‘impotent’.79 Although I agree with Asensio and Spadaccini that Chanfalla and company manipulate the villagers into participating in their sham spectacle, I differ in their assessment that the villagers are passive recipients of the hoax. As Michael Gerli convincingly shows in his study of the play, Cervantes appears to direct his criticism most emphatically at the villagers for readily choosing to be self-deceived and sustaining the tricksters’s lie.80 Gerli argues that the

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villagers serve as stand-ins for seventeenth-century audience members who demand plays that idealise Old Christian peasants, and promote and sustain the falsity of the ideology of limpieza.81 Gerli maintains that Cervantes explicitly censures the comedia de labradores (dramas about heroic Old Christian peasants) for its espousal of ‘the Arcadian vision of cristianos viejos’.82 It should be recalled, for instance, that Lope de Vega’s quintessential hero of his comedia de labradores, Peribáñez, is introduced as the model Spaniard, ‘of peasant rank / clean of blood never / stained with Hebrew or Moorish blood’.83 In accordance with Gerli’s view, Cervantes subverts the idealised depictions of Old Christian peasants in Lope’s plays by figuring them as cowardly, vacuous, and self-absorbed. I might add that Cervantes also challenges the presumed pure blood of every single member of the village within the play and, by extension, the viewers watching his appropriation of the comedia de labradores. The willingness of the villagers to play along with the tricksters’s deceit is manifested in the behaviour of the mayor of the village – Benito Repollo – and one of the aldermen  – Juan Castrado. These characters conveniently ignore indications of the hoax because the prospect of being able to see other people’s invisible ‘stain’ is too compelling. Benito notices, for instance, that Chanfalla does not carry any props for the play – ‘this producer does not bring very much stuff for such a big show’ – and Juan brushes it aside as part of the ‘marvel’ of the play.84 Juan and Benito represent Old Christians who are wilfully deceived by the tricksters, not because they have been misled into false consciousness, but rather because they are desperate to find, quite consciously, a device that would render them superior from comparable peers. In other words, the tricksters are successful in their deceit because they are fulfilling the villagers’s yearning for spotting the telltale signs that mark others as inferior. This yearning, nonetheless, is accompanied by the increased insecurity that they themselves might not be legitimate. The more they pretend to interact with illusory puppets, the more they come to embrace that meta-reality. The furrier – the embodiment of common sense – provides the villagers with the opportunity to reconsider their situation without prejudice, but they choose social polarisation instead. I infer that the frenzied reaction of the villagers underlines the inherent paradox of the ideology of limpieza: while promoting the segregation or even expulsion of the New Christians, the presumed Old Christians need impure subjects to reside in their social spaces so that they can define themselves against them. Cervantes’s play is driven by the dominant’s fear of the possibility that they may not be different from the conspicuous impure after all. El retablo de las maravillas may be read, more broadly, as an analogy for the wide-ranging discourses that shaped the ideology of limpieza in early modern Spain. The allegation that the physiology of Conversos was innately deficient and discoverable is evoked in Chanfalla’s prerequisite for viewing his

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play. Cervantes implies that the ideology of limpieza flourished because it was embraced and promoted by elite discourses at the centre of power (treatises, essays, poetry, and dialogues), dramatic performances that catered to a general audience that craved the reinforcement of anti-Semitic prejudices, and popular tales mostly geared towards Spaniards in the lower strata. But perhaps even more troubling is that this unsubstantiated ideology could not have been so successful without the support of the same people it targeted. Cervantes’s play reminds us of the self-defeating performance in which Conversos often engaged through the scenes in which Juana Castrada and Teresa Repolla acknowledge that they do not qualify to see the spectacle and yet still resolve to pretend to pass for dominant members of the audience. Juana and Teresa’s ensuing melodramatic interactions with the non-existent characters on stage make the readers or viewers of Cervantes’s play ever more aware that their behaviour is fraudulent. Teresa and Juana are as guilty as all of the other villagers of indicting the furrier and construing a delusional culture of violence and mistrust. Their actions also show us that their performative passing is not a mere act of self-defence. It is decisive in cultivating the very anxiety of sameness that marginalises them. Notes

1 El libro verde de Aragón. Ed. Isidro de Cacigas (Madrid:  Compañía Ibero-americana de Publicaciones, 1929), 14. 2 ‘Callo los casos desastrados originados de aquí, las muertes violentas de uno de las casas a manos de los otros por salir de la infamia del parentesco y por no tener sucesión infecta’ (quoted in Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la edad moderna (Granada:  Universidad de Granada, 1991), 202–203). As a comparison, in Spanish America, according to Twinam, racial mixing added another complicated factor, that of implied illegitimacy. But being racially mixed and/or illegitimate did not preclude social mobility and a level of local support in achieving it, at least, until the eighteenth century (Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets. Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3–55). 3 James Scott, Domination and the Arts of the Weak (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1990), 149. 4 Scott, Domination and the Arts of the Weak, 143. 5 ‘Y así es consejo sano / para contentos vivir, / que xpiana con xpiano. / y marrana con marrano / procuren de se enxerir. / / Y quien es xpiano viejo / por codicia de ducados / no tome tan mal consejo / de querer mudar pellejo / haziendo hijos manchados’ (Sebastián de Horosco, El cancionero de Sebastián de Horosco. Ed. José María Asencio (Sevilla: Rafael Tarascó, 1874), 258). 6 ‘A ti, don Fray Arias puto / que eres y fuiste judío, / contigo ya no disputo, / que tienes gran señorío. / / Águila, castillo y cruz, / dime ¿de dónde te viene? / Pues que tu padre capuz / nunca le tuvo ni tiene. / / Águila, castillo y cruz, / judío, ¿dónde lo hubiste? / El águila es de rapiña, / el castillo del Maux [sic], / y la cruz, donde pusiste / á mi Redentor Jesús’ (Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla, El tizón de la nobleza española o máculas y sambenitos de sus linajes (Barcelona: La Selecta, 1880), 97). Beusterien has found that this song formed part of the body of the Medieval Coplas del Provincial, a compilation of short rhymed poems/ songs that slandered prominent families (not exclusively anti-Converso/Jewish) (John

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Beusterien, ‘Blotted Genealogies: A Survey of the Libros Verdes’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78.2 (2001): 183–194,, 184). 7 The full title reads Floresta española de apotegmas o sentencias, sabia y graciosamente dichas, de algunos españoles. 8 See Maxime Chevalier, Folklore y literatura:  El cuento oral en el Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Crítica, 1978). 9 ‘Mostrando uno su casa a un caballero, entre otras cosas que le mostró fue una pieza en que estaban colgados docientos tocinos, diciendo: – ¿Qué le parece a vuestra merced qué buena sala de arneses? Como vido el caballero que no había ninguno encentado, respondió: – Buena, y que no les falta hebilla’ (Melchor de Santa Cruz, Floresta española. Ed. María Pilar Cuarteto y Maxime Chevalier (Barcelona: Crítica, 1997), 209). 10 ‘Entrando acaso uno en casa de hidalgo, mandó esconder unos tocinos que estaban en el suelo. Dijo el que venía de fuera: – ¿Por qué los meten?, que en verdad que me crié con ello. Respondió el hidalgo: – Es verdad, que os lo pusieron en la teta por acíbar, para destetaros’ (Santa Cruz, Floresta española, 206). 11 ‘Al judío y al puerco no lo metas en tu güerto’ (Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales y otras fórmulas comunes de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Jaime Ratés, 1906), 33. 12 ‘A uno de raza de judíos que labró una gran casa, poniendo en la portada una cruz se escribió este pasquín: Es propio de cazadores/ Después de la caza muerta, / Poner la piel á la puerta’ (Anonymous, ‘Floresta de varia poesía’, Poetas líricos de los siglos XVI y XVII. Ed. Adolfo de Castro. Vol. 2 (Madrid: Atlas, 1951), 501–575, at 575). 13 ‘Uno que no era hidalgo, vistiéndose un sayo de terciopelo, congojábase, y dijo que no sabía qué se había. Díjole un escudero:  – Debeos de probar la seda [de puerco]’ (Santa Cruz, Floresta española, 209). 14 ‘El obispo de Jaén hizo un banquete a muchos caballeros en la Corte, y un paje sirvió a un caballero una escudilla de manjar blanco, y el paje estuvo esperando a si el caballero dejaba algo, y como sintiese la enfermedad del paje, comióse todo el manjar, y dio de mano a la escudilla diciendo: – Paje, jaque de ahí. El paje disimuló y fuese al aparador, y traído un plato de tocino, púsolo al caballero diciendo: – Caballero, mate, motejándole de converso. Respondió el caballero: – Yo os juro a tal que tenéis razón, que no tengo dónde ir’ (Luis de Pinedo, Libro de chistes (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Católicas Argentinas, 1939), 43–44). 15 The editor of the story seems to have added the Converso’s recognition of his hidden identity, an aberration in this type of jokes. 16 Diego Gavilán Vela’s Discurso contra los judíos, Juan Adam de la Parra in Pro cautione christiana (1630), and Quevedo’s Execración de los judíos (1633) were treatises in which the authors criticised Count-Duke Olivares’s efforts to relax blood purity statutes. 17 Carroll Johnson is the only scholar who has analysed the dialogue in the context of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. He conjectures that Alemán must have utilised the anti-Semitic material of the dialogue to construct the figure of Guzmán’s father (Carroll Johnson, ‘Mateo Alemán y sus fuentes literarias’, Nueva revista de filología hispánica 28.2 (1979), 360–374, at 369). 18 ‘Caparrastroso de ruin çepa’ (Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura. Ed. José López Romero. Jerez de la Frontera: Centro de Estudios Históricos Jerezanos, 2004), 15). 19 Spaniards with ancestry in the mountanous regions of Leon, Burgos, Vizcaya, Asturias, Galicia, Navarra, Aragón, and Catalonia claimed communal hidalguía. They were known as hidalgos de montaña. 20 ‘Caballeros de Judea’ (Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 22). 21 ‘No te marauilles de esso que quieran llamarse caualleros y con el título de Don I Don tal, que ansí holgauan que los llamassen a sus abuelos, o Don Samuel, Don Rabí, Don Joseph, que los Dones en España de los judíos vivineron, y su agudeça inuençión los inuentó, que ia sabes tú que en nuestros tiempos no sabían qué cosa era Don, sino el Conde Fernán Gonçález, y Rui Díaz de Vibar’ (Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 19). 22 See note 22 in Chapter 1 on the linguistic origin of Don.

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23 According to Nina Melechen, in Toledo, the title Don began to be used by Jews to signal noteworthiness in the thirteenth century and by the Christians to indicate nobility in the fourthteenth century. Laws prohibiting Jews and Muslims from using Don in the early 1400s had limited effect, as not only did Jews in certain sectors continue to use it, but Christian officials also used it purposely when recording Jewish names (see Nina Melechen, ‘Calling Names: The Identification of Jews in Christian Documents from Medieval Toledo’, On the Social Origins of Medieval Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan. Ed. Donald J. Kagay and Theresa M. Vann (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 21–34; Manuel Ferrer-Chivite, ‘El factor judeo-converso en el proceso de consolidación del título “Don”’, Sefarad: Revista de Estudios Hebraicos y Sefardíes 45.1 (1985): 131–174, at 152). 24 ‘Pues no es sino verdad, que por aquí verás salir i entrar a mula y a cauallo cada mosquito de aquestos mercaderçillos caualleros. A un tal Abila, vn tal Sorico, otro tal y tal de Segouia … y otros nombres de santos y ciudades metidos en cada cuerpo de estos caualleros de el Tusón’ (Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 19). The author is alluding to the custom practised by Converso families of taking their surnames from a geographical location, which was often the name of the city in which their ancestors had converted to Christianity. 25 Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 24–25. 26 ‘Se huelen como el olor de el toçino añejo puesto al fuego; ansí luego por el olfato unos i otros se conozen’ (Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 23). 27 James Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, 2 vols (London: Tamesis, 1978–1982), Vol. 1, 58. 28 Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, Vol. 2, 202. 29 Iffland and Ignacio Arellano define the ‘grotesque’ as a style that attempts to express the unresolved clash of incompatibles (i.e., the disagreeable and the comic). See Ignacio Arellano, Poesía satírico burlesca de Quevedo (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003) 37–40; Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, Vol. 1, 56. 30 ‘Viua la ley de Moyses, y muera la de Christo’ (Francisco de Quevedo, Execración de los judíos. Ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza y Santiago Fernández Mosquera (Barcelona:  Crítica, 1996), 6). 31 ‘Los judíos que públicamente profesan su error y visten traje de judíos se contentan con no ser ellos cristianos, mas éstos, dolosamente conversos, son judíos que pasan a pretender que sean [sic] judíos los cristianos’ (Quevedo, Execración de los judíos, 82). 32 ‘Con tocas y trajes de judíos, hombres que en Madrid había visto con cuellos y espadas’ (Quevedo, Execración de los judíos, 80). 33 Quevedo, Execración de los judíos, 71. 34 ‘La isla de los Monopantos’ is a narrative included in La hora de todos y la fortuna con seso. Ed. Luisa López-Grigera (Madrid: Castalia, 1975), 189–203. 35 Friar Gaspar de San Agustín, who might have read Quevedo’s text, utilised the word Monopantos to describe the Indians of the Philippine Islands in his chronicles and explained that he had called them so because ‘one is known, all are known’ (Emma Helen Blair, James Alexander Robertson, and Edward Gaylord Bourne, ‘Some considerations concerning the matter in Father Gaspar de San Agustín’s letter’, The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898. Ed. Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, Vol. 40 (Cleveland: The A. H. Clark Company, 1903–09), 331–338, at 331). 36 Critics agree that ‘La isla’ was conceived as an attack against Count-Duke Olivares, whose name, Gaspar Conchillos, was used to anagrammatize the name of the fictional Jewish Prince of the Monopantos, Pagas Chincollos. According to Donald Bleznick, Quevedo accused Olivares of making business deals with Sephardic Jews in exchange for Spain’s security (Quevedo (New York: Twayne, 1972), 63–65). 37 ‘Son hombres de cuatriplicada malicia, de perfecta hipocresía, de extremada disimulación, de tan equívoca apariencia, que todas las leyes y naciones los tienen por suyos (Quevedo, La hora de todos, 191). 38 Quevedo, La hora de todos, 200, original emphasis. 39 ‘Que sirve de máscara a la circuncisión’ (Quevedo, La hora de todos, 197).

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40 ‘Pícaros hay con ventura / de los que conozco yo, / y pícaros hay que no’ (Quevedo, ‘Letrilla satírica’, Poesía original completa. Ed. José Manuel Blecua (Barcelona: Planeta, 1981), 695) 41 ‘Y he visto sangre judía, / Hacerla el mucho caudal, / Como papagayo real, / Clara ya su vena oscura’ (Quevedo, ‘Letrilla satírica, 695–696). 42 ‘Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado, / érase una nariz superlativa, / érase una alquitara medio viva, / érase un peje espada mal barbado; / era un reloj de sol mal encarado, / érase un elefante boca arriba, / érase una nariz sayón y escriba, / un Ovidio Nasón mal narigado. // Érase el espolón de una galera, / érase una pirámide de Egito, / las doce tribus de narices era; / érase un naricísimo infinito, / frisón archinariz, caratulera, / sabañón garrafal, morado y frito’ (Quevedo, ‘A un hombre de gran nariz’, 546). I have adapted the translation from the work of Christopher Johnson (Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 143) and Arthur Terry (Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 159). 43 Maurice Molho, ‘Una cosmogonía antisemita:  “Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado” ’, Quevedo in Perspective. Ed. James Iffland (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982), 57–79, at 73. 44 Molho, Una cosmogonía antisemita’, 60. 45 Ignacio Navarrete, Orphans of Petrach. Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 237. 46 ‘Cristiano viejo no eres / porque aún no te vemos cano; / hi de algo, eso sin duda, / pero con duda hijodalgo’ ‘Francisco de Quevedo, ‘Respuesta de Don Francisco de Quevedo a Don Luis de Góngora’, Poesía original completa. Ed. José Manuel Blecua (Barcelona: Planeta, 1981), 1170). 47 ‘Rabí de la [lengua] judía’; ‘censuras la lengua griega’; ‘No escribas versos más, por vida mía’ (Quevedo, ‘Soneto’, Poesía original completa, 1171). 48 ‘En lo sucio que has cantado’; ‘en lo largo de narices’ (‘Escribió Quevedo contra Góngora y se defendió Góngora con aquellas décimas suyas que empiezan Musa que sopla y no inspira. Y dice Quevedo’, Quevedo, Poesía original completa, 1164). 49 In Política de Dios y gobierno de Cristo (1626; c.1635) Quevedo makes a concerted effort to ‘historicise’ Jewishness, but even in this instance, they are likened to hyperbolical devils whose only function is to destroy Christ and his followers. 50 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:  An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 119. 51 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 121–122. 52 Hermosilla’s Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio was discussed in the context of hidalguía in Chapter 1. 53 ‘Quál es mas mal[o]‌comunmente, el hijo del cauallo y yegua, y el del asno y borrica, o [el] de la yegua y del asno, y el de la borrica y cauallo?’; ‘ya queda satisfecha vuestra pregunta, por[que] la confusión y mezcla de espeçies diferentes hazen casi otra naturaleza, que trae consigo la mudança de la conplexion y costunbres’ (Diego de Hermosilla, Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio. Ed. Donald Mackenzie (Valladolid: Viuda de Montero, 1916), 45). 54 As Cuart Moner has cited, records of investigations of purity of blood contained statements such as the following: ‘oyó decir a Beatriz de Nova, fija del dicho Juan de Nova, que ella era casada con un hidalgo como un gavilán e pobre como un Job, e que más le quería pobre fidalgo que no rico converso’; ‘Su hijo Francisco Suárez casó con doña Inés de Guzmán, hija de Ramiro de Guzmán e de doña Juana Carrillo, e que si fuera confesa no se la dieran por cosa del mundo’; ‘Juan de Mendoza, según se preciaba de venir de sangre real, no se casara con muger que tal mácula tuviere por todo el mundo’ (Baltasar Cuart Moner, ‘La sombra del arcediano. El linaje oculto de don Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal’, Studia Historia 15 (1996): 135–178, at 158). 55 Joseph Silverman was the first critic to point out that limpieza is the centralising motif of the entire play. See ‘Del otro teatro nacional de Lope de Vega: El caso insólito de El galán escarmentado,” Hispania 67.1 (1984): 23–27.

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56 Silverman, ‘Del otro teatro nacional’, 26. 57 Silverman, ‘Del otro teatro nacional’, 25. 58 Lope de Vega Carpio, El galán escarmentado, Obras de Lope deVega, ed. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, Vol. 1 (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1916), 117–152, at 152. 59 ‘Tácito: ¿Has de descalzar los pies / y entrar en el agua? // Ricarda: Sí’; ‘Ricarda: Para enseñarme con ello / a sufrir y a porfiar’ (Vega Carpio, El galán escarmentado, 144). 60 ‘Tácito: Yo he tenido la culpa en dar mi sangre / a quien la tiene, por ventura, en mezclas. // Julio:  Yo soy hidalgo, y conocido hidalgo, / de hecho notorio y de solar antiguo. // Tácito: Solar. ¿De qué solar? ¿De los que agora / se labran en Madrid en muladares?’ (Vega Carpio, El galán escarmentado, 138). 61 ‘Tácito: ¿A un hombre honrado afrentas de esa suerte?’ (Vega Carpio, El galán escarmentado, 138, emphasis added). 62 Tancredo: ‘en su pecho esquivo / ya te dió muerte y acierto, / en echar la culpa a un muerto / para que se salve un vivo’ (Vega Carpio, El galán escarmentado, 144). 63 ‘¡Oh, cuánto un leal criado / tristes sucesos remedia!’ (Vega Carpio, El galán escarmentado, 152). 64 ‘Paréceme que cuanto más se apartan los judíos más ruines son’ (Pinedo, Libro de chistes, 24). 65 Américo Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1966), 168–169. 66 Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos españoles, 10 and 130. 67 Michael McGaha, ‘Is there a Hidden Jewish Meaning to Don Quixote?’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 24.1 (2004): 173–88, at 174. 68 Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, Trans. J. R. Jones (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 25. 69 ‘Judío, hijo de confeso, hijo de otro, hijo de una puta’ (quoted in Mauricio Molho, Cervantes: Raíces folklóricas (Madrid: Gredos, 1976), 164). 70 ‘Que ninguno puede ver las cosas que en él se muestran, que tenga alguna raza de confeso, o no sea habido y procreado de sus padres de legítimo matrimonio; y el que fuere contagiado destas dos tan usadas enfermedades, despídase de ver las cosas, jamás vistas ni oídas, de mi Retablo’ (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Entremeses. Ed. Jacobo Sanz Herminda (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998), 196–197). 71 Cervantes calls the dancer Herodias, but the description of the character matches Salome from gospel of Matthew (14.1–12). 72 ‘Governador: … todos ven lo que yo no veo; pero al fin habré de decir que lo veo, por la negra honrilla’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Entremeses, 200). 73 Cervantes Savedra, Entremeses, 206. 74 Alternatively, Mauricio Molho has studied the folkloric roots of the play in ‘El retablo de las maravillas’, (Cervantes: raíces folklóricas, 37–214); Dawn L. Smith interprets the play as allegorical of the power that each spectator or reader has in the production of dramatic meaning (‘Cervantes frente a su público: aspectos de la recepción en El retablo de las maravillas’, Actas del X Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Barcelona, 21–26 de agosto de 1989. Ed. Antonio Vilanova (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1992), 713–721). 75 Bruce Wardropper, ‘The Butt of Satire in El retablo de las maravillas’, Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 4.1 (1984): 25–33. 76 Matthew 27.6; Wardropper, ‘The Butt of Satire’, 30. 77 Matthew 26.73–74; Wardropper, ‘The Butt of Satire’, 31. 78 Eugenio Asensio, ‘Introducción’, Entremeses (Madrid: Castalia, 1970), 7–49, at 30–31. 79 Nicholas Spadaccini, ‘Prólogo’, Entremeses. Ed. Nicholas Spadaccini (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), 13–74, at 67. 80 Michael Gerli, ‘El retablo de las maravillas: Cervantes’s “Arte nuevo de deshacer comedias”’, Hispanic Review 57.4 (1989): 477–492). 81 Gerli, ‘El retablo de las maravillas’, 490. 82 Gerli, ‘El retablo de las maravillas’, 486.

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83 ‘Aunque de villana casta / Limpio de sangre, y jamas / De hebrea ó mora manchada’ (Lope de Vega, Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña. Ed. Donald McGrady (Madrid: Crítica, 2002), vv. 3032–3035). 84 ‘Benito. – Poca balumba trae este autor para tan grande Retablo. Juan. – Todo debe ser de maravillas’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Entremeses, 198–199).

III Moriscos and the reassurance of difference

Luis Gómez, the son of the mentioned Francisco Gómez, attempted to and managed to marry Juana Florín, the sister of the defendants … [The defendants] publicized on many and different occasions that the said Luis Gómez and his family members were not clean, and were Moriscos, and descendants of such. They declared that their [own] sister had intended to soil their blood, because they were clean people and said that even one drop of his [Gómez’s] blood was going to disqualify the rest [of the family]. And to prove this [that the Gómez family are Moriscos], the defendants had mentioned on other occasions that he [Luis Gómez] had seduced their sister by bringing couscous to her, which is a notorious Morisco dish. Excerpt from a defamation court case against Fabiana and Isabel Florín in which Francisco and Lucas Gómez claimed that the former defamed them by calling them Moriscos (1628–1632).1

Note

1 ‘Luis Gómez, hijo del dicho Francisco Gómez, trataba de casar como se había casado con Juana Florín, hermana de las partes contrarias, sin gusto ni voluntad; ofendidas de lo susodicho había dicho y publicado en muchas y en diferentes ocasiones que el dicho Luis Gómez y sus partes no eran limpios, y que eran moriscos, y descendientes de tales. Diciendo que su hermana con el casamiento que trataba hacer procuraba manchar su sangre, siendo como era gente limpia; que una gota de sangre suya se podía calificar sus partes. Y para dar a entender lo susodicho habían dicho las partes contrarias en otras ocasiones que a la dicha su hermana la habían engañado sus partes con el cuz-cuz que la traían, a ello por ser como era comida de moriscos, como era notorio’ (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14. 1632; Image 7 right).

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5 Imagining the Morisco problem

The Spanish Crown justified the passage of the edicts of expulsion of all adult Moriscos – somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 – in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Valencia (1609–1614) by arguing that they were innately foreign and unable to acculturate to a Christian society.1 Religious leaders, such as the friar Sebastián de Encinas from Montserrat, had been advocating the expulsion for years because they claimed to have seen the fear and suspicion that ‘all the people’ felt towards the Moriscos.2 In an effort to propagate the view that the expulsion was the will of the general Spanish population, the Court of Philip III encouraged and financially sponsored the production of artistic media that praised the Morisco expulsion. Vicente Mestre’s painting Embarque de los moriscos en el puerto de Denia (The Departure of the Moriscos from the Port of Denia) (1612–1613) is one of a series of seven paintings produced as propaganda for the expulsion. In this painting, both Old Christians and Moriscos are depicted as willing participants of the expulsion.3 As in other commissioned paintings portraying the forced departure of the Moriscos from Valencia, Old Christians and Moriscos are shown to be carrying out the king’s mandate in an orderly, uneventful, and placid manner. While waiting for their turn to exit Spanish soil, the Moriscos are shown passing time in several ways. Some men, on the right side of the painting, are engaged in Greco-Roman wrestling while others watch (Figure 5.1). On the lower left-hand side, a dozen Moriscas are dancing to the rhythm of a Morisco’s singing while two others are playing a flute and a hand-drum. Six Old Christian women also appear to be entertaining themselves by dancing to the rhythm of the music. The mood portrayed in this painting – particularly seen in the smiles of the Old Christian women – is festive in nature, and for modern audiences, perhaps disturbingly so (Figure 5.2).The painting is a visual interpretation of stories about Moriscos celebrating their departure from Spain, and of tales that were disseminated by apologists such as Jaime Bleda. In Bleda’s words, Moriscos were leaving places such as Alicante ‘singing and playing music with flutes, drums, and dulzainas,

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Figure 5.1 Vicente Mestre, Detail from Departure of the Moriscos in the Port of Denia (1612–1613).

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Figure 5.2 Vicente Mestre, Detail from Departure of the Moriscos in the Port of Denia (1612–1613).

