Vázquez Montalbán and the case against rationalism in philosophy and art

In Madrid earlier this year I had the good fortune to pick up a second-hand copy of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's 1970 philosophical essay-play-poetry collection-novella Manifiesto subnormal, sadly long since out of print and as far as I know never translated into English. Vázquez Montalbán is of course best known for his Pepe Carvalho detective series, about the eponymous Catalán gastronome and ex-communist/ex-CIA (yes, such things are apparently possible!) private investigator.

However Vázquez Montalban was also an astute cultural critic with many fascinating insights into Spain during the epoch of 'tardefranquismo' ('late Francoism') and subsequent 'transition' to liberal democracy as well as the world of Spanish far left politics, in which he was an active participant - beginning with his involvement with the Guevarist FLP in the 1960s and continuing with his lengthy career as a perennial dissident in the Unifed Socialist Party of Cataluña during the 70s and 80s (Vázquez Montalbán sided with the Eurocommunists during the PSUC's interminable faction fights but at the same time liked to satirise leading Euros such as Santiago Carillo - the 'born again' former hardline Stalinist - mercilessly). Vázquez Montalbán's collection of essays Crónica sentimental de la transición and his 1985 novel El pianista - charting the hopes, tragicomic failures and disillusionment of a generation of Spanish leftists - are essential reading for any serious student of the period.

Manifiesto is, as its publisher's blurb proudly proclaims, a book that is impossible to categorise in terms of genre. Nor is it easy to take away from it a neat didactic message, since the author characteristically satirises even those philosophical positions which he himself would be most inclined to defend. At the heart of it though is a call for leftists to overturn the time-honoured equation of Reason and rational philosophy with revolutionary politics and art and to celebrate instead what Vázquez Montalbán refers to as "la subnormalidad" and "la consciencia subnormal" - terms which I am not quite sure how to translate because nowhere does the author actually explicitly define them, but is perhaps closest to the standpoint of the Surrealist school in its delight in the irrational and absurd.

As Vázquez Montalbán writes "the prestige of Reason has been one of the cultural institutions most firmly established by the bourgeoisie" - and with good reason, since it encourages artists and philosophers to abstract themselves from reality - a reality that will now be mediated through the obfuscticating lens of ideology and false unity. Capitalism has also devised a system - humanist liberal democracy - which is capable of embracing and co-opting its own Hegelian artisitc antithesis, the aesthetic of desencanto or disillusionment, so long as it agrees to play by capitalism's own house rules. Vázquez Montalbán's message is that artists and would-be revolutionaries should try to resist this process of co-option or "recuperación" from "subnormalidad" into the capitalist cultural industry, although he is quite frankly pessimistic about the chances of success.

In the theatrical farce which forms the central section of the book, a dialogue plays out between a number of characters including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Theodor Adorno, Leonid Brezhnev, the Marx brothers as well as an anonymous narrator (whose views seem more akin to the Stalinist cultural operative Lukács than to Vázquez Montalbán himself - as evidenced by the condemnation of surrealism as "a false cultural terrorism that distracted the attention of philistines from the new literature of social protest influenced by Naturalism"!!).

In what follows, it is Theodor Adorno who emerges in the most sympathetic light. In response to Cohn-Bendit's simplistic revolutionary street-theatre and the narrator's defence of the doctrine of Third Period Stalinist "social-fascism" Adorno declares that he has broken with all such "grand rationalisations" because he wants above all to survive and sees little chance of the socialist revolution succeeding. As he says "without doubt the old dame [capitalism] will pass away, but she will have lived long enough to corrupt both her children and her antagonists."

Summing up, Adorno seems to echo Vázquez Montalbán's exhortations in favour of "subnormalidad" as he proclaims "Reason has prostituted itself - long live Feeling!"

