Morisco Catechisms: Religious Incorporation and Differentiation in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

In the debate over the theory and practice of the Spanish empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century, political, religious, and legal discourses differentiated conquered peoples and recent converts to Christianity from so-called “old Christians”, thereby creating distinct categories of Spanish subjects. In Spain itself, cultural markers like language, dress, and diet became the foundations of fiscal and legal differences, while normative codes were promulgated and negotiated across a range of documents, e.g., legal instruments, civic and ecclesiastical records, university debates, and juridical theory. Concomitant with this process, a set of Christian catechisms was produced in Spain, both before and after the promulgation of Tridentine reforms, that were directed especially at the converted morisco populations in Granada and Valencia. These catechisms were produced in Iberian Arabic and Romance languages and included instructions about how new converts from Islam should behave, as well as what they should believe in order to participate in liturgical activities and to be recognized as full members of the Christian community. This article examines the morisco catechisms produced in Spain between 1496 and 1566, as these documents are representative of a unique period in both the history of Latin Christianity and the burgeoning Spanish empire. Through the emergence of this corpus and against the backdrop of targeted legislation and new policies aimed at Arabic-speaking moriscos, first in Granada and later in Valencia, the ideological foundations constraining the morisco experience were forged.

1. Introduction: Confessionalization and Territorialization

In 1566, the final, posthumous publication of the recently deceased Archbishop of Valencia, Martín Pérez de Ayala, was printed in Valencia. This was the bilingual Doctrina cristiana, en lengua Arauiga, y Castellana. Ayala was a prolific author of catechisms, among other doctrinal writings. Though brief, his final work was an apt conclusion to a life of missionary work and theological debate throughout Spain and on the international stage of Trent (Gutiérrez 1957, pp. 774–93; Soto 2019, pp. 127–30). This work would also prove to be the capstone to a unique set of catechisms written for recent converts from Islam, known as moriscos. This short-lived genre of morisco catechisms flourished briefly between the 1490s and 1560s, merging an agenda of missionary persuasion with revived anti-Islamic sentiment. Though innovative, Ayala’s bilingual Doctrina cristiana followed in the footsteps of several other texts, written in Spanish and Andalusi Arabic, including Pedro de Alcalá’s Breve colación para los clerigos que confiessan los cristianos nuevos, a brief bilingual catechetical handbook which took up the second half of his Arte para ligeramente sauer la lengua arauiga (Alcalá 1505a).

Catechisms like Ayala’s Doctrina cristiana and Alcalá’s earlier Breve colación represented two important episodes in the complex processes of reform and confessionalization that would take place across Europe in the sixteenth century.1 In Spain, that confessionalization represented a mutual engagement between theologians and politicians which would reshape discourses, institutions, and practices, thereby connecting belief and conduct to political subjecthood. At this time, universalizing theological projects were increasingly linked to local concerns through incipient national interests, which manifested first as the development of centralized, territorial states that gradually replaced the constellation of kingdoms and other forms of princely power which had served as the basis for medieval politics, before extending into the overseas empire. Such interests included would-be “national” churches, including in Spain, which were beginning to assert themselves in debates over church reform and authority. Though the Spanish monarchs continued to rely on Papal power to execute and legitimate many of their initiatives, including the conquests of Granada and of the Americas, they also sought ways to enhance their control over ecclesiastical revenues and to accentuate the moral aspects of conquest and colonization. This jockeying for supremacy was both the backdrop and motive for the creation of new categories of political subjecthood in this period which came to be associated with cultural traits.2 Across an incipient trans-Atlantic Spanish empire which included the Peninsula, Spanish subjects from different confessional communities were subject to Christian politics through the mechanism of catechism. To ensure the success of this conversion along with the maintenance of diverse corporate statuses, catechisms were tailored in terms of their content, language, and rhetorical style to achieve political as well as theological ends.

Along with doctrine and politics, a third pillar of the confessionalization process which influenced the collective catechetical program was language itself. As Paul Shore pointed out, in the early modern period, “the development of national languages both influenced the dissemination of theological concepts, while these concepts themselves became reference points in the shaping of the state” (Shore 2016, pp. 43–46). Along with theological claims and the intersection of local and national interests, the promotion or suppression of linguistic identities informed confessionalization, and one special vector for this process was catechism. Although this process is more often associated with the catalysts of the Lutheran reformation and subsequent pan-European religious wars, the Iberian Peninsula was the site of an early manifestation of religious territorialization and new approaches to the regulation of orthodox forms of Christianity. Short, vernacular catechisms are associated with the Lutheran reformation and Luther’s own Small Catechism of 1529, while confessionalization as a contemporary scholarly heuristic is usually thought to have begun in around 1570. Nevertheless, vernacular catechisms were already well established in late fifteenth-century Spain; the genre came to include romance-language and Arabic examples that were produced for converted Spanish subjects of Muslim descent between the 1490s and the 1560s. That is, these subjects represented a special challenge for evangelization, since they were baptized as Christians but required instruction and persuasion in Arabic and with reference to Islamic beliefs and practices in order to be integrated fully into the orthodox church community.

Translation work, legal structures, ecclesiastical organization, and royal policy all contributed to this confessionalization process, and the morisco catechisms were one instance whereby such activities intersected. The morisco catechisms joined a wave of vernacular catechetical materials which flourished in the last decades of the fifteenth century, in tandem with the arrival of print in Spain. Throughout the conversion efforts aimed at Spain’s mudéjar and morisco populations during the first half of the sixteenth century, Arabic catechisms would prove as viable as Romance-language texts. Such materials, geared toward recent converts from Islam, joined a revived tradition of anti-Muslim polemic which was likewise galvanized by early print initiatives. Examples include the revival of the thirteenth-century qur’anic polemics of Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, recovered by Nicolas of Cusa in the fifteenth century, which were printed in new Latin editions and Spanish translation in Granada, Seville, and Toledo between 1500 and 1502.3 The new Monte di Croce editions influenced preachers in early sixteenth-century Granada, like Joan Martí de Figuerola or even Hernando de Talavera (Bernabé-Pons 2022a, pp. 332–33). In addition, the burgeoning tradition of antitalcoranes which emerged in the 1520s and 1530s was another manifestation of the tandem nature of persuasion and polemic through which Spanish churchmen hoped to undertake successful conversions (García-Arenal 2022, pp. 11–17). Both tactics—persuasion and polemic—reflected the priorities of Spain’s clerical elites and the experiences of such figures both reading about Islam and interacting with the mudéjar and morisco communities.4 Indeed, aspects of early ethnographic discourse, more often identified with travel writing and depictions of distant Others, can be identified in catechetical and polemical materials, as well as legal proscriptions and other modes of normative discourse which emerged alongside the evangelizing project.5 This early ethnographic impulse contributed as much as to the universalizing mission of such texts as to the gradual creation of differential categories of Spanish Christian subjects.

This article proposes that the corpus of morisco catechisms produced in Spain between 1496 and 1566 is representative of a unique period in both the history of Latin Christianity and the burgeoning Spanish empire. Through the emergence of this corpus and against the backdrop of targeted legislation and new policies aimed at Arabic-speaking moriscos, first in Granada and then Valencia, the ideological foundations constraining the morisco experience were forged. Part one defines the corpus of morisco catechisms as a specific genre which emerged in the wake of the Castilian conquest of Granada (1485–1492) and whose last expression was in Valencia following the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Part two looks at how the different texts in this corpus approached the question of doctrine and religious instruction for converted Muslim neophytes as part of a project of integration. Part three connects the morisco catechetical corpus to the broader context of new legislation and government institutions which were likewise established with the stated aim of integration. Nevertheless, the actual functioning of such institutions, like the catechisms, helped reify a normative and differential morisco identity which could not be shed through instruction or the passing of generations. A concluding section situates the phases of morisco confessionalization within the broader project of creating differential subjects and subjectivities across the Spanish Empire.