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and other instruments they had, making snorting sounds and saying: Hail the Great Turk … and hail Mohammed who has allowed us to see these happy times in which we may go live in the land from where our ancestors came’.4 The painting portrays two clear and distinct groups of people: on the one hand, the foreign-looking Moriscos who are being cast out, and the Old Christians overseeing and witnessing the expulsion, on the other. The foreignness of the Moriscos is also emphasised in another highly stylised rendition of the expulsion, Antonio Mira de Amescua’s Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos (The Masque of the Expulsion of the Moriscos) (1617).5 The masque  – a brief play, which consisted of dancing and acting performed by entertainers with covered faces – was commissioned by Philip III’s prime minister, the Duke of Lerma (Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas), as part of a larger celebration in Lerma to mark the dedication of the Collegiate Church of San Pedro. Although we are unaware of the existence of a written text of Mira de Amescua’s masque, we do have a detailed description of the performance by one witness, Pedro de Herrera.6 In the vein of Mestre’s polarised depiction of Moriscos and Old Christians, Herrera’s narration of the masque presents the two groups as visibly distinct. Moreover, Herrera’s interchangeable use of the terms Moriscos and Moors encourages the reader to dismiss empathetic feelings towards the first. In Herrera’s account, a woman representing the allegory of Fame enters the stage on a cloud and sits on a throne. She may be recognisable as Fame by her archetypical wings and the long trumpet she holds in one of her hands. After praising the king and his prime minister, she inquires about the motives for the joyful atmosphere in the domains of the Duke of Lerma. A female character playing the role of the village of Tudela appears dressed in traditional peasant attire and tells Fame that the celebrations are due to the Duke of Lerma’s success in expelling the Moriscos from Spain. At this point eight musicians appear, playing a number of musical instruments (a lute, a harp, a theorbo, and a number of guitars and basses). While singing, they tell ‘the story of how His Majesty, had become a second Pelayo and had restored Spain from the Moors once more’.7 By comparing Philip III to King Pelayo, the legendary Christian king famed for winning Asturias from Islamic forces at the beginning of the Reconquest (c.722), the masque envisions the expulsion as a necessary instalment of the Holy War against the Infidel. In congruence with this framework, the Moriscos are depicted as enemies within. On stage, a group of Old Christian peasants from Castile approach Lady Justice – who is accompanied by two caballeros – and inform her about a Morisco plan to revolt against the Crown. Introduced in this context, the allusion to the belief that there was a plan for a Morisco revolt (founded on hearsay and gossip) leads the audience to interpret it as a legitimate history. The reference to a possible revolt would

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have also brought to mind the Morisco uprising in the Alpujarras Mountains that took place between 1568 and 1570, in which Moriscos were blamed for indiscriminately massacring Old Christians and pillaging their homes. Next on stage, an actress playing the role of a peasant specifically asks Lady Justice to prevent a Moorish destruction of Spain, pleading for the banishment of all Moriscos. Having a female subject approach Justice evoked the vulnerability of the Old Christian woman whose body was believed to be at risk of being ravished by savage Moriscos. On listening to the peasant’s plea, Lady Justice pronounces the sentence of expulsion against the Moriscos, to which all of the subjects on stage – peasants, caballeros, and servants – respond by rejoicing with singing and dancing.8 All of these characters exit the stage as a new troop of musicians, dancers, and actors enter ‘dressed like Moriscos’, or as described later, ‘dressed in the African fashion’, ‘with turbans, robes, and cloaks, which are luxuriously adorned with embroideries, feathers, and jewelry’.9 While singing about their respective plans to wage war against the Crown, the Moriscos take swords and shields and line up and begin to march. Another Morisco then enters and tells the Moriscos on stage that the Old Christians have pre-empted their plan for insurrection.The king has proclaimed an edict banishing Moriscos and they will have to abandon Spain. Herrera describes this last Morisco as being ‘ridiculous’ (ridículo) due to his ugliness and to his aljamiado (Morisco dialect) speech.10 The Morisco is presented as a misfit due to his mismatched appearance and the fact that he speaks aljamiado, a mixed language that can be determined to be neither Castilian nor Arabic.11 As Lucas Marchante-Aragón has insightfully interpreted, Herrera constructs the Morisco as a clown, that is, as an undesirable member of the Spanish body politic.12 Herrera’s stance is further substantiated in the Morisco’s reaction to the notice of expulsion. Alluding to the Morisco’s lack of concern for spiritual matters, Herrera describes how the ridiculous Morisco grieves for the loss of all of his figs and raisins. ‘Allah! Allah!’, he cries.13 The Moriscos on stage are subsequently joined in their performance by an army of Old Christian peasants with whom they engage in a dance that dramatises a battle between the two groups.The Moriscos concede defeat and the peasants declare victory. The masque ends as the Old Christians bind the Moriscos with neck leashes and leave the stage dancing the Canary.14 The implied reference is, of course, to the slur ‘perro-moro’ (Moorish dog), with which Moriscos were often attacked by the populace and elite alike. It should be pointed out that respectable treatise writers, such as Father Aznar Cardona, liberally insulted Moriscos by making statements such as ‘[d]‌ogs at church, were the Moriscos in Spain’.15 One cannot avoid thinking that this last scene of the Old Christians dragging the Moriscos by leashes informs us of the visceral nature of the rhetoric that led these New Christians to be forcefully removed from their homes.

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The chasm between the pure and the impure in both Herrera’s description of the masque and in Mestre’s painting might be interpreted as an effort to represent a sanitised version of the event, a version that attempts to purge any lingering ambiguities in the political message. Moreover, the festive tone that underlines these works serves as a foil to the conflicted stance of other Old Christian narratives of the expulsion, for, in contrast to the official rhetoric of the Crown, Old Christians did not monolithically support the expulsion. In effect, the voices of the Old Christians I examine in this chapter do not express Morisco difference as a serious threat to their society. These texts reveal that Crown authorities might have misunderstood or maybe even purposely exaggerated the so-called ‘Morisco problem’. Even more progressive thinkers such as Pedro de Valencia, who opposed the expulsion and rallied Old Christians to intermarry with Moriscos in order to absorb them into the dominant culture, might have misread some of the Old Christian perceptions of Moriscos.16 It is quite possible that a significant section of the Old Christian population did not necessarily believe that the comprehensive erasure of Morisco culture was necessary and were willing to cohabit with Moriscos. I have consulted three legal cases in which Old Christians do not even consider Morisco cultural practices to be a problem as long as the Moriscos stay within their subjugated social bounds and do not endanger the socio-economic status of Old Christians. When Old Christians do express anxiety about Moriscos in these texts, it is directed at the Moriscos who were highly assimilated, relatively successful, and posed a threat to the Old Christians’s own social and/or economic status. Misreading the Morisco problem Pedro de Valencia – Philip III’s Royal Chronicler of Castile and the Indies, and the author of Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España (Treatise on the Moriscos of Spain) (1606) – agreed with other intellectuals in the Spanish Court that a large portion of Moriscos continued to be ‘Moors’. In other words, many of them had been forcefully baptised, but had not truly accepted the Christian faith and could be seen as ‘declared and manifest enemies of the whole Christian Church’.17 In agreement with the staunchest supporters of the Morisco expulsion – such as Friar Jaime Bleda, Friar Damián Fonseca, Marcos de Guadalajara, and Father Pedro Aznar Cardona – Valencia argued that very few of these new converts were true Christians.18 Valencia also agreed with expulsion supporters that a great majority of Moriscos posed a threat to the public safety of the Spanish kingdoms. According to Valencia, Moriscos were enemies of the monarch and were in continuous contact with the Muslims of North Africa. He surmised that about a thousand Morisco spies and crypto-Muslims were

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planning to rebel against the king and help the Ottomans conquer Spain.19 Valencia was, nonetheless, vehemently opposed to the expulsion of Moriscos. For Valencia, the ‘Morisco problem’ could not be solved through their mass removal. His main argument was that such an extreme measure was unjustified because Moriscos were legitimate subjects of the Spanish king, entitled to the same civil protections afforded to Old Christians, and ultimately could not be banished from their own homeland.20 Echoing the advice of the arbitrista (proto-economist) Martín González de Cellorigo, Valencia claimed that rather than anathematising their entire people, it was necessary to escalate efforts to evangelise those Moriscos who were unfaithful.21 Regardless of their immoral behaviour and lack of understanding of Christian teachings, all Moriscos were: in their natural constitution, and therefore, in their intelligence, temperament, and spirit … as Spanish as the other inhabitants of Spain, since it has been almost nine hundred years that they have been born and reared in it, and this is seen in the similarity or uniformity that they share the appearance with the other inhabitants of the land.22

Valencia added that Moriscos, like the rest of the Spaniards, lived by honour, and had grown increasingly frustrated by the Old Christians’s attacks on their dignity. Valencia’s pronouncement of the Spanishness of Moriscos was, no doubt, the most open-minded view publicly expressed by an official in Philip III’s court. It is, however, difficult to ignore his polarised way of understanding the Morisco population and experience. For Valencia, Moriscos were either ‘good Christians’, whom he defined as those who had adopted Old Christian ways of living, or heretics. He overlooked the possibility that Moriscos could be faithful Christians and yet foster traditions that were unique to their respective communities. Furthermore, he was greatly distressed by Moriscos who took pride in their distinct identities and were uninterested in assimilating culturally to the dominant majority.23 More significantly, Valencia made the assumption that the entirety of the Old Christian population wished to have Moriscos look and behave just like themselves. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Moriscos in Spain were as culturally heterogeneous as the non-Morisco population.The degree of acceptance of Old Christian cultural practices and assimilation fluctuated across geographic areas and according to the circumstances under which the Moriscos had been converted. A large number of Moriscos whose homes were in the last Muslim strongholds (i.e., Granada and Valencia) showed the greatest tendency to hang on to their cultural traditions and to preserve a visibly distinct Moorish identity. Many of the Castilian Moriscos who had resided there prior to the forced resettlement of the Granadan Moriscos were former mudéjares who had adapted

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their customs and appearance to approach the Old Christians’ cultural practices. Castilian Moriscos were more likely to dress in ‘Christian’ fashion and not practice rituals that were believed to have stemmed from Islam.They might have spoken aljamiado along with Castilian, although not necessarily Arabic. Some Castilian Moriscos resided in ‘new districts’ or barrios nuevos, but others preferred to be more integrated with the general non-Morisco population, and married Old Christians.24 Unlike Conversos, however, even the highly integrated Moriscos were known by their Old Christian peers as having Moorish heritage, and few Moriscos attempted to pass for Old Christians.25 In contrast to Castilian Moriscos, the general population of Moriscos in Granada and Valencia was probably more proficient in Arabic and less in Castilian. David Coleman conjectures, nevertheless, that there were few Granadan Moriscos – by the mid sixteenth century – who did not have a rudimentary command of Castilian.26 Granadan and Valencian Moriscos were also likely to dress in distinguishable Moorish fashion, marry other Moriscos, and uphold customs and rituals (i.e., ablutions, fasts, burials) of Islamic origins or influence. Those living in aljamas or Morisco quarters might have felt some affinity towards the Muslims of Berbery and North Africa, and some Moriscos might have been crypto-Muslims.27 Priests who were sent to work in aljamas often complained that Moriscos’s religious practices had not changed after their conversion. A special commission convened by Philip II in 1581 characterised the Valencian Moriscos as infidels who were ‘Moriscos as stubborn as the Moors of Barbary’.28 Valencian Moriscos who lived on the coast were considered to be potentially dangerous and eager to rebel against the Spanish king.29 Moriscos, especially those from Granada and Valencia, had few incentives to integrate more fully into Old Christian spaces. The kind of cultural assimilation that was demanded of Moriscos by Old Christian authorities was impracticable. Moriscos were, in essence, told to renounce the way in which they lived their daily lives. They were expected to almost instantly give up their manners in eating, dressing, and speaking, as well as how they commemorated births, marriages, and deaths. Most Moriscos probably suspected that even if they severed their ties with their cultural origins, they were likely to be subjected to the margins of Old Christian society. Their social mobility was restricted by limpieza de sangre clauses, which were set to prevent New Christians having access to elite educational institutions, and to government and religious posts. They were also prohibited from becoming midwives, physicians, or pharmacists. In Granada, Moriscos – unlike their Old Christian counterparts – were required to pay a special tax or farda to support the defence of the southern coast. Morisco males were forbidden from carrying arms, a source of humiliation and emasculation. In Valencia, they were barred from changing residences without special approval.30 While they were faulted for not fully participating

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in Catholic activities, they were barred from joining most cofradías (religious brotherhoods). Since much of Spanish social life revolved around activities organised by confraternities, Moriscos had little choice but to set up their own brotherhoods. By forming Morisco cofradías, they could enjoy the social benefits and the honour that were associated with participating in the religious processions of their towns. Belonging to Morisco cofradías, which afforded the same benefits to all of their members, allowed Moriscos to find respite from the discriminatory treatment they encountered in society at large. Cofradías allowed Moriscos to enhance their honour by giving them opportunities to rise through their ranks. Elsewhere, Moriscos were constantly reminded of their inferiority to Old Christians and were expected to subordinate their needs to those of the latter.31 Pedro de Valencia conjectured that the only way dominant Spaniards would accept Moriscos as legitimate subjects and stop discriminating against them was if they became indistinguishable from Old Christians in semblance and behaviour.32 Valencia implied here that Christianity had to be redefined in stricter terms when it is applied to Moriscos. He suggested that spiritual conversion could only be demonstrated if Moriscos gave in to the complete eradication of their distinct cultural practices. Valencia’s opinion that Moriscos’s religious beliefs were reflected in their appearance was quite conventional. It evoked the view that had prompted the court of Philip II to pass the pragmática (royal decree) against Moorish cultural practices in Granada in November 1566. In the decree, Philip II declared that the ban on Morisco culture was a necessary means to encourage them to truly embrace the Catholic faith. He asserted in his decree that it was imperative to erase the ‘memory of the damaged lives and sect’ that was preserved in the Moriscos’s physical appearance and behaviour.33 The king emphasised numerous times that if Moriscos were truly Christians, they needed to cut ties with ‘the language through which they retained and conserved the memory of their ancient and harmful sect’.34 Moriscos were given a term of three years to learn Castilian, to stop speaking and writing Arabic, and to dispose of all Arabic texts. Both male and female Moriscos were ordered to dress in Old Christian fashion ‘so that their interior as well as their exterior would correspond exactly to [that of] true Christians, and the memory of their ancient life and sect would be forgotten’.35 Women were given a period of up to three years to discontinue wearing marlotas (a one-piece dress), but were ordered to immediately stop wearing veils. In addition, Moorish bathhouses were to be destroyed and public bathing was strictly prohibited. Moriscos were not allowed to have Old Christian employees who were younger than twenty years old for fear of indoctrination, and were required to obtain special permission for the ownership of black slaves. Moorish instruments and music were banned, even if the music did not contain

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anti-Catholic messages. In order to prevent Moriscos from engaging in musical performances, they were also required to keep the doors of their homes open on celebratory days as well as on Fridays and Sundays.36 Speaking on behalf of Granada’s Moriscos, Don Francisco Núñez Muley – a descendant of Granadan and Moroccan Muslim nobility, and a former page to the Archbishop of Talavera – wrote a memorandum to Don Pedro de Deza, the president of the municipal court in Granada. Núñez Muley’s intention with this communication was to convince Deza that the customs practised by his fellow Granadan Moriscos had no connection to Islamic devotions.37 But as Barbara Fuchs has remarked so insightfully, ‘[t]‌he central problem with Núñez Muley’s plea is that he assumes an audience sympathetic to claims that the new legislation will erase Moorish culture from Spain, while ignoring the fact that such was precisely the aim of the repressive measures.’38 Núñez Muley insinuated that it was cruel to demand that Moriscos deny their traditions since Old Christians did not have a genuine interest in having Moriscos join them in their ranks as analogous subjects. Núñez Muley observed that, regardless of how much effort Moriscos put into resembling them, Old Christians in Granada continued to seek ways in which they could keep them marginalised. More specifically, he cites the example of Moriscos who had been mistreated even after they had complied with a decree passed in 1511, which required them to wear Christian dress: For the past 35 to 40 years, the men here have worn Castilian-style clothing and footwear with the hope that His Majesty might show them the mercy of granting them certain liberties, relieving them of their tax-burden, or giving them permission to carry arms. Well, we have seen nothing like this. With each day that passes we are in worse shape and more mistreated in all respects and manners, as much by the secular as by the ecclesiastical arms of justice, a fact that is well known and not in need of further elaboration.39

Núñez Muley was unable to influence either the local or royal authorities to reconsider the enactment of the pragmática. Fearing the extinction of their unique identities, Moriscos rose in a mass revolt at the end of 1568. The uprising, which started in the mountains of Alpujarras and spread to other rural areas, was violent and caused the demise of both Old Christians and Moriscos. Lashing out against all Catholic symbols, insurgents burned churches, destroyed sacred objects, and killed religious men. It took two years for Juan de Austria to quell the revolt. In the aftermath, the Crown ordered the resettlement of about 80,000 Granadan Moriscos to different areas in Castile. About 30,000 died in the process of being relocated from typhoid fever and other common illnesses worsened by nutritional deficiencies and fatigue.40 Only about 10,000 to 15,000 destitute and unthreatening Moriscos – widows, seniors, children,

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slaves, and some indispensable labourers  – remained in Granada after this civil war. In the aftermath of the uprisings in the Alpujarras, support grew among Crown officials to banish the entire Morisco population from Iberia. The ‘peaceful’ attempts to Christianise them properly had failed drastically. Even Friar Ignacio de las Casas, himself a Morisco, concluded: ‘[ t]hey do not do anything like Christians, they do not participate in ceremonies and beliefs, and do not mix with Christians.’41 Valencia agreed. But while pro-expulsion Old Christians assumed that the assimilation of the Moriscos was nearly impossible to achieve, Valencia believed that more efforts had to be put in place to properly absorb them into the Old Christian population.42 Valencia was optimistic that if Moriscos were dispersed in very small groups throughout the Spanish kingdoms, they would eventually become ashamed of their Moorish roots. He explained: This is the end of dispersion … And not being surrounded by people of their nation and faith, with whom they can be honoured as Moors (as they do now), they would aspire to appear like Old Christians and gain honour like them, and to do this they would stop speaking Arabic, and would abhor and forget the ceremonies and customs by which they are known, and they would procure to conceal [their identities], and resemble Old Christians.43

Valencia thought that for religious and cultural absorption to be successful, Moriscos had to intermarry repeatedly with Old Christians for many generations until Moorish signs were completely lost. He called this method of integration permixtion, which he defined as a ‘total mix, so that what is of this or that nation cannot be discerned or distinguished’.44 Valencia recognised, however, that Old Christians would not agree to marry Moriscos due to their concern with limpieza de sangre. His solution was to subvert the value of blood purity among Old Christians by repealing all statutes of limpieza.45 The effect of achieving absolute cultural and social sameness between Moriscos and Old Christians, Valencia hypothesised, was the elimination of all inter-religio-cultural tensions. All inhabitants of Spain would eventually share the same physical semblance, follow the same faith, and be loyal subjects of the same Christian king. Some Hispanists have deemed Valencia to be an exceptionally subversive thinker in an age in which tolerance for cultural difference reached a nadir, and have lamented that the Crown largely ignored Valencia’s views.46 But to my knowledge, no scholar has critically considered Valencia’s suppositions regarding the way in which Old Christians related to Moriscos. As I mentioned above, Valencia’s idealistic solution to the Morisco problem was founded on two stereotypes regarding Moriscos and Old Christians. He implicitly assumed that

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if Moriscos refused to resemble Old Christians in appearance and accept their customs, it was because they were blind to the inferiority of their own religious and cultural practices. Furthermore, he projected his own personal view in his assumption that Old Christians were unwilling to tolerate Moriscos unless they gave up their cultural differences unconditionally. Both premises are at odds with the reality that both Morisco and Old Christian populations were much more heterogeneous than Valencia acknowledged. Moreover, if Moriscos had rejected integration into Old Christian communities, it was not because they were necessarily false Christians. It was because they sensed, as Nuñez Muley articulated, that even if they abandoned all of the qualities that made them superficially distinct, they would continue to be discriminated against due to their Moorish lineages. Rather than conceding to being defective versions of Old Christians, many Moriscos appear to have nurtured cultural characteristics that they believed were singular to their origins and different from those of their Old Christian neighbours.47 Permixtion was Valencia’s answer to preventing a mass exile of Spaniards from their own land, no doubt, but it was based on the premise that all aspects of Morisco culture were unchristian, substandard, and had to be eradicated. And as Núñez Muley asserts in his memorandum, the Moriscos he represented, at least, were unwilling to deny the integrity of their traditions. It should also be pointed out that Valencia failed to see that the less-acculturated Moriscos might have defined honour as a virtue that was inextricably linked to respecting the cultural practices they associated with their Muslim heritage. Valencia also ignored the possibility that Old Christians might have been more tolerant about cultural differences than many in his cohort ever imagined. Philip III rejected all arguments against the expulsion and, presumably persuaded by the view that no other peaceful methods of true conversion had been effective, passed his first edict of expulsion from Spain against the Moriscos in Valencia.48 He declared in that edict: ‘I have been convinced that I punish them by taking hold of their lives and property without any scruples, because they have proven with their crimes to be heretic apostates and guilty of high treason.’49 The initial orders of expulsion exempted the descendants of old Castilian mudéjares and the ‘good Christians’ who could attain the written sponsorship of a religious authority who testified that the Moriscos involved were true Catholics.50 But the number of Moriscos claiming these exemptions was larger than expected, and by 22 March 1611, Crown officials decided that all Moriscos had to be expelled.51 The expulsion was declared completed on 22 February 1614.52 As soon as the expulsion was ended, the Bishop of Granada wrote to the king about the instalment of a special fiesta (festival) of thanksgiving for the elimination of the Morisco people in Spain.53 Other apologists of the expulsion, such as Jaime Bleda, declared that the Moors had finally been

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ousted after 900 years of occupation.54 The Duke of Lerma had articulated that the objective of the expulsion was no less than to leave the kingdoms ‘so clean of Moriscos, so that there would not be memory of these people in them’. Lerma’s aspiration was far from being accomplished.55 The propagandist production of texts praising the final defeat of the Moors belied private narratives about Moriscos who had managed to stay in Spain or who had secretly returned to their homes from their forced exiles. A year after the royal project of expelling all of the Moriscos of Spain was officially concluded, the Count of Salazar – Bernardino de Velasco y Aragón, the individual in charge of expelling the Moriscos from the kingdoms of Castile, Extremadura, Andalucia, and Murcia – wrote two letters to the Spanish king claiming that the plan for a comprehensive Morisco expulsion had failed catastrophically. Salazar contended that a significant number of Moriscos had hidden illegally from Crown authorities and had avoided expulsion or, if expelled, they had managed to return from their forced exile to North Africa. An obviously perturbed Salazar told the king that the main problem was that local authorities, powerful members of the community, as well as the Old Christian population at large were helping Moriscos to avoid detection by officers from the Crown. His aggravation about the matter is obvious in one of the letters he sent to the king in 1615. Salazar argued: In the kingdom of Murcia, as many Moriscos who have left have shamelessly returned because of the good will they have received from its [non-Morisco] native inhabitants and are concealed by the local authorities … In all of Andalucía it is known by way of the Duke Medina Sidonia and other people that the only [Moriscos] who have not returned are the ones who are dead. In Old and New Castile, in La Mancha, and in Extremadura, particularly in lands ruled by lords, it is known that there are [Moriscos] returning there every day, and that the local officers pretend not to see it … In the islands of Mallorca and Menorca, and the Canaries, there are as many Moriscos living there, including [Moriscos] who were born there and [Moriscos] who were expelled. In the Crown of Aragón … there is a large quantity of [Moriscos] who with local permission and licences, and with false court documents have stayed in Spain.56

Three years later, Bleda published the sizable Coronica de los moros en España (Chronicle of the Moors in Spain) (1618), in which he surveyed the history of the Moorish presence in the Iberian Peninsula with the purpose of justifying the edicts of expulsion.What is certainly compelling about Bleda’s book for our discussion is that, towards the end of the book, after countless attempts to explain the expulsion in theological terms and after praising the courage of the king and the Duke of Lerma in carrying out such a difficult project, he admitted that he was dissatisfied with the outcome. Bleda believed that Spain remained populated with Moriscos – especially the elderly – who managed to avoid expulsion

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due to the compassion of Old Christians. He feared that the elderly Moriscos who still resided in Spain would corrupt the remaining Morisco children and would turn them into enemies of the Crown. Exasperated at the fact that no official actions were taken to resolve this problem, he mourned: ‘and I will die without being able to see my land purified from this evil seed’.57 Nine years after the end of the Morisco expulsion and five years after Bleda’s publication, an accountant for the Crown of Aragón, Pedro Alós, claimed in a memorandum he sent to Philip IV in 1621 that a great number of the banished Moriscos were living in Aragón. According to Alós, some of these Moriscos had escaped forceful removal from their homes and the others had returned from their exiles in Barbary. Alós also informed the king that these Moriscos lived in peace with their Old Christian neighbours and benefitted from the protection of influential members of the community.58 The statements of Salazar, Bleda, and Alós about the limited success of the expulsion efforts cannot be taken as representing any other sentiment than their own personal biases on the subject. On the other hand, their narratives do encapsulate the frustration that expulsion officers experienced in areas in which Moriscos were protected by local officials, communities, and private individuals. Historians Henri Lapeyre, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Carla Rahn Phillips, and Mercedes García-Arenal have indeed pointed out in their works that, in certain areas, Old Christians from all levels of society – aristocrats, churchmen, and local authorities – attempted to help their Morisco vassals and neighbours to avoid banishment or to return to Spain after being exiled. These scholars have also agreed in the assessment that the great majority of Moriscos were eventually expelled by the time the expulsion was deemed ended in 1614.59 Deviating from this last view, Trevor Dadson has conjectured that a significant number of Moriscos in La Mancha and Extremadura returned to their homes after the expulsion or evaded banishment altogether due, in large part, to assistance from their Old Christian neighbours. Dadson’s hypothesis is based primarily on archival research of the village of Villarrubia de los Ojos (La Mancha), where about half of the population was Morisco (about three hundred families). To his surprise, Dadson discovered that there was an increase in the number of baptisms and marriages of individuals with Morisco names between 1611 and 1615.60 Dadson proposes that, at least in the case of Villarrubia de los Ojos, Old Christians were moved to help Morisco residents because the latter reflected the non-Morisco population in the practices of their daily lives. While the majority of Moriscos were farm workers and cattle breeders, some had become university graduates and served their village in the positions of teachers, priests, doctors, soldiers, and officers of the local government. A significant number lived in the barrio nuevo, which was identified as the Morisco section of village, but

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as the Count of Salinas – Don Diego de Silva y Mendoza – had underlined in a letter to the king requesting that his vassals be exempted from the expulsion, the barrio nuevo was not the same thing as a barrio apartado or segregated neighbourhood. Salinas also defended the Christianity of his subjects by noting that the main village church was closer to the barrio nuevo than the more predominantly Old Christian areas. There were even some Old Christian and a number of mixed Morisco–Old Christian families who could be found in the barrio nuevo.61 The Moriscos of Villarrubia were indeed acculturated in the sense that they spoke, dressed, ate, and worshipped in the same manner of their Old Christian neighbours. But it would be an exaggeration to assume that Moriscos were considered to be social peers by Old Christians, unless we accept the feasibility of the principle of ‘separate but equal’. Moriscos continued to marry endogamously, felt more secure in their barrios (even if more diverse and integrated than the former morerías), and buried their dead in their own cemetery or maqabil.62 If there was a larger than expected number of Moriscos in elite professions, it could have also been because they fulfilled the demand that the large Morisco population had for physicians, lawyers, teachers, and spiritual leaders who would treat them without prejudice. It remains to be investigated whether Morisco professionals were patronised by as many Old Christians as Moriscos, but I dare to conjecture that, if given a choice, the Moriscos from el barrio preferred to associate with Moriscos in their enclave and Old Christians with those who lived in their part of town. In such a case, Old Christians and Moriscos would have largely served different clienteles and would not have competed with each other for business. Old Christians might have been moved to find passive ways to resist collaborating with the expulsion because they did not perceive their Morisco neighbours to be a threat to their socio-economic condition. I  agree with Dadson’s conclusion that the example of Villarrubia de los Ojos is representative of the reality that ‘[c]‌oexistence, assimilation, toleration and acceptance of difference, of the other, were possible even in the most hostile environment that early seventeenth-century Spain often was’.63 But what kind of difference was considered to be acceptable for Old Christians? Upon analysing the representation of Moriscos and their stand-ins in official accounts, popular narratives, and literary works, I have come to suspect that Moriscos might have been assimilated but not fully absorbed into the dominant culture precisely because a recognisable degree of Morisco difference was indispensable in sustaining the ‘harmonious and peaceful’ relationship between Moriscos and Old Christians. At least in the texts I have examined, Moriscos are considered non-problematic minorities as long as they accept the dominant cultural norms of speaking, eating, dressing, and worshipping but do not overstep their social boundaries by