Antonio Machado and the uses of Spanish history

As I've noted on other occasions (see for instance here and here) the poetry of the Spanish writer and "martyr" for the Republican cause Antonio Machado is both endlessly fascinating and, at the same time, deeply problematic in the way it manages to combine progressive leftist political sentiments with a Romantic attachment to symbols of Spain's imperialist past and ideas of Castillian supremacy. Yet, at the same time there is a powerful argument that poetry is not an exercise in instrumental reason and as such should be judged solely according to political criteria (a fact that I think also makes it hard to dismiss anti-rationalist philosophers such as Unamuno and Zambrano so hard to dismiss).

Looking down the River Dureo towards the Hermitage of San Saturio

I was reminded of this paradox during my visit last month to Soria, high up at the eastern end of the Castillian meseta near the headwaters of the River Duero, where Machado wrote his most famous collection of poems - Campos de Castilla - and where he met, married and then buried his young wife Leonor. While the strident literary nationalism that inhabits much of this collection is disconcerting, when actually physically confronted with the landscape which Machado describes in these poems it is difficult not to feel moved in a similarly irrational, 'Romantic' way... Somehow this desolate, rocky terrain - with its accumulated millenia of ruined cities, fortresses and monasteries - speaks to you in a way that the empty vistas of 'Godzone' can never even hope to aspire to...

The ruins of the 12th century monastery of San Juan del Duero

While the town of Soria itself is perhaps today a little too eager to cash-in on the legacy of its most famous resident (as evidenced by the 'Cervecería Machado' I encountered in the Calle de los Estudios which sold only Belgian beer...) and has lost some of its poetic 'lustre', a short walk across to the other side of the river you find yourself amidst the familiar vistas so beloved by the poet:

He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados,
álamos del camino en la ribera
del Duero, entre San Polo y San Saturio,
tras las murallas viejas de Soria - barbacana
hacia Aragón, en castellana tierra-.

Estos chopos del río, que acompañan
con el sonido de sus hojas secas
el son del agua, cuando el viento sopla,
tienen en sus cortezas
grabadas iniciales que son nombres
de enamorados, cifras que son fechas.
¡Alamos del amor que ayer tuvisteis
de ruiseñores vuestras ramas llenas;
álamos que seréis mañana liras
del viento perfumado en primavera;
álamos del amor cerca del agua
que corre y pasa y sueña;
alamos de las márgenes del Duero,
conmigo vais, mi corazón os lleva!

('Campos de Soria' VIII)

Along the banks of the river it is also possible to see the remains of the monastery of San Polo, which belonged to the Templar military order until their forcible dissolution in the 14th century, and about which the patron saint of Spanish Romanticism Gustavo Bécquer dedicated his gothic tales 'El Monte de los Ánimas' and 'El Rayo de Luna'.

The gatehouse of the monastery of San Polo, which sits astride the old road between San Juan del Duero and the Hermitage of San Saturio

In the midst of all this history, it is hard to begrudge Machado's appropriation of Castile's store of cultural and historical capital in the pursuit of his modernista literary project, even though the nationalist overtones make his poetry difficult to defend from an objective, political point of view. Perhaps the real problem for Machado (and his fellow Republican intellectuals) was not so much their tendency to appeal to nationalist sentimentality and a rose-tinted view of Spain's military past, but rather the fact that Franco's Nationalists were simply more credible representatives of this historical tradition. What was needed therefore was not so much a simple appeal to history but rather, as Juan Goytisolo advocates in his novel Juan sin tierra, a systematic re-writing or re-imagining of the national past, which promotes dissident figures such as Enrique IV (the reputedly - at least according to according to Gregorio Marañon - homosexual and morisco-phile half brother of Isabel 'la Católica') at the expense of the dominant "Golden Age" narrative handed down to us by authors such as Menéndez Pidal.

In this sense then, it might be said that the problem is not so much a surfeit of irrationality or Romanticism on the part of Machado, but rather that in his pursuit of these strategies he simply does not go far enough...