The Council of Trent promoted translation and the use of vernacular languages for catechetical materials, thus underpinning a massive translation movement of biblical materials aimed at Catholic or potentially Catholic communities which is said to have begun with the Roman Catechism of 1566 (Santoyo 2008, p. 182 and passim). In Spain, however, it was at this very moment that Church and Crown authorities began to turn away from promoting or engaging with the Arabic Catholic religious culture they had sought to create over the previous seventy years. This turning away coincided with Spain’s changing internal politics concerning the burgeoning “morisco question” in the late 1560s, as some royal advisors even sought to ban moriscos from the Church and the sacraments. Such a ban was in direct contravention of the goals of the morisco catechists. It was at this time that debate began over a definitive measure for morisco assimilation, a debate which would ultimately end in a blanket condemnation of lese mageste and the expulsion of 300,000 Spanish morisco subjects between 1609 and 1614 (Feros 2014, p. 60). The morisco catechisms which were produced after 1566 were aimed not at morisco audiences but at galvanizing different sides of the “morisco question”, which interrogated the possibilities of assimilation, and none was produced in Arabic. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Catholic Mediterranean, 1566 saw the beginning of a long-lasting surge in the production of Arabic catechetical materials in Italy and the Levant. In the Spanish Americas, emphasis on the vernacular for evangelization and religious instruction was even renewed (Wasserman-Soler 2020, p. 158). This early episode of morisco confessionalization as part of the broader territorialization strategies of the Iberian kingdoms thus helps elucidate the diverse responses to missionary activities and conversions across the Iberia and the Catholic world.

2. A Corpus of Early Short Catechisms for the “Newly Converted” Emerges

Over the first half of the sixteenth century, four catechisms were produced for morisco populations in Granada. Two more would be produced in Valencia in the 1560s, both of which held a special relationship to those produced previously in Granada. These six texts, designed specifically for the morisco mission and ministry, were produced by members of the Hieronymites, an Augustinian order founded in Spain in the fourteenth century (see Table 1). Three of the authors came to be archbishops of major sees with significant morisco populations. Collectively, these texts and the missionary endeavors they represented fashioned new forms of political subjecthood in Spain.

The earliest morisco catechetical writings were produced by Hernando de Talavera (1428–1507), the Hieronymite confessor to Queen Isabel, who was named as the first Archbishop of Granada in 1492. Not long after arriving in the newly conquered city, he would order the printing of a compendium of his catechetical writings, which was headed by the Breve y muy provechosa doctrina de lo que deve saber todo christiano. Talavera had long been a prolific writer, and it seems that many of these materials were composed during his earlier tenure as Bishop of Ávila, where he had also interacted with Jewish and Muslim communities. Despite its name, the Breve doctrina and its attendant materials functioned as a lengthy reference catechism whose primary audience would have been fellow clergy. Instructions were given in the third person, and the work would have served to instruct clergy in the materials they needed to communicate or as a reference work. Nevertheless, there are a few indications that the work was intended to be used in the special circumstances of a Granada ministry, such as the specification in the instructions for the sign of the cross, i.e., that it should be made “En nombre del padre y del hijo y del spiritu sancto: un dios amén” (emphasis added), and in the instruction that a believer “Ha de saber en romance el credo que compusieron los apóstoles” (emphasis added), as well as the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria (Talavera 1496, ff. 11r–v). These specifications could indicate that Talavera anticipated the presence of parishioners whose understanding of the Trinity and Incarnation might be shaky and whose first language might not be Spanish. Talavera’s famous interest in linguistic accommodation was memorialized in biographies written by his contemporaries, including an anecdote about how an old man, recently converted from Islam, “saw above his head a flame which came out of his mouth and which remained with him until he stopped preaching, and for this reason he must be a saint”.6 This pentecostal imagery built upon the ways in which language use captured the attention of converts and missionaries alike.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, reference catechisms came to be accompanied by shorter catechetical instructions which were intended for use by the neophytes themselves. In the case of Talavera’s Breve doctrina, it engendered two, if not three, of the early morisco catechetical texts. The next was Talavera’s own brief Instrucción del Arzobispo de Granada en respuesta a cierta peticion que hicieron los vecinos del Albaicín sobre lo que debían hacer y las prácticas que deben observar (s.f.).7 While not a formal catechism (doctrina), this short instruction was explicitly addressed to a specific community of newly converted living in the capital city of Granada who had requested instructions about religious practice. It was strongly grounded in the Granada context, making frequent reference to “cosas moriscas” and contrasting the current knowledge and behavior of the Albaicín community with the model of the “xpianos de naçion”. Its form, as a list of systematic instructions for performing Christianity, especially on feast days, is reminiscent of the doctrinal tables or pamphlets which had hung from the walls of late medieval Spanish churches (Framiñán de Miguel 2005, p. 30).

A fundamental pathway to conversion was language, and this priority was reflected in Talavera’s Instrucción. He admonished the new converts to “forget as much as you can the Arabic language and never use it in your houses”.8 Yet, another of Talavera’s instructions in the same document was that “those of you who know how to read should keep all the Arabic books of the prayers and psalms that will be given to you along with this memorial and you should use them to pray in the church”.9 Most likely, Talavera was referring to the works of his confrère, the Hieronymite priest Pedro de Alcalá, who published two major works of vernacular Arabic philology in 1505: the Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua araviga and the Vocabulista araviga en letra castellana.10 Over half of the 110 pages of the Arte were in fact dedicated to a catechism in Granadan Arabic— albeit printed in Latin letters—along with some Arabic liturgies which could be read by priests at mass. Thus, the work functioned as both a kind of “short catechism” which could be used by neophytes, as well as a script for priests using the Arte to learn the language of their new parishioners. Unfortunately, very little is known about the actual use of the Arte in a missionary or confessional context in Granada, although the work was popular enough to go through a second printing in 1506.11 Like Talavera’s Instrucción, it reflects an ambivalence about the role of language in conversion. Alcalá was an enthusiastic student of Arabic and took pains to explain to his readers that they should take different languages on their own merits, going so far as to encourage Romance-speakers in Granada to use his Vocabulista to learn aljamia (Castilian) so that they could converse with their neighbors. Yet, he also prefaced his Arte with strongly anti-Islamic sentiment and suggested that the major use of the grammar would be to “unite [old and new Christians] in the same corral with the same pastor”.12 This reference to John 10:16 reflected not only an evangelical aspiration but Alcalá’s potential connection with the eschatological tropes which were circulating around the Mediterranean (Starczewska 2015, p. 417).

Despite the planned distribution of materials like those created by Alcalá, the success of any morisco mission in Granada was debated and much criticized over the next decades. A series of laws was drawn up between 1511 and 1516 which attempted to limit cultural practices deemed to be “muslimizing” among the newly converted population.13 When King Charles, now Holy Roman Emperor, visited Granada for the first time in 1526, he ordered an investigation into the progress of the conversion and indoctrination of the morisco communities across the kingdom. The report was not positive, leading to a number of resolutions around the 1526 council held at the Real Capilla in Granada. Among these resolutions were two royal orders, one directed at the Granada moriscos and one at the incoming Archbishop of Granada, the Hieronymite Pedro Ramiro de Alba.14 Ramiro de Alba thus began work immediately on a catechism specifically directed at Granada’s morisco communities. This catechism, the longest of all the early morisco catechisms, was written in Spanish and meant for use by priests who would work directly with moriscos. It was written in the third and collective first person, indicating that the ultimate message was for both priests and neophytes who saw themselves as part of the community of believers. Though not written in Arabic, the catechism reflected Ramiro’s extensive knowledge of the differences between Christian and Islamic doctrine, including some familiarity with the Qur’an. The work was concluded and printed in 1527 or 1528, coinciding with Ramiro’s death, although there are no extant copies of it. What we do have is a later printed version which was repurposed for use in the Valencian morisco mission in 1568.15