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camouflaging their religious origins or by striving to be socially analogous or better than their Old Christian counterparts. The reassurance of difference in post-expulsion judicial narratives The case of the Morisca María López from Villarrubia validates Dadson’s hypothesis that some Moriscos were able to evade expulsion and lived in relative peace with Old Christians. In the context of the present study, however, the case is particularly significant because it reveals how Moriscos could go from being acceptable residents to being seen as a threat to the well-being of the Old Christian community. María López was denounced to the Toledo Inquisition in 1628 – along with four other Moriscas – for performing Muslim rituals on her deceased sister. All the witnesses at López’s trial evince that Villarrubia had a sizable Morisco population that coexisted with the rest of the residents of the village without major disturbances. In effect, prior to the attack on López and her relatives by two Old Christian women, the Moriscas are described as being amiable with their Old Christian neighbours. It is noticeable that none of the Old Christians made any comments about the fact that their village had a Morisco enclave that continued to thrive in their village fourteen years after the expulsion was closed. The presence of Moriscos in Villarrubia was obviously not a problem for the Old Christians, and they only appear to have become illegitimate members of the community when they overstepped their social boundaries. In my estimation, María López and her Morisca colleagues blundered by behaving in a way that was seen by their female Old Christian fellows as being excessively arrogant and impudent, and hence not Christian. The details of the López case, which Dadson transcribed in its entirety in the appendix to his study, inform us of precisely what type of behaviour was considered to be unacceptable of Moriscos.64 López was attacked by two Old Christian women, María Lozana and Isabel de Ortega, for shrouding López’s sister, Ana Yébenes, in non-Christian fashion. Three of the four witnesses who testified against López  – María Lozana, Catalina Martínez, and Catalina de Ortega – mention in their testimonies that the suspicious rituals executed by the Moriscas took place at either the eve of the feast of Saint Lucy or on the day of the celebration. None of the witnesses for the defendant mentioned Saint Lucy at all. This specific aspect of the Old Christians’s testimonies is significant because it suggests that María Lozana and the other witnesses for the plaintiff deliberately associated Saint Lucy’s day with the moment of their ‘discovery’ of the Moriscas’s engagement in Muslim rituals. Saint Lucy is the patron saint of sight, and her devotees attribute to her the ability to endow light on those

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who are either physically or spiritually blind. Given that the feast of Saint Lucy was one of the most important celebrations in Villarrubia, it may be assumed that the Old Christian accusers meant to insinuate that their charge against the Moriscas was divinely inspired by the patron saint of sight.65 The charges against López concerned the specific manner in which she and her Morisca relatives had prepared Yébenes for burial. All of the rituals described involved objects deemed by the Old Christian women to be valuable with the exception of the detail about washing the deceased with herbal waters. The accusers reiterated the following details of Yébenes’s shrouding: The deceased was made to wear clean linen tights that extended from the area above her knees to her feet, a new linen blouse stitched in white thread and with embroidered strings worth about five reales, and a gorget valued at two ducados. She was accessorised with a red satin ribbon pin on her chest, silver earrings with hanging pearls, a bead necklace, two or three rounds of coral bracelets, and a golden ring. Her hair was held up in braids with two new nettings, and a headdress, all held together by new hairpins purchased especially for the occasion. A hood was then placed on her head and a shroud of fine linen that stretched from the back of the neck of the deceased over her face and torso down to her knees. From among these ritual practices, the Inquisitors were not necessarily interested in the monetary value and particular details of the objects put on the deceased. They appeared to be concerned only with the activities and objects they associated with Muslim practices. More specifically, they found it unusual that the deceased was washed with herbal water, was costumed with a hood, had her feet covered, was covered with a sheet, and had her hair styled with braids and accessories. The defence attorney, Miguel Sánchez, addressed the concerns of the Inquisitors by arguing that the suspicious customs were not heretical, but rather regional customs practised by both Moriscos and Old Christians in Villarrubia. Sánchez asked a number of Moriscos and Old Christian witnesses from Villarrubia whether or not the deceased Old Christians in Villarrubia were prepared for burial in similar manner. The witnesses – who included the village priest and an officer of the Inquisition – stated that it was considered to be quite common for Old Christians in Villarrubia to also bury their dead with their feet and heads covered, and that it was up to the discretion of the respective families if they wanted to bury their dead covered in fine shrouds. Some of the witnesses also stated that they had heard that some Old Christian women were buried with their hair styled with braids and with added accessories. The only item that might have remained questionable for inquisitors was the washing of the dead body, but that was probably addressed satisfactorily with the testimonies of the witnesses for the defence who testified that the washing of Yébenes with herbal water had been necessitated by the fact that her

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corpse smelt abominably from the excessive oozing of bodily fluids. It was also learned in the investigations that María Lozana and Isabel de Ortega could have denounced López to the Inquisition as retribution for López’s insinuation that they had stolen a skirt that had disappeared from Yébenes’s home. About seven months after the initial denunciation, during which López was imprisoned, the judges of López trial decided the case adjourned after examining the evidence at hand. We can assume that they must have concluded that there was nothing out of the ordinary in the shrouding of Yébenes in the context of the village of Villarrubia and that the accusers were probably acting out of revenge against López and not (as they claimed) out of a desire to protect the Catholic religion. If the basic rituals that involved the shrouding ofYébenes were not exceptional for the residents of Villarrubia, why did María Lozana and Isabel de Ortega contact Inquisition officers? One possibility is that the women were aware of the distinctiveness of the shrouding practices in their village and had naively thought that the Inquisition would rule them to be heretical without further inquiring into the regionalistic aspects of burial practices. A more feasible explanation is that they genuinely believed that there were some components of Yébenes’s shrouding that were unchristian and dangerous. It may also be assumed that the practices of the shrouding that troubled them – the fact that the fabrics used in dressing and covering the deceased were fresh, very white, and expensive, that new hairpins had been especially purchased from the local store to style her hair, and so on – were also the details that Inquisition officers had deemed to be insignificant in judging the case. Yet for María Lozana, Catalina Martínez, Catalina de Ortega, and Isabel de Ortega the transgressions of the Moriscas were to be ascertained in these very details. All four emphatically state that Yébenes should not have been buried with fine jewellery. Lozana presumably asked why the Moriscas did not remove the golden ring from her finger and the coral bangles from her hand and ‘given them to some street children instead of having her take them into the earth’.66 Martínez and Catalina de Ortega similarly recall telling the Moriscas to take Yébenes’s coral bangles and give them to a needy village girl or hand them over to the church for masses. In pointing out the squandering of Yébenes’s jewellery, the Old Christian women might have attempted to reinforce the stereotype of materialistic Moriscos who eschew charity and would rather bury their treasures than offer them to the benefit of the larger community. Additionally, if it is taken into consideration that the four Old Christian women were poor without much prospect of improving their condition, we might interpret their excessive meticulousness in describing the admirable quality of Yébenes’s burial g­ arments as an expression of envy. They might have been irritated by the prospect of not being able to ever be attired in life with the fine linen, gorget, and silver and golden jewellery Yébenes was made to wear in death.

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The Old Christian women’s fixation on Yébenes’s garments might have been further stimulated by the squabble López and Lozana had over the missing skirt on the day prior to Yébenes’s passing. According to the testimonies of both parties, Lozana, Martínez, and Catalina de Ortega were upset because López had inquired whether they knew who had taken her sister’s missing skirt and specifically asked whether or not they thought María de Ortega had taken it. López observes that the Old Christians felt so profoundly offended at her query that they had turned ‘from very good friends to massive enemies’.67 The indignation of the Old Christians is comprehensible if we assume that they were insulted by the insinuation that they had coveted a garment that belonged to a person of ostensible inferior extraction. For an Old Christian to affirm that another Old Christian could have desired to be clothed in a garment worn by a Morisco was an acknowledgment that the body of the Old Christian was analogous to that of the Morisco.68 The ‘friendship' between the Morisca and the Old Christian appears to have been contingent on the mutual acknowledgment that the dominant role was assigned to the latter. The case of López reveals that Moriscos could be seen as a threat to their community if they were perceived to be better off than their Old Christian neighbours, and if they were believed to have defied the natural superiority of Old Christians over Moriscos. For Lozana and her allies the only way to repair the Moriscas’s transgressions was to have the Inquisition mark them with definite signs of difference. The Inquisition case of the Morisco Diego Díaz reveals more transparently how easily a group of vengeful Old Christians could redefine ‘good Christian’ Moriscos into deviant members of society.69 Díaz, a tavern owner and meat-cutter, was denounced in September of 1632 to the ecclesiastical authorities in Belmonte, the town of his residence, by a couple of innkeepers – Antonio Malo, his wife María de Laguna, and two of their servants, María Hernández and Ana López – for being a secret Muslim. The case was considered serious enough to be brought up to the Cuenca Inquisitorial tribunal to be tried over the course of the following sixteen months.70 Due to the intervention of his defence attorney, Díaz was able to limit his arrest to the last six months of the trial. The grounds for initiating an investigation of Díaz’s alleged heresy were the following:  he routinely changed his shirt on Fridays, was seen with his head shaved, used olive oil instead of animal fat, abstained from eating pork, rarely went to mass and prevented his servants from taking a feast day off work, ate meat on days of vigil and abstinence, refrained from regular prayers, and congregated with Moriscos with whom he spoke in algarabía (Arabic dialect spoken in Spain). The judges of the case could not find any witnesses who could corroborate the initial charges of Díaz’s eating habits and areligiosity and deemed them unverifiable. They accepted the explanation that Díaz changed

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shirts on Fridays because it was his resting day and had shaved his head upon the advice of a barber to address a phlegmatic medical condition. They appear to have been additionally satisfied with his statement that the strange language he had spoken with other Moriscos from the Valley of Ricote was not Arabic but Valencian, for he had become fluent in the language when he lived there for about five or six years. Ironically, the matter that ended up being the most problematic for the judges was something that was not known to the witnesses of the prosecution, but had been brought up by Díaz himself during his trial.71 Díaz had been circumcised during his (second) forced exile to Algiers, which took place probably sometime in 1612. Díaz claimed that the captain in charge of deporting the Moriscos in his ship had sold them to Algerian Moors as captives. The deposition reads: ‘and the sin occurred when … they were disembarked near Argel and the Turks of that city took them there and put them in tarazanas which are large royal houses where they store their arms and artillery and there they [the Turks] took a look at all of the males and started peeling off the foreskin of their shameful parts.’72 Díaz assured the judges that he had confessed his sin (of allowing the circumcision) to a priest in Avignon and had been absolved. The prosecutor, Alonso de Vallejo, was not convinced by Díaz’s declaration that the circumcision had been forced and argued that Díaz was lying. In his estimation, Moors did not coerce non-Muslims to accept their religion. He argued that Díaz probably reneged Catholicism and that is why he was circumcised. Díaz’s defence lawyer was obviously competent because he found a witness – Don Bernardino de Cuellar y Medrano, a nobleman and former captive in Algiers – who validated Díaz’s account that Algerian Muslims often circumcised Spanish Moriscos by force. The witness did not manage to convince the deposing inquisitor, who wrote: ‘after the deposition of Don Bernardino de Medrano I gather that he is trying to help the prisoner in terms of what he says about the violent circumcisions [of captives], and it does not prove anything because he is the only witness and in no way is able to prove much to support the [Díaz’s] claim.’73 The prosecutor advised his colleagues to torture Díaz in order to extract a more truthful confession, but the other Inquisitors disagreed and decided to close the case. He was cleared of all of the major charges, with exception of his minor offence of allowing himself to be circumcised, for which he was privately penanced with a sentence of abjuración de levi (forswearing of minor heresies). García-Arenal and Dadson consider Díaz’s case to be another fitting example of a Morisco who, about twenty years after his expulsion, was found back in Spain living a more-or-less uninterrupted daily life along with Old Christians who were aware of his religious origins.74 For Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer, the interest of the case is more in the specific strategies Díaz

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utilised in constructing an autobiography that would serve him in gaining the favour of the Inquisitors.75 Kagan and Dyer point out Díaz’s attempt to appeal to the prejudices of the Inquisitors by attacking the Algerian Moors’s purported proclivity for male homosexuality, his admission that his circumcision was a sin but not a heresy, his statement that his case was disadvantaged because of the disgrace suffered by his ancestors and his ‘nation’, and his resolve in proving that his accusers were his mortal enemies and thereby unreliable. From my point of view, an aspect of the case to which Kagan and Dyer alluded but should be examined in more detail is the opinion Old Christians had of Díaz while he lived in Spain as an ‘illegal’ resident. Díaz never hid his ancestry, married a Morisca, and congregated openly with other Moriscos. Díaz’s ability to survive in different parts of Spain and thrive as a businessman in Belmonte at a time when all Moriscos had theoretically been expelled was greatly due to the fact that the Old Christians he encountered on a daily basis were not disturbed by the presence of Díaz or of other Moriscos in their localities. Díaz was, in fact, able to hide from the expulsion authorities in his hometown of Daimiel for eight to ten months sometime between 1611 and 1612 because he was helped by his then-employer, a man with the surname Orozco. Although Orozco was, ironically, a familiar of the Holy Office, he appears to have been more willing to use the Morisco’s services than to comply with the king’s order of expulsion. Unfortunately for Díaz, he was eventually discovered by one of the Crown’s officers of the expulsion, and was again expelled, this time to Algiers, from where he was able to escape after about six years of captivity. Upon returning to Spain (after a brief period in France), Díaz was again protected in the town of Albaterra in Valencia by another Old Christian employer, a meat-cutter (Pedro de Casas), for whom he worked six years and learned his trade. Had it not been for Casas’s protection and the discretion of the Old Christians with whom he interacted, Díaz would not have been able to go from being a destitute Morisco to owning a business in meat-cutting (a trade of the middling class) and running a tavern alongside this in Belmonte. Once in Belmonte, Díaz used his social intelligence and resourcefulness to continue to foster good relationships with Old Christians, but especially with the influential residents of the town. He conducted himself publicly in ways that counteracted the stereotype of the selfish Morisco hoarder of goods and cash. He donated money to the church, the poor, and the king’s army. The vicars of his town knew him as a good Christian, and he pleaded with the Inquisitors present in his second audience go to his town and ask them about his reputation. Díaz’s efforts had been worth it because it appears that the prosecutor had been unable to find effective witnesses to depose, whereas Díaz’s defence was able to secure witnesses – including a medical doctor and a respectable nobleman – willing to craft their testimonies to favour Díaz.

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Yet Díaz made an error in not predicting and pre-empting the detrimental impact that an otherwise negligible Old Christian woman could have in his life. This Old Christian, María Hernández, was one of the individuals who denounced him to the Inquisition. Hernández had been Díaz’s servant and held a grudge against the Morisco because of an episode in which he had publicly humiliated her. Díaz had found Hernández drunk and unconscious on the floor of a house where aguardiente (a type of distilled liquor) was sold. Irritated at her behaviour, he woke her up by taking a pitcher of water and pouring it on her. Hernández became furious at Díaz and went to work for Antonio Malo and Laguna (his wife), who were rival tavern owners and who, eventually, conspired with her to denounce Díaz to the Inquisition. One could imagine that Hernández’s humiliation at the Morisco’s hands could have been exponentially exacerbated if her peers had turned it into a topic of gossip, as is likely to have happened. That an impure Morisco had forcefully given Laguna a ‘cleansing’ might have been a source of ironic humour for the townspeople of Belmonte. Malo and Laguna’s accusation of Díaz, one the other hand, was probably motivated by envy of his success in the innkeeping business. The prosecutor himself acknowledges the illegitimacy of Malo and Laguna’s accusation when he comments that he does not trust them because ‘it is credible that they would be his enemies, because they are [Díaz, Malo, and Laguna] innkeepers and neighbours and these vile people would engender envy and be interested in ejecting the opposing party from the area’.76 According to Díaz, Malo and Laguna’s tavern was located next to his, but failed in bringing in the necessary number of customers because of its bad reputation. While Díaz’s establishment was known for its hospitable service, his competitors were said to cheat their customers out of their money. One of the witnesses for the defence – the physician – corroborates Díaz’s testimony and states that María Hernández was a notorious alcoholic and that Antonio Malo and his wife were envious of the success of the Morisco’s business. Díaz indeed declares that he is sure that Malo and Laguna denounced him and that they did so out of sheer envy. He believes that the husband and wife are criminals who compel their guests to get drunk and to play cards with marked decks with the objective of stealing their money. Díaz’s bold condemnation of the pair is reflective of his belief in his own moral superiority to the Old Christians. If Díaz was as outspoken about the criminality of his rivals in his town as he was to the Inquisitors, it is not surprising that Malo and Laguna would have been tempted to avenge his temerity by approaching the Inquisition. Malo and Laguna might have wanted to shame Díaz by reminding him of his Moorishness and the most obvious method by which to do so was to accuse him of heresy. It is possible that Malo and Laguna did not expect Díaz’s case to be thoroughly prosecuted by the Inquisition, especially given that all of their allegations were in probably false. The tavern

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owners had, in fact, disappeared after making their initial denunciation and the Inquisitors were unable to summon them for Díaz’s trial. I suspect that Hernández, Malo, and Laguna’s objective might have been, at the very least, to disgrace Díaz and socially marginalise him as punishment for daring to upstage them. Díaz’s only ‘heresy’, in the cultural context of his time, was to believe that he could compete economically on an equal footing with Old Christians regardless of the ineptitude of the latter. The dishonour Díaz suffered must have been substantial because, in spite of his good reputation, he was compelled to switch residence to another town, Mota del Cuervo, during his trial. Such was the power of gossip. Judges could decree the innocence of a defendant accused of heresy or punish individuals for defamation, but neither they nor any other official could stop the spread of false rumours behind closed doors or control their rippling effects on the victims’s lives. As James Scott reminds us, gossip is an elementary form of disguised aggression often used by people who do not have the means or the capacity to harm their opponents.77 Early Modern Spaniards knew that reputations could be ruined if they were targets of malicious gossip. Fabiana and Isabel Florín, residents of the village of Villaseca de la Sagra (Toledo), were two Early Modern women who, feeling disenfranchised, sought to disparage the reputation of a family they purported to be passing Moriscos by initiating rumours about their unclean blood. Unable to prevent the marriage between their sister Juana and a man they believed to be a secret Morisco – Luis Gómez – they decided to disgrace the Gómez family by bemoaning in the presence of third parties and on numerous occasions the fact that their sister was going ‘to soil their blood, because they were clean people and said that even one drop of his [Gómez’s] blood was going to disqualify the rest [of the family]’.78 The sisters also broadcasted to the members of the community of Villaseca that Luis had lured Juana into taking interest in him by often bringing couscous for her to enjoy. As humorous as the allegation might seem to us, it had serious implications for the honour of the Gómez family, for if true, it could have been taken as a definite sign of Moorishness. The father of Luis Gómez – Francisco Gómez – and his uncle – Lucas Gómez – were infuriated upon learning that the Floríns had slandered them with false allegations about their lineage and eating practices. They filed a lawsuit against the two Florín sisters for libel in 1628. If we consider that Fabiana and Isabel stated under oath that the Gómez family had ‘a fine reputation, were held in good esteem, faith, and opinion; were taken as limpios and as having a distinctive lineage’, it might seem curious that they were so adamantly opposed to the union between Luis and Juana.79 It does not appear that Juana had other suitors, and given that both parties were probably of peasant stock, they shared social spaces, and neither had a

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noticeable socio-economic advantage or disadvantage over the other. For mysterious reasons, however, the Floríns regarded the Gómez family to be secret Moriscos. The conviction of the Floríns in the Moorishness of Gómez was so powerful that even under arrest and in danger of being convicted for defamation, Fabiana and Isabel refused to declare that the father and uncle of Luis, Francisco and Lucas Gómez, were ‘free of taint and the mixed blood of Moors, Jews, or individuals penanced by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and free of any other bad race’ as they claimed.80 They recognised that the Gómez family had a respectable reputation, but fell short of declaring that they agreed with how others perceived the Gómezes. Fabiana and Isabel simply claimed to be too young to know about ‘matters of lineage’. Since both defendants were in their thirties, it is likely that their claim of ignorance was a strategy to stand their ground without incriminating themselves.81 Upon reviewing the evidence, the judge of the court inVillaseca – Cristóbal Fernández – declared Francisco, Lucas, and Luis Gómez to be ‘Old Christians, descendants of such, and unblemished from any bad race of Moors, of Jews, of people who have been penanced by the Holy Office, or of people who have newly converted to our Holy Catholic faith’.82 He further determined that only one of the sisters, Fabiana, could be proven to be guilty of the charge of defamation and sentenced her to ‘retract and unsay the injurious words that were said against the mentioned Francisco and Luis Gómez, his son, and Lucas Gómez’.83 The sentence also included the charge of 1,200 maravedís and payment for the cost of the trial. The Gomezes never enjoyed any kind of retraction from the Floríns, however, as Fabiana died soon after the verdict was delivered and Isabel was not obliged to do so by the court. Regardless of the statement of limpieza the court had granted the Gómezes, they seem to have continued to suffer from the suspicions that the Floríns had raised about their lineage because they appealed their case at the Real Chancillería de Valladolid (1632). The Gómezes specifically requested that Isabel should be made to ‘unsay’ her injurious statements, especially given that her sister Fabiana had been unable to fulfil the court’s sentence.84 Unfortunately for the Gómezes, the outcome of four years of litigation was more favourable to the defendants than to plaintiffs. The judges of the Real Chancillería overturned the sentence given to Fabiana and validated the ruling to exonerate Isabel from her charges.85 The case could be interpreted as a victory for the Florín sisters because they ultimately accomplished their objective: to deny social parity to Moriscos by socially inscribing them with marks of shame. In the larger context of Morisco–Old Christian relations, this case illustrates that, in opposition to Valencia’s idea of permixtion, Old Christians were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent Moriscos – even those without any visible trace of their religious origins – from being completely absorbed into the dominant parts of society.

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The Moriscos deemed to be ‘good Christians’ appear largely to have been those who recognised their inherent inferiority to Old Christians. The Consejo de Estado (Council of State), indeed, had recommended to the Crown in 1608 that, if they were to stay in Castile, the Moriscos should be forced to become land labourers and banned from professional posts.86 Using the exact same wording, the Council insisted twice that it was essential that ‘Old Christians always be greatly superior’.87 The Old Christian views espoused in the examined cases are consistent with the spirit of these recommendations. Moriscos are expected to be acculturated enough to communicate, socialise, and provide meaningful services to Old Christians, but are seen as being a threat to the well-being of their community if they are suspected of desiring to become an exact cultural reflection of the Old Christians. Indeed, the Moriscos of Villarrubia de los Ojos might have been shielded from expulsion authorities by their Old Christian neighbours because they self-identified as Moriscos, were unlikely passers, and, hence, were not perceived to be a menace to the Old Christians’s socio-economic standing. These Old Christians found Morisco difference to be acceptable and even desirable as long as it remained subject to the dominant culture. Notes

 1 Henri Lapeyre places the number at 275,000 (Geografía de la España morisca, trans. Luis Rodríguez García (Valencia:  Diputación Provincial de Valencia, 1986), 220); Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent calculate the number to be slightly higher, at about 300,000 (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent Bernard, Historia de los moriscos:  Vida y tragedia de una minoría (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985); Julio Caro Baroja sets the number anywhere between 250,000 and 300,000 (Ciclos y temas de la historia de España: los moriscos del reino de Granada (Madrid: Istmo, 1976), 84).  2 Encinas writes in 1602: ‘[q]‌ue todo el pueblo esta receloso, y se teme mucho, y a todos pone en cuydado el aumento y consideraciones desta gente, y assi se deve en ello poner remedio pues lo que todos dicen, suelen dezir que eso quiere ser, y que la voz del pueblo, es voz de Dios’ (quoted in Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión: Estudio histórico-crítico, Vols 1 and 2 (Valencia: Francisco Vives y Mora, 1901), Vol. 2, 25–26).  3 See Jesús Villalmanzo Carmeno, La expulsión de los moriscos del Reino de Valencia. Catálogo de Exposición (Valencia: Fundación Bancaja, 1997), 34–68.  4 ‘Yvan cantando, y tañendo, con flautas, tamborines, y dulçainas, y otros instrumentos que solian tener, relinchando, y diziendo: viua el Turco … Y viva Mahoma, que nos ha dexado ver estos tiempos tan felices, en los quales vamos a vivir a tierra, de donde vinieron nuestros passados’ (Jaime Bleda, Coronica de los moros de España (Valencia: Felipe Mey, 1618), 1002).  5 I am indebted to Lucas Marchante-Aragón for bringing the existence of this play to my attention in his article ‘The King, the Nation, and the Moor: Imperial Spectacle and the Rejection of Hybridity in The Masque of the Expulsion of the Moriscos’ (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8.1 (2008): 98–133, at 109). Marchante-Aragón analyses how the performance was shaped to exalt the Duke of Lerma’s role in the expulsion.  6 Pedro de Herrera, ‘Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos’, Translación del santíssimo sacramento a la iglesia colegial de San Pedro de la villa de Lerma (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1618), 46v–50r. The masque took place on 17 October 1617. The poet Francisco López de Zárate lyrically recounted many of the festivals related to the celebration in Lerma, including the

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masque, which he interestingly calls ‘Baile de la expulsión de los moriscos’ (‘Fiestas en la translación del Sacramento, a la Iglesia Colegial dedicadas al Ilustrissimo, y Reuendissimo Señor D.  Juan Coello de Sandoual’, Obras varias de Francisco Lopez de Zarate (Alcalá de Henares: María Fernández, 1651), 203–259, at 246).  7 ‘Relacion, como su Magestad, siendo otro Pelayo, con esta espulsion restauró de los moros segunda vez a España’ (Herrera, Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos’, 47v).  8 Damián Fonseca also writes that Spaniards reacted to the news with elation: ‘atropellauan los unos a otros con general aplauso y alegria de todo el pueblo dando gracias a Dios’ (Iusta expulsion de los moriscos de España (Rome: Jacomo Mascardo, 1612), 219).  9 ‘Vestidos como moriscos’, ‘adereçadas luzidamente a lo africano’ (Herrera, “Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos,” 49r). 10 The term aljamiado is defined by Autoridades as ‘Epitheto que se dá al hombre ò muger que vivía en la Aljama de los Moros, ò Judios, y à los que hablan el lenguáje de ellos, y tambien al mismo lenguáje. Lat. Arabico-Hispana dialectus’ (‘Aljamiado’, Real Academia Española, Autoridades, 1726, www.rae.es, accessed on 15 December 2014). 11 Herrera, ‘Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos’ ” 49v. 12 Marchante-Aragón, ‘The King, the Nation, and the Moor’, 115. 13 ‘Halà! Halà!’ (Herrera, ‘Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos’, 50r). 14 The masque calls to mind the Fiesta de Moros y Cristianos (Festival of Moors and Christians) celebrated all over Spain – best known in Valencia – at different times of the year. 15 ‘Perros en la iglesia, eran los moriscos en España’ (Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles (Huesca: Pedro Cabarte, 1612), 63v). 16 Pedro de Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España. Ed. Joaquín Gil Sanjuán (Málaga: Algazara, 1997). 17 ‘Enemigos declarados y manifiestos de toda cristiana Yglesia’ (Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 71). 18 See Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos españoles, especially 97v–159r; Fonseca, Justa expulsion de los moriscos de España; Jaime Bleda, Defensio fidei in causa neophytorum sive Morischorum Regni Valentiae, totiusq. Hispaniae (Valencia: Juan Crisóstomo Garriz, 1610), and Corónica de los moros de España; Marcos de Guadalajara, Memorable expulsión y justísimo destierro de los moriscos de España (Pamplona: Nicolás de Assiayn, 1613) and Prodición y destierro de los moriscos de Castilla, hasta elValle de Ricote (Pamplona: Nicolás de Assiayn, 1614). 19 Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 74 and 111. 20 Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 124–129. 21 Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 106. See Martín González de Cellorigo, Memorial de la política necesaria y útil restauración a la República de España, y estados de ella, y del desempeño universal de estos Reynos (Valladolid, 1600), at 6r–6v. 22 ‘En quanto a la complexión natural, y por el consiguiente en quanto al ingenio, condición y brío, son españoles como los demás que habitan en España, pues ha casi novecientos años, que nacen y se crían en ella, y se hecha de ver en la semejanza o uniformidad de los talles con los demás moradores de ella’ (Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 80–81). 23 Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 76–77. 24 See Trevor J. Dadson, Los moriscos de Villarrubia de los Ojos (Siglos XV-XVIII) (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2007), 106–107; and Miguel Romero Saiz, Mudéjares y Moriscos en Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca: Ediciones Llanura, 2007), 141–142. 25 For example, an affidavit by Joaquín Pérez stated the good Christianity of his Morisco neighbour Martín Alonso. According to Pérez: Martín ‘fasted during Lent, refrained from bad conversations, reprimanded those who swore, won indulgences and was admitted to the confraternity of Saint Lupercio, even though everyone knew he was a Morisco’ (quoted in James B. Tueller, Good and Faithful Christians (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2002), 203). 26 See David Coleman. Creating Christian Granada. Society and Religious Culture in an Old World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 66–67.