Postscript:

I couldn't conclude this brief soliloquy on Spanish left nationalism without mentioning the website of the Castilian federation of the Stalinist Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España, which amusingly fights for the self-determination of Castile (along with all the other "oppressed nations" of Spain) and 'liberation' from the rule of EU and US imperialism (since they view Spain as essentially an exploited neo-colony of these latter). Somewhat scarily, in large parts of provincial Spain (such as La Rioja, where I spent the majority of time during my recent trip to the Iberian peninsular) these guys seem to be just about the only organised far left force!

Of festivals, saints and the aesthetic appeal of the irrational

In Burgos - the old capital of mediaeval Castilla and home of Spain's dubious national hero "El Cid" - during the festival of the San Lesmes (the city´s patron saint) over the weekend I was struck (as I have so often been in my travels around Spain) by the tremendous attraction that Catholicism exerts on a aesthetic level in this part of the world, despite sharing in the manifest intellectual bankruptcy of all religion and blind-faith based ideologies.

Even a cynic such as myself cannot help but be impressed by the visual grandeur of it all - a grandeur with which evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism simply cannot hope to compete (although perhaps High Church Anglicanism comes a little closer to matching it). It would seem that the Roman Catholic Church understood better than its rivals the importance of offering something more tangible and concrete than the promise of heavenly salvation, which was why it was able to sink such deep and enduring roots in the soil of the Old Roman Empire. Like 19th century Social Democracy, Catholicism achieved hegemony not so much through evangelical fervour but rather through the slow permeation or co-option of every facet of mass, popular culture.
Possibly this is why evangelism (in both its religious and Leninist variants) has been unable to offer anything other than the most fleeting of challenges to the Old Religions - of Saint Peter and of Kautsky and Bernstein - despite the obvious deficiencies and internal contradictions of both. Perhaps the best option for the anti-capitalist left in its efforts to capture the imagination of the working class is also to cultivate, as another blogger has recently suggested, a sense of the irrational and marvelous - as opposed to the standard devices of logic and reason.

Perhaps, like Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, we should accept that at the end of the day what matters not so much what people believe but rather the objective function that belief fulfils?

Interrogating the myth of the Popular Front

Reading Mark Derby's book Kiwi Compañeros (which compiles a wealth of primary source material detailing the involvement of New Zealanders in the Spanish Civil War) recently I was struck by the disjunction between the confused and often demoralising experiences of the some of the participants whose stories were reproduced in that volume and the traditional leftist narrative according to which the Spanish Civil War was the most glorious hour of the Popular Front and the struggle against Fascism.

This disjunction between heroic narrative or myth and tragic reality has also been explored in depth in another book which I also happened to pick up recently, Sebastian Faber's Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico 1939-1975 and which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in this subject area.

Faber locates the leftist mythologising of the Popular Front in Spain squarely within the context of the struggle between the Spanish Republicans and the Franco regime over who were the genuine inheritors of Spanish national culture and identity, pointing out the striking similarities in the kinds of patriotic rhetoric and appeals to a glorious national past which characterised the propaganda of both sides during and after the Civil War.

These similarities account for the political disorientation felt by intellectuals who flocked to support the Republican cause during the Civil War, most notably the English writer George Orwell whose book Homage to Catalonia describes how the initial euphoria following the electoral victory of the Popular Front coalition of Republicans, Catalan nationalists and the PSOE in February 1936 which saw peasants and workers spontaneously expropriating latifundia and factories and forming their own armed militias was abruptly curtailed and repressed by none other than the Popular Front government later that same year in the name of maintaining "unity" in the struggle against Franco's Nationalist insurgency.

For many Spanish Republican intellectuals this process of disillusionment began even earlier, with the failure of their misiones pedagógicas or educational missions to the countryside which were couched in terms of elitist Krausist ideology to inspire the hoped-for spark of enlightenment among the oppressed pueblo (who naturally were preoccupied with more pressing, material concerns!).

Some of these Spanish intellectuals (such as Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset) were sufficiently disillusioned with the masses as to cross over to sympathising with Franco's Nationalists. However the majority continued to live in a state of denial about the true nature of their relationship with the muchedumbre (multitude).