The final two morisco catechisms likewise blend the short and long catechetical formats. They were also produced in the context of exchanges between the Granada and Valencia morisco acculturation projects. Both were written by the Hieronymite Martín Pérez de Ayala, who served for over a decade as Bishop of Guadix, a territory in the Kingdom of Granada with a majority morisco population, before becoming, briefly, Bishop of Segovia in 1560, and finally Archbishop of Valencia in 1564. Pérez de Ayala was part of the Spanish delegation to the Council of Trent during its second session (1551–1552), which took place during his episcopal rule in Guadix. When he returned to Guadix in 1554, he held a Synod, which would prove to be a major vector for the circulation of Tridentine debates and decrees in Spain.16 He would publish a number of works in relation to this synod, including the short catechism, Doctrina cristiana para los que entienden ya algo más de lo que a los niños se les suele enseñar comúnmente por modo de diálogo (Pérez de Ayala 1554a). This work seems to have circulated, and it is cited by a number of Jesuit catechists of following generations, but no copies of it are extant except a single manuscript copy of an Arabic translation which was made around the time of publication in Guadix by the beneficed priest Bartolomé Dorador.17 Although the work was directed at fellow priests, as indicated in its prologue, the Dorador translation was clearly intended for consumption by Arabic-speaking morisco communities, since it is written in the second person and in Arabic. Unfortunately, we know little about the relationship between Pérez de Ayala and Dorador, though it seems probable that the former may have commissioned the latter to translate the work, since both were working in Guadix in 1554. Just over a decade later, now Archbishop of Valencia Pérez de Ayala commissioned an Arabic translation of the last morisco catechism, designed for primarily missionary (rather than polemical) use, requesting the services of a Jesuit Arabist from the Duke of Gandía (Medina 2001, 2769–2770). In 1566 in Valencia, Pérez de Ayala published the Doctrina Christiana en lengua Arauiga, y Castellana, “para la instrucción de los nuevamente convertidos deste Reyno” (Pérez de Ayala 1566, n.p.). This catechism included instructions that were geared specifically toward Arabic-speaking parishioners about what they should say and do during the mass, and instructions for priests using Arabic materials who may not have had extensive knowledge of the language.

These six texts, which were produced between c. 1496 and c. 1566, represent a significant initiative on the part of the Spanish church, notably represented by the Hieronymite order, to develop effective instructional materials for morisco neophytes and to ensure sincere conversions. Such conversions could then be measured by inquisitorial officials after the Holy Office came to Granada, first in 1499 and then as a permanent institution in 1526 (Pérez de Colosia 2022, pp. 311–12). As instruments of instruction and assimilation, each catechism invoked local practices but sought to universalize church doctrine. In addition, the promulgation of catechisms seems to have been an important aspect of archepiscopal politics, particularly for sees with significant newly converted populations. Finally, as we will see in the third section, the catechisms promoted messages about how to be a good subject of the Spanish kings.

Table 1. Morisco Catechisms, 1490s–1560s.

Author/Translator	Title	Place of Publication/Translation	Printed or Manuscript
Hernando de Talavera	Breve y muy provechosa doctrina de lo que deve saber todo christiano	Granada, Meinardo Ungut y Juan Pegnitzer 1496	Printed
Hernando de Talavera	Instrucción del Arzobispo de Granada en respuesta a cierta peticion que hicieron los vecinos del Albaicín sobre lo que debían hacer y las prácticas que deben observar	Granada, c. 1500	Manuscript
Pedro de Alcalá	Breve colación para los clerigos que confiessan los cristianos nuevos	Granada, Juan Varela de Salamanca 1505	Printed
Pedro Ramiro de Alba	La doctrina christiana que el reverendissimo Pedro Ramiro, Arçobispo que fue de Granada hizo y ordeno […]	Valencia, Pedro Borbón and Miguel Martínez 1568	Printed
Martín Pérez de Ayala/Bartolome Dorador	Ta’alīm wa qirā’a naṣraniya lī-hawlak al-adhīn ya’arifū wa yafhamū aktharan bi-shwayān ‘ala al-ashay al-adhīn yata’alim bihim al-tarabī ‘am	Guadix?, 155418	Manuscript
Martín Pérez de Ayala/Unknown Jesuit Translator	Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Arauiga y Castellana: Compuesta y Impressa por Mandado del Illustrissimo y Reverendissimo Señor don Martín de Ayala Arçobispo de Valencia: Para la Instruçion de los Nuevamente Convertidos Deste Reyno	Valencia, Joan Mey, 1566	Printed

Table 1. Morisco Catechisms, 1490s–1560s.

Author/Translator	Title	Place of Publication/Translation	Printed or Manuscript
Hernando de Talavera	Breve y muy provechosa doctrina de lo que deve saber todo christiano	Granada, Meinardo Ungut y Juan Pegnitzer 1496	Printed
Hernando de Talavera	Instrucción del Arzobispo de Granada en respuesta a cierta peticion que hicieron los vecinos del Albaicín sobre lo que debían hacer y las prácticas que deben observar	Granada, c. 1500	Manuscript
Pedro de Alcalá	Breve colación para los clerigos que confiessan los cristianos nuevos	Granada, Juan Varela de Salamanca 1505	Printed
Pedro Ramiro de Alba	La doctrina christiana que el reverendissimo Pedro Ramiro, Arçobispo que fue de Granada hizo y ordeno […]	Valencia, Pedro Borbón and Miguel Martínez 1568	Printed
Martín Pérez de Ayala/Bartolome Dorador	Ta’alīm wa qirā’a naṣraniya lī-hawlak al-adhīn ya’arifū wa yafhamū aktharan bi-shwayān ‘ala al-ashay al-adhīn yata’alim bihim al-tarabī ‘am	Guadix?, 155418	Manuscript
Martín Pérez de Ayala/Unknown Jesuit Translator	Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Arauiga y Castellana: Compuesta y Impressa por Mandado del Illustrissimo y Reverendissimo Señor don Martín de Ayala Arçobispo de Valencia: Para la Instruçion de los Nuevamente Convertidos Deste Reyno	Valencia, Joan Mey, 1566	Printed

Collectively, these early morisco catechisms emerged in the midst of theological and doctrinal debates which were informed by religious polemics and political projects. Anti-Islamic ideology in Spain had long sought to enumerate and categorize the “errors of Muhammad”.19 Meanwhile, during the sixteenth century, a reciprocal crypto-Muslim polemic would emerge among moriscos, sometimes in response to the catechisms and other aspects of missionary and inquisitorial campaigns (Cardaillac 1977, pp. 225–29 and passim; Green-Mercado 2019, pp. 78–83). The texts of the morisco catechisms certainly reflect the dialogue and engagement of their authors with Muslims and Islamic ideas. At least three routes were available to the authors of morisco catechisms to learn about such ideas: (1) the polemic genre of antialcoranes, which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain, i.e., at much the same time as the morisco catechisms; these included lengthy quotations from qur’anic suras and tafsīr on which evangelical authors could draw;20 (2) the abbreviated “morisco Qur’ans” which circulated in the sixteenth century, often in aljamiado Romance translations (Martínez de Castilla Muñóz 2014, pp. 91 and 95–96), and (3) direct engagement with Islamic scholars.21

Individually, each text demonstrates a tandem political-theological and imperial-ethnographic engagement with the newly converted communities of their time. That engagement reveled strategies for conversion designed to address the specific beliefs and experiences of Muslim converts and sought to draw those converts into the universal Christian community. Nevertheless, it was also through this process of conversion that a distinctive category of Spanish subject emerged which was hierarchized through the very process designed to erase distinction between the “nuevamente convertidos” and the “xpianos de naçion”. Erasing such a distinction was, at its core, a political as well as an ecclesiastical goal. The political project of incorporating morisco subjects was underpinned by emerging fiscal policies and legal initiatives which aimed to successfully incorporate the former mudéjar subjects of Spanish kings as “new Christians” (Galán Sánchez 2016, p. 116). Thus, the texts of the catechisms joined a broader momentum of discursive and institutional innovations which contributed to the definition and reification of a morisco subject as a distinct cultural, legal, and ultimately, political category.