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27 Benjamin Ehlers has found instances in Valencia, such as the town of Buñol, where Islamic teachers or alfaquíes were responsible for leading putative Islamic rituals, delivering sermons (at his home), providing counsel on personal matters, and adjudicating in disputes between Moriscos (Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568–1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 30–35). Furthermore, Stephen Haliczer has observed that the rituals practiced by Valencians had become ‘decayed and watered down’ and bore little resemblance to the practice of their ancestors. Burial rituals practised by some Valencians, for instance, were described by Inquisitorial investigators as ‘ceremonies that they have introduced among themselves’, and not representative of traditional Islam (Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1990), 250). In a similar vein, Mercedes García-Arenal’s investigations in the archives of the Inquisition in Cuenca reveal that many of the Moriscos in Castile (probably granadinos transplants for the greater part) who were tried for being secret Muslims practised weakened forms of Islamic ablutions, fasts, prayers, and rituals of birth, marriage, and death (Mercedes García Arenal, Inquisición y moriscos. Los procesos del tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno, 1978), 10–23, 46–63). Whether Moriscos were keeping customs ‘properly’ or not, however, does not change the fact that they believed these customs were an intrinsic part of their inherited identity. 28 ‘Mas obstinados estos moriscos con los moros de Berveria’ (quoted in Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles, Vol. 1, 292). 29 Jaime Bleda, Defensio fidei, 583. 30 Matthew Carr, Blood and Faith:  The Purging of Muslim Spain (New  York:  New Press, 2009), 96–98. 31 See Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain:  Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1998), especially 3–56. 32 Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos, 136. 33 ‘Conserva la memoria de su antigua y dañada vida y seta’ (Felipe III, Pregmaticas y provisiones de su M. el Rey don Philippe nuestro señor, sobre la lengua y vestidos, y otras cosas que an de hazer los naturales deste Reyno de Granada (Granada: Hugo de Mena, 1567), no paging). I am thankful to María Antonia Garcés for kindly sharing her digital copy of the document. 34 ‘Por medio dela qual lengua retenian y conseruauan la memoria de su antigua y dañada seta y vida’ (Pregmaticas y provisiones, no paging). 35 ‘Para que en todo ansi en lo interior como en lo exterior, se conformassen con los verdaderos Christianos, y se perdiesse la memoria de su antigua vida y seta’ (Pregmaticas y provisiones, no paging). 36 Pregmaticas y provisiones, no paging. 37 For a detailed analysis of Muley Núñez’s letter, see Fuchs, ‘Virtual Spaniards’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2.1 (2001): 4–19. The entire memorial has been transcribed by K. Garrad and included in his article ‘The Original Memorial of Don Francisco Núñez Muley’, Atlante 2.4 (1954):  199–226, 225. See also Vicent Barletta, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Francisco Núñez Muley, Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada. Ed. and trans. Vincent Barletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1–54, at 8. 38 Fuchs, ‘Virtual Spaniards’, 18. 39 Núñez Muley, Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia, trans. Barletta, 72; ‘visto que desde treynta y çinco o quarenta años acá an vestido y visten y calçan áuito y calçado castellano, para que Su Magt. le uviera hecho merçedes de livertades, sus pechos y seruiçios, y de dalles liçencia general para traer armas. Pues no emos visto cosa alguna deste favor; paramos cada día peor y más maltratados en todo y por todas vías y modos, ansí por lo que tengo dicho por las justiçias seglares y sus ofiçiales, como por la esclesiástica; y esto es notorio y no tiene neçesidad de se hazer ynformación dello (Garrad, ‘The Original Memorial of Don Francisco Núñez Muley’, 212).

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40 A. Katie Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University, 2007), 24. 41 ‘No hacen nada como los cristianos, no participan de las ceremonias y creencias, y no se mezclan con los cristianos’ (14r–v). I am grateful to Antonio Feros for sharing with me a draft of his article ‘Retóricas de la expulsión’ (to be published) in which he includes this citation. His source is De los moriscos de España, por el padre Ignacio de las Casas (c.1605–1607) in the British Library (Ms. Add. 10238). 42 There were other counterproposals to the expulsion. Elizabeth Perry provides a good summary of them. Alonso Gutiérrez suggested Moriscos be prohibited from carrying arms and advocated the castration of Moriscos. He also proposed that Moriscos be divided according to lineages and placed under the supervision of an Old Christian chief. Manuel de Ponce de León, proposed that a tax be levied on Moriscos who got married, restricting the geographical movement of Moriscos, sending rebellious Moriscos to the galleys, taking their arms, and charging Moriscos for building and sustaining three strongholds in the Meditarranean. Nicolás del Río suggested sending all able Moriscos to the galleys and imprisoning all others (including women) perpetually (Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 143–145). Trevor J. Dadson focuses on anti-expulsion correspondence sent to the Court in ‘Official Rhetoric versus Local Reality:  Propaganda and the Expulsion of the Moriscos’, in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain. (Ed. Richard J. Pym (London: Tamesis, 2006), 1–25). 43 ‘Este es el fin de la dispersion … Y que no teniendo pueblo circundante de los de su nación y professión, con quien quiera ser honrados por Moros (como aora hacen) pretendan parecer fieles, y leales a los Cristianos Viejos y ganar honra con ellos, y para esto dexen de hablar Arábigo, y aborrezcan y olviden las ceremonias y costumbres, que los hacen conocidos, y procuren encubrirse, y parecer Cristianos viejos’ (Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos, 119). 44 ‘Total mezcla, que no se puede discernir ni distinguir qual es de aquesta, o aquella nación’ (Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos, 136). There had been unsuccessful attempts to encourage intermarriage (i.e., tax incentives) between Old Christians and the newly converted moriscos in Granada during the reign of Charles V (see Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del Quijote (Madrid: Taurus, 1975), 312). 45 Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos, 138. 46 Márquez Villanueva modulates his view of Valencia and recognises that Valencia’s views were far from promoting modern values of social inclusion (Personajes y temas del Quijote, 265–330). Grace Magnier idealises Valencia for his contention that the expulsion was both unethical and illegal (Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moriscos: Visions of Christianity and Kingship (Leiden: Brill, 2010)). 47 Mercedes García-Arenal goes as far as arguing that a significant number of Moriscos in Cuenca (who were likely to be transplants from Granada) identified themselves more as Moors than as Christians. Among others, she cites the case of one Morisca – Ana Padilla – who declared that she wished to perform Moorish rituals, but was not acquainted with any. Another Morisco confessed that he was baptised but ‘en su corazón era moro e queria mas ir con los moros que con los christianos e que no sabia cosa de Mahoma mas que queria creer en Mahoma’ (García-Arenal, Inquisición y moriscos, 86). 48 Fernand Braudel thinks that Philip III might have used the expulsion as a means to deflect attention from acquiescing to the Dutch in the Twelve Years Truce of 9 April 1609 (see Fernand Braudel, “Conflits et refus de civilisation:  espagnols et morisques au xvi siècle,” Annales ESC (1947): 397–410). 49 ‘Assigurandome que podia sin ningun escrupulo castigarlos en las vidas y haziendas, porque la continuacion de sus delitos los tenia conuencidos de hereges apostatas, y proditores de lesa Magestad diuina y humana’ (quoted in Mercedes García-Arenal, ‘Bando de Expulsion de los Moriscos de Valencia’, Los moriscos (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1975), 251–255, at 252). 50 The edicts of expulsion were dispatched in different stages:  the order against Valencian Moriscos was pronounced on 22 September 1609; the order against the Moriscos in

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Andalucía, Murcia, and Villa de Hornachos was pronounced on 18 January 1610; the order against Castilian Moriscos was pronounced on 12 January 1610; the order against Catalan Moriscos was pronounced on 17 April 1610; the order against Aragonese Moriscos was pronounced on 29 May 1610; and finally, the order against the Moriscos from Old Castile, New Castile, Extremadura, and La Mancha was pronounced on 10 July 1610. 51 The Moriscos of Murcia, most of whom were descendants of mudéjares who had lived peacefully in the region since the thirteenth century, were exempted from the order of expulsion until the end of 1613 (Charles Lea, The Moriscos of Spain, Vol. 3 (London:  Bernard Quaritch, 1901), 356). The order also made exceptions for Morisco priests, monks, nuns, and the Morisco wives of Old Christians and their children (Lea, The Moriscos of Spain, 352). Children under four could remain with the consent of their parents; children under six could stay along with their Morisco mothers if they had an Old Christian father. Moriscos who were married to Old Christian women were subjected to the order of expulsion. Their wives, on the other hand, had the option of remaining in Spain with any of their children who were younger than six years old (Lea, The Moriscos of Spain, 321). 52 On 20 February 1614 the Council of State decided to assume the expulsion completed and ignored pending cases of Moriscos found in hiding. The Council stated that ‘conviene al servicio de Dios y de V. Md. que cesen ya las delaciones y juridiciones que ay en esta materia de espulsion y que teniendola por concluyda se trate solamente de que no buelban los que han salido y castigar a los que lo hizieren por medio de las justicas ordinarias, poniendoles por capitulo de residencia la omision que en esto se tubiere, y que se ordene al conde de Salazar que alce la mano desta negociacion, y a todas las justicias que no admitan ninguna delacion de moriscos, si no fuere de los que huvieren buelto o bolvieren, como esta dicho, para castigarlos conforme a los bandos, y que los que el dia de oy no hoviesen salido de España, aunque esten sus causas pendientes, no sean molestados ni se hable en ello, porque si esto no se ataja, es cosa que nunca tendra fin, ni los agravios y ynconbenientes que dello resultarian’(Lapeyre, Geografía de la España morisca, 329). 53 Duque de Lerma (Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas), ‘Carta del rey al arzobispo de Granada sobre instituir una fiesta religiosa en celebridad de la expulsion de los moriscos’, Condición social de los moriscos de España. Ed. Florencio Janer, (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1857), 366–367. 54 Bleda, Defensio fidei, 595–596. 55 ‘Tan limpios de moriscos que en ellos no hubiese memoria de esta gente’ (quoted in Dadson, Los moriscos deVillarrubia de los Ojos, 395). 56 ‘En el Reino de Murcia, donde con mayor desvergüenza se han vuelto cuantos moriscos salieron, por la buena voluntad con que generalmente los reciben todos los naturales y los encubren los justicias … [E]‌n toda Andalucía por cartas del Duque de Medina Sidonia, y de otras personas se sabe que faltan por volverse solo los que han muerto en todos los lugares de Castilla la Vieja y la Nueva y la Mancha y Extremadura, particularmente en los de señorío se sabe que vuelven cada día muchos y que las justicias los disimulan … [L]as islas de Mallorca y de Menorca y las Canarias tienen muchos moriscos así de los naturales de las mismas islas como de los que han ido expelidos, en la corona de Aragón se sabe que fuera de los que se han vuelto y pasado de los de Castilla hay con permiso mucha cantidad de ellos y la que con las mismas licencias y con pruebas falsas se han quedado en España’ (Mercedes García-Arenal, Los moriscos (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1975), 267–269 at 268). Salazar had sent a letter of similar content earlier that year, on 13 February. 57 ‘Y yo … moriré sin ver mi tierra limpia desta mala semilla. No soy tan inhumano, que me pese, se ayan quedado tantos niños de moriscos, ni que aya jamas pretendido, los echen a tierras de infieles: lo que yo he sentido mucho, es que tantos moriscos grandes esten entre estos pequeños: porque les seran maestros de la secta, y les acordaran de como a sus padres los echaron, y les quitaron las casa, y campos: y que estan en Argel, llorándolos a ellos.Y su naturaleza es tan fragil, y malingna en esto, que con un silvo los tornaran Moros sus padres facilmente’ (Bleda, Defensio fidei, 1022–1023).

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58 Alos’s idea, which was dismissed by the Council of Aragón, was to take about 200,000 ducats from the ‘illegal’ Moriscos, and then send the Moriscos to row in the galleys (Joan Reglá Campistol, Estudios sobre los moriscos (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 74). 59 Lapeyre, Geografía de la España morisca, 235–240; Domínguez Ortiz, Historia de los moriscos, 177–200; Rahn Phillips, ‘The Moriscos of La Mancha, 1570–1614’, The Journal of Modern History 50.2 (1978): D1067–D1095); Mercedes García-Arenal, ‘Los moriscos del Campo de Calatrava después de 1610, según algunos procesos inquisitoriales’, Les cahiers de Tunisie 26 (1978):173–196. 60 Dadson, Los moriscos deVillarrubia de los Ojos, 560–576. 61 Dadson, Los moriscos deVillarrubia de los Ojos, 362; letter is transcribed at 954–955. 62 Dadson, Los moriscos deVillarrubia de los Ojos, 272–273; 53. 63 Trevor J. Dadson, “The Assimilation of Spanish Moriscos:  Fiction or Reality,” Journal of Levantine Studies 1.2 (2011): 11–30, at 25, emphasis added. 64 Dadson, Los moriscos deVillarrubias de los Ojos, 1135–1177. 65 Relaciones histórico-geográfico-estadísticas de los pueblos de España hechas por iniciativa de Felipe II:  Ciudad Real. Ed. Carmelo Viñas and Ramón Paz (Madrid:  Consejo Superior de Investigacines Científicas, 1971), 593–612, at 610–611. It should be noted that in Inquisition trials – as opposed to secular trials – people who made denunciations were not technically considered to be accusers, but witnesses (see Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer, ‘Introduction’, Inquisitorial Inquiries (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 1–20, at 15). 66 ‘Y esta testigo dijo que por qué no se las quitaban y daban a unos niños que andan por allí que no llevarlas a la tierra’ (1136). 67 ‘Lo llevaron tan desabridamente como lo han manifestado, pues de muy amigas son enemigas capitales’ (Dadson, Los moriscos deVillarrubias de los Ojos, 1152). 68 This is an example that follows Douglas’s view that ‘people really do think of their own social environment as consisting of other people joined or separated by lines which must be respected’. The Moriscas here become dangerous because because they first ‘crossed the line’ and second, they ‘endangered others’ (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 172). 69 I first found the reference and excerpts to this case in García-Arenal’s Inquisición and Moriscos, 140–150. This sizable case may be read in its entirety in the legajo 437, número 6169, in the Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca. 70 The case was closed on 21 January 1634. 71 This confession was made on 9 September 1633 (Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, legajo 437, número 6169, no paging). 72 The entire citation reads: ‘y que el pecado es que quando la expulsion de los moros salio este con los demas y los desembarcaron cerca de argel y enviaron los turcos de aquella ciudad y los llevaron a la mesma ciudad y los metieron en las taraçanas que son unas Casas Reales grandes donde estan las armas y tiros de artilleria y alli los yban mirando a todos los barones y los yban cortando el pellejo de las Berguenças’ (Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, legajo 437, número 6169, no paging). 73 ‘Después de vista esta deposicion de D. Francisco de Madrano me parece que hace algo en fabor deste reo en quanto dize de la circumcision violenta aunque este es solo un testigo que en ningun caso prueba enteramente especialmente en cosa poco probable por lo que tengo alegado’ (Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, legajo 437, número 6169, no paging). 74 García-Arenal, ‘Los moriscos del Campo de Calatrava, 173–184; Dadson, Los moriscos de Villarrubias de los Ojos, 459–465. 75 Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer, ‘A Captive’s Tale:  Diego Díaz’, Inquisitorial Inquiries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 147–179. 76 ‘Se haze credible la enemistad por ser los unos y los otros mesoneros y vecinos, que en gente vil engendraria embidias, y intereses de echar al otro del lugar’ (Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, legajo 437, número 6169, no paging).

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77 See James Scott, Domination and the Arts of the Weak (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1990), 142 and 144. 78 ‘Manchar su sangre, siendo como era gente limpia; que una gota de sangre suya se podía calificar sus partes’ (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14. 1632; Image 7 right). 79 ‘Buena reputación, buena fama, crédito y opinión, y por limpios y de buena calidad’ (Image 4, right). This was Fabiana Florín’s statement made in 1628 to the local court in Villaseca de la Sagra. Isabel recalled her sister’s statement verbatim. 80 ‘Sin mácula ni mezcla de moros, ni judíos, ni penitenciados por el Santo Oficio de la Santa Inquisición, y no tienen otra raza’ (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14. 1632; Image 4, left side). 81 ‘Es muy moza … no sabe nada de linajes’ (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14. 1632; Image 4, left side). 82 ‘Cristianos viejos, descendientes de tales, y por limpios de toda mala raza de moros y judíos y penitenciados por el Santo Oficio, ni de los nuevamente convertidos a nuestra santa fe católica’ (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14. 1632, Image 7, right). 83 ‘Se tracte y desdiga de las palabras de injuria que dijo contra los dichos Francisco y Luis Gómez, su hijo, y Lucas Gómez’ (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14, 1632, Image 7, right). 84 Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, caja 2566, 14, 1632, 10 right). 85 Each of the sisters was also sentenced to pay a fine of 2,000 maravedís. 86 One of the suggestions made by the Consejo de Guadalajara sent to the king in 1598 was that Moriscos be ordered to perform only agricultural work. A proposal states that Moriscos ‘se hacen ricos y poderosos; y a esta causa demas de los ynconbinientes que pueden resultar que este genero de gente este con caudales grandes … y por ser como son de si codiçiosos y allegadores seria de mucho aprobechamyento acudir a las labores de los canpos y criar ganados … e ynclinados a esto se estorbaria de que obiesse tanto comercio y correspondencia entre si mismos como ahora de presente an proque la causa o achaque de traxinar con pasaportes se conumican y tratan acudiendo a los de su naçion y hordenandose e mandandose que los dichos naturales del Reyno de Granada y sus descendientes listen en sus repartimientos y beçindades y no traten ny contraten y que solo se puedan ocupar en labrar tierras’ (García-Arenal, Los moriscos, 71). 87 ‘Que los Christianos viejos quedasen siempre muy superiores’ (Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles, Vol. 2, 110 and 459–460).

6 Desirable Moors and Moriscos in literary texts

The notion that the foreign Moor, a patently different individual in the context of Old Christian society, was less threatening than the Morisco, an ambiguous member of the Spanish body politic who embodied both Moorish and Old Christian cultural marks, is represented in a number of literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the most part, early modern Spanish prose and poetry depicts the Moor as a depraved, unscrupulous, and fundamentally unredeemable figure. There are a number of notable texts, however, in which he appears romanticised in the form of a caballero whose courage, virtuousness, and capacity to love evoke his Christian counterpart.1 Georges Cirot coined the term ‘literary maurophilia’ in the 1940s to describe the tendency of the latter texts to idealise Moorish characters, especially the Moors of Nasrid Granada.2 I apply the term to describe discursive situations in which a Moorish character is idealised, irrespective of the motives of the author, but unlike Cirot, I limit my analysis of literary maurophilia to works that revolve around Moorish characters of unquestionable exemplarity.3 Texts of literary maurophilia include: the anonymous novel, Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa (History of Abencerraje and the beautiful Jarifa) (1561/1562/1565); the so-called romances of Moriscos produced in the sixteenth century and eventually compiled in the Romancero general (General Collection of Ballads) (1600); the first part of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (The Civil Wars of Granada) (1595);4 Mateo Alemán’s story about Ozmín and Daraja, which is intercalated in his Guzmán de Alfarache (1599); and Miguel de Cervantes’s tale of the captive in Algiers in the first part of Don Quijote (1605) and the story about the Morisca Ana Félix (1615) in the second part of the novel. María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti has pointed out in her influential study of the Moorish figure in Golden Age prose that the Moor of maurophilic works exhibits characteristics that echo Spanish Aristocratic customs, though they are ‘slightly modified by an occasional exotic note’.5 Along these lines, it should be pointed out that the Moorish protagonists in these texts fully embrace their

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inherited identity and show no interest in disrupting the established order in Christian and/or Spanish society. Even in cases in which the Moorish protagonists possess the ability to impersonate their Christian enemies, they do not challenge the social rank of dominant Christians. In Alemán’s interpolated tale, for example, the noble Moor Ozmín successfully passes for an ex-Christian captive, so as to enter into the service of the household where his promised future wife, Daraja, has been taken captive.6 Although he cannot hide his aristocratic nature (as observed by one of his masters), he keeps his performance confined to the role of servant and remains subservient to his Christian masters. Daraja also has the capacity to impersonate Old Christians. Her captors delight at knowing that she could theoretically pass for an Old Christian. She can speak Spanish like a native speaker, and she is endowed with the appropriate physique to look beautiful in Christian attire. Daraja’s near-sameness, however, is not threatening to the other Old Christian characters because her Moorish identity is never contested, and, given her confinement, she lacks the agency to effectuate the hypothetical passing. The anonymous novel, Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa (History of Abencerraje and the beautiful Jarifa) (1561/1562/1565) could be seen as the definitive text that catered to some Spaniards’s taste for narratives about exemplary and sentimental Moors.7 Three versions of the Abencerraje were published at around the same time. Parte de la Corónica del ínclito infante don Fernando que ganó Antequera (Part of the Chronicle of the Renowned Prince Don Fernando who Won Antequera) was printed in the format of a historical account in 1561. Jorge de Montemayor included it as an intercalated story in the second edition of his pastoral novel Los siete libros de la Diana (The Seven Books of Diana) (1562). Finally, Antonio de Villegas’s version was published 1565 in his miscellaneous collection of prose and poetry, Inventario (Inventory). There is congruence across the three versions in terms of the depiction of the main characters and the basic storyline, which takes place along the Christian–Muslim frontier in Granada sometime before its final conquest. The main plot of the narrative essentially concerns the Moor Abindarráez – a nobleman – who is on his way to meet his bride-to-be when he is caught in a skirmish with the Christian alcaide (governor), Rodrigo de Narváez. Narváez overpowers him and takes him prisoner. Upon noticing that his prisoner appears to be exceptionally melancholic, Narváez inquires about the cause for the melancholy. Abindarráez explains to Narváez that he is stricken by grief because he will not be able to reunite with his betrothed Jarifa in Coín, where she is waiting to secretly marry him. Abindarráez further tells the Christian knight that he and Jarifa have concealed their love from her father, because Abindarráez’s clan  – the noble Abencerrajes  – has fallen out of political favour in their home city of Granada. When Narváez learns that the Moor is more devastated about his

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inability to fulfil his promise to his beloved than about his imprisonment, he makes a pact to release him under the condition that he will return to his prison within three days. The noble Moor agrees and then meets his beloved in her castle in Coín. After an emotional encounter and the consummation of their relationship, Abindarráez delivers the news to Jarifa that he must keep his promise to Narváez and return to captivity. Realising that her lover cannot be dissuaded, Jarifa resolves to join him in his imprisonment. Witnessing the Moor fulfilling his promise, the Christian knight not only releases him and his bride to their freedom, he also secures the King of Granada’s approval for the lovers to be officially married. The Abencerraje stimulated early modern writers to produce a significant number of ballads or romances about its main subject and characters in the sixteenth century. Carrasco Urgoiti conjectures that the commercial success of Abencerraje might explain the multiplication of romances with idealised Moorish subjects between 1575 and 1585. About 40 per cent of the nine parts of the collection of ballads of Pedro de Moncayo’s Flor de varios romances nuevos (Flower of various new romances) (1589–1597) could be categorised as maurophilic.8 The Romancero general (General Collection of Ballads) (1600) included 210 ballads that fall into this subcategory.9 Some of these were romances fronterizos (frontier ballads), which were new variants of medieval ballads about life in the Christian–Moorish frontier and had been largely shaped through oral transmission. The new romances were more highly stylised than their predecessors and were composed by individual authors, the most famous among them being Lope de Vega and Luis de Góngora.10 The authors of the new ballads sought to give readers and listeners the illusion that they were collective works because they were published anonymously in pliegos sueltos (leaflets) and in anthologies of poems. The most common themes developed in the poems are the experiences of unrequited love, the separation of lovers, and physical confrontations in war or in equestrian games between groups of Moors or between Moors and Christians. The protagonists of these romances are always Iberian Moors of noble rank and their antagonists could be either Moorish or Christian knights. The romances presume that the reader or listener is acquainted with the archetype of the noble Moor and only faintly evoke the period (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) in which the events take place. Critics have pointed out that Spaniards might have been attracted to literary maurophilia because it allowed them to negotiate the Moorish threat by allaying cultural difference and by focusing on the honourable values that were shared by Moors and Christians alike.11 More recently, Barbara Fuchs has observed that maurophilia  – not only in textual but also in material forms – questions the polarisation of the Moor–Christian binary. She argues that the Abencerraje not only conveys the possibility of greater tolerance for

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Moorish Spaniards, but also advocates for the inclusion of Moorish features in Spanish identity. Fuchs contends that maurophilia ‘should be read not as a counternationalist discourse but rather as an alternative vision of the Spanish nation, predicated on a particular version of Spain’s Moorish past, and on the privileging of often aristocratic compatibility over the suspicion of religious difference’.12 But while these texts might privilege ‘aristocratic compatibility’ between Moorish and Christian protagonists, they also always underline the cultural difference of the Moor. I conjecture that the Moor’s nobility is conveyed as being compatible with the nobility of the Christian precisely because he is defined as a foreign subject and a follower of Islam. In the Abencerraje, the Moor’s cultural difference is undeniably conspicuous. Audiences are encouraged to gaze at the Moor, and to be astonished by his graceful demeanour, beauty, and exotic apparel. The main character, Abindarráez, is first presented through the perspective of Narváez and his soldiers. Hidden in trees, the Christians of the story are impressed with their prey: a handsome Moor mounted on a roan horse; he was of considerable size and had a beautiful face, and he rode the horse well. He wore a crimson marlota [Moorish gown] and a long cloak of damask of the same colour, embroidered all over in gold and silver. He had the image of a beautiful lady embroidered on his right sleeve, and in his hand he held a two-headed lance. He carried a shield and a scimitar, and on his head he wore a Tunisian turban that he wound around multiple times and served him as embellishment and protection of his person.13

In the tradition of romances fronterizos, both Pérez de Hita and the authors of romances moriscos show a fascination with the luxury items worn or carried by the noble Moor. For instance, in a ballad authored by Lucas Rodríguez, the body of Abindarráez is adorned with precious metals and stones.14 The harness of his horse is golden, as are his spurs and the handle of his dagger. His blue marlota is embroidered with fine silver, which is as striking as the splendid gold ornaments that decorate his headdress. As the Christian poet of the ballad and the narrator of the Abencerraje gaze at Abindarráez’s seductive foreign body, they manifest a direct connection between the Moor’s nobility, his exoticism, and his desirability. Rodríguez’s poem, unlike prose versions of the story, describes a fight between Narváez and an uninjured Abindarráez. In Rodríguez’s rendition, Abindarráez loses his skirmish because he had overestimated his competency to fight against the Christian knight.15 The Moor here is the strongest and bravest of all Moors, yet still not quite comparable to Narváez. He does not pose a danger to Christians because, as observed by Carrasco Urgoiti, Abindarráez does not show ‘ambitions of power or of fame, engrossed as he is in his love for Jarifa’.16 Abindarráez’s response to Narváez’s request that he surrender shows that he is not a willing opponent. ‘You could as well kill me,’ says the Moor to the Christian, ‘but the only one who can defeat me is the one who