As Faber points out, this delusion was only intensified during the long exile of the Republican intellectuals in Latin America after 1939, where they founded numerous magazines and reviews dedicated to the task of preserving the flame of "authentic" Spanish culture and identity. Faber cites the journal España Peregrina founded by the Creationist poet Juan Larrea as a typical example of this reinterpretation of the Civil War as a process of national spiritual purification, noting that

...this particular brand of "poetic" historiography, which combined Hegelian teleology with an exceptionalist reading of Spanish history, allowed Larrea to represent the Spanish Civil War ' which had been experienced by most exiles as a great and unnecessary injustice - as a positive event of enormous historical significance.

(132)

Juan Larrea (right) with Vicente Huidobro

In the end though, Faber argues, the struggle of the Republican exiles for cultural hegemony was doomed from the beginning due to several key factors.

The first of these was the concentration of their efforts in the area of literary or "high" culture, which in countries such as Mexico with repressive authoritarian governments was the only avenue open to the intellectuals as it commanded no mass audience and therefore posed no threat.

The second was their need as financial and material beneficiaries of these same regimes to remain silent about the very real injustices and inequalities that existed in their new home countries (Faber returns again and again to the fact that Mexican PRI following the retirement of Cárdenas in 1940 certainly had little reason to be deserving of the appellation "progressive").

Finally, there was the arrogant supposition that with the departure of the Republican exiles the Spanish nation had been deprived of any literary or cultural means of expressing itself. Yet during the 1950s a new generation of writers - such as novelist Juan Goytisolo and the poet Carlos Barral - who unlike the exiles were actually read by the general public yet had no dynastic ties to the Republic.

The failure of the Republican exiles' crusade for cultural hegemony is highly significant, Faber contends, in that superiority in the sphere of cultural and literary production had always been crucial to the Popular Front's claims of political legitimacy - especially from 1937 onwards as it began to repress (now with the enthusiastic support of the Stalinist PCE) left oppositionist forces such as the marxist POUM and the anarchist CNT. It is hardly coincidental that in that same year - 1937 - the Spanish Republican government co-sponsored the "International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture" in Valencia, whose list of participants (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidobro, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Bertolt Brecht, WH Auden - to name only a few!) reads like a who's who list of the international literary world at the time.

However, while the Republic may have failed to secure cultural hegemony among the ordinary Spanish masses it did succeed in convincing the international leftist intelligentsia, many of whom to this day do not question the heroic iconography associated with the Spanish Popular Front such as the International Brigades, La Pasionaria and the "Defence of Madrid".

In this respect, it was undoubtedly helped by the Nationalist atrocities which converted figures such as Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado into martyrs or secular saints.

Faber's book is an important antidote to this powerful and pervasive myth of the Popular Front which enables us to look at the events of recent Spanish history in a clear-eyed, non-sentimental way, without for a moment trivialising the magnitude of the suffering which many of the Popular Front's supporters endured.

The Spanish Muslims of Timbuktu

In a comment on my previous post about the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, Joaquim Pisa (who besides being the author of numerous fictional, travel and poetical works also maintains an excellent Spanish-language blog out of Barcelona entitled Aventura en la tierra) brought to my attention the remarkable story of the Spanish Muslims of Timbuktu.

Joaquim pointed me to the website of the Fundación Mahmud Kati, set up following the "rediscovery" in 1999 in the ancient city of Timbuktu (in Mali, West Africa) of a library of over 3 000 manuscripts literally "splashed" (as the one report put it) with words written in the Aljamiado script. The significance of this find was simply that the Aljamiado script was the same script used by the mudejar inhabitants of Spain to transcribe words in the Romance dialect of Mozarabic, and moreover that the manuscripts found in Timbuktu contained frequent references to the Spanish peninsular.

The collection of manuscripts in question had spent nearly two centuries scattered among various descendants of the great 16th century Timbuktu chronicler Mahmud Kati (himself descended from Spanish Muslims) before being reunited by one of these descendants of Kati - Ismael Diadiè Haïdara.