3. Creating the “Morisco” Subject: Doctrine and Religious Instruction

The morisco mission was executed at the parish level. According to the records of a handful of extant ecclesiastic visits, evangelization consisted of instructing new converts in the recitation of the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Credo, and the Salve Regina, along with the ten commandments and the articles of faith (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 1993, pp. 95–96). This indoctrination of new converts from Islam required a dual message: to reject the central tenants of Islam while accepting the central tenants of Christianity. Beyond the principal tenant of Islam, “There is no God but God”, Christian clergy, steeped in polemic tradition, would have first wanted to address the second essential tenant, “and Muḥammad is his prophet”. Thus, a fundamental lesson for neophytes was to criticize the veneration of Muḥammad. Depending on the catechism, this lesson was more or less explicit. If the work did not make explicit condemnation of the figure of Muḥammad, it condemned “muslimizing” practices which corresponded to qur’anic injunctions. For example, although Talavera’s undated short instruction did not engage directly with theological concepts, he nevertheless sought to motivate neophytes so that “your conversion be without scandal to those xpianos de naçion and that they not think that you still hold fast to the sect of Muḥammad in your hearts” (Talavera 1964, p. 763). Alcalá, likewise, criticized Muḥammad severely in his prologue, drawing on traditional anti-Muḥammedan imagery, i.e., of a sinister figure vomiting evil and false prophecies, which had been transmitted by polemicists throughout the middle ages.22 Nevertheless, neither he nor the translators of Ayala’s two catechisms made explicit reference to Muḥammad in the text of his catechism, either in Spanish or in Arabic. Ramiro de Alba, on the other hand, regularly cast aspersions on Muslim veneration of Muḥammad. In the final section of his catechism, “What the New Christians should neither believe nor do”, he insisted that the most important belief to discard was reverence for Muḥammad, for which he gives a litany of reasons, drawing on both Christian polemic and the Qur’an (Ramiro et al. 1568, ff. 35v–37v).

Ramiro’s frequent references to the Qur’an indicate the relatively high level of engagement with Islamic ideas and scholars which characterized the morisco catechisms. All the catechetical authors spent time with the newly converted and learned from them about their beliefs, questions, and practices. Ayala’s connection with Bartolome Dorador is evidence of his connection to networks of Arabic-speaking clergy across Guadix who would have ministered to a majority-morisco flock. Talavera was famous for his openness to learn about the faith and traditions of the Granada mudejares in order to create ethnographically informed strategies for their conversion. For example, Francisco Nuñez Muley described the many friends that Talavera had among the “alfaquíes and meftis” who were paid to provide the archbishop with information about “Muslim rites”.23 Alcalá also referred to the language teachers and informants that Talavera had hired for him.24 This knowledge was combined with received ideas about Islam which had been transmitted in Iberia through the medieval polemical tradition and which were being revived through the proliferation of the parallel genre of antialcoranes.25

Informed by direct engagement with Islamic scholars and observation of Muslim practices, the authors of the catechisms demonstrated familiarity with Islamic as well as Christian doctrine. The most explicit engagement with the Qur’an itself in the catechisms is Ramiro de Alba, in the first book of his 1528/1568 Doctrina cristiana. In this portion of the work, Ramiro provides an exegesis of the Credo in twelve parts, in which he makes regular reference to the Qur’an and ideas which he attributes variably to Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And though his work is entirely in Spanish, he relies on readings and conversations with Muslims in order to provide information that can be used to convince neophytes, including familiar terms. For example, when explaining the “mystery of incarnation”, Ramiro de Alba introduces Jesus Christ “who the Muslims call Yiça” as “the perfect soul, and not only a soul, but a soul joined to the eternal word or son of God, which the Qur’an says is ‘the Roch [rūḥ] of God, or word of God’”.26 Indeed, Q4, 171 says “The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger (rusūl) of God and his word (kalima), delivered upon Mary, the soul from him”. This passage was among those qur’ānic excerpts which circulated in the Spanish and Latin antialcoranes to which Ramiro would have had access (Szpiech 2022, p. 288). In the actual qur’anic passage, Jesus’s importance is signaled by his relationship with God, Mary, and the use of the word rusūl, the same term used to describe Muḥammad, i.e., as God’s messenger. However, the meaning of this passage is that Jesus was a man, sent by God. Ramiro de Alba reads this passage into the Christian tradition, latching on to the concepts of “word” and divine “spirit” which underpin the belief in Jesus’s divinity and the miracle of incarnation. Such emphasis on the word—as opposed to compulsion—was itself a feature of Hieronymite evangelization strategies, beginning with Talavera and Alcalá (Bernabé-Pons 2022b, p. 235).

Though catechists like Ramiro de Alba rejected Muḥammad and called on the newly converted to do the same, all authors sought to find common ground from which they could build some of the more difficult concepts of Christian theology, like the Trinity and Incarnation. Perhaps the most basic aspect of Christian doctrine, and one which required little introduction for the newly converted, was the shared concept of a monotheistic divinity. Across the catechisms, the Christian authors consistently recognized that Christianity shared a concept of divinity with Islam. In the three Arabic-language catechisms, the word “Allah” was consistently used for “God”. Beyond the catechisms, in his Vocabulista, Alcalá listed the definition for “Dios bibo y verdaero” directly as “Allah”, and in other declinations of the word “Dios”, the most usual definition was a variation on Ar. Allah (الله).27 This god, Allah, was qualified regularly by characteristics which would have been familiar to Muslim audiences. All three Arabic translators used “Allah” and frequently included the Islamic epithet ‘azz wa jalla (the mighty and glorious), subḥānahu (praise be to him), and al-ḥamdu li-lah (glory upon God). Accommodation of Islamic concepts in the Christian catechism went beyond the inclusion of Islamic epithets. For example, Alcalá’s directions for priests to make the sign of the cross included an additional phrase in the Arabic version to fulfil expectations for the ritual power of the gesture. Where in Spanish, the script listed only “By the sign of the cross” (Por la señal de la cruz), in Arabic, the script read (in Alcalá’s distinctive transcription) “Bihaq a‘alémat a çalīb etc. Alhāmdu lilléh. Allāh ya‘īxcum bi ḳāir” (“By the veracity of the sign of the cross, etc. Glory upon God. God grants you a righteous life”) (Alcalá 1505a, unfoliated (n.p)). In Spanish-language texts, shared monotheism was invoked as a means of persuading Muslim converts of common ground. For example, in Ramiro de Alba’s 1528 Doctrina, printed in 1568, an exegesis of the Credo appeared early on in which Ramiro quoted the Qur’an as support for the idea of a monotheistic creator.28

Despite the mutual acceptance of monotheism, one of the most significant distinctions between Muslim and Christian conceptions of divinity was the Trinity, an idea which had to be introduced carefully to neophytes. For this reason, the catechisms took care to emphasize the unity of the triune God and the vital relationship between God the father and Christ the son. Ramiro de Alba, in his exegesis of the Credo, explained:

The second part [of the Credo] says: I believe in Jesus Christ his son, our lord. It is around this article that all the difficulties arise between the Christians on the one hand, who avow this belief, and the Jews and Muslims who deny it because they do not understand it as they should. And for this reason it is important to know that it is this article which avers the Trinity of the three persons of God and the mystery of the Incarnation, both of which are necessary to believe under pain of eternal damnation.29

Beyond exegesis, the catechisms could use translation to reinforce the idea of the trinity. In the 1566 translation of the Credo, the Arabic reads “I believe in God the father (billéhi huild) who holds power over all things, creator of the heavens and the earth, and in ‘Īsā his son—our lord is one—who took on the flesh of man by the miracle of the holy spirit”.30 In addition to the potential resonance of “billahi”, a conventional way of swearing an oath, the translator offered an explanation of how Jesus became human while being the son of god and simultaneously one with him. The translator’s phrasing indicates a literal interpretation of the concept of “incarnation”, the becoming of flesh, which also offered an explanation of the process by which such a miracle could have occurred.