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already defeated me before.’17 He is a lover, not a warrior, a point that Lope de Vega underlines in his rendition of the story, in which Abindarráez explains his weakened state as ‘feminine frailty’.18 As William Childers reminds us, Moorish knights appear to be more preoccupied with matters relating to love and gallantry than with ‘practical and military considerations’.19 In the end, it is his Christian captor who is shown to be magnanimous in victory, securing the King of Granada’s approval for Abindarráez’s marriage to Jarifa. Rather than projecting an image of a Spain that more fully embraces its Moorishness, the Abencerraje and subsequent maurophilic texts function as a means for providing Spanish readers with a noble, definable, and unthreatening Moor who is ultimately domesticated by the Christian knight. While in the Abencerraje the subordination of the Moor by the Christian is implied through his figurative emasculation, in Pérez de Hita’s first part of Guerras civiles de Granada subordination is fully materialised by the Moors’s conversion to Christianity at the end of the novel. Pérez de Hita, a shoemaker from Murcia who had participated in the war of the Alpujarras against the Morisco dissidents, never associates the noble Granadan Moors with the rebels he fought against in the first instalment of his work. Guerras civiles de Granada is, essentially, the story of the tyranny of King Boabdil, known as ‘el rey Chico’ (the Little King), which led Moorish Granada into a civil conflict between Boabdil and his faction of Zegríes and the Abencerrajes. According to Pérez de Hita, the clash begins when King Boabdil is purposely misled by the Zegríes into believing that his wife, ‘la reina sultana’ (the Queen Sultana), was having an affair with Albinhamad Abencerraje and planning to overthrow the king. The gullible Boabdil orders to have more than thirty of the knights in the Abencerraje clan decapitated, all of whom convert to Christianity before they die. As a result, the leaders of the surviving Abencerrajes also express a wish to become Christians. They write to King Fernando and ask him for protection: ‘we want to be Christians and die in the same holy faith held by you and your people. And, in order to achieve this we want to know if it is in your will to admit us under your protection and to have us in your service.’20 Don Fernando responds affirmatively to the Abencerrajes’s request and the former enemies become officers of the Christians Don Manuel Ponce de León and Don Alonso Aguilar. It is apparent that the narrator conveys the notion that the most appealing Moorish knights of Granada – Abenámar, Sarrazino, and Reduán – offered Granada to the Catholic kings. That the queen sultana secretly converts to Christianity and joins the dissidents further supports Pérez’s imagined world, in which all of the ‘good’ Moors have repudiated their tyrant ruler and wish to be governed by the just Catholic Monarchs. The narrative is interspersed with ballads, some of which were authored by Pérez de Hita himself. Diane Sieber and Carrasco Urgoiti have convincingly

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argued that many of the novel’s events were selected from ballads and taken from the old and new romancero. The first half of the novel focuses heavily on equestrian games and matters of romantic love between Moors. The second half deals with physical confrontations on the battlefield between the Zegríes and allies, and the Abencerrajes and the Christians. The Christian conversion of noble Moors also occurs with greater frequency in the latter part of the novel. Besides drawing upon Moorish ballads for his sources, Pérez de Hita probably used parts of Hernando del Pulgar’s Crónica de los Reyes Católicos (Chronicle of the Catholic Monarchs) (1545), Pedro del Corral’s Crónica Sarracina (Saracen Chronicle) (1499), Esteban de Garibay’s Compendio historial de todos los reinos de España (Compendium of the Universal History of all the Kingdoms of Spain) (1571), and Miguel de Luna’s La verdadera historia del rey Don Rodrigo (The True History of King Don Rodrigo) (1592).21 In the Nasrid Granada of Pérez de Hita, opponents are as courteous in equestrian festivals and jousts as in actual battles. Many parts of Guerras civiles de Granada evoke the chivalric motifs of the Abencerraje. The magnificence of the Christian is personified in Don Rodrigo Téllez Girón, the Master of Calatrava, who stops duelling with Muza, the half-brother of Boabdil, at a tournament when he senses that his opponent is no longer physically able to fight; he does this to earn the Moor’s friendship. In turn, Muza, like Abindarráez, shows his admiration for the Master of Calatrava, which he conveys in the old ballad ‘Ah, God, what a good knight / the Master of Calatrava’.22 He will, again, exhibit his superior morality by showing compassion for Moors who wish to convert to Christianity. After mortally wounding Albayaldos in a battle, the Master baptises him in a spontaneous ritual as the Moor confesses his desire to die a Christian. Albayaldos’s conversion indeed foreshadows the eventual Christianisation of all of the Moorish knights in Granada who willingly accept the hegemony of the Crown of Castile by the end of the volume. After the Moors have fallen, the narrator cites a well-known romance fronterizo in which King Boabdil bemoans the loss of Alhama. In this version of Boabdil’s grieving, a wise old Moor reminds him that he lost Alhama because he sided with the Zegríes and killed many of the Abencerrajes: ‘For this reason you deserve, King / A double penalty: / The loss of yourself and the kingdom / And the loss of Granada.’23 King Boabdil is blamed for the end of Moorish Granada, and, with it, the end of acceptable Moorishness.The Moor’s sigh, ‘Oh, my Alhama!’ hints at the genesis of a post-reconquest Granada, a hybridised space inhabited not by Moors, but by Moriscos with ambiguous identities and religious loyalties.24 The motif of Moorish emasculation is quite palpable in Pérez de Hita’s work. Queen Isabel is described immediately prior to entering Granada as yearning to finally seize its symbol of power, La Alhambra. Pérez de Hita’s narrator explains that after admiring the beauty of the fortress, the castle, its

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towers, and walls, the queen ‘wished to see herself inside it and very soon call it hers’.25 The queen’s gaze on the coveted fortress, which is gendered as female, reminds the reader of the desirable body of the Moor in the novel as analogously exotic and conquerable. Comparable to preceding works of literary maurophilia, the dress of the Christian knights is rarely the focus of attention.26 The garb of the Moorish knights, both Abencerrajes and Zegríes, is depicted with precision and great detail. The impression given to the sixteenth-century reader was that while Christians use clothing functionally, in order to help them win battles (i.e., bearing a red cross on their chest), Moors dress simply to impress, like women. The recurring characterisation of the garments of Moorish knights emphasises luxurious fabrics such as silk, velvet, and damask, colourful accessories, and headgear with feathers and golden embroidery. The weapons of the Moors are also depicted as aesthetic objects. Their exoticism is emphasised at the end of the war, when the Moorish arms are collected and exhibited at the Alhambra.27 The feminisation of the Moor, furthermore, is presented as self-produced. Suffering a defeat at the hands of the Catholic kings, Boabdil bemoans the loss of his kingdom. Boabdil’s mother then bluntly declares ‘that since he had been unable to defend it like a man, it was appropriate to cry for it like a woman’.28 The Moors are defined in contrast to the Christians: they are noble but exotic, strong but feminised, and willing to be conquered. From loyal Moor to problematised Morisco in the second part of Guerras civiles de Granada and El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra The first part of Pérez de Hita’s novel – as well as the Abencerraje and the Morisco ballads of the romancero – conveys the message that an honourable and identifiable enemy could be turned into a trustworthy subject, whereas the second instalment of Guerras civiles de Granada implies that a deceitful and inconstant subject is always an enemy. The second part of Guerras civiles de Granada (1604) is indeed strikingly different from the previous part in its subject and depiction of Moorish characters, who are now no longer noble Moors, but subjected Moriscos. And in the same vein as most literary Moriscos who appear in post-expulsion texts, they are portrayed as potential false Christians at best, and, at worst, as diabolical creatures. The central events that drive this part of the novel are: the rebellion of the Moriscos; the battles between the Moriscos and the king’s army, which is led by his brother Don Juan de Austria; the Moriscos’s defeat; and finally, the Moriscos’s forced exile from Granada and relocation to Castile. If there are any remnants of maurophilia, they are

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extremely tenuous or accidental. In contrast to the first part of Guerras, there are fewer interpolated ballads, and none of them deal with the chivalry of the Moors or their irresistible exoticism.With the exception of the Morisco Tuzaní, the heroes of the second part are now the Old Christians, while the antagonists are the Moriscos who have reneged on their loyalty to the Catholic faith and have led a revolt in the Alpujarras. Published at a time when anti-Morisco sentiments were intensifying, it is transparent from the outset of the narration that Pérez de Hita no longer idealises his Moorish characters. Both the Old Christians and the Moriscos in the novel have deeply flawed personalities. But while the Old Christians’s adherence to the true faith legitimises their exertion of violence upon the Moriscos, the unreliable religious and political loyalties of the Moriscos render their violent actions censurable. In the first part of the novel, civil wars are the result of envy and rivalries over love-interests among noble Moors. By contrast in the second part, the conflicts between the Moriscos and the Christians that lead to the rebellion in the Alpujarras Mountains are the consequence of the ‘mortal hatred of the Moors against the Christian faction’.29 As is the case in extant post-expulsion texts, the Moriscos are repeatedly associated with the devil. The description of the Morisco dissidents is an oversimplified reminder of the Moorish stereotypes found in anti-Morisco texts. They are said to bear an infernal fury and be inspired by the devil in their daring actions against the Christians.30 What makes the Moriscos of the second part particularly threatening to the Old Christians are their secretive ways and ability to deceive. Pérez de Hita draws attention to the dangerous connivance of the Moriscos from the beginning of his text, when the narrator explains: ‘the Moors did not stop to lay harm on the Christians in secret.’31 It should be highlighted that the word secreto is used to describe the anti-Christian scheming of the Moors at least another eighteen times in the second part of the novel. In Pérez de Hita’s sequel, the only Morisco protagonist who is portrayed in a relatively favourable light is Tuzaní. Carrasco Urgoiti and others have suggested that Pérez de Hita inscribes an implicit plea for empathy for Moriscos in the story of Tuzaní.32 But if Pérez de Hita’s intention was to portray a sympathetic Morisco character that stands apart from numerous malicious traitors, he was not fully successful. A close analysis of the character of Tuzaní reveals him to be an admirable lover, but inconstant in temperament and self-serving. His only loyalty is to the woman he loves, Maleha, whose image he idolises and always carries with him. His resolute devotion to Maleha, however, only draws attention to his uncertain religious and ethnic loyalties, which appear to change according to need. Readers are first introduced to the legend of Tuzaní when the narrator of the Guerras describes Don Juan’s devastating takeover of the town of Galera.33

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Since Maleha is in Galera at the time of the seizure, her brother Maleh, the captain of the Moorish army in Purchena, seeks out a particular soldier to learn if his sister is among the dead or has been taken captive. In the interpolated ballad about the episode, Maleh’s personality is depicted as uncontrollable. He avows that in order to learn what happened to his sister, he ‘would sacrifice / a Christian Virgin’.34 Maleh’s words remind the reader that the Morisco is a lower-status progeny of the noble Moor of the first part of the novel, in which not even the Moor Boabdil is given such a crude portrayal. The young soldier Tuzaní, who had been secretly engaged to Maleha, volunteers to embark on a mission to find her. But what Tuzaní does not reveal to Maleh is that if Maleha has indeed been taken captive, he plans ‘to throw himself at Master Don Juan de Austria’s feet, offer to be his slave, and rescue his mistress to marry her and to stay in Huéscar or go on to live in Murcia’.35 In the end, Tuzaní does not carry out his plan because when he arrives in Galera, he finds Maleha dead among countless corpses. She lies dressed in her undergarments, a sign that she has not been raped, though she has been stabbed twice in the chest. After burying her, the Moor writes an epitaph in which he vows to kill the ‘Christian dog’ who murdered his lady.36 Tuzaní’s grief and thirst for revenge is highlighted again in the ballad when he pledges yet again to kill the Christian soldier who stabbed Maleha. At this point in the story, we learn that Tuzaní poses as an Old Christian soldier and that, with Maleh’s permission, he joins Don Juan’s army. He infiltrates the army of the Spanish king because ‘he was courageous, very shrewd, and Hispanicised in such a manner that nobody could judge that he was a Morisco, for he had been raised by Old Christians’.37 As he seeks out Maleha’s killer, he learns the soldiers’s passcode ‘Santa María’, and reveals it to the Morisco leader of Tíjola, the fortress besieged by Old Christians. With the passcode, and under Tuzani’s watch, a massive number of Moriscos in Tíjola escape the siege in the darkness of the night. During this escape, some of the Old Christian soldiers hear unidentified noises and suspect that something might be amiss, but Tuzaní convinces them that the sounds are of crumbling rocks. By the time the Christians discover the massive exodus that is underway, it is too late; 2,000 Moriscos have already passed through the Old Christian blockade. The successful passing of the Moriscos through the Christian camp is possible because, in the darkness, the Old Christians are unable to see the Moriscos. Towards the end of the narrative we learn from Tuzaní that, on a separate occasion, Captain Maleh had also infiltrated the Christian camp in order to gauge the strength of the enemy. The ability of the Moriscos to slip in and out of the Christian army draws attention to the danger of having one’s enemies shielded by ethnic invisibility. From his experience as a soldier in the same civil conflict that he fictionalises, Pérez de Hita makes the case that the most formidable enemies are those who can masquerade as allies.

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Tuzaní exploits his own religio-cultural malleability in order to stay embedded in the Old Christian camp without rousing any suspicions. Moreover, Tuzaní is described as being able to adopt different personalities, depending on need. For example, in order to find Maleha’s killer, Tuzaní disguises himself as an intrepid Moor-slayer. He befriends as many soldiers as possible and relates fabricated stories about his unwavering ability to kill Moors to them. At one point, a soldier named Francisco Garcés interrupts Tuzaní and censures him for killing women, and hence for his lack of compassion. This soldier then confesses to having killed one woman in Galera, an act that he regrets and for which he has suffered emotionally. As Garcés describes his victim, Tuzaní realises the person Garcés murdered was Maleha. After confirming his suspicions, he leads Garcés to a field outside the Christian camp, reveals that he was the promised husband of the murdered woman, and then mortally stabs him twice in his chest, which is the same way that the soldier had killed Maleha. Before he dies, Garcés informs his peers that the person who stabbed him is a Morisco disguised as an Old Christian, but no one suspects that that Morisco could be Tuzaní. Tuzaní is finally revealed when a renegade Morisco from his town pretends to be his ally, but instead informs Don Juan de Austria of his true identity. By exposing another Morisco who is attempting to pass for a Christian, the renegade is intent on proving that he himself is not trying to pass for one. Having been exposed as a Morisco to Don Juan, Tuzaní narrates his life – he provides details that are as surprising to the king’s brother as they are to readers. The Morisco explains that his intent had not been to deceive the Old Christians; instead, he was single-handedly acting as a pro-Old Christian double-agent. He tells Don Juan that his goal had been to incentivise the Moriscos to evaluate Tíjola in order to facilitate its takeover by the Old Christians. He also confesses that he and Maleha had been secret Christians and were planning to escape together to Murcia, a plan that was thwarted when she was killed. Under the influence of his captain Don Lope de Figueroa, Don Juan is persuaded by Tuzaní’s story and absolves him both of killing Garcés and of assisting the flight of Moriscos of Tíjola. Tuzaní vows to serve in the king’s army under the guidance of Don Lope, which he does until Don Lope’s death. To demonstrate his devotion to the Old Christian cause, he changes his name to Fernando de Figueroa, in honour of the Catholic king and his new master Don Lope de Figueroa. Although Pérez de Hita attempts to cast Tuzaní in a sympathetic light at the end of the story, it is likely that careful readers would deem the Morisco protagonist to be highly untrustworthy. Tuzaní’s explanation might have convinced Don Juan and Don Lope, but it cannot be completely corroborated by what the readers have already witnessed at earlier stages in the story. That is, the narrator had mentioned earlier that Tuzaní was raised by Old Christians as a

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child and not by Moriscos. Readers may have surmised that by the time Tuzaní joins the Morisco army under Maleh, he had abandoned his Christian faith and upbringing. Moreover, before Tuzaní leaves Galera to find Maleh, he states that he is ready to retake the Christian faith if it will help him to reunite with his beloved. But having found Maleha killed by a Christian soldier, he returns to Purchena and informs Captain Maleh that he will infiltrate Don Juan’s army in order to find Maleha’s killer. Tuzaní secretly allows Maleh to enter and inspect the Christian camp, a deed that casts some suspicion on his proclaimed loyalty to the Old Christians. Readers might also recall that the passcode Tuzaní reveals to the Moriscos is ‘Santa María’, an insinuation of   Tuzaní’s betrayal of the Christian faith. Furthermore, Tuzaní’s assertion that aiding the escape of the Moriscos of Tíjola was really a ruse to help the Old Christians’s entry into the fortress seems at odds with the narrator’s description that T   uzaní’s act of revealing the password is ‘full of malice’, ‘badly intended’, and for a ‘malevolent objective’.38 Finally, Tuzaní’s ‘confession’ is a virtually uninterrupted monologue, in contrast to the narrator’s third-person account of his supposed disloyalty.39 The incongruities of Pérez de Hita’s conclusion to the story point to uncertainties about Tuzaní’s identity. Is he a Christian renegade, a Muslim renegade, a Christian masquerading as a Muslim renegade, or a Muslim posing as a Christian renegade? Is his description of his faith authentic or is it an act of self-fashioning necessary in order to escape persecution? Whether intended or not, Pérez de Hita’s story might have reminded Old Christians that Moriscos could easily permeate ethnic and cultural boundaries, and both physically and culturally resemble Old Christians. Pedro Calderón de la Barca was probably aware of this undesirable characterisation of Tuzaní, and attempted to refashion him in a way that was more adequate for his Old Christian audience in his play El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra (Tuzaní from the Alpujarra) (c.1633, also known as Amar después de la muerte (Love After Death)).40 El Tuzaní may be read as the dramatist’s corrective retelling of Pérez de Hita’s legend of Tuzaní to an audience that felt uncomfortable with the ambiguous identities that arose in that version of the story. In Calderón’s drama, the tension between Moriscos and Old Christians rises out of the inability of the highly ranked Old Christians to recognise the members of the Morisco nobility as their social equivalents. Unable to succumb to the infeasible demands of the Old Christians, the noble Moriscos mobilise their followers into forming a separate nation. They abandon Christianity, give up their Christian names, and proceed to dress in Moorish fashion; that is, they give up any superficial marks that might identify them as normative Spaniards. In the midst of war against the Old Christians, Tuzaní (formerly Don Álvaro), whom Calderón imagines as a noble Morisco, marries Maleca (formerly Doña Isabel, Pérez de Hita’s Maleha), though soon after the nuptials they are ordered to separate by their king, Abenumeya (formerly Don Fernando Valor). As Don Juan de Austria’s

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troops rapidly advance into the Alpujarras Mountains and the Moriscos must split their forces, Tuzaní is sent to lead the defence of Gavia while Maleca follows her father Malec (formerly Don Juan, Perez de Hita’s Maleh) who is to lead the defence of Galera. The Old Christian army is eventually able to enter Galera and devastate its Morisco residents. One of the victims of the sack is Maleca, who is discovered by Tuzaní as she is taking her last breath. An incensed Tuzaní swears to kill the Spanish soldier that killed his lover, and from that point on his only goal is to avenge her death. Tuzaní’s determination leads him to pose for a Spanish soldier along with his servant Alcuzcuz and to find Maleca’s killer – Garcés – in the Spanish camp. Once the unsuspecting Garcés confesses to Tuzaní that he killed Maleca, the Morisco discloses his identity and kills him. As Tuzaní is surrounded by Spanish soldiers, he learns that Abenumeya has been killed by his own men and that the remaining Moriscos have decided to surrender to Don Juan de Austria. Tuzaní, as a renewed subject of the King of Spain, is pardoned for his crime, which Don Juan de Austria proclaims as an honourable deed that is worth commemoration.41 In the last couple of decades, scholarship has typically accepted the premise that Calderón’s play responds to the increasing social marginalisation of the Moriscos in the sixteenth century. For several critics, the play contains a veiled attack on the Crown’s discourse against cultural difference and, more specifically, on its polarised view that Moriscos had to be either absorbed into normative Christian society or definitively expelled. While I do acknowledge that Calderón’s play draws attention to the shared values between Moriscos and Old Christians and to the impossibility of setting them apart in some cases, I argue that the play ultimately conveys the message that social stability in Spain can only be accomplished by upholding the pre-established social order. As it is often the case in the Spanish comedia, Calderón contrives a highly charged situation that exposes the inherent complexities in rigid systems of beliefs, only to settle it through convention and over-simplification. Diane Sieber’s insightful reading of the play focuses on the ambiguities that characterise not only the Moriscos, but also the Old Christians themselves. She interprets that the figurative correspondence between the Morisco protagonist (Tuzaní) with the hybrid mythological Minotaur and between the Christian hero (Don Juan de Austria) with Theseus is subverted in the play. Sieber observes that towards the middle of the play the correspondence is replaced with a new analogy in which the Christian soldier Garcés is portrayed as the barbaric monster of uncertain identity and Tuzaní as the hero who defeats him. For Sieber, the supposed paradigm in which the Old Christians must destroy the monstrous Moriscos is corrupted in order to reveal the very fact that such binary myths cannot be faithfully narrated in the first place. The play, as Sieber points out, exposes the faulty cultural system of identification espoused by the

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Crown as the root cause for the tension between Old Christians and others.42 Margaret Greer’s reading follows a similar vein, although she more decisively views Calderón as having the political intent of censuring the administration of Philip III. Whereas Sieber focuses on the imprecise identities of both Old Christians and Moriscos, Greer draws more attention to the cultural sameness shared by these two groups. As Sieber and Greer observe, Calderón’s play emphasises the unviability of a social system that relies on flawed notions of human categorisation. But in the play this fundamental fallacy is either ignored or suppressed by the Old Christian elite, who throughout the play strain to demarcate themselves from the Moriscos. One of Greer’s most compelling points is that Calderón assigned the name of Don Juan to three principal characters in the play in order to draw attention to the fact that, despite their ethnicities, they are all Christian Spaniards. She suggests that this was Calderón’s deliberate attempt to emphasise that the Morisco Don Juan Malec as well as the Old Christians Don Juan Mendoza and Don Juan de Austria were rightful subjects of the king.43 Calderón’s ultimate intent in having three of his noble characters named Don Juan is unknowable, but it is probable that, as Greer has noted, it was to underline their comparable social positions. I propose, nonetheless, that in the play these names and what they represent – the theoretical social parity of Moriscos and Old Christians – is a reflection of an unbearable anxiety felt by Christians of the time, and that it is this anxiety, the anxiety of sameness, that leads them to push the Moriscos to revolt. Although Calderón follows Pérez de Hita, as well as historians Luis de Mármol y Carvajal and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in attributing the dissent of the Granadan Moriscos to Philip II’s Pragmática of 1566, he deviates from his sources by fabricating the specific instance when the Moriscos are compelled to secede from the Old Christians. In effect, the triggering event in Calderón’s play is a heated altercation between the alcalde Don Juan Malec (prior to renouncing his Christian name) and the councilman Don Juan de Mendoza at an official meeting that included a pronouncement of Philip II’s edict (1566) prohibiting all major displays of Morisco culture. Don Juan Malec protests the edict, not because he himself wants to preserve Morisco culture, but because he finds it inconceivable that Moriscos would be able to give up their entrenched habits and traditions due to the fury of the Old Christians.44 When Don Juan de Mendoza insults his counterpart by calling all Moriscos ‘vile, common, and lowborn’,45 Don Juan Malec corrects him by reminding him that the noble Moors who had voluntarily converted to Christianity were allowed to retain their social status. Malec adds with pride that ‘Moorish [knights] do not owe / anything to Christian knights / since the day they accepted / the water of baptism’.46 Don Juan Malec then reminds Don Juan de Mendoza that he is himself a descendant of Granadan Kings. But the Old

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Christian refuses to acknowledge the nobility of Malec and implies here that nobility and Moorishness are incompatible. When the quarrel reaches boiling point, Mendoza retrieves Malec’s staff – his symbol of authority – and strikes him with it. The degree of humiliation suffered by Malec and his followers is described by the Morisco leader as being ‘unspeakable’.47 In one last attempt to placate the anger of the dishonoured Malec and his followers, the highest ranking Morisco leader, Don Fernando Valor, suggests to Mendoza that he marry Malec’s daughter. In Valor’s judgement, the merging of the bloodlines of the offender and the offended can overpower all differences between the Old Christian and the Morisco. As Valor continues to argue for the marriage, Mendoza interrupts with great indignation. He cannot lower himself to marry a Morisca. According to the Old Christian, the bloodlines of Mendozas and Malecs cannot mix because they are unequal. Adding insult to injury, Mendoza reiterates his previous slight to Valor by asserting that the noblest Morisco is lesser in value than a pure blooded Old Christian. As Mendoza had stated to Garcés in a previous conversation, insulting the Morisco patriarch is nothing less than fair retribution for his hubris. An irritated Mendoza asserts that Don Juan Malec and noble New Christians like himself, who are ‘excessively proud, arrogant, and insolent’,48 have to accept – even if by force – that they do not share social parity with Old Christians. Mendoza’s stance is representative of the Old Christians who might have hypothetically accepted the theology that baptism brought about spiritual sameness among all Christians, but nevertheless in practice saw baptism as another form of subjecting former enemies to their dominance. Upon the realisation that cultural resemblance does not necessarily yield to sameness, the Morisco leadership then opts for regaining their lost honour by reneging on their baptism, severing themselves from the Christian body politic, and waging war against the Old Christians. What becomes evident in these critical scenes is the hypocrisy of the official discourse of acculturation and absorption. The Old Christians in the play show that they find the erasure of social distinctions a threat to their own identities. The most conspicuous signs of difference are embodied by the gracioso (the assigned comic relief), Alcuzcuz, who serves as a foil to both the noble Morisco and Old Christian characters. Alcuzcuz  – which literally means couscous – is cowardly, unappealing in physical appearance, almost incoherent in his use of the Castilian language, disloyal to both Moriscos and Old Christians, and ready to shift religion (whether Christian or Muslim) according to need. Margaret Olsen has fittingly observed that Calderón attempts to bring relief to the fears that Old Christians felt towards ethnically overt Moriscos, as figured in Alcuzcuz, by applying slapstick humour to moments of tension between Old Christians and Moriscos, and by showing that

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Morisco and Old Christian food practices were inherited from shared cultural exchanges.49 The assumption, however, that Calderón’s objective was to ‘draw spectators into compassion for the Moriscos and a catharsis of national remorse for their persecution’ is countered by the remorseless attitude displayed by the Old Christians in the play who act as stand-ins for Calderón’s audience members.50 The fact that there is not a single Old Christian character in the play who shows compassion for Alcuzcuz might be seen as indication that Calderón did not expect his audience members to empathise with the gracioso. Rather, Calderón is likely to have contrived Alcuzcuz to function as the assigned scapegoat with whom the Old Christians (in the play and in the audience) could conveniently confirm the stereotype of the low-born Morisco. Alcuzcuz’s cowardliness and cultural primitiveness would have also encouraged audience members to see him as a nuisance rather than as a threat to the Old Christian community. But the feature that would have most reassured Calderón’s audience of the political insignificance of Alcuzcuz is his inability to pass for a dominant Spaniard. Old Christians would have been expected to derive pleasure from witnessing Alcuzcuz’s maladroit attempts to pass for an Old Christian soldier along with Tuzaní. Tuzaní, on the other hand, represents the type of Morisco Old Christians would have feared because of his capacity to pass undetected into the dominant social sphere. Indeed, once Tuzaní penetrates the Spanish camp, nobody suspects his impersonation. Tuzaní is in absolute control of his identity in the Christian camp. What might be unsettling for mindful spectators, however, is the realisation that they are compelled to root for the noble Morisco’s passing so that he can avenge the death of his bride. After all, audience members would have found his fervent devotion to Maleca admirable and shared with him his sense of honour. Tuzaní’s impersonation might have also subliminally encouraged audience members to want to empathise with his experience. One could even argue that Tuzaní’s type of performative ethnic passing would have had a destabilising effect for the Old Christians watching the play. The sympathy the audience might have felt for Tuzaní is likely to have been deflated once audiences were reminded of their pre-established loyalties and social anxieties. This is especially the case when Tuzaní dares Mendoza to fight with him as equals, ‘face-to-face and hand-to-hand’, and then kills a bystanding soldier when Mendoza refuses the duel.51 Tuzaní’s unwillingness to surrender to Don Juan de Austria is what further defeats any sense of sympathy the characters in the play and spectators might have shared for Tuzaní. Calderón’s audience would have felt great relief when Tuzaní is finally compelled to accept his subaltern position along with the Morisco rebels. With the defeat of the insurgent Moriscos, the social order is restored and the boundaries that protect the identity of the Old Christian elite are well

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established. In the last scene of the play, the audience witnesses Don Álvaro Tuzaní and his sister – the former Queen of the Moriscos – kneel before the Spanish King, symbolically submitting to their obligatory marks of alterity. Calderón’s audience would have been pleased see that at the end of the play no Morisco could claim social parity to Old Christians. It appears that Calderón, unlike Pérez de Hita, understood that in order to rouse his Old Christian audience’s compassion towards Tuzaní, it was necessary for him to be cast as inferior and unmistakably different. I do not mean to claim that Calderón sided with the elite Old Christian view of the Morisco problem, but rather that he addressed it in his play. It is wholly feasible that Calderón hoped that his play would ignite a discussion among his elite audience members about the legitimacy of the 1609–1614 Morisco expulsion. Calderón might have meant to draw a contrast between the rebel Moriscos who were dislocated in the aftermath of the Alpujarras war from Granada to Castile, and the generally non-violent Moriscos who were banished from Christian Spain to be resettled in Muslim territories. Resemblance as grounds for expulsion in Don Quijote de la Mancha (1615) Whereas the war of the Alpujarras was seen to be a clear victory for Old Christians and was, therefore, a viable subject for dramatisation within the protocols of a moral play, the final expulsion of the Moriscos – as discussed earlier – was not accepted as a definite triumph and its effects were still a matter of debate decades after it concluded. An anonymous ballad from the first half of the seventeenth century provides us with another glimpse at how the general populace might have rationalised the Morisco expulsion and its aftermath. The ballad is called ‘De cómo y por qué el rey Don Felipe III expelió á los moriscos de España, y de la pena que les causó este destierro’ (‘How and Why King Philip III Expelled the Spanish Moriscos and of the Sorrow that this Banishment Caused’) and its self-contradictory contents show the author’s own ambivalence and dismay towards the notion that so many people who looked just like normative Spaniards were evicted from their homes.52 The poem begins by exposing the official justification of the expulsion. The Moriscos here are depicted as enemies within who must be excised from the Christian nation: There is a commotion in Spain, there is turbulence in the kingdoms, because of the Morisco nation, enemy of Christians.