In the text of a conference paper delivered in Bamako in 2005 entitled "Andalusians in the curve of the Niger" Antonio Llaguno Rojas (vice president of the Fundación Mahmud Kati) recounts the story of how these Spanish mudejares and moriscos - in all but their religion identical to their Christian compatriots - came to reside in such a far-flung, exotic location.

From this account it appears that the first wave of Spanish Muslims who emigrated to the region of the Niger left Spain either before or just after the fall of Granada, thus escaping the vicious religious persecution suffered by their morisco brethren during the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

The reasons for the emigration of these mudejares can be traced back to the period of the Mali Empire and the reign of Musa I, who flourished in the first half of the fourteenth century. Musa was a devout Muslim, and for this reason went to great lengths to persuade the great poets, philosophers and architects of the Muslim cities of Al-Andalus (i.e. Spain) to come and reside at his court. The Sankoré mosque in Timbuktu - constructed by the Andalusian poet and architect Abu Ishaq Es-Saheli as part of a wider complex that also included a library and a university - dates from around this time.

The Sankoré Mosque in Timbuktu

The remarkable thing about the Spanish Muslim presence in the Niger is that it seems to have been largely unaffected by changes in dynastic politics. Thus in 1468 when the Mali Empire was eclipsed by the neighbouring Songhai kingdom, the new ruler of Timbuktu continued to employ scribes and clerics from Al-Andalus as high-ranking civil servants, notably among them the Kati family.

Mahmud Kati, who was a member of the second or third generation of of this family of mudejar emigrants (depending on which sources you believe), compiled not only the fabled library but also the most important historical account of the Songhai Empire and its predecessors - the Tarikh el-Fettach.

Ironically, in 1591 an army of invasion sent by the Sultan of Morocco and led by a morisco general, Yuder Pachá, conquered Timbuktu and overthrew Mahmud Kati's Songhai patrons.

This Yuder Pachá was born into a family of Spanish Muslims in Morocco, banished by the Spanish Crown following the failed Alpujarras uprising of 1568-71. He fought with distinction on the Moroccan side in the Battle of Alcazaquivir in 1578 when a Portuguese-Spanish army of invasion was defeated and the King of Portugal killed (much to the relief of the local Jewish community, who Don Sebastián had promised to put to the knife if they did not convert to Christianity!).

His conquest of Timbuktu for the Sultan, while only temporary, led to the settlement of a second wave of Spanish Muslims (this time moriscos as opposed to mudejares) who subsequently founded their own "empire" (el Imperio de los Armas) which, according to the scant sources I have been able to find on the subject, survived until being overwhelmed by the invasions of Tuareg nomads and French colonialists in the 18th century.

The history that europe would prefer to forget

Given the tide of anti-immigrant fervour sweeping Europe at the moment - as evidenced by the victory of Meisseurs Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Rajoy and their lesser brethren (Griffin, Wilders et al.) at last weekend's European elections - it seems like an opportune moment to repost the following article by Juan Goytisolo, originally published in El País back in March. Apologies to the reader for the roughness of my translation.


The inconvenient history of the Moriscos[1]

Official and academic Spain is trying to forget the fourth centenary of one of the most ominous deeds in our history: the expulsion in 1609 of hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women of Muslim descent.

- Juan Goytisolo El País 15/03/2009

To Francisco Márquez Villanueva

The past of all countries contains alternating moments of embarrassment and patriotic pride. The fourth centenary of the expulsion of the Moriscos in the reign of Philip III obviously belongs among the former. Outside of the Andalusí Legacy[2] foundation and the conference of historians it is organising this May, official and academic Spain has maintained a defensive position of diplomatic silence on this issue, revealing its obvious discomfort.