Indeed, as Ramiro de Alba noted, the incarnation and the simultaneous divinity and humanity of Jesus was a difficult concept to translate across confessional lines. Jesus is and was revered in Islam, but as a holy prophet and not as divine. For this reason, several of the morisco catechisms introduced Christology carefully to the newly converted. To emphasize Christ’s divinity, the Arabic catechists sought rhetorical strategies to align the figure of Christ with God. Talavera’s instructions assumed a basic familiarity with the incarnation and trinity, and so Pedro de Alcalá was the first to tackle the issue theologically, through translation. Very often when mentioning Christ, Alcalá used the apposition “rabuna ‘īsā allah azeguegél”, which translates as “our lord Jesus God, the mighty and the most high”. The epithet for Allah, “‘azz wa jalla”, is commonly used in the Qur’an and across Islamic texts. When introducing the concept of transubstantiation in the confessional dialogue, Alcalá explained the unity of God and Christ: “that is the blessed bread of the heavens; it is the body of our lord Jesus God the mighty and glorious”.31 In Spanish, the phrase read simply, “the holy sacrament (which is the body of Jesus Christ)” and did not put God, with its Islamic epithet, into apposition.32 In the 1554 Ta’alīm wa qirā’a, a similar strategy was used in the chapter on “The Divinity of Our Lord Christ the Messiah”, characterizing “our lord, the Messiah, Jesus, who is truly God and truly human”.33 Ramiro de Alba, writing in Spanish, invoked qur’anic authority to underscore the points of the Credo which were accepted in Islam, such as the role of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’s birth and Mary’s virginity. He also explained where Muslim and Jewish belief diverged from the Christian creed, concluding always that it was the other traditions which could be shown to be in error (Ramiro et al. 1568, ff. 5v–6r).

All of the catechisms emphasized shared veneration of figures like Jesus and Mary. Since both Jesus and Mary are revered in Islam and appear in the Qur’an, it was important to instruct neophytes in the theological implications of these figures in Christianity. Talavera instructed the moriscos of the Albaicín to keep images of Christ, the cross, the Virgin, or other saints, along with a blessed candle and the palm frond they receive on Palm Sunday (Talavera 1964, p. 762). All of the morisco catechisms included versions of the Ave Maria and Salve Regina. Marian prayers were not necessarily found in all catechisms from the turn of the sixteenth century, whereas in the morisco catechisms, they were central.34 In Alcalá, the Ave Maria was given just after the Sign of the Cross, and before the Pater Noster. In Pérez de Ayala’s 1566 catechism, the Ave Maria comes after the Sign of the Cross and the Pater Noster, but before the Credo. Likewise, Pérez de Ayala’s 1554 catechism dedicated several folios to the Ave Maria and Salve Regina in Arabic translation (BNA Ms. 3 (1398), ff. 31r–33v). Ramiro de Alba treated this complex question most explicitly through his exegesis of the major prayers in the first part of his catechism. The question of reverence for the Virgin would become a central theological debate in Spain during the sixteenth century, and debates about her immaculate nature were playing out already in the morisco mission (Hernández 2019, pp. 4–5 and passim). Indeed, the main cathedral of Granada was dedicated to Santa María de la Encarnación, having been erected on the site of the former Friday Mosque of Granada.

The physical sites of religious instruction were an important part of the overall catechetical project. In Granada, the physical and institutional structure of the “restored” church was established by papal bull in 1486 and reconfirmed in 1493 (Garrido Aranda 1979, pp. 47–49). The first cathedrals were established in Almería, Guadix, and Málaga, and all were dedicated to the Incarnation, as they were built in the first decades of the sixteenth century. That so many new churches were dedicated to the Incarnation, according to Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “demonstrates clearly the firmness with which the Church wanted to cement the new religious edifice that it understood as the restoration of the Christianity that had existed on the Peninsula prior to the Islamic invasion” (Ladero Quesada 1994, p. 103). Indeed, we should include the erection of churches and other religious buildings as a key component of the project of religious territorialization undergirding Spanish confessionalization. This included the establishment of monasteries. In 1492, following the royal entry and possession of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Kings ordered that monasteries be built for the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Hieronymites, all of whom participated to different degrees in the evangelizing project of conquest and colonization.

The work of catechetical writers was thus one part of a larger process of conversion and acculturation which ultimately led to the ideological definition of a morisco subject which could be subject to policies like forced removal and resettlement. In the realm of doctrine and religious instruction, the process was supported by cross-confessional dialogue, a renewal of polemic tradition, and the redefinitions of Granada’s physical landscape through the establishment of parish boundaries and the construction of churches (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 1993, p. 95). The fact that this process lasted for generations created a discourse of disappointment and frustration on the part of the church, who could increasingly attribute insincere conversion to choices made by newly defined political subjects, rather than ignorance. Buttressing this discourse was a related, if not entangled, process to which the catechisms provided important support: the establishment of a new government and political relationships in Granada.

4. Creating the “Morisco” Subject: Language, Translation, and Governance

Sixteenth-century Spain witnessed a tandem age of vernacular philology and vernacular catechism, both of which contributed to the development of ideas about sovereignty and subjecthood. The early morisco catechisms were all written in recently codified local vernaculars and designed, through their language, register, rhetoric, attitudes, content, etc., to facilitate the incorporation of new Christians into the universal Christian community through Spanish subjecthood. They nevertheless ended up contributing to the long-term processes of legal, fiscal, and cultural differentiation which created the morisco subject by mid-century. This was an ideological process that made expulsion possible, first in the 1570s in the aftermath of the Second Alpujarras War, and again in the first decades of the seventeenth century.

The early morisco catechisms shared certain characteristics which indicated their special role in the desired political integration of newly converted subjects. These characteristics included an emphasis on normative authority, attention to language, and ethnography. Indeed, the early morisco catechisms were part of a broader project which elaborated normative discourses and institutions like religious doctrine, parish boundaries, laws, taxation inventories, and the procedures of legal and religious tribunals. Indeed, the morisco catechisms emerged at the very same time as the series of laws targeting the cultural habits of the newly converted, as opposed to Spanish subjects more generally, which we might refer to as morisco legislation. Generally, in addition to their religious training and missionary experiences, the first generations of Spanish clergymen confronting their flocks of nuevamente convertidos were responding to ethnographically-informed instructions, laws, and policies drawn up by crown officials. Special focus was given to cultural habits like language and writing, dress and corporal decoration, food preparation, and bodily practices like circumcision, bathing, dancing, and singing.35

The discourses and institutions which aimed to marginalize and erase such cultural habits were contingent on linguistic programs like translation and instruction. This institutionalization also depended on an incipient ethnography which was emerging across the Spanish Empire in Europe and the Americas in the sixteenth century. Though often associated with European encounters with the “New World” via the activities of overseas empires, ethnographic descriptions also created opportunities for governing over stratified subjects in Spain. In her study of European depictions of the new world, Surekha Davis defines Renaissance ethnography by drawing on anthropological concepts, extending her historical definition “to include all manner of descriptive writing and of the making of images and artifacts intended to represent people” (Davies 2016, p. 4). In morisco Spain, such descriptive writing was found in genres other than histories and travel accounts, including law codes and catechisms. Anthony Pagden’s definition of the ethnology which emerged in the writings of clergy working in the Spanish Americas is closer to the mark: “an ethnology which argued that cultural difference could be explained neither as the consequence of differing psychological dispositions, nor as the merely contingent arrangements of different social groups, but as the indication of the positions which the various human societies had reached on an historical time-scale” (Pagden 1982, p. 4). Such progressive ethnology, Pagden shows, emerged most fully in the eighteenth century, though it was constructed upon ideas about the barbarian other which were transplanted from Aristotelian thought into proto-ethnographic discourse about the peoples of the new world (Pagden 1982, pp. 15–18 and passim). Such experiences and the discourses they generated had a reciprocal effect in the old world, and particularly in the colonial atmosphere of post-conquest Granada. Observation and the codification of cultural differences created a widening gap between perceptions of Old and New Christians. This gap became especially wide in the case of perceptions of language, which of course was the hallmark distinguishing the barbarian Other from the civilized self.