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Long live God and the King, despite these pagans; and the Holy Inquisition. May God personally protect, may the heretic be punished, may the Christian be known; and let us all live together as very faithful brothers.53

Immediately after stating the false Christianity of all Moriscos, the poet explains how some Moriscos transgressed their given status by moving up in the socio-economic hierarchy: And the Morisca grocer who used to wash dishes, shows off her silver hair pins, the gold on her shoes, her ample silk dress, extravagant necklaces, and a golden chain with enamelled links. They [the Moriscas] not only have servants, they also have decorated coaches, and carry the semblance of the wives of respectable governors.54

These explanations evoke parts of the testimonies of Old Christians who denounced María López or Diego Díaz to the Inquisition because they were indignant at being upstaged by marginal Moriscos.55 The poet of the romance expresses a similar sentiment in his reminiscing of a time when Moriscos used to behave humbly towards Old Christians. He complains about the insolence Moriscos developed after they became wealthier: ‘It was so much the extravagance / and their excessive success [the Moriscos’] / they do not respect / the knight and the hidalgo.’56 According to the poet, the impertinence of the Moriscos had reached such levels that they began to seek and attain the most reputable posts and positions of authority: In Spain they had climbed so high that they each aimed for offices of great power. They were many doctors, many of them scribes, lawyers at every turn, and very learned men.57

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The poet argues that these Moriscos deserved to be expelled in the first place because of their lack of respect towards the Old Christians and, additionally, because they failed to show true Christian devotion. They are accused of attending church for the sole purpose of exhibiting their garments of silk and gold. At the same time, when the poet describes their exile, he acknowledges that the Moriscos look and act just like devout Old Christians: They are all together [the Moriscos] leaving. Whoever is watching, has his heart broken, because they [the Moriscos] look like Christians. And many of the Moriscos, before being sent away, have made generous offerings to their chosen churches.58

The poet does not, however, address the paradox he has pointed out here: that the Morisco enemy might actually be a Christian whose semblance and, by implication, inner self match his own. He instead suggests that Spaniards trust that God will take care of the expelled Christians. He then provides his version of the reasons for Philip III’s expulsion of the Moriscos: in order ‘to separate the good / from the insolent and bad’.59 The poet here reveals that Morisco insolence – which he defines as their aspiration for social mobility and enjoyment of valuable objects – is the reason the Moriscos have turned ‘bad’. This a posteriori rationalisation for the expulsion of the Moriscos might be a better reflection of the source of the type of cultural tension that might have arisen between common Old Christians and Moriscos. It might be argued that the singers of and listeners to the ballad would have been more likely to reject the official narrative of the expulsion for the interpretation that their Morisco neighbours were banished because they refused to explicitly bear their marks of otherness. The paradox inherent in the image of the expelled Morisco who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dominant Old Christian is the subject of exploration in the episode of Morisco Ricote and his daughter Ana Félix in the second part of Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha (1615). Cervantes introduces the fictional case of an acculturated Morisco family from La Mancha in c­ hapter 54 of the second part of his novel. Ricote, the patriarch of the family and Sancho Panza’s friend, leaves his home with the family’s fortune after hearing rumours of the approaching edict of expulsion. Ricote’s objectives are to find a safe place to bury his valuable assets before they are withheld by Crown authorities and to locate a site abroad where he could go with his family after the edict is announced. While Ricote is still away the edict expelling the Moriscos from Castile is announced and Ricote’s family is taken to Algiers. Unaware that they

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have been banished to North Africa, Ricote re-enters Spain in the disguise of a German pilgrim in hopes of recovering the treasure he had buried and to be reunited with his family. On his way back to La Mancha, he encounters Sancho, to whom he relates the story of his self-exile and travails. They have a moment of communion, sharing bread, nuts, cheese, ham bones, and wine; all elements that contemporaries of Cervantes would have identified as an authentic Castilian meal. The momentary fellowship between Sancho and Ricote amidst their respective journeys evokes, as Childers as pointed out, a lost time of solidarity between Castilian peasants of differing political affiliations and religions – ‘the mudéjar period, which it evokes as a time of more or less harmonious coexistence’.60 I would add, in addition, that it stresses more poignantly the kind of untroubled coexistence between Old Christians and Moriscos that might have prevailed in many regions of Spain (such as Villarrubia de los Ojos, as studied by Dadson) prior to the passing of the Morisco edict. Ricote offers Sancho the opportunity to join him to find his buried treasure for a considerable commission, but Sancho refuses. Sancho then informs Ricote that Ricote’s brother-inlaw, a ‘shrewd Moor’, took his wife and daughter to Algiers.61 After Sancho assures Ricote that he will not denounce him to the authorities, they each go their separate ways. Nine chapters later (­c hapters 63 and 64), Don Quijote and Sancho are touring the galleys in Barcelona when they unexpectedly witness the capture of a Turkish ship and its captain. The Spanish general is about to hang the captain, when the latter reveals that he is not who he appears to be. He is in fact none other than Ana Félix, Ricote’s beautiful daughter. Ana Félix explains that when she was expelled from Castile, her promised husband, a wealthy nobleman named Don Gaspar Gregorio, had followed her into exile. Upon arriving in North Africa, she was summoned by the King of Algiers, who sent her back to Spain in a brigantine to recover the purported treasure she claimed to have hidden prior to her exile. Before embarking on her mission, Ana Félix protects Don Gaspar from being taken as one of the Algerian kings’s lovers by disguising him as Moorish woman. Ana Félix’s story moves her listeners to tears. Among those present is her father Ricote, disguised as a pilgrim, who confirms Ana Félix’s identity. Recognising both Ana Félix and Ricote, Sancho then corroborates the truth of Ricote’s story. The authorities who are present – the general of the galleys, the Viceroy, and the aristocrat Don Antonio Moreno – devise a plan to free Don Gaspar. Don Gaspar is successfully rescued and reunited with Ana Félix, after which he returns to his home in La Mancha for resources to take his betrothed with him. Don Antonio volunteers to go to Madrid to see how he can help Ricote and Ana Félix remain in Spain. The episode has an open ending as

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readers are told that the Moriscos will wait for the imminent resolution to their case. Literary critics by and large have followed Márquez Villanueva’s view that Cervantes criticises the cruelty of the Crown’s attempt to indiscriminately expel the entirety of its Morisco population.62 Márquez Villanueva contends that Cervantes’s view in Don Quijote coincides with the stance of intellectuals and religious leaders, such as Pedro de Valencia, who believed that Moriscos had to be completely absorbed into the Old Christian population. More specifically, Márquez argues that Cervantes faults Crown authorities for not exempting from expulsion the acculturated Moriscos, such as Ricote and Ana Félix, who were in the process of being completely absorbed into the Old Christian population. He also interprets Ricote’s defence of the expulsion as Cervantes’s ironic means to demonstrate the harm the policy caused to the acculturated Moriscos. Although I agree with Márquez Villanueva that Cervantes probably opposed the version of the Morisco expulsion implemented by the Crown, I  challenge the view that in the novel Cervantes champions the case for all acculturated Moriscos. I  surmise that while Cervantes makes a clear case against the expulsion of Ana Félix, he presents a more ambivalent view on how to cope with Ricote, which can be gauged from the differing treatment offered to the Moriscos by the Old Christian characters in the novel. I  believe that Cervantes problematises Ricote especially because he is a Morisco of ambiguous political loyalties with the ability to pass through dominant spaces unrecognised. Cervantes ultimately recognises the benefits of acculturation for the stability of the body politic, but he also defies the view that absolute cultural absorption (Valencia’s permixtion) – and, by extension, the erasure of Morisco culture – provides the solution to the Morisco problem. Ricote’s multiple identities (Morisco, German, and Old Christian pilgrim) evoke the oscillating allegiances of Pérez de Hita’s Tuzaní. Cervantes presents Ricote’s ability to pass for various members of the dominant culture and his utilitarian approach to impersonation as problematic for the well-being of both Old Christians and Moriscos. When Ricote first encounters Sancho on his way back to La Mancha, Sancho does not suspect in the least that the German pilgrim before him is his neighbour. It is only when Ricote speaks to him in flawless Castilian that Sancho realises that the man is his Morisco neighbour. Sancho ‘looked at him more carefully and the figure of the man became familiar to him, and then, he recognised him completely in every detail’.63 But unlike Ricote, who is delighted to see his friend, Sancho reacts with fear and curtly chastises Ricote for daring to disobey the edict of expulsion. What is immediately noticeable in the conversation between the two is that Sancho and Ricote speak in different registers. While Ricote addresses Sancho in all confidence and under the assumption that he is speaking to his friend in a safe atmosphere,

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as he would have done when they were in their village, Sancho speaks to Ricote with much more restraint. Sancho’s measured conduct might be an indication of the mistrust he now feels for his neighbour. There is little question that Ricote dominates the conversation. Sancho merely listens and responds with reticence to Ricote’s queries. When Ricote offers Sancho a cut of his treasure if he helps to retrieve it, Sancho refuses. He replies with an answer that is suspiciously exemplary for his character. He declares: ‘I’m not avaricious … and likewise, I think that I would betray my king in order to favour his enemies.’64 With this reply, Sancho is implying that he disapproves of Ricote’s materialism, which he does not share, and conveys to him that Ricote should no longer consider him his friend. Childers has interpreted Sancho’s renunciation of his friendship with Ricote as a loss compelled by ‘the reach of royal power.’65 But such reading is questionable if we consider that, as observed by Salvador Fajardo and Julio Baena, Sancho actually protects Ricote by keeping his encounter and conversation with Ricote undisclosed, even to Don Quijote.66 The narrator is silent about Sancho’s thoughts, but it could be assumed that Sancho’s lukewarm mistrust of Ricote is due to the fact that, just moments earlier, he had been so easily deceived by his impersonation. Indeed, Sancho – as well as the novel’s readers – would have interpreted Ricote’s nonchalant attitude about identity switching as a reflection of his wavering loyalties. Sancho does not condemn Ricote to expulsion, but he is, at the same time, critical of his neighbour’s secretive dealings, and his lack of a stable identity is a source of anxiety. The Old Christian peasant makes allusion to his contradictory stance when he relates to Ricote: ‘be content that you will not be betrayed by me, and go your way in God’s name and let me go on mine’.67 That Sancho’s anxiety derives from Ricote’s impersonations becomes more evident during the encounter in the galley in Barcelona a few chapters later. At this time, Ricote is disguised as an elderly Old Christian pilgrim, but he discloses his Morisco identity in order to help his daughter prove to the authorities in the galley (the admiral general and the Viceroy of Barcelona) that she is not an infidel, but a Christian Morisca. Sancho intervenes to corroborate the Morisca’s confession, but disavows his association with Ricote and his suspect identities. ‘I know Ricote very well, and I know that what he says about Ana Félix being his daughter is true,’ Sancho confesses, ‘as for this other business of coming and going and having good and bad intentions, I have nothing to say about that.’68 Sancho is evidently willing to acknowledge that he knows Ricote for the exact purpose of helping Ana Félix, but he shows no interest in defending Ricote and his dubious impersonations. Ana Félix also uses impersonation to aid her return to Spain, but, unlike her father, her false identity is depicted as acceptable by all of the Old

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Christians in the novel. The primary difference between the impersonations of father and daughter is that while Ricote borrows the identities of legitimate members of society, Ana Félix takes on a role that is wholly undesirable to Old Christians. In other words, while Ricote’s ability to pass up rouses the anxiety of sameness for the Old Christians, Ana Félix’s history of passing down for a Moor has the effect of mitigating the anxiety.69 For the aristocrats in Barcelona Ana Félix represents an exemplary Morisca precisely because she does not make any attempts to deny her marks of otherness. Without any real choice, she is exoticised by the aristocrats who, taken aback by her beauty and intelligence, put her on a type of exhibition at Don Antonio Moreno’s house. The news of the unlikely desirable Morisca is indeed said to have attracted ‘all the people in the city’, who came to see her ‘as if summoned by a pealing bell’.70 Ana Félix is a native Spaniard, but the manner in which the Old Christians treat her is comparable to how the foreign Zoraida is treated by the Old Christians of the first part of the novel. The character of Zoraida appears in one of the intercalated tales of the first part of Don Quijote. She is a Moorish woman who has escaped from her father’s home in Algiers in hopes of living a Christian life in Spain. She appears at an inn accompanied by the Christian-captive Ruy Pérez. This is the same famed inn in La Mancha in which Don Quijote and other friends are being lodged. Cognisant that somebody with such a conspicuous appearance might cause concern, Ruy Pérez also seems to understand that difference is acceptable as long as it is unthreatening. He attempts to dispel the Old Christians’s discomfort by describing her as ‘Moorish in her body and her dress, but a great Christian in her soul, because she has great desires to be such’.71 As I  have discussed elsewhere, Ruy Pérez contrives the figure of Zoraida in the mould of the prototype of a legendary Virgin Mary in the account of his captivity in Algiers.72 More specifically, he emphasises her role as the person who, in a nearly miraculous way, rescued him from his enslavement in Algiers. Yet once in Spain, Zoraida is unconditionally dependent on Ruy Pérez. It is as if Zoraida’s purported authority exists only outside of Spain, in a mythical and distant context and history. Within the Spanish context, Zoraida is almost voiceless. She is not even capable of articulating her desire to eschew her given name in favour of her chosen name, ‘María’. Not even the narrator gives Zoraida the benefit of being anything other than a beautiful ‘Moor’. Like the Moor Abirrandáez from the Abencerraje, Zoraida is acceptable because she represents the consummate enemy-turned-subject: markedly different and unthreatening.73 But while Zoraida is in fact ‘a Moor’, Ana Félix is not.Yet, she is also referred to as a ‘Moor’ just after she has identified herself as a ‘Christian woman’.74 The Old Christians’s willingness to help the Morisca – as in the case of Zoraida – appears

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to be connected to her willingness to submit to their authority and bear the mark of the desirable exotic. Sancho demonstrates a deep sorrow about the fact that Ana Félix had been banished from their hometown, a stark contrast to his reservations about showing any emotions about Ricote’s situation. Sancho lets his emotions slip through his cool demeanour in one of his most stirring expressions of fellowship over the expulsion decree. Confessing that he was the one in the crowd mourning the departure of Ana Félix, he recalls for Ricote: I can tell you that your daughter looked so beautiful when she left that everybody in the village came out to see her, and they all said she was the fairest creature in the world. She was crying and embracing all her friends and companions, and all those who came out to see her, and asking them all to commend her to God and Our Lady, His Mother, and she did this with so much feeling it made me cry, though I am not usually much of a weeper. By my faith, there were many who wanted to hide her and take her from those she was leaving with, but fear of defying the orders of the king stopped them.75

This inconspicuous rite – an unprompted shared moment of communitas – is how a particular group of Old Christians conveys its resistance to the king’s order. This scene is not one of unchallenged compliance of the edict, as it might appear on the surface, but rather a scene of veiled resistance. Sancho’s confession of sorrow regarding the expulsion of an exemplary Christian is a reflection of his own passive protest against the expulsion. The rise of the villagers in an impromptu procession of mourning may also be interpreted as a retort to the Crown’s command that each legitimate Spaniard participate in the collective exorcism of the Morisco evil from the body politic. Within this paradigm, the king functions as a God-chosen priest or surgeon who is to symbolically exorcise the Morisco poison from the social body. The symbolic exorcism, nonetheless, is a failed one because  – along with apostates like Ricote’s brother (Juan Tiopieyo) – it forces out true Christians, like Ana Félix and her Old Christian suitor Don Gaspar. The villagers do not see Ana Félix as a viper in need of being excised, but rather as an innocent scapegoat embarking on a via crucis. This spontaneous Passion-like procession that arises at the moment of Ana Félix’s banishment could then be seen as a counter-rite of resistance. Cervantes exposes the irony that good Spaniards like Ana Félix were thrown out of their homes and often taken to Muslim lands because of the Crown’s disengagement from the will and experience of its subjects. Through the description of Sancho and his neighbours’s passive resistance to the expulsion decree, Cervantes alludes to the experience of the significant portion of Old Christians who were untroubled by their Morisco neighbours and were accepting of their safe differences.What we observe through the Ricote episode

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is that it is not the so-called ‘Morisco problem’ that causes the disarray of the social order in Sancho’s village, but, rather, the edict itself. It is not only the Christian Moriscos who are unfairly affected by it, but also Old Christians, like Don Gaspar, whose lives are disrupted. Cervantes also problematises the figure of the unpredictable Morisco, represented by Ricote, whose semblance recurrently changes possibly along with their politico-religious stance.While there is not a single instance in which Sancho or the aristocrats of Barcelona doubt Ana Félix’s loyalty to Spain, their support of Ricote is less transparent. The Old Christians agree that Ricote is ‘well-intentioned’, but do not ever recognise his Christianity as they do in the case of Ana Félix.76 Sancho and the aristocrats clearly disapprove of his illicit schemes, but they do not believe that his conduct merits banishment. At the same time, the Old Christians in Barcelona seem to be well aware that while Ana Félix’s chances for an exemption to the expulsion are minimal, Ricote’s are nearly non-existent.77 Ricote himself takes a very pragmatic view of his situation when he predicts that the Count of Salazar, whom he compares to the mythical hundred-eyed Argus, will not allow him to escape his given fate. It is not surprising, then, that in the last moments of the episode the aristocrats decide, without explanation, to separate father and daughter. By separating the two, Cervantes hints at the loss Moorish Spaniards had to bear in order to even have a chance at surviving the expulsion; the loss of kinship, family history, and cultural distinctiveness. Most poignantly, he exposes the paradox that to be a redeemable Morisco in Spain, one was obliged to show contempt for his or her culture and parentage while still being willing to exhibit unthreatening and containable forms of exoticism.78 Notes

 1 I use the term Moor in the way it was used in early modern Spain. A Moor was a Muslim from North Africa or Turkish territories.When applied to a Morisco, it was used as a derogatory insult.  2 Georges Cirot, ‘La maurophilie littéraire en Espagne au XVIe siècle’, Bulletin Hispanique 40 (1938): 150–157, 281–296, 433–447; 41 (1939): 65–68, 345–451; 42 (1940): 213–227; 43 (1941): 265–289; 44 (1942): 96–102; 46 (1944): 5–25. While Cirot regarded maurophilia as a phenomenon limited to textual productions, most critics today agree that maurophilia may be applied to material productions as well.  3 Israel Burshatin has opposed the use of the term maurophilia to make reference to this type of idealisation. For Burshatin, the positive descriptions of Moors and their superficial friendships with Christians belie a larger social framework, which irreparably places the Christian in control of ‘the Moor and his world’ (Israel Burshatin, ‘Power, Discourse, and Metaphor in the Abencerraje’, Modern Languages Notes 99.2 (1984): 195–213, at 197). Burshatin makes this statement in relation to The Abencerraje. While I agree with Burshatin’s basic premise that literary texts that depict Moorish characters in a favourable light do so for the purposes of furthering an Old Christian viewpoint, I disagree that maurophilia is a misnomer.  4 Pérez de Hita’s work is also known by the title of Historia de los bandos de Zegríes y Abencerrajes (The History of the Factions of the Zegríes and the Abencerrajes). The second part of the novel

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(1604) fictionalises the historical events that led to the Morisco revolt in Alpujarras, the civil war that followed, and its aftermath. I do not consider this sequel to partake in literary maurophilia, because of its perspectivistic representation of the Moriscos.  5 María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel (Boston:  Twayne Publishers, 1976), 47. Among her other important works on Moriscos are:  El moro retador y el moro amigo (Granada:  Universidad de Granada, 1996); Estudios sobre la novela breve de tema morisco (Barcelona:  Edicions Bellaterra, 2005); and Los moriscos y Pérez Ginés de Hita (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2006).  6 Ozmín takes on the name of Ambrosio. When his second master, Don Alonso, witnesses him displaying exceptional expertise in equestrian games, he becomes suspicious of his social rank, not his ethnicity. Ozmín then tells Don Alonso that he is a caballero named Jaime Vives.  7 El Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa: Cuatro textos y su estudio. Ed. Antonio de Villegas y Francisco López Estrada (Madrid:  Publicaciones de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1957), 16–65; Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel, 53–54.  8 Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel, 43–49.  9 Early in the nineteenth century, Agustín Durán compiled these ballads in a collection entitled Romancero de romances moriscos (Madrid: León Amarita, 1828). 10 General features of the new romances are: the vagueness or absence of the historical context, the focus and elaboration of a theme from a detail, a proclivity for metaphors and metonymies, colloquialisms, and a descriptive emphasis on garments and weapons (see Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel, 50). 11 Georges Cirot suggests that the Abencerraje may be read as an allegory for ‘convivencia’ at a time when intolerance for Moriscos was rapidly increasing (Bulletin Hispanique 46 (1944), 13); Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del Quijote (Madrid:  Taurus, 1975), 242–246. Carrasco Urgoiti implies that the text is an effort to pose the possibility of convivencia between Aragonese Lords and Crypto Muslims (‘Las cortes señoriales del Aragón mudéjar’, in Homenaje a Casalduero (Madrid:  Gredos, 1972), 115–128, at 118). Marina Brownlee’s study of the Abencerraje sees in the text an instance of how the novelistic genre embodies history, not so that it can establish a particular point of view, but ‘to interrogate meaning in the tensely multicultural environment of mid-sixteenth-century Spain’ (‘Intricate Alliances: Spanish Formulation of Language and Empire’, Modern Languages Quarterly, 67.1 (2006): 63–80, at 79). 12 Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation:  Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 8. 13 ‘Un gentil moro en un cavallo ruano; él era grande de cuerpo y hermoso de rostro, y parescía muy bien a cavallo. Traía vestida una marlota de carmesí y un albornoz de damasco del mismo color, todo bordado de oro y plata. Traía el braço derecho regaçado y labrada en él una hermosa dama, y en la mano una gruessa y hermosa lança de dos hierros. Traía una darga y cimitarra, y en la cabeça una toca tunezí que, dándole muchas bueltas por ella, le servía de hermosura y defensa de su persona’ (Inventario version of the Abencerraje, 314). 14 Romancero general. Ed. Agustín Durán, Vol. 2 (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1851), 103. 15 In Lope de Vega’s version, Abindarráez himself recognises that Narváez is superior after finding himself defeated and captured. Recognising that his fate depends on Narváez’s will, he declares: ‘Pues me dan menos nobleza, / Que ser vuestro esclavo, Alcaide, / Ser Bencerraje y Vanegas’ (Lope de Vega Carpio, La Dorotea. Ed. Edwin S. Morby (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 180). 16 Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel, 68. 17 ‘Matarme bien podrás’; ‘mas no podrá vencerme sino quien una vez me venció’ (Inventario version of El Abencerraje, 317). 18 ‘Flaqueza afeminada’ (Lope de Vega Carpio, El remedio de la desdicha. Ed. Francisco López Estrada and María Teresa López García-Berdoy (Barcelona:  Promociones y publicaciones universitarias, 1991), 151) For the sexualised ‘orientalising’ of Abindarráez, see Laura Bass,

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‘Homosocial Bonds and Desire in the Abencerraje’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 24.3 (2000): 453–471. 19 William Childers, ‘ “Granada”:  Race and Place’, Spectacle and Topophilia:  Reading Early Modern and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures. Ed. David R. Castillo and Bradley J. Nelson (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 19–42, at 22. 20 ‘Queremos ser cristianos y morir en la santa fe que tú y los tuyos tenéis. Y para esto queremos saber si tu voluntad es de nos admitada debajo de tu amparo, y que estemos a tu servicio’ (Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada. Primera Parte. Ed. Shasta M. Bryant (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982), 207). 21 Diane E. Sieber, ‘The Frontier Ballad and Spanish Golden Age Historiography: Recontextual ising the Guerras civiles de Granada’ (Hispanic Review 65.3 (1997): 291–306). See also Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel, 94–95. 22 ‘¡Ay, Dios, qué buen Cavallero / el Maestre de Calatrava!’ (Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, 34). 23 ‘Por eso mereces, rey, / Una pena bien doblada: / Que te pierdas tú y el reino / Y que se pierda Granada’ (Tesoro de los romanceros y cancioneros españoles. Ed. Eugenio de Ochoa (Paris: Librería Europea de Baudry, 1838), 370). 24 ‘¡Ay de mí, Alhama!’ (Tesoro de los romanceros, 370). 25 ‘Deseaba verse dentro y tenerla ya por suya’ (Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, 282). 26 The only time the Christians’s dress is described in detail is when Don Juan Chacón and three other knights disguise themselves as Turks in order to fight on behalf of the sultana against the Zegríes. 27 The notion that the greatness of the conquered subject is a reflection of the even more superior conqueror is conveyed in the verses of a ballad that satirises the romancero ­morisco. The pertinent verses read:  ‘Que el encarecer los hechos / Del vencido en la batalla, / Engrandece al vencedor’ (Romancero general, Vol. 1, 130). 28 ‘Que pues no había sido para defendella como hombre, que hacía bien de llorarla como mujer’ (Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, 287). 29 ‘El mortal odio de los Moros contra el Christiano vando’ (Ginés Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos (Segunda parte de las guerras civiles de Granada). Ed. Paula Blanchard-Demouge (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1998), 2. This edition is based on the Cuenca edition of 1619, which is the earliest surviving copy of the text. 30 ‘Furor endiablado’; ‘infernal furia’; ‘furor infernal’; ‘diabólica astucia’; ‘osadía diabólica’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 2, 3, 4, 62, 79, 319, 349). 31 ‘Los Moros no dexavan de hazer gran daño en los Christianos de secreto’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 1–2). 32 Carrasco Urgoiti, The Moorish Novel, 135. 33 Margaret Wilson demonstrates that there is no known precedent to this story, which was probably conceived entirely by Pérez de Hita (‘ “Si África llora. España no ríe” ’ A Study of Calderón’s “Amar después de la muerte” in Relation to its Source’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61.3 (1984): 419–425, at 421). 34 ‘Hiziera sacrificio / de una Christiana doncella’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 295). 35 ‘Echarse a los pies del Señor Don Juan, ofreciéndose a ser su esclavo, y rescatando a su señora se casar con ella y quedarse en Huéscar o passarse a vivir a Murcia’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 292). 36 ‘Perro Christiano’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 294). 37 ‘Era valiente y muy ladino, y aljamiado de tal manera que nadie le pudiera juzgar por ­morisco, por averse criado de niño entre Christianos viejos’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 297). 38 ‘Lleno de malicia’; ‘mal intento’; ‘con mal fin’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 325). 39 There is another inconsistency regarding Tuzaní’s origin. The narrator initially says: ‘dizen que era de Cantoria o de los Vélez’ (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 297). In his