What happened from 1609 to 1614 was an inglorious episode that provided the first European precedent for the bloody ethnic cleansings (of various magnitudes) that we have witnessed over the past century. The “preventive” measures ordered by the Duke of Lerma[3] with the strong support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and Patriarch Ribera[4] were the subject of a long, uncertain and controversial political-religious debate. It is useful to remind ourselves, albeit only briefly, of its various stages:

1499: forced conversion of the people of Granada by Cardinal Cisneros; 1501-02: Muslims in the Kingdom of Castile given a choice between exile and conversion: the mediaeval Mudéjares[5] became Moriscos pure and simple; 1516: forced to abandon their dress and customs, although the measure was not enforced for 10 years; 1525-26: conversion by edict of the Moriscos in Aragón and Valencia; 1562: a council of ecclesiastics, jurists and members of the Inquisition prohibits the people of Granada from using the Arabic language; 1569-70: rebellion of Alpujarra and the wars of Granada… from the crushing of the Moriscos to the execution of Aben Humeya, the political strategy of Philip II consisted of dispersing the people of Granada and resettling them in Castile, Murcia and Extremadura, far from the southern coasts and possible Turkish invasions.


So many vacillations and changes of direction reflect the contradictions that existed between an ecclesiastical hierarchy with scant respect for the universal Christian ethic on the one hand and on the other the interests of the peninsular nobility, for whom the expulsion of those who worked their lands would spell agricultural ruin. As we now know thanks to historiographical work carried out since the end of the 19th century, the political-religious crusade was the subject of a furious behind-the-scenes controversy.

While some opposed the expulsion and preached baptism and gradual assimilation, the hard-line elements of the episcopacy were strongly inclined towards more forceful proposals: slavery, collective extermination or castration of all the males and the deportation to the Island of Bacalao,[6] in other words to Newfoundland.

Banishment to the much closer African coast, favoured by the majority of the members of the Council of State, was opposed by a venerable bishop with an argument of impeccable logic: after arrival in Algeria or Morocco the Moriscos would renounce their Christian faith, the most charitable thing would therefore be to put them in leaking ships so that they would be shipwrecked during the voyage and their immortal souls be saved.

In the debate that for decades pitted doves against hawks, the hawks relied upon the eloquent pens of propagandists such as Brother Jaime de Bleda, González de Cellorigo, Brother Marcos de Guadalajara and, most importantly of all, Pedro Aznar de Cardona. – for whom the expulsion marked the closing of a long and ignoble historical digression opened by the invasion of 711: thanks to the work of Lerma and Philip III Spain would be Catholic without exception.

Along with their religious arguments, they put forward other ridiculous claims concerning demographics: the supposed danger of a giant increase in the Morisco population in abrupt contrast with a static or declining Christian one due to ecclesiastical celibacy, the cloistering of women in convents, the wars in Flanders and emigration to America. Such arguments, which are being revived today by the European nationalist ultras, were ironically summed up by the dog Berganza in Cervantes’ Symposium of the Dogs.[7]

The Morisco problem and the radical solution applied to it have been the subject of numerous well-documented studies in the last fifty years by historians as diverse as América Castro, Domínguez Ortiz, Julio Caro Baroja, Mercedes García-Arenal, Bernard Vincent, Louis Cardaillac, Márquez Villanueva, among many others. Thanks to these people we now know of the opposition of those whom today we would call courageous citizens to the edict of expulsion four hundred years ago. Very significantly, the majority of these people were recently converted Christians of Jewish origin – no less visible despite having altered their names and outward appearance. Their advocacy in favour of assimilation of the Moriscos was as much a plea on their own behalf and both contradicted and challenged the very recently introduced Christian statutes regarding limpieza de sangre.[8]

The reassertion of commerce, labour and merit against the “black honour” of the Old Christians offered some hope of arresting the already perceptible Spanish decline and the long “holiday from history” which was prolonged for another two centuries until the Cortes de Cádiz[9], despite the eminently sensible policies of Olivares[10] and the enlightened ministers of the 18th century.

Example of this reassertion include González de Cellorigo’s memorial addressed to the monarch Of the Necessary Policies and Useful Restoration of the Republic of Spain –its regenerationist spirit obvious from is title – and Luis de Mármol y Carvajal’s excellent History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos – evocative of a human tragedy that could have been avoided with a more pragmatic approach. Both of these books helped to alter the current of Erasmean thought[11] to which the would-be modernisers of self-absorbed Spanish society subscribed.