In the morisco context, the trend toward ethnographic observation which informed distinctive law codes aimed at minority and minoritized communities like the moriscos and indigenous peoples of the Americas could shape the form and messaging of catechisms. In Granada, Spanish clergy sought to engage with both the high-status Muslim interlocutors with whom they debated doctrine and learned language, and with a large population of practicing Muslims of all social ranks. Based on these experiences, catechetical authors merged what they knew of what they took to be the theological errors of Islam with what they observed amongst their new flocks. The three most ethnographically informed catechisms were Talavera’s short instruction, Alcalá’s Breve colación, and Ramiro de Alba’s Doctrina cristiana, all of which were produced during the first decades of the conversion process. All three catechisms demonstrated their authors’ familiarity with Islamic cultural practices, doubtless observed in post-conquest Granada. The final two morisco catechisms, Pérez de Ayala’s commissioned translations of 1554 and 1566, were less explicit about the ethnographic observations derived from the cross-cultural context in which they were produced, with the important exception of their translation into vernacular Arabic.

4.1. Creating Normative Authority through Catechism

All morisco catechisms emphasized the importance of obedience to normative structures and made religious identity a keystone of political subjecthood. Perhaps drawing on his experiences in the multi-confessional context of Ávila, Talavera included a chapter on the sin of interacting with the infidels (infieles) (Talavera 1496, f. 23r). In this chapter, Talavera expresses concern about Christian servants in Muslim and Jewish households, Christian recourse to Muslim or Jewish doctors and midwives, bathing together, dressing distinctively, and keeping doors and windows closed on Fridays. This kind of domestic entanglement, with its potential for intimacy, and practices commensurate with keeping a Muslim religious calendar, were the same practices that Juana and Ferdinand sought to outlaw in the morisco legislation of 1511–1518 and to which Charles would respond severely in his Instruction to Ramiro de Alba in 1526. Thus, already in 1496 in the mudéjar context across Castile and newly conquered Granada, catechists and religious leaders were creating a rubric for obedience which would come to include the secular orders of the crown, starting with Talavera’s succinct command in 1496, “Obey and comply with the commandments of the priests and ecclesiastical and secular officials and honor each of them according to their status”.36

Indeed, in Talavera’s later short Instrucción, he concluded his advice to the morisco community with an appeal to the executive power of the crown to enforce his instructions: “we beg of the king and queen our lords that they order punishment to those who don’t keep the commandments”.37 Alcalá dedicated his catechism to Talavera in the hopes that it would serve both the royal majesty and church that the Archbishop represented. Ayala’s Guadix translator used the work’s title to emphasize the importance of the catechism’s author as a representative of the church, a similar strategy used on the title pages of the 1566 Doctrina cristiana and the 1568 edition of Ramiro de Alba’s 1528 Doctrina cristiana. In addition to their status as Archbishops, Ramiro de Alba’s position vis-à-vis the crown is elucidated by the relationship of his catechism with the specific royal instructions promulgated by Charles V in December 1526.

In addition to emphasis on obedience to church authority, all catechisms included some reference to political patrons. From a political standpoint, the close relationship between crown and catechism was clear. Every catechism invoked the authority and executive power of the kings in some fashion. Talavera authorized his own 1496 Breve doctrina by associating himself as the royal confessor. By considering and responding to royal legislation, the catechisms sought to reiterate sovereign control over bodies, clothes, cultural habits, and fiscality. Indeed, part of the Pauline tradition of conversion represented by evangelizers like Talavera was a self-conscious shedding of former practices to take on the habits (practices and vestments) of a “new man”.38 For this reason, catechisms emphasized behavior and habit which would support a holistic education as a good Christian and political subject.

For example, in both Ayala catechisms, translated in 1554 and 1566, respectively, special sections enumerating the “Commandments of the Church” were included (see

Table 2. Commandments of the Church.

	Ta’alīm wa qirā’a (1554), ff. 20 v–21 v.	Doctrina cristiana (1566), Biii. v–Biiii.
First	To attend mass and listen to the whole ceremony on Sundays and Feast Days	To pay taxes and first fruits
Second	To confess your sins and take the Eucharist from your priest at least once a year	To confess your sins to the priest at least once a year, close to Easter
Third	To fast during Lent (cuaresma) and on certain other feast days or vigils.42	To take the Eucharist on Easter
Fourth	To pay the tithe and first fruits	To not marry during periods forbidden by the Church
Fifth	To not marry on any day that is forbidden by the church	To fast during Lent and other prescribed fasts
Sixth	To obey the laws and structures of the land where you live	To listen to mass on Sundays and on other days as commanded

). Of note are the instructions about behavior and action, especially the paying of ecclesiastical taxes. Talavera, in 1496, had included an entire chapter on “The Sin of Not Paying Taxes”, which included the admonition for those who “do not pay the taxes and first fruits according to the good custom of the land in which we live. For this [custom] is the most important law and rule which must be observed in this case”.39 The later catechisms would incorporate the commandment “To Pay Taxes and First Fruits” into the Commandments of the Church which were taught alongside the Biblical commandments. The question of taxation had been one of the most important secular issues throughout the conversion of the Granada mudéjares. As early as 1488, a papal bull had granted that Ferdinand and Isabella would receive “the taxes of the Muslims, equivalent to what they paid their kings, following qur’anic precepts”, along with portions of ecclesiastical taxes from conquered and future conquered territories (Garrido Aranda 1979, pp. 50–51). Such provisions were directed at the Christian inhabitants of such territories, including new settlers. In 1492, this rule was confirmed, and it was agreed in the final surrender treaty that “Muslims (moros) do not have to give or pay to their Majesties any more taxes than they were accustomed to giving and paying to the Muslim kings”.40 Nevertheless, when the former Nasrid subjects were subject to forced conversions beginning at the end of 1499, as New Christians, they became subject to ecclesiastical taxes. In 1500, the Catholic Kings received a new papal bull determining that the monarchs were authorized to keep 2/3 of the ecclesiastical tithes paid by New Christians.41 Thus, the catechisms offered important instruction and support for royal revenues from their newly converted subjects.

Talavera’s 1500 Instrucción, Alcalá’s Breue colación, and Ramiro de Alba’s 1528 Doctrina cristiana likewise enumerated in detail what new Christians should do and believe, and in both cases, significant emphasis was placed on how they should behave. Behavior was the central concern of Talavera’s text, of which all sixteen instructions concerned outward signs or practices, from performing the sign of the cross to keeping images of Christ, Mary, and the saints. Alcalá also gave numerous instructions about behavior, emphasizing the ritual aspects of confession and why and how a penitent should perform the sacrament with their priest. Ramiro de Alba devoted an extensive section on “what good Christians are obliged to know”, which was an instruction manual for performing Christianity through the sign of the cross, prayers, and sacraments (Ramiro et al. 1568, f. 16r). Both individual bodies and groups were instructed and policed through a tandem process of articulating “lo que teneys de saber y fazer” (what you must all know and do) with respect to an emerging category of “xpianos de nación”, who were defined against the also-emergent category of “nuevamente convertidos de moros”, all phrases used repeatedly in Talavera’s Instrucción.