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confession to Don Juan, Tuzaní tells him that he is from Finis (Pérez de Hita, La Guerra de los Moriscos, 336). 40 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte. Ed. Jorge Checa (Kassel:  Edition Reichenberger, 2010). 41 ‘La más amorosa hazaña / del mundo escrita’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, vv. 3194–3195). 42 See Diane E. Sieber, ‘El monstruo en su laberinto: cristianos en las Alpujarras de Amar después de la muerte’, Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (Madrid 1998) (Madrid: Castalia, 2000), 740–746. 43 Margaret Greer, ‘The Politics of Memory in El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra’, Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain. Ed. Richard Pym (London: Támesis, 2006), 113–130, at 127. 44 ‘Con furia tanta’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, v. 109). 45 ‘Gente vil, humilde y baja’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, v. 123). 46 ‘Los que fueron cavalleros / moros no debieron nada / a cavalleros cristianos / el día que con el água / del bautismo recibieron / su fe católica y santa’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, vv. 138–143). 47 ‘Hay cosas que cuestan más / el decirlas que pasarlas’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, vv. 166–167). 48 ‘Soberbios, altivos y arrojados’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, v. 575). 49 Margaret Olsen, ‘ “¿Ley ser, morir el más feo?”: Calderón’s Morisco Gracioso Teases out Spain’s Violence’, Bulletin of the Comediantes 62.2 (2010): 63–78. 50 Olsen, ‘¿Ley ser, morir el más feo?’, 63. 51 ‘Cuerpo a cuerpo y cara a cara’ (Calderón de la Barca, Amar después de la muerte, v. 3066). 52 Romancero general, Vol. 2, 190–192. 53 ‘Gran revuelta hay en España./ Los reinos alborotados / De la morisca nación, / Enemigos de cristianos. / Viva Dios y viva el Rey / A pesar de los paganos; / Y á la Santa Inquisición / Téngala Dios de su mano./ Castíguese al que es hereje, / Conózcase al que es cristiano / Y todos vivamos unos / Como muy fieles hermanos’ (Romancero general, Vol. 2, 190). 54 ‘Y la morisca tendera / Que solía fregar platos, / Saca barretas de plata / En los chapines dorados, / Con gran vestido de seda / Colleretes extremados, / Y gran cadena de oro / Eslabones esmaltados; / No solo salen con amas, / Mas en coches adornados, / Que parecen ser mujeres / De señores venticuatros’ (Romancero general, Vol. 2, 191). 55 See references to the Inquisition cases of María López or Diego Díaz in Chapter 5. 56 ‘Era tanta ya su pompa / Y triunfo demasiado, / Que por ellos no conocen / El caballero y hidalgo’ (Romancero general, Vol. 2, 191). 57 ‘Estaban ya por España / Con punto tan remontado, / Que cada cual ya pretende / Oficios de mucho cargo. / Había mucho doctores, / D’ellos muchos escribanos, / Procuradores á vueltas / Y muy peritos letrados’ (Romancero general, Vol. 2, 191). 58 ‘Embarcados juntos llevan / Que á quien los está mirando, / Le quiebran el corazón / Por ser forma de cristianos. / Y muchos de los moriscos, / Antes de ser embarcados, / Dejaron muy ricas mandas / A los templos señalados’ (Romancero general, Vol. 2, 191). 59 ‘Apartando del que es bueno / El que es insolente y malo’ (Romancero general, Vol. 2, 192). 60 William Childers, Transnational Cervantes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 181. 61 ‘Fino moro’ (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. 2 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 1978), Vol. 2, 452). 62 Stanislav Zimic, ‘El drama de Ricote el morisco’, Literature, Culture and Ethnicity:  Studies on Medieval, Renaissance and Modern Literatures:  a Festschrift for Janez Stanonik. Ed. Mirko Jurak (Ljubljana:  Znanstveni inštitut, 1992), 297–302; René Querillac, ‘Los m ­ oriscos de Cervantes’, Anales Cervantinos 30 (1992):  77–98; Julio Baena, ‘Sintaxis de la ética del texto: Ricote en el Quijote II, la lengua de las mariposas’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.4 (2006):  506–522; Michael Gerli, Refiguring Authority:  Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 1995):  40–60. Cervantes also echoes anti-Morisco discourses in defence of the expulsion through the talking dog Cipión in

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‘El coloquio de los perros’ (Novelas ejemplares. Ed. Harry Sieber (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991), 299–359) and through the Morisco Jarife in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Ed. Carlos Romero Muñoz (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997). 63 ‘Le miró con más atención y comenzó a rafigurarle, y, finalmente le vino a conocer de todo punto’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 448). 64 ‘No soy nada codicioso … y así por esto, como por parecerme haría traición a mi rey en dar favor a sus enemigos’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 452). 65 For Childers, Sancho’s abandonment of Ricote is one of three acts of renunciation (the other two being ‘of class mobility and self-government’) he experiences after he abandons the governoship. ‘The peasant Sancho has begun to think if himself as a Spaniard, the loyal subject of his king … From this moment on, there will be no dimension of local, traditional culture beyond the reach of royal power’ (Transnational Cervantes, 183). 66 For comments on Sancho’s unbroken promise to keep his meeting with Ricote secret, see Salvador J. Fajardo, ‘Narrative and Agency:  The Ricote Episode (Don Quijote II)’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78.3 (2001): 311–322, at 319; and Julio Baena, ‘Sintaxis de la ética del texto’, 516. 67 ‘Conténtate que por mí no serás descubierto, y prosigue en buena hora tu camino, y déjame seguir el mío’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 453). 68 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote,Trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005,) 883; ‘Bien conozco a Ricote, y sé que es verdad lo que dice en cuanto a ser Ana Félix su hija; que en esotras zarandajas de ir y venir, tener buena o mala intención, no me entremeto’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 530). 69 I agree with Fuchs that when survival is at stake in a dominant space, the only option is to ‘pass up’ (Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain:  Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 16). My discussion here, however, is focused mainly on how Old Christians react at the knowledge that Ricote and Ana are passers. 70 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, trans. Grossman, 884; ‘toda la gente de la ciudad, como a campana tañida, venían a verla’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 531). 71 ‘Mora en el traje y en el cuerpo, pero en el alma es muy grande cristiana, porque tiene grandísimos deseos de serlo’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 1, 463). 72 I provide a detailed analysis of Cervantes’s figuring of Zoraida as the Virgin Mary in ‘The Legend of the Christian Arab Madonna in Cervantes’s Don Quijote’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 32.1 (2007): 105–121. Other critics who have seen Zoraida as comparable to Mary are Luis Murillo, ‘The Quixotic Fiction’, A Critical Introduction to Don Quixote (New York: Peter Lang, 1988) 111–127; María Antonia Garcés, ‘Zoraida’s Veil: “The Other Scene” of the Captive’s Tale’ (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 23.1 (1989): 65–98); and Gerli, Refiguring Authority. 73 While religious and secular authorities ‘verbalised’ a discourse of cultural sameness by advocating prohibitions of non-Christian dress, food, and modes of conduct, they were deeply perturbed (and maybe fascinated) when New Christians displayed no visible signs of otherness. See Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 41–45. 74 ‘El virrey, tierno y compasivo, sin hablarle palabra, se llegó a ella y le quitó con sus manos el cordel que las hermosas de la mora ligaba’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 529). 75 Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Grossman, 816; ‘séte decir que salió tu hija tan hermosa que salieron a verla cuantos había en el pueblo, y todos decían que era la más bella criatura del mundo. Iba llorando y abrazaba a todas sus amigas y conocidas, y a cuantos llegaban a verla, y a todos pedía la encomendasen a Dios y a Nuestra Señora su madre; y esto, con tanto sentimiento, que a mí me hizo llorar, que no suelo ser muy llorón. Y a fee que muchos tuvieron deseo de esconderla y salir a quitársela en el camino, pero el miedo de ir contra el mandado del rey los detuvo’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 454).

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76 ‘De allí a dos días trató el visorrey con don Antonio qué modo tendrían para que Ana Félix y su padre quedasen en España, pareciéndoles no ser de inconveniente alguno que quedasen en ella hija tan cristiana y padre, al parecer, tan bienintencionado’ (Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. Murillo, Vol. 2, 540). 77 Diane Williams points out in her article about this episode that Ana Félix’s case resembles the cases of some Moriscas who were exempted from the edict. See ‘De moriscos padres engendrada’. Brave NewWords: Studies In Spanish Golden Age Literature. Ed. Edward H. Friedman and Catherine Larson (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1996), 136–143. 78 In my article ‘Don Antonio Moreno y el “ ‘discreto” negocio de los moriscos Ricote y Ana Félix’, I have argued that Ana Félix is for the aristocrats primarily a source of attention and amusement (Hispania 88.1 (2005): 32–40).

Conclusion

The textual representations I  have examined up to this point suggest that Old Christians and elite Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might have discursively marginalised New Christians and low-borns not only because of their difference – the emphasis of existing scholarship – but also because of their potentiality for sameness with members of dominant groups. The anxiety of sameness I have described is most likely to flourish when a growing similitude between the purported high and low threatens the identity of the high. Fearing social devaluation, the dominant Spaniards in the discourses I analyse express an excessive preoccupation with identifying passers and would-be passers. They are shown to warily guard their exclusive social spaces from the encroachment of hypothetical outsiders whom they fear might attempt to substitute for them. Given the lack of signs of otherness, the dominant group aims to construct the probable passer as being innately different. Low-borns appear in these discourses as conniving creatures with the inability to control their natural instinct to destroy high-borns, and Conversos appear as literally carrying tainted blood in their veins. Unlike low-borns and Conversos, Moriscos are viewed as being more tolerable because they may be identified by their appearance and are less likely to attempt to pass for Old Christians. But the presumed Moriscos who do come dangerously close to physically looking and behaving like Old Christians are treated analogously to other illicit passers and attempts are made to publicly alienate them. From the particular focus I  have given to understanding the dominant’s motivation to subject his/her assigned others, there emerge at least two fruitful sets of inquiries that have yet to be explored. First, an examination of the discourses that convey the elite’s fixation with the social mobility of the marginalised reveals another group that also displays an uneasiness that approaches a distinct anxiety of sameness. The subjects implicated in this group are individuals who are en route to becoming dominant members of society,

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that is, socio-cultural passers or would-be passers. The anxiety of these passers or would-be passers differs from that of the established Old Christians or high-born Spaniards, because while the latter’s anxiety stems from the realisation that the barriers that separate them from the presumed marginal are permeable, the anxiety of passers or would-be passers arises from the insecurity that they will be identified as members of their own religio-cultural or social group. These “in-between” subjects are keenly aware that their birth lineage precludes them from having a legitimate position in the desirable group. A question that naturally surfaces from this discussion – one that falls outside the scope of this book, but necessitates closer analysis – is why New Christians and the underprivileged would attempt to subjugate others like themselves. As Barbara Fuchs has implied in her study of passing characters in Cervantes’ works, it is feasible that the act of passing does not necessarily mean that its subscribers advocate discriminatory practices against their own people. Some individuals could be compelled to imitate dominant behaviour in this regard because their passing is ‘crucially involved with survival’.1 One example that comes to mind in this regard are the efforts of Cervantes’s Ricote to convince his friend Sancho that he is different from the image of the stereotypical Morisco promoted by pro-expulsion advocates. Although Cervantes does not reveal the extent of Ricote’s loyalty to the Spanish Crown, we may understand his defence of Philip III’s ‘heroic resolution’ to expel ‘the body of his contaminated and rotten people’ as a device he utilises in order to prove his (either truthful or false) alliance with the dominant group.2 An alternative explanation for the desire of would-be passers to attack or unveil the masks of other individuals in the same predicament could be that they have internalised the dominant’s belief that their lineage and inherited culture is defective and wish to embody their image of the desirable Spaniard. They might believe that they are superior to all of the other members of their origin group and wish to completely sever themselves from it. The would-be passers’s discriminatory practices against members of their own group of origin would simply be a part of their attempted modelling of the prototype of the dominant that they wish to be. A popular joke recorded in Gaspar Melchor de Santa Cruz’s collection of jokes illustrates this. The story is about a low-born Converso whose eagerness to expose the Jewishness of his neighbour to his son leads him to ironically reveal his own imposture. It reads: A man who liked to flaunt being an hidalgo, but who was not, was strolling around while holding his son by the hand. As they passed by the house of the New Christian, he called his son’s attention [to the owner of the house] and said: – Son, there’s a Jew. The boy stared at the [father’s] face and replied: – Father, he looks like you.3

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The false Old Christian attempts to suppress a reminder of his marginal extraction by humiliating others from the same social group. His disdain of the ‘Jew’ could indeed be read as an expression of self-hatred, and as an unfortunate moment in which he is modelling self-rejection for his son. The joke could also be read as a stylised reflection of how passers might have indoctrinated their descendants about the superiority of Old Christians and of how far would-be passers would have had to go to distinguish themselves from the members of their same group. The son’s ingenuous remark about his inability to tell his father from the ‘Jew’ also alludes to the conflicted identity that the son would have inherited from his passing father. Another character I  identify as being self-conflicted by his inherited identity is Felisardo in Lope de Vega’s short novel ‘La desdicha por la honra’ (‘Misfortune for Honour’) (1624).4 Felisardo believes he is an Old Christian nobleman until the Crown enacts the edict of expulsion of Moriscos and he learns from his parents that he is in fact a Morisco. Upon realising his identity as an unknowing Morisco passer, he becomes obsessed with obliterating any hints of or allusions to his similarity with other Moriscos. He abandons his post, his promised wife, and unborn child in Naples, and moves to the Court of the Grand Turk, where he becomes a self-designated, undercover Christian spy in Turkey. He refuses to interact with other Moriscos because he ‘disliked their behaviour and did not want to spare any thoughts on them’.5 In order to oppose the overwhelming ‘vergüenza’ (shame) of his Morisco identity, he plans to perform ‘a remarkable feat’ for the King of Spain to prove that he is a loyal Spanish subject: the successful rescue of a Spanish captive (the Sultan’s favourite wife) to Spain.6 He believes that the liberation of the captive will transform him into a true Spanish hero. But Felisardo’s plan never comes to fruition: he is killed during his attempted escape with the Spanish captive. Felisardo’s aversion to all other Moriscos and his fantasy of single-handedly overpowering the Turks could be seen as being driven by a desire to prove his superiority over the ‘Moors’, an expression of internalised self-hatred towards his religious origins and a desperate attempt to crucify the Morisco within. Jodi Bilinkoff mentions the historical case of a sixteenth-century nobleman Diego Álvarez de Bracamonte from Ávila who, like Felisardo’s parents had done, appears to never have disclosed his New Christian lineage to his children. To the contrary, Don Diego insisted in his will that whoever inherited his estate would be disowned if he or she did not marry an Old Christian. He stated:  ‘he who succeeds to the said estate, be it a man or a woman, at no time shall be married to or marry a woman or man who belongs to the race of Jews, but only [a spouse] that be an Old Christian on all sides.’7 Moreover, Álvarez de Bracamonte entrusted all of his heirs with the duty to investigate all four branches of the parents of prospective

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spouses in order to preserve the purity of his falsified lineage. Bilinkoff suggests that Álvarez de Bracamonte’s disdain for Conversos was an expression of ‘a keen sensitivity on his part regarding his family origins’.8 Another way of interpreting Álvarez de Bracamonte’s stance against New Christians is that he had fully absorbed the conventional values of the Old Christian nobleman and was sincerely expressing his belief that he and his family members were only nominal Conversos. In other words, they might have viewed themselves as ‘accidental’ Conversos. More cases like that of Álvarez de Bracamonte would need to be examined for a deeper understanding of the consciousness of social and religio-cultural passers who had become detached from their former birth identities but had yet to completely metamorphose into dominant members of society. A second set of questions that naturally emerge from my study concern the extent to which the anxiety of sameness manifests itself beyond early modernity. What we do know is that the obsession with purity of blood and with the outing of so-called stained members of society, which had been so pervasive across all social ranks, decreases substantially in the eighteenth century. Antonio Domínguez Ortíz believes that it is during this period when the concepts of limpieza de sangre and hidalguía (and purity of trade by implication) lose their distinct attributes and become increasingly conflated in their usage. Military academies, high government, and religious establishments did continue to keep blood purity requirements for their prospective members until the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it appears that limpieza requirements started losing the authoritative value they had previously enjoyed. Don José Fernández de Jubera, for instance, was granted a canonship in Toledo in 1724 after literally failing his limpieza investigations and enduring the complaints of some of the city’s cabildo members.9 Although the haphazard ways in which limpieza investigations were often performed could be interpreted as a reflection of the difficulties entailed in checking the background of the growing number of ancestors per candidate, they could also be emblematic of the loss in the value of the notion of blood purity. Indicative that limpieza was no longer intrinsic to defining one’s honour is the fact that individuals were now openly ridiculing it as, essentially, an antiquated concept without any function in society. One of these individuals was Juan Antonio Llorente, a commissary to the Inquisition in Logroño. In his autobiography, he pointed out the irrelevance of purity investigations, calling them ‘a formality introduced by the first Castilian inquisitors of the late XV century’.10 Llorente himself had successfully undergone investigations during his appointment to the high post as inquisitor in 1785, but was vocal about his belief that the concept of limpieza itself was problematic or, in his precise words, ‘a stylistic

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formality’.11 He reminds the reader that for his limpieza investigation to have been performed effectively, the investigators would have had to make sure that none of his 4,064 ancestors had had any Jewish, Moorish, or heretical ancestry. He rhetorically asks: ‘Who could prove without doubt that none of the 4,064 was a Jew, a Moor, or a heretic punished by the Inquisition? If one of the names of my ancestors [which could coincide with the name of a different person] appears in the registries of the Holy Office, I cannot prove that I do not descend from that person.”12 Llorente is not unique for his opposition to limpieza per se, but what distinguishes him from thinkers of previous periods who expressed similar sentiments – such as Agustín Salucio, Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla, or even Cervantes – is the refreshingly open tone with which he expresses his argument. Particularly striking is his unabashed suggestion that he himself could be an unaware New Christian. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the motif of the passing Converso or Morisco seems to disappear in the literary production of the eighteenth century and thereafter. The Jew and the Moor continue to have a presence in Spanish literature, but almost always as foreigners and extraneous to the body politic. The figure of the destabilising passing low-born also seems to disappear from the literary discourses of the time. In theatre there are examples of characters who attempt to pass for aristocrats, such as the false baron in Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s El barón (The Baron) (1787, 1803).13 This type of character, however, differs from his early modern predecessor in that his impersonation does not aim at gaining entry into the nobility. Moratín’s false baron attempts to pass for a member of the aristocracy among the townspeople of Illescas, not because he has any serious aspirations for social mobility, but solely to be able to steal a young girl’s dowry from her unintelligent mother, Mónica. It is also implied in Moratín’s drama that the false baron does not represent a threat to the established nobility because he would not be able to perform his imposture convincingly anywhere else other than in provincial regions with gullible folk blinded by a fascination with the aristocracy. One possible explanation for what appears to be a pronounced decline in the body of texts centred on the subject of uncovering false noblemen could possibly have resulted from a considerable decrease in the elite’s preoccupation with social infiltration; the elite had become more confident about preserving its social space. In the 1700s the barriers to entering the nobility were substantially raised and commoners were less likely to pass into the hidalgo class. In an attempt to reduce the number of hidalgos, the new Bourbon Crown passed an order in 1703, which would be echoed in subsequent policies, prohibiting municipal governments from the granting of hidalgo status to individuals listed as tax-paying citizens.14 An added barrier to the social

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mobility of commoners was their lesser means to acquire seigniorial estates, which were likely to be in the hands of an economically thriving aristocracy.15 The upper crust of the nobility, as Stanley Payne reminds us, increased its income during the first century of Bourbon rule thanks to the rise in agricultural prices and its increased production of cattle. The aristocracy, which held about 65 per cent of Spain’s fertile land, might have been aware of the profound chasm drawn between themselves and others and might no longer have felt that the figure of the conniving plebeian was plausible as a threat to their positions. The combination of these legislative and ideological factors may well have contributed significantly to the shrinking proportion of hidalgos in the population.16 The reduction in the desirability of hidalguía might have also contributed to the decrease in the commoner’s pursuit of nobility. We know that the middle class of merchants, landowners, and professionals begin to forge a distinct identity that embraced a sense of dignity in its own class and recognised, to some extent, the benefits of wealth over nobility. Some intellectuals and artists moved in the same direction of rejecting the idea that the nobility was inherently of higher morality and superior than the rest of the population. One of the representative progressive thinkers of his time, Gaspar de Jovellanos, stands out because he opposed the interests of his own high-born class in his recognition that nobility is a purely accidental quality. He is, in Domínguez Ortiz’s words, ‘a nobleman, who without daring to confess it, no longer believes in nobility’.17 Indeed, the general public appears to begin to espouse the view that nobility was an indication of a lifestyle rather than an intrinsic virtue. A possible reflection of this new ideology could be found in the declining prevalence and importance of the elitist plays of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and the rise of the dramas of Gaspar Zavala y Zamora, Tomás de Iriarte, Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor, and other dramatists who catered primarily to the tastes of their middle-class public. In these plays, commoners or peasants win instant and almost miraculous nobility through virtuous deeds, or honest females of low birth fall in love and marry males from the aristocracy.18 Whether these plays reflect evolving attitudes towards class and social mobility is a potentially fruitful area for exploration. A starting point could be the conjecture that by the 1700s the Spanish audience at large proved to have overcome its former anxiety and instead clamoured for sameness, even if only exhibited on stage. This discussion is not meant to imply that the anxiety of sameness disappeared completely from the Spanish landscape. As it is with all cultural phenomena, there are interstices of the anxiety of sameness that might have stubbornly survived time and change. A personal example provided by Manuel Moreno Valero in a conference that took place in 1981 comes to mind. In his

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presentation, Moreno Valero intimated the following practice in his Andalusian hometown: ‘as long as we – Pozoblanco residents – can remember, we have heard others repeat the idiom “that one belongs with the ones with a tail”, in reference to a person or family with Jewish ancestry.’19 The element of this anecdote that I find most compelling is not necessarily that Pozoblanco residents might have held on very tightly – even as late as the 1980s – to an archaic system of marking difference. It is rather the fact that Moreno Valero never once contemplated in his presentation the possibility that the neighbours his townspeople othered might not have been of Jewish ancestry, or that those who sneered at the supposed ‘ones with a tail’ might have belonged to marginalised groups themselves in a not too far away past. Notes

 1 Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 16.  2 ‘Heroica resolución del gran Filipo Tercero’; ‘el cuerpo de nuestra nación está contaminado y podrido’ (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. 2 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 1978), Vol. 2, 540).  3 ‘Uno que se preciaba de muy hidalgo, sin serlo, llevaba un hijuelo suyo de la mano.Y, pasando por la puerta de un cristiano nuevo, mostrósele, diciendo en voz baja: “– Hijo, aqueste es judío.” Respondió el niño, mirándole la cara: “– Padre, parece a vos” ’ (Melchor de Santa Cruz, Floresta española. Ed. María Pilar Cuarteto y Maxime Chevalier (Barcelona: Crítica, 1997, 296).  4 Lope de Vega, ‘La desdicha por la honra’, Novelas a Marcia Leonarda. Ed. Antonio Carreño (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002), 179–231.  5 ‘No gustaba de su trato ni les osaba fiar su pensamiento’ (Vega Carpio, ‘La desdicha por la honra’, 216).  6 ‘Una insigne hazaña’ (Vega Carpio, ‘La desdicha por la honra’, 221).  7 ‘El que sucediere en esta dicha mejora o mayorazgo, ora sea varón o embra, en ningún tiempo se aya casado ni case con mujer ni con varón que tenga rraça de judío, sino que sea cristiano viejo por todas partes’ (quoted in Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa, 20–21, n. 15).  8 Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of SaintTeresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 22.  9 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en la España Moderna (Madrid:  Mapfre, 1992), 171. 10 ‘Formalidad introducida por los primeros inquisidores castellanos de fines del siglo XV’ (Juan Antonio Llorente, Noticia biográfica de D. Juan Antonio Llorente; o Memorias para la historia de su vida, escritas por él mismo (Madrid: Bobée, 1818), 34). 11 ‘Formalidad de estilo’ (Llorente, Noticia biográfica, 34). 12 ‘¿Quien podrá justificar plenamente que ninguno de las otras 4.064 no fué Judío, Moro, herege ni castigado por la Inquisition? Si el nombre de algunos antiguos está escrito en los registros del Santo Oficio no consta que yo no descienda de aquella persona’ (Llorente, Noticia biográfica, 34). 13 Moratín’s play was first written as a zarzuela or Spanish operetta (1787), and then reworked as a comedia (1803). 14 Exceptions were made for individuals who could fully document their claim to hidalguía and had received the unequivocal support of their town council (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, Instituto Balmes de Sociología, 1955), 84). 15 Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVIII, 87.

220

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16 Stanley G. Payne calculates that hidalgos fell from 7.5 per cent in 1768 to 3.8 per cent in 1797 (A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2 (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 373). 17 ‘Un noble que, sin querer confesarlo, no cree ya en la nobleza’ (Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVIII, 114). 18 Among this type of play we find: Gaspar Zavala y Zamora’s El premio de la humanidad (1790), Tomás de Iriarte’s El huérfano inglés o el evanista (1796), Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor’s El preso por amor o el real encuentro (1796), and Matos Fragoso’s Juan Labrador (1670), which is believed to have been performed multiple times in the 1800s. 19 According to Moreno Valero, ‘de siempre hemos oído en Pozoblanco, cuando se hace referencia a una persona o familia emparentada con judíos este modismo: “ese [sic] es de los del rabo” ’ (Manuel Moreno Valero, “Judeoconversos en Pozoblanco,” Actas del II Congreso de Academias de Andalucia: Córdoba: 20 al 22 de noviembre de 1981 (Córdoba: Real Academia de Córdoba de Ciencias, Bellas Letras y Nobles Artes, 1982), 117–127, at 126).