In a soon-to-be-published work that I have just had the opportunity to read thanks to the kindness of the author – Moors, Moriscos and Turks in the Work of Cervantes – Francisco Márquez Villanueva analyses with his usual aplomb the writings – mostly unedited – of the humanist Pedro de Valencia, disciple and executor of the Hebrew scholar Benito Arias Montano. His Treatise Concerning the Moriscos in Spain, unknown until its publication in 1979 and which only came into my hands very recently, could be perhaps – seen from the perspective of its own time – the most reasoned defence of the cause of those who were expelled.

A convert from Judaism like Arias Montano and an enemy of the Church scholastics and the doctrines propounded by the Council of Trent,[12] de Valencia energetically denounced “the insult that is done (to the Moriscos) in depriving them of their lands and in not treating them with the same equal honour and esteem as all other natural-born citizens.” Like Brother Luis de León (he who is remembered for his famous description of the statute of limpieza de sangre as “an affront to generations that will never cease”), Pedro de Valencia opposed the statute of Cardinal Siliceo[13] and advocated a policy of mixed marriages between Moriscos and Old Christians in order to “persuade the country’s citizens that all of them are brothers of one lineage and one blood.”

Morisco refugees set sail from the Spanish port of Viñaroz, Valencia

The spectacle of tens of thousands of baptised men separated from their children while begging for mercy from God and the King and proclaiming in vain their desire to stay in the country of their birth was difficult for many sincere Christians to tolerate. The brutal nature of the expulsion and the massacres carried out on those who tried to avoid it were received with sadness and compassion by an intelligent minority, but with cries of hatred and spontaneous cheers by those like Gaspar de Aguilar who turned them into songs of heroic deeds.

The majority of the Moriscos took refuge – with varying success – in the Maghreb. The natives of Hornachos[14] set up the so-called republic of Salé in Morocco,[15] with the illusory hope of ingratiating themselves with the King and some day returning to Spain.

During a four-year relaxation those in the Ricote Valley[16] were allowed to voluntarily emigrate across the French frontier and travel on to other European countries. Although they had been completely assimilated, the Duke of Lerma signed without qualm their order of collective banishment in 1614. The episode of the Morisco of Ricote who in the second part of Don Quixote meets with Sancho Panza allowed Cervantes, a master in the art of cunning, to reclaim a voice for those who were victims of such a savage violation.

“I left our town – said the Morisco – entered France and although I was well-received there, I wanted to see it all. I went to Italy and Germany and there it seemed to me that one could live with more freedom, the inhabitants being a good-natured people: each one living as they wished, because for the most part there is freedom of conscience.”

Freedom of conscience! Almost casually and as if not even wanting to, the author of Don Quixote puts his finger on the problem. The agents of the Inquisition did their job well but to a good reader sometimes words are not needed.


________________________

[1] A term that has no direct equivalent in English, but refers to the Muslims living in Spain after the reconquista who converted to Christianity.

[2] Andalusí – person coming from al-Andalus/Spanish Muslim

[3] Don Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma (1552/1553-1625), courtier and favourite of Philip III

[4] Saint Juan de Ribera (1532-1611), Archbishop of Valencia and Patriarch of Antioch.
[5] Mudéjares: the name given to those Muslims living in Spain after the reconquista who did not or had not yet converted to Christianity.

[6] Mystery island in the Atlantic depicted on many 16th Century maps as lying just off the coast of Newfoundland.

[7] Reference to one of the Novelas Ejemplares or “exemplary novellas” by Miguel de Cervantes (published 1613) in which two dogs share their bemused observations on the contradictions and nonsensical elements in human society.

[8] “purity of blood” i.e. favouring of those of pure Christian descent.

[9] The Cortes of Cádez met in 1810 during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and the detention of King Ferdinand VII in France. It promulgated Spain’s first liberal constitution, which provided for a limited constitutional monarchy ruling through parliament and universal male suffrage. It was repealed by Ferdinand after his restoration in 1813.