Through these instructions regarding performing as good subjects, we see a distinctive proto-confessionalism and confessionalization taking place during the Spanish pre-reform, through which catechetical instruction and explanation doubled as a refashioning of the body politic and augmented the tax base. In both cases, translation and multilingual texts played an important role in ensuring Castilian control via the adaptation of familiar Nasrid frameworks of power, whether fiscal practices or deploying the authority of the alfaquíes through new normative institutions.43

4.2. Strategies of Translation in the Catechetical Project

Vernacular catechisms in Spain represented a phenomenon of compromise which indicated the mutual agreement between church and crown about how religious education should shape good subjects. Whether between Arabic and Spanish or between vernacular languages and Latin, translation as a linguistic and a social practice was a major component of the ways in which the catechetical corpus interacted with morisco governance.

The texts of the catechisms themselves reflected processes of translation, including the bilingual liturgies of 1505 and 1566, along with the 1554 vernacular Arabic translation of Ayala’s Doctrina cristiana. In both 1505 and 1566, the translators reflected on the distinct characteristics of the Arabic and Latin languages, especially as could affect pronunciation which would, in turn, affect the intelligibility of the Christian message. This emphasis on pronunciation mirrors the strategic use of transliteration to harness “the oral modality of Muslim engagement with the text” which Ryan Szpiech has studied (Szpiech 2022, pp. 287, 299). Ramiro’s 1528 work, reprinted in 1568, reflected the long-running engagement of Spanish clergy with Islamic materials translated from Arabic, including the Qur’an, to which Ramiro refers repeatedly. In all cases, sustained contact between Arabic and Spanish-speaking communities is manifested in the catechisms, whether the language instruction that made possible translation, or the translations that made possible polemic engagement with Islamic texts.

There is also evidence of the ways in which language and translation sustained the catechetical project beyond the texts of the catechisms. For example, as mentioned above, sites of religious instruction were constructed on converted sacred spaces. The conversion project reshaped the landscape of Granada as well as the habits and relations of its inhabitants, and the physical transformation was accompanied by a sustained translation movement. The primary object of this translation movement was legal records pertaining to property, inheritance, and endowment. Those records made possible the construction and maintenance of churches, like the Granada cathedral, which were physically imposed on the sites of former mosques. The awqāf/bienes habices (pious endowments) of the Islamic institutions were likewise transferred to Spanish royal and ecclesiastic patronage after 1501. This transfer meant that deeds and other Arabic-language records needed to be translated into Castilian and housed in Castilian archives. The translation process would provide another vector through which Castilian sovereignty was established through the tandem process of confessionalization and territorialization which moved in contravention to the surrender treaties of 1492, which had stipulated protection for bienes habices (Garrido Atienza 1910, p. 273).

One illustration of the tandem physical and linguistic movement which buttressed the missionary project was the founding of the Hieronymite monastery in Granada, which was the first to be founded in 1492, in tandem with Hernando de Talavera’s appointment as Archbishop (Espinar Moreno 1993–1994, p. 83). According to the Hieronymite chronicler José de Sigüenza, writing a generation later, the original Hieronymite monastery was erected on the site of Santa Catalina la Real, where Ferdinand and Isabel had staged parts of the siege of the city and where the final surrender treaties had been signed (and translated) on Saint Catherine’s Day (November 25) in 1491. However, the fifteen monks who arrived to staff the new monastery found the site so infested that they obtained permission to move the enterprise to another site, where a small mosque and hermitage had previously stood. When the monastery was transferred to the Muslim holy site, the Spanish monarchs decided they would also change the name and dedication to Santa María de la Concepción (Sigüenza 1909, p. 43). The establishment of the Hieronymite monastery of Granada thus sheds additional light on the early catechetical program for moriscos in the context of the religious territorialization of Granada and the concomitant constitution of a new category of political subject.

Turning from early modern chronicles to the archives, we see how translation played an important extra-textual role in the presence of the Hieronymite catechists in Granada by making possible the physical occupation of formerly Islamic sites or Muslim properties by the new monastery. In the complex legal process of transferring Nasrid-era properties to Castilian settlers, translators drawn from the former religious elite of Muslim Granada played a vital role.44 These alfaquíes and other Nasrid religious leaders and legal experts were drawn from the very same cadre who helped Alcalá learn Arabic and gather linguistic information for his grammar and dictionary, or who were reported to be the “friends of Talavera”. Among the best known of such figures is Ambrosio Xarafí, formerly the alfaquí Hamet Xarafí, and one of the earliest officials to be named as a translator (responsible for “trugania”) by the Catholic Kings in 1493.45 Xarafí was subsequently named escribano público for the Granada town council; he translated regularly for both the cabildo and the Royal Appellate Courte (Real Chancillería), which was moved to Granada in 1505. Along with two of his sons and several other converted alfaquíes who found employment in Castilian institutions based on their linguistic knowledge, social status, and legal expertise, Xarafí is emblematic of an Arabic translation movement in Granada which underpinned all of the political and missionary efforts to control the bodies and souls of the newly converted.

In 1508, Xarafí translated a series of Arabic documents on behalf of the newly founded (and not yet constructed) Hieronymite monastery representing the property deeds and habices pertaining to lands and rents granted to the new monastery by the Spanish monarchs.46 This episode was one of many in the convoluted foundation of the monastery which relied on Arabic translations by former alfaquíes. Much of the 14th- and 15th-century documentation about Nasrid pious endowments pertaining to the territories which would come to be occupied by the monastery was translated by the alfaquí Mahoma Broçon, likely before the end of 1493 (Espinar Moreno 1993–1994, p. 95). The translation and possession of such documents was part of the ideal and physical foundation of the religious institution. Among the negotiations predicated upon the translation of property documents was the right ceded to the Hieronymite monks to use the stones found in the neighboring Islamic cemetery as literal building blocks for their church (Espinar Moreno 1993–1994, p. 85).

The long process of foundation was memorialized by José de Sigüenza in 1600. The integration of land parcels via Arabic deeds and translations in litigation were effaced in his account, and yet the echo of Arabic translation in the establishment of the Granada mission remained in his hagiographic depiction of the heroic monks overcoming every obstacle to remain in Granada and fulfill their evangelical duty, including through catechism. He recalls how, still in the 1490s, a wave of plague swept through Granada, causing royal authorities to remove them from their residence so that they would not die. Sigüenza recounted, “los sacaron de allí a una granja, ó como la llaman en lengua Arabiga, y Hebrea, una Carmen, que en nuestra lengua suena lo mismo que viña; allí estuvieron en tanto que pasaua la furia de la peste, que era de secas carbuncos” (Sigüenza 1909, p. 43). Indeed, Pedro de Alcalá’s Vocabulista attests that “Viña, lugar de vides” is translated as “cārm/curmīt”.47 This anecdote, though eliding the technical detail of the political and legal processes and their reliance on the same group of religious experts who helped the catechists accomplish their goals, represents a powerful memory of how contact among the diverse linguistic and confessional communities of Granada contributed to the establishment of the Christian church in that territory.

4.3. The Ethnography of Empire

In his account of the Hieronymite order in Granada, Sigüenza provided ethnographic details about Nasrid Granada, as transmitted to him by his confrères, including the founding of an Islamic shrine and hermitage and linguistic information about Arabic and Hebrew. Such details were commensurate with the tendency of all the morisco catechisms to invoke local practices as part of a project to convey universal doctrine. In fact, Talavera and his confrères represented a mode of evangelization by ethnography, that is, by putting “an emphasis on the distinctive cultural figures of Granada’s Muslims (use of Arabic, appreciation of zambras, proximity to the fuqahā’…)”, a mode which followed in the footsteps of earlier polemicists Nicolas of Cusa and Juan de Segovia (Bernabé-Pons 2022b, p. 235). This habit of incorporating local references in the universalizing project of religious indoctrination would prove instrumental in the differentiation of the morisco subject through both legislation and catechism.