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Index

Abencerrajes faction civil conflict with Zegríes, 188–190, 207–208n4, 209n26 novel, Abencerraje, based on see Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa Adam de la Parra, Juan, Pro cautione christiana, 129, 146n16 Alciato, Andreas, Emblemata, 81 Alemán, Mateo Converso status of, 91n38 Guzmán de Alfarache, 146n17, 184 Alós, Pedro, 166, 182n57 Alpujarra wars, 14–15, 19–20n37, 156–157, 162–163, 188, 191, 199, 207–208n4 in fiction see Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra; Pérez de Hita, Ginés, Guerras civiles de Granada Álvarez de Bracamonte, Diego, 215–216 Anderson, Ellen, 98n144 Aquinas, Thomas, 54 Arce de Otálora, Juan biographical information, 27–28 Summa nobilitatis Hispanicae et immunitatis regiorum, 27–28, 55 view of birth nobility, 30, 41n14, 84 Asensio, Eugenio, 143 Aznar Cardona, Pedro, 13, 108

Expulsion justificada de los Moriscos españoles, 104, 119n17, 119nn21, 120nn24, 157, 158 on menstruation by Jewish males, 105–106, 131 Bataillon, Marcel, 49, 57 berberiscos, 9, 19–20n37, 20n45 Bernáldez, Andrés, 7, 102 Bilinkoff, Jodi, 34, 215–216 blackness associated with the most abject servant class, 9–10 black man and the fulano legend, 1, 9, 10 black slaves, 19–20n37, 161 Iberian Hispanic blacks from sub-Sahara Africa, 9–10, 19nn35–36, 20 see also Moriscos Blair, Emma Helen and James Alexander Robertson, 147 Bleda, Jaime, 153–156, 164–165 blood purity statutes see limpieza de sangre (purity of blood statutes) Blumenthal, Debra, 9 Braudel, Fernand, 180n47 Brownlee, Marina, 208n11 Burshatin, Israel, 207n3 El buscón see Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de, Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos

238

Index

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro Amar después de la muerte, 44–48, 51, 210nn40–41 El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, 15, 194–199 middle-class audience of, 218 Canavaggio, Jean, 95n109, 141 Cantimpré, Thomas of, 107 Carrasco Urgoiti, María Soledad, 184, 186, 187, 188–189, 191, 208n5 Cartagena, Alonso de (son of Pablo de Santa María), 7, 18n15 Casey, James, 38 Castillo Solórzano, Alonso de biographical information, 72 La garduña de Sevilla y anzuelo de bolsas, 68, 69 La niña de los embustes,Teresa de Manzanares, 11, 58–59, 68–72, 94nn77,79–84,86 and picaresque works featuring anti-heroes with potentially social-order threatening ambitions, 58–59 Castro, Américo, 3 Catlos, Brian, 5 Cavallería, Fernando de, 5 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Don Quixote see Don Quijote de la Mancha ‘El coloquio de los perros’, 210–211n62 Entremeses, 149nn70, 72, 150n84 Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 210–211n62 possible Jewish ancestry of, 79, 95n109, 141 El retablo de las maravillas, 14, 141–145, 149n74 Chappell, Miles, 97n124 Charles V and Diego de Hermosilla, 52 and the limpieza statute passed by the Cathedral of Toledo, 101–102, 118n3 and Quevedo’s ancestry, 48

unsuccessful attempts to encourage intermarriage during the reign of, 180n43 Childers, William, 188, 202, 204, 211 Cigoli, Lodovico Allegory of Envy, 84, 97n124 Allegory ofVirtue, 84, 87 Cirot, Georges, 2, 207n2, 208n11 Clamurro, William, 3, 64 Conversos (converted Spanish Jews and their descendants) anti-Converso actions. highly achieved and noble individuals, 18n15 see also Cartagena, Alonso de (son of Pablo de Santa María); Santa María, Pablo de introduced, 1 mass conversions resulting from pogrom in Spain of 1391, 4–5 transitionality/malleability of, 134–135, 136, 192–193 see also Marranos Corteguera, Luis, 87 Costa Matos, Vicente da, 13, 104–105, 108 Crawford, Michael, 32, 40n9, 44nn60, 68 Creel, Bryant L., 96n114 Cros, Edmund, 63 Cruz, Anne, 49, 63, 92n52 Cuart Moner, Baltasar, 148n54 Dadson, Trevor J., 166–167, 168, 172–173, 180n41, 202 Descamps, Antonio, 41–42n22 Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura, 15, 106, 119n19 difference as acceptable as long as it is unthreatening, 4, 159, 205–207, 211n73 asserted by Espinel’s Obregón, 12, 73, 75–76

Index

asserted in anti-Semitic jokes and tales, 13–14, 126–127, 140 defined as sociocultural and genealogical heterogeneity, 3 of a low-born Converso asserted in anti-Semitic jokes and tales, 214–215 nostalgia for secure legibility of bygone days, 4 self-hatred of marginalised groups, 214–215 social class identification as a concern, 28, 70, 103 toleration and acceptance of see toleration and acceptance of difference of would-be passers, 213–215 dirt/impurity of the characters Don Quijote and Sancho, 85–86 construction of analysed by Mary Douglas, 2, 47, 89n2, 136 Jewish haemorrhoids/male menstruation associated with, 12, 99, 105–106, 131–132 of New Christians, 12–13, 136 and the purchasing of titles of nobility by Conversos, 130–131 disguise and masking, by Conversos, Moriscos, and/or low-borns in unfavourable environments, 3 Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, 166 ‘Don’ as a title of nobility and Cervantes’ Don Quijote, 12, 48, 80, 88–89 and Cervantes’ Sancho Panza, 48, 88–89 by Jews, 41–42n22, 130–131, 147n23, 147n23 linguistic origin of, 41–42n22 by low-borns, 26–28, 38 masquerading by Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán, 58

239

masquerading of Lope de Vega’s Luzmán, 60 and Quevedo’s ‘Don Dinero’, 11, 51–52, 63, 67 and Quevedo’s Don Felipe Tristán/ Pablos, 66–67 and Salas Barbadillo’s Juan de Toledo, 47–48 and Zayas’s Don Enrique, 22–23 Don Quijote de la Mancha Alonso Quijano el Bueno’s acceptance of his sameness, 12, 88–89 enchantment addressed in, 96n114 Quijote’s madness, 79–80, 88–89, 95–96n110 Salas Barbadillo’s Juan de Toledo compared with, 48 tale of Morisco Ricote and his daughter Ana Félix (fictional characters), 3, 184, 201–207, 211nn65–66, 69, 212nn77–78 tale of the captive in Algiers, 184 Dopico Black, Georgina, 4, 211n73 Douglas, Mary, 2, 3, 19n35, 47, 89n2, 91n35, 136, 182n67 Dunn, Peter, 68, 91n38, 93n76 Echevarría, Ana, 5 Ehlers, Benjamin, 179n26 Enrique II, Jews ordered to wear red by, 108 Enrique III, counsellor of see Santa María, Pablo de Enrique IV Conversos in the service of, 18n15 Friar Alonso de Espina, 107 Moorish guards of, 5 treasurer, Pedro Arias, 125 envy (envidia) allegorised as a female, 81–84 of the burial garments of Morisca Ana Yébenes by Old Christian women, 168–170, 200

240

Index

envy (cont.) of Diego Díaz by Old Christian competitors, 174–175 hidalgo envy, 10–11, 39, 55–56, 58–59, 61, 68, 77–78, 91n35 Jacob Matham’s Envy, 81, 82f2.1 Jacques Callot’s Envy, from the Seven Capital Sins, 81, 83f2.2 Lodovico Cigoli’s Allegory of Envy, 84 murder of Jesus attributed to, 81, 97n121 Espinel, Vicente biographical information, 74 Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón, 12 as required reading for school children, 78 Ettinghausen, Henry, 93n69 Fernández de Navarrete, Pedro, 10–11, 38, 39–40, 48, 66 Ferrer-Chivite, Manuel, 26, 41–42nn22–23 Fra Molinero, Baltasar, 9–10, 20n41 Fuchs, Barbara, 2, 3, 162, 186–187, 211n69, 214 García-Arenal, Mercedes, 166, 179n26, 180n46 García de Saavedra, Juan, Tractatus de hispaniorum nobilitate, 41n14 Gavilán Vela, Diego Discurso contra los judíos, 129, 146n16 translation of Pedro Aznar Cardona’s Expulsion justificada de los Moriscos españoles, 119n17 gender emasculation of Don Quijote, 85 envy allegorised as a female, 81–84, 82f2.1, 83f2.2 feminising of the Converso body, 106–108, 131 impersonation of, 2 by Castillo Solórzano’s Teresa, 72

motif of Moorish emasculation, 160, 188, 189–190 sexualised ‘orientalising’ of Abindarráez (fictional Moor), 208n18 Gerli, Michael, 143–144 Gilman, Sander L., 120n28 Giotto, 81 Godoy (Hermosilla’s fictional Old Christian hidalgo), 52–55, 84, 137 gossip about Jewish menstruation, 106 and linajudos (keepers of lineages), 110 as a source of passive aggression, 124–125, 174–175 Greenblatt, Stephen, 3, 17nn5,9 green books see Libros verdes Greer, Margaret, 196 Guardiola, Juan Benito and the infiltration of false nobility, 37–38 Jewish or Moorish ancestry considered unrelated to nobility, 3, 25, 28 ‘stain of shame’ (‘pudoris macula’) associated with noble–plebian intermarriages by, 28 Tratado de nobleza y los títulos y dictados que oy tienen los varones claros y grandes de España, 28–29, 41n12 Hering Torres, Max S., 6, 18n23, 122n61 Hermosilla, Diego de biographical information, 52 endogamous marriage advocated by, 137 Godoy (fictional Old Christian hidalgo), 52–55, 84, 137 and the social devaluation feared by hidalgos, 11, 52, 55–56, 90n21 Herrera, Pedro de, 156–158, 177–178n5

Index

hidalguía carta ejecutoria lawsuit, 10, 28, 31, 32–35, 36, 44n60 hidalgos de montaña, 25–26, 41n14, 146n19 individual portrayals of see Godoy (Hermosilla’s fictional Old Christian hidalgo) linked to service rather than genealogy, 30–31, 77–78 and the Fuero viejo de Castilla, 30 purchase of patents of (privilegio de hidalguía), 30, 33, 43nn53–54 by Pedro Marcos, 32, 44n57 social honour claimed by, 10, 25, 29, 35, 37, 40, 57, 70, 103 social insecurity of impoverished hidalgos, 12, 24, 37–39, 58–59, 73, 73–78, 78–79 see also social mobility stations of hidalguía outlined by Olivares, 26–27 subjectivity of, 35, 78 and tax exemptions, 25, 32, 33–34, 40n9 title envy of, 10–11, 39, 55–56, 58–59, 61, 68, 91n35 see also ‘Don’ as a title of nobility; identity devaluation; titles of nobility Hill, Ruth, 123n80 Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa as an allegory for convivencia, 208n11 ballads/romances inspired by, 186, 208n9 Moor Abirrandáez from, 185–186, 187–188, 189, 205 and the noble Moor as exemplary defeated enemy, 8, 15–16, 185–187, 190 Horosco, Sebastián, 125 identity devaluation, 10–11, 49, 55, 74

241

and hidalgo envy, 10–11, 39, 54–56, 58–59, 61, 68, 91n35 Quevedo’s concern with, 11, 49–50, 51–52, 58–59, 63–64, 67 Salas Barbadillo’s concern with, 47–48 see also impersonation; social mobility Ife, Barry, 63 Iffland, James, 49–50, 90n11, 132–133, 147n29 impersonation and the achievement of hidalguía, 33–34 Archbishop Arias’s deceitful identity, 125–126 by the false baron in Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s El barón, 217 passing down by Cervantes’s character Ana Félix, 204–205 passing up by Cervantes’s character Morisco Ricote, 184, 201–207, 211nn65–66, 69, 212n78 by Tuzaní see Tuzaní (fictional Morisco protagonist) Inquisition see Spanish Inquisition Jews and Judaism camouflaging of Jewish ancestry resulting from, 7–8, 116–117 see also Conversos (converted Spanish Jews and their descendants) Cervantes’s possible Jewish ancestry, 95n109 crypto-Judaism, 5, 7–8, 18n18, 19n29, 102, 108, 132–136 large nose stereotype of, 134–135 murder of Jesus attributed to envy of, 81, 81, 97n121 nobility of a person not associated with, 3, 25, 28 non-pork eating of, 13, 108, 126–127, 171

242

Index

Jews and Judaism (cont.) Pedro Marcos’s post as a familiar of, 32 and Saint Teresa’s grandfather, Juan Sánchez, 34–35 in Spanish literature in the eighteenth century and thereafter, 217 statutes excluding Christians of Jewish descent (1483), 7 surnames, 113–114, 115 tail-like rears stereotype, 132, 219 title Don used by, 41–42n22, 147n23, 147n23 see also Conversos (converted Spanish Jews and their descendants); Marranos (derogatory name for Conversos); Spanish Inquisition Johnson, Carroll, 67, 93n69, 95–96n110, 130, 146n17 Juan I, 6 Juan II Moorish guards of, 5 sentencia-estatuto condemned by, 7 successful Conversos in court of, 18n15 Toledo Rebellions during the reign of, 5–6 Kagan, Richard L., 33, 44n65, 172–173, 182n64 Kallendorf, Hillaire, 96n114 Kamen, Henry, 7, 118nn3–4 Lapeyre, Henry, 166 Lazarillo de Tormes, 56–57, 70 Lerma, Duque de (Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas), 119n15, 158, 165, 177n4 Libros verdes (green books) as ‘catalogues of shame’, 117, 123n80 linajudos (keepers of lineages) compared with, 112 and the threat of violence associated with miscegenation, 124

El libro verde de Aragón, 112–114 attribution to Juan de Anchías, 112n65 El tizón de la nobleza española contrasted with, 115–116 Jewish surnames listed in, 113–115 Philip III’s banning of, 117 limpieza de sangre (purity of blood statutes) as the centralising motif of Cervantes, El retablo de las maravillas, 14, 141–145, 149n74 of Lope de Vega’s, El galán escarmentado, 137–138, 148n55 Church of Toledo’s institutional decrees passed by Siliceo, 101–103, 118n3 conflation with hidalguía, 216 Count-Duke Olivares’s efforts to relax enforcement of, 146n16 and the Crown, 118n4 in the eighteenth century, 216 of the late 1400s, 7 and local linajudos (keepers of lineages), 110–112 Mendoza y Bodadilla’s efforts to relax enforcement of, 116–117 questioned by Juan Antonio Llorente, 216–217 sentencia-estatuto as an incipient form of, 6–7, 18n26, 101, 118n2 lindos, 6, 18n23 Llorente, Juan Antonio, 216–217 Lope de Vega see Vega Carpio, Lope de Luzmán (fictional pícaro from Lope de Vega’s El caballero del milagro), 59–62, 70, 72, 73, 81, 92n45 choice of surname, 59–60 outward appearance as a reflection of his inward self, 61 Teresa (fictional pícara) compared with, 70, 72 MacKay, Angus, 6, 17n14 McKenzie, Donald, 52

Index

Maravall, José Antonio, 11, 58–59, 92n43, 93n73 Marchante-Aragón, Lucas, 157, 177n4 Mariscal, George, 49, 57, 64, 87, 88, 98n144 Marquez Villanueva, Francisco, 3, 79–80, 180n45, 203 Marranos (derogatory name for Conversos), 12, 14, 102, 127, 131 and marriage, 102, 125 Spains reputation as a nation of, 102 see also Conversos; Jews marriage Converso–Old Christian miscegenation, 14, 27, 102, 137–140 endogamous relationships, popular song about, 125 permixtion (intermarriage) advocated by Valencia, 163–164, 176, 203 among Moriscos of Murcia, 181n50 mixed Morisco-Old Christian families in the barrio nuevo, 166–167, 202 registry of baptisms and marriages, 44n65 ‘stain of shame’ (‘pudoris macula’) associated with noble–plebian intermarriages, 28–30 Martínez, María Elena, 19n29, 101 Martz, Linda, 43n54, 109 maurophilia as a term, 184, 207nn2–3 featured in new romances, 186–187, 189 as tenuous and accidental in Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civles de Granada, 190–191 Melechen, Nina, 41–42n22, 147n23 Mendoza y Bobadilla, Franciso de, El tizón de la nobleza española, 13, 112, 115–117

243

Mestre, Vicente, Embarque de los Moriscos en el puerto de Denia, 153, 154–155ff5.1–2, 156, 158 Mexía, Fernando, 27–28, 29, 30, 42nn26–28 ‘stain of shame’ (‘pudoris macula’) associated with noble–plebian intermarriages by, 28 Meyerson, Mark D., 5 Mira de Amescua, Antonio, Máscara de la expulsión de los Moriscos, 156–158, 175n5, 177–178n5 Molho, Mauricio, 49, 135, 141–142, 149n74 Montemayor, Jorge de, 185 Moors as a term, 207n1 motif of Moorish emasculation, 160, 188, 189–190 positive descriptions of see maurophilia in Spanish literature in the eighteenth century and thereafter, 217 Moreno de Vargas, Bernabé (Governor of Mérida) acquired nobility promoted by, 30–31, 78 Discursos de la nobleza de España, authenticity of hidalguía discussed in, 30–31 hidalguía de sangre and hidalguía de virtud both considered legitimate and honourable, 30, 43n74 Moreno Valero, Manuel, 218–219, 220n19 Moriscas Ana Félix (fictional character from Don Quijote), 3, 184, 201–207, 211nn65–66,69, 212nn77–78 burial of Ana Yébenes, 168–170, 200 Cervantes’ figuring of Zoraida as the Virgin Mary, 205, 211n72

244

Index

Moriscas (cont.) Lope de Vega’s Felisardo, 215 María López, 168–170, 200 ‘Morisco problem’ banishment evasion hypothesised by Dadson, 166–167, 168 and expulsion, 4, 15–16, 162–164 ballad about, 15–16, 199–201 and the Duke of Lerma, 158, 165, 175n5 and permixtion (intermarriage) advocated by Valencia, 163–164, 176, 203 rationalisation by the general populace of, 199–207 Moriscos in Castille see mudéjares defended by Francisco Núñez Muley, 14, 162, 164, 179nn36,38 eradication of culture of, 161–162 expulsion of see ‘Morisco problem’ introduced, 1 legend of Tuzaní see Tuzaní (fictional Morisco protagonist) marginalisation of, 3 self-hatred of religious origins, 215 texts of literary maurophilia, 184–185, 207n3 see also Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa tolerance associated with cultural differences of, 15–16, 164, 186–187 tolerance of associated with identifiability of, 167–168, 213 women see Moriscas mudéjares adaptation of Old Christians’ cultural practices by Castilian Moriscos, 76, 159–160, 164, 180–181nn49–50 Moriscos of Murcia descendants of, 181n50

religious and cultural practices maintained by, 5 renegade Morisco in Espinel’s, Vida de Marcos de Obregón, 76–77 Netanyahu, Benzion, 19n29 Nirenberg, David, 5, 6, 17n14 Núñez Muley, Don Francisco, 14, 162, 164, 179nn36,38 Old Christians (Spaniards without Jewish or Moorish ancestry), anxiety of sameness, 1 Olivares, Count-Duke (Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental) efforts to relax blood purity statutes, 119n15, 146n16 and Quevedo’s ‘La isla de los Monopantos’, 147n36 stations of hidalguía outlined by, 26–27 Olsen, Margaret, 197–198 Pablos (fictional pícaro), 63 blood impurity shame of, 64–65 compared with Luzmán (fictional pícaro), 72 Parker, Alexander, 66 Payne, Stanley G., 218, 220n16 Peñalosa y Mondragón, Benito acquired nobility promoted by, 30–31, 78 Libro de las cinco excelencias del español, 30–31, 41n20, 43n41 unreliable methods used to determine nobility as a concern of, 37–38 Pérez de Hita, Ginés biographical information, 188 Guerras civiles de Granada, 184, 188, 190–194 Tuzaní (fictional Morisco protagonist), 191–194 Historia de los bandos de Zegríes y Abencerrajes, 207–208n4

Index

Perry, Elizabeth, 180n41 Philip II ban on Morisco culture, 160, 161, 196 and the Cathedral of Toledo’s anti-Converso statutes, 101 and Mendoza y Bobadilla’s El tizón de la nobleza española, 116 Pragmática of 1566, 196 Philip III compared with King Pelayo, 156 expulsion of the Moriscos, 164, 180n47, 199–201, 214 legal scholar of see Valenzuela Velázquez, Juan Bautista El libro verde de Aragón banned by, 117 prime minister see Lerma, Duque de Royal Chronicler of Castile and Indies see Valencia, Pedro de titles of nobility restrained by, 26–27, 32 Philip IV Pedro Alos’s memorandum to, 166, 182n57 personal physician see Quiñones, Juan de and the stations of hidalguía outlined by Count-Duke of Olivares, 26–27 pícaras hidalgo envy of, 68 individual Elena (Salas Barbadillo’s fictional pícara), 68, 69 Justina (Úbeda’s fictional pícara), 58, 67–68, 69 Rufina (Castillo Solórzano’s fictional pícara), 68, 69 see also Teresa de Manzanares lack of feminine discourse in narratives of, 68 as the lowest of the low, 72–73 motivations of, 93n76

245

picaresque narratives anti-heroes with potentially social-order threatening ambitions featured in, 49–50, 58–59, 201–207 defined, 56–57, 91n36 upward mobility of unwanted subjects featured in, 59 see also Castillo Solórzano, Alonso de, La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares; Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de, Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos; Vega Carpio, Lope de, El caballero del milagro pícaros Converso writers’ invention of proposed by Castro, 57 female see pícaras individual see Luzmán; Pablos social marginalisation of, 56–58 Pike, Ruth, 20n38 Pinedo, Luis de, Libro de chistes (Book of Jokes), 13, 126, 128–129, 140 Pope Nicholas V, 7 Pope Paul IV, 101 Predmore, Richard, 96n114 Prendergast, Ryan, 98n144 Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de biographical information, 48, 63 Execración de los judíos, 129, 133, 146n16 Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos, 11, 63–64 ‘La isla de los Monopantos’, 133–134, 147nn34–36 ‘Poderoso caballero es don Dinero’, 51 on the role of money in fashioning fraudulent noblemen, 11, 51–52 Sueños, Providencia de Dios, 63

246

Index

Quiñones, Juan de Discurso sobre la sangre menstrua de los Judíos, 104, 119n17, 119n19 on Jewish haemorrhoids/male menstruation, 13, 105–109 status as Philip IV’s physician, 105 Quint, David, 79–80, 85, 86, 88–89, 96n111 Rahn Phillips, Carla, 166 raza (unclean or defective lineage), 112, 122n61 Redondo, Augustin, 93n69 Rey Hazas, Antonio, 73 Rico, Francisco, 64, 91n42, 93n59 Rodríguez, Lucas, 187 Romancero general (General Collection of Ballads), 184, 186, 189, 190 ballad authored by Lucas Rodríguez, 187 De cómo y por qué el rey Don Felipe III expelió, á los Moriscos de España, y de la pena que les causó este destierro, 199–200 verses satirising the romancero Morisco, 209n27 romances new romances, 186, 208n10 romances fronterizos (frontier ballads), 186, 187, 189 romances Moriscos, 184, 187, 208n9 see also Romancero general (General Collection of Ballads) Los siete libros de la Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, 185 Roth, Norman, 19n29, 19n33 Rowe, Erin, 20n42 Salas Barbadillo, Alonso Jerónimo de El caballero, 47–48 La hija de la Celestina, 68, 69, 93n71 La ingeniosa Elena, 58 Salucio, Agustín (Archbishop of Toledo) ‘Aprobaciones del discurso del Maestro Salucio’, 119n15

‘Discursos acerca de la justicia y buen gobierno de España, en los estatutos de limpieza de sangre y si conviene, o no alguna limitación de ellos’, 118–19n14 sambenitos chapter in El tizón de la nobleza, 116 described in El día de fiesta por la mañana, 111–112, 121n48 names on robes worn by the condemned in autos de fe, 109, 110f3.1 used by linajudos (keepers of lineages), 110, 112 San Agustín, Friar Gaspar de, 147 Santa Cruz, Melchor de, Floresta española, 13, 126, 128–129, 214–215 Santa María, Pablo de, 5, 118n4 Sarmiento, Pero, 6–7, 18n23, 18n26, 101 Scott, James, 124, 175 self-hatred of religious origins, 215 sentencia-estatuto formulated by Sarmiento, 6–7, 18n26, 101, 118n2 Sieber, Diane E., 188–189, 195–196 Siliceo, Archbishop Juan Martínez de biographical information, 102 and the limpieza statutes of the Cathedral of Toledo, 101–103 spurious letters disseminated by, 115, 133 slavery berberiscos, 9, 19–20n37, 20n45 and ‘Blots in the highest lineages’, 116 demographics of Sevillian slaves, 19–20n37 enslavement of Espinel’s Obregón by a renegade Morisco, 76–77 ownership of black slaves by Moriscos, 161 religious and cultural practices maintained in cases of, 5

Index

stereotypes of, 20n38 sub-Saharan Africans, 9, 19nn35–36, 20 Smith, Dawn L., 149n74 Smith, Paul J., 63 social currency, 3, 17n9 social marginalisation of Moriscos, 160–162 of pícaros, 57 and the toleration of Conversos, 140 and the upward social mobility of the marginalised, 213–214 social mobility acquired nobility promoted by Moreno de Vargas and Peñalosa y Mondragón, 30–31, 78 see also hidalguía, carta ejecutoria aspirations to nobility feared by Fernández de Navarrete, Pedro, 10–11, 38, 39–40, 48, 66 aspirations to nobility portrayed in Zayas’s ‘El traidor contra su sangre’, 78–79 and the dramas of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 218 evolving attitudes towards, 218 and the social insecurity of impoverished hidalgos, 12, 24, 37–39, 58–59, 73, 78–79 see also hidalguía social passing and the anxiety of sameness, 8–9, 15, 16–17, 213–214 see also difference in Cervantes’s fiction, 2 crypto-Judaism, 5, 7–8, 18n18, 19n29, 102, 108, 132–136 crypto-Muslims, 158–159, 160 literally ‘becoming’ one, 15, 16–17 of low-borns reflected in the figure of the pícaro, 56–58

247

disappearance from literary discourse, 217 and the mismatch between outward appearance and ‘true’ nature, 132–133 and survival, 3, 16, 160–161, 214 transitional state of the Converso body, 136 see also toleration and acceptance of difference Spadaccini, Nicholas, 143 Spanish Inquisition 1478 founding of, 7 of 1619, 110f3.1 of 1632, 34–35, 106 of Aragón and Castile, 116 assassination of Inquisitor Épila by Conversos, 113, 114–115 camouflaging of Jewish ancestry resulting from, 7–8 in Castile, 216 founding of (1478), 7 Grand Inquisitor Fernando Niño de Guevara, 119n15 Inquisitor Siliceo see Siliceo, Archbishop Juan Martínez de limpieza investigations questioned by Llorente, 216–217 see also limpieza de sangre (purity of blood statutes) in Logroño, 216 Muslim practices targeted by, 168–171 official rank of Friar Antonio de Sotomayor, 105 Pedro Marcos’s post as a familiar of, 32 and Saint Teresa’s grandfather, Juan Sánchez, 34–35 statutes excluding Christians of Jewish descent (1483), 7 in Toledo, 34, 35, 109, 168 in Zaragoza (1482–1499), 115 Stevens, James R., 121n54

248

Index

Taylor, Scott K., 40 Téllez de Meneses, Alonso biographical information, 42–43n39 Primera parte del libro llamado Luzero de nobleza, 29–30, 42–43n39 Teresa de Manzanares (Castillo Solórzano’s fictional pícara), 11, 58–59, 68–72, 94nn77,79–84,86 compared with Luzmán (fictional pícaro), 81 as a figurative male social passer, 72 Thompson, I.A.A., 33, 34, 43n53, 44n60, 92n43 titles of nobility acquired legally by Conversos, 25 blood nobility viewed as the only genuine form of hidalguía outlined by Fernando Mexía, 27–28 of caballero, 28, 33, 38, 41n20 see also Luzmán Christ’s royal blood, 29 deceitfully used by Archbishop Arias, 125–126 escudero (squire) defined, 73–74, 94n92 see also Espinel, Vicente, Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón purchased by Conversos, 130–131 sale of, 31, 33 stations of hidalguía outlined by Olivares, 26–27 see also hidalguía use of ‘Don’ see ‘Don’ as a title of nobility use of ‘Doña’, 26–27, 42n23, 68–69, 70, 75 toleration and acceptance of difference and identifiability, 167–168, 213

Jews ordered to wear red by Enrique II, 108 see also identity devaluation limits of, 8–9, 16–17, 140–141, 167–168 the noble Moor as exemplary defeated enemy, 15–16, 190 Valencia’s views of Moriscos, 159, 161 see also social passing Torrejoncillo, Francisco de, 13, 104–105, 108 Tueller, James B., 178n24 Tuzaní (fictional Morisco protagonist) Calderón de la Barca’s El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, 15, 194–199 malleability of, 191 inconsistencies regarding his origins, 209–210n39 Pérez de Hita’s legend of, 191–194, 209n33 Twinam, Ann, 118n4, 145n2 Valencia, Pedro de permixtion (intermarriage) advocated by, 163–164, 176, 203 on the Spanishness of Moriscos, 159, 161 Tratado acerca de los Moriscos de España, 15, 158 Valenzuela Velázquez, Juan Bautista, 39, 46n89, 81 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 186 Abindaráez in El remedio de la desdicha of, 188 Abindaráez in La Dorotea of, 208n15 biographical information, 62–63 El caballero del milagro, 11, 58, 59–63 fictional pícaro Luzmán see Luzmán ‘La desdicha por la honra’, 215

Index

El galán escarmentado, 14, 137–140, 148n55 Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, 62, 144 El perro del hortelano, 62 La prueba de los amigos, 51–52 San Nicolás de Tolentino, 97n121 Velasco, Jesús, 43n46 Villegas, Antonio de, 185 Vincent, Bernard, 14, 151n1 Wardropper, Bruce, 143 Williams, Diane, 212n77 Wilson, Margaret, 209n33 Yovel,Yirmiyahu, 103

Zabaleta, Juan de El día de fiesta por la mañana linajudos (keepers of lineages) portrayed in, 111–112 sambenitos described in, 111–112, 121n48 studies of, 121n54 Zapata, Luis, Miscelánea, 13, 126 Zayas y Sotomayor, María de ‘El traidor contra su sangre’, 23–24, 78–79 self-defeating repercussions of blood purity statutes, 30 Zegríes faction, civil conflict with Abencerrajes, 188–190, 207–208n4, 209n26

249