[10] Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, Count of Olivares (1587-1645) was prime minister for 22 years under Philip IV.

[11] Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69-1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist and Catholic theologian.

[12] Ecumenical council of the Catholic Church which took place in the middle of the 16th century, at the height of the Counter-Reformation drive against Protestantism and other “heresies” in the Church.

[13] Juan Martínez Guijarro (1477-1557), Archbishop of Toledo and intellectual author of the statute of limpieza de sangre.

[14] A town in Extremadura near Badajoz.

[15] A small maritime republic that existed for a brief period during the 16th century encompassing the cities of Salé and Rabat.

[16] In Murcia, south-east Spain

The Other Count Julian

Tariq the conqueror of al-Andalus laying his conquests at the feet of the Umayyad viceroy

It is funny how sometimes a line or fragment of a poem can lead you off on the most circuitous yet interesting of intellectual tangents.

I had this experience a couple of years ago when I was reading the through some of the Civil War poetry of Antonio Machado - the Spanish modernist writer and contemporary of Unamuno and Azorín - and came across a sonnet entitled "A Otro Conde Don Julian" ("to the other Count Julian").

The poem itself, which is far inferior to Machado's earlier works such as those found in his collection Campos de Castilla (Lands of Castile) and of primarily propagandistic rather than literary significance, held little interest to me - but the title, which casts the nationalist leader General Franco in the role of the arch-betrayer of Spanish history Count Julian of Ceuta held a strange fascination.

My knowledge of the half legendary, half historical figure of Count Julian was derived from my early-adolescent reading of Walter Scott's "The Vision of Don Roderick" which with Scott's customary poetic licence recounts the story of the last Visigothic King of Spain and his defeat at the hands of the Moorish invaders (Sir Walter Scott, along with the Romances of King Arthur and Charlemagne, informed most of my 12-year-old world view).

In the poetic account of the fall of Visigothic Spain, King Roderic is betrayed by Count Julian, the governor of the Christian outpost of Ceuta which lies on the North African coastline at the closest point to the Spanish shore (the Romans knew it as the city of Septem). The reasons suggested for Julian's betrayal are many and varied - some say it was because Roderic raped one of Julian's daughters who was a hostage at the Visigothic Court in Toledo, others that Julian was the protector of the sons of the previous Visigothic King Wittiza, whom Roderic was suspected of assassinating.

More recently, historians have suggested that Julian may have been a Byzantine Greek official who had only entered into a temporary alliance with the Visigoths after the fall of Carthage to the Umayyads in 695-698 and the departure of the last Roman troops. Given the fact that the Umayyads proved to be considerably more tolerant towards other religions and denominations than the formerly Arian Visigothic rulers (who with the zeal of recent converts to the one true faith were continually trying to prove their Catholic bona fides to the Pope by violently persecuting Jews and heretics) it is not inconceivable that Julian's decision to enter into an alliance with Musa ibn-Nusair, the Umayyad governor of the newly conquered Maghreb provinces was motivated simply by enlightened self-interest.

Whichever of these scenarios is correct, what is uncontested is that in the year 711 Julian provided the fleet which transported the Berber Umayyad general Tariq ibn-Ziyad and his troops across the narrow straits to the landing place which now bears Tariq's name - the Rock of Gibraltrar (from the Arabic "Jabal Tariq"), echoing the invasion of Republican Spain by General Franco at the head of the Army of Morocco in August 1936, some 1200 years later.

After the defeat of Roderic at the Battle of Gaudalete and the establishment of Umayyad rule in Spain, Julian was rewarded for his "act of treachery" with extensive lands and titles.

These then were some of the literary and historical associations that Antonio Machado's piece of Civil War propaganda rekindled in my head, leading me to look up again the story of the Fall of Visigothic Spain and in the course of this process to discover the work of a remarkable man - also an exile estranged from the political and religious order of Christian Spain, a modern day Count Julian living in Morocco - the novelist Juan Goytisolo.

To be continued...