Language was one arena in which ideas about translation were used to bridge local practice with universal messaging. Focus on language became a catalyst for emerging ethnographic discourses which differentiated the newly converted communities based on observed practices and ideas about language use. The conclusion of the 1566 Doctrina cristiana included a brief section of “Rules for how to read the Arabic phrases of this Doctrina” since “Arabic (like all other languages) has not only its own letters but its own pronunciations and sounds for those letters, which cannot be adequately represented by Latin letters”.48 This Arabic had been specified in the prologue as “the vernacular tongue of this kingdom [of Valencia]”.49 Pedro de Alcalá had included a similar commentary in the midst of the dialogic catechism portion of his Arte, in which he offered a reflection about the nature of language and of translation:

Anyone who reads the present questionnaire and catechism for confessors should keep in mind that each language has its manner of speaking, with which the judicious man will endeavor to conform as much as he can, since to do otherwise would be to obscure rather than explain what that man wanted to say. And for this reason, in the present questionnaire, many of the questions are translated word for word into Arabic, because the language could take it, and other not so, because the language could not take it, but the meaning is the same even if by different terms.50

In both cases, i.e., in 1505 and 1566, the catechists sought to use translation and locally relevant references in order to enhance communication of both theological and political instructions. On the other hand, the use of translation and emphasis on Arabic could also be a rhetorically polemic strategy, as Ryan Szpiech has found to be the case in the use of Arabic in the antialcoranes. He shows how the incorporation of Arabic qur’anic phrases could be a form of coopting Islamic ideas, while using transliteration “undermines the practice in morisco communities of using transliteration to preserve some vestige of its own Muslim cultural sensibility”.51 A similar ambivalence persists in the catechisms. The accommodating strategies of translation, along with the strategic invocation of Islamic concepts, might have appealed to neophytes. On the other hand, it was a means of converting those very concepts and their language into a Christian discursive framework.

Across all three Arabic-language catechisms, we encounter strategic adaptations in translation which reflect the ethnographic sensitivities of the catechists. These strategies could be minor, such as the systematic translation of iglesia (church) by jamī‘ (mosque) across all three works, or the translation of “Dios te salve” for “Açeléma a’aléiq” or “In the name of the father” (en nombre del padre) for the phrase “In the name of God the father” (biçmiléhi huílid), which incorporated the Basmala into the prayer.52 The strategies could be more elaborate, as in the following example.

In addition to his reflections on language throughout his Arte and in the prologue to the companion Vocabulista, Alcalá also applied a number of polemically and ethnographically informed metaphors when instructing an Arabic-speaking neophyte about the confession of sins. The problem of original sin was a unique aspect of the Christian doctrine, not shared by Islam. When Alcalá explained the process of confession, he likened God’s forgiveness to a cleansing, specifying that it was a better form of spiritual cleansing than those ritual ablutions he had seen performed by Granada’s mudejares. In the dual versions of this injunction, in Arabic and Spanish, theological and ethnographic information was distributed to different audiences via translation.

Este es el verdadero lauatorio y alimpiamiento delos pecados, y no aquel que los Moros hazen, lavandose los pies y piernas y partes del cuerpo vergonçosas en el baño o acequia.

[This is the true washing and cleansing of sins, and not that which the Muslims do, washing their feet and legs and private parts in the bath or the irrigation ditch.]

Héde hu a tahór guá al guaddó a çadīq guá a naca min ḍunūb: le bahál hédiq al guadó alleḍī yatguadáu almuzlimīn, enne yagcélu açacáyhum guá guará al hadīĉa guá maguádie oḳár

(Alcalá 1505a, n.p.).

[This is a true transformation and ritual purification [وضوء] and a scraping away of sins; not like that ritual purification which is performed by the Muslims, where they wash their private parts53 in their irrigation ditches and other waterways.]

Though there is a good deal of parity between the versions, they deliver subtly different messages. In Arabic, the conventional term wuḍū’ was used for ritual ablution. Such a term would have invoked additional significance for Muslim converts to Christianity, drawing as it did a parallel with a familiar practice. Similar tactics were employed by the authors of the antialcoranes, who hoped to use Arabic phrases to appeal to Muslim audiences (Szpiech 2022, pp. 298–99 and passim). Alcalá chose this technical religious term for this purpose, eschewing other possible Arabic translations for his Spanish terms for a place where washing takes place, lavatorio (Al. magsel, Ar. maghsil), and cleansing, alimpamiento (Al. tanquia, Ar. tanqīa), versions of which he provided in the Vocabulista. On the other hand, the specification that the new kind of wuḍū’ was not like that performed by the Muslims (almuzlimīn) created a message about differentiation. By performing the correct guaddó (wuḍū’), the converts would no longer act as almuzlimīn. In so doing, they would adhere to the legislation against Islamic bathing rituals that had been promulgated by Juana and Ferdinand as early as 1511 and confirmed by Charles in 1526. In Spanish, on the other hand, Alcalá provided what amounts to an ethnographic description of the ritual ablution, including the specification that it could take place in a public or private bath, or in an irrigation ditch (acequia), since prayers were performed throughout the workday. Such ethnographic information contributed to the reification of political categories based on cultural habits, i.e., those who performed such ablutions were acting as Muslims, and in contravention to royal law.

They were also in contravention of the laws of the Church, as the later Granada Inquisition records show. For example, in 1560, Ysabel Hernández, an impoverished resident of Ystán, near Marbella, was prescribed the “misa mayor” for having bathed in her own house. The inquisitors explained, “the moriscas are taking baths in their houses, washing their whole bodies, which is effectively performing ritual ablution (wuḍū’) and is punished by this Inquisition”.54 Though the extant records of the Granada Inquisition date from only much later, they show how catechisms could provide a means to measure the faith of the newly converted through their cultural practices. In the same visit and in the same village, diverse residents were punished for the same catalogue of infractions prohibited by the 1511 and 1526 legislation, i.e., performing zambras, butchering meat without an old Christian present, and wearing henna.55

Such examples of how catechists depended on local experience, including linguistic facilities, might have promised an accommodating approach to missionary efforts. In some cases, like Talavera’s famous adoption of Arabic phrases in the Granada mass or Alcalá’s encouragement of his readers to learn Granadan Arabic, catechists seemed to participate in the creation of a common ground, where new converts could contribute to Christian society based on their local experience.56 Nevertheless, much of that common ground had evaporated by the 1560s. One effect of the tandem theological and ethnographic arguments advanced through the morisco catechisms was the emergence of a differential legal and political status for the “newly converted”. Ultimately, by the 1560s, a new series of draconian measures prohibiting cultural and linguistic practices would contribute to codifying morisco differences through a shift in conversion strategies. Indeed, the very focus on linguistic differentiation which emerged through the tandem confessionalization-territorialization project echoed Aristotelian ethnographic trends which emphasized the barbarism of those who could not be understood. As Luis Bernabé-Pons so eloquently put it, “What these measures [in the 1560s] did achieve was to consecrate an image of the morisco as a different and threatening Other. The moriscos from Granada, like those from the rest of Spain, were unified under a negative image that emphasized their distance from Old Christians” (Bernabé-Pons 2022b, p. 242). The propagation of this image engendered the very category of the “morisco”, a term which was not used as a noun until the middle of the sixteenth-century, most famously in Philip’s 1566 pragmática (Kimmel 2019, p. 2). That royal order would define a conceptual break in the possibility for the integration of Philip’s morisco subjects and would inspire a very real-world conflict in the form of the Second War of the Alpujarras and the subsequent forced resettlement of Granada moriscos across Castile.

5. Conclusions: Morisco Subjecthood and the Spanish Empire

Catechisms helped devise strategies that aimed to naturalize morisco subjects of Spanish monarchs. A shift in the processes of Spanish confessionalization took place around the year 1570, and was due at least in part to the emergence, over the previous decades, of a morisco subjecthood which had come to be definitively segregated from the majority body politic. With this ideological separation came a drastic program of forced resettlement, whereby most Granada moriscos were expelled from the region and sent to live in scattered communities across Castile. Though intended to foster a universal message and engender cultural and political integration, the conversion project which took place over the first two thirds of the sixteenth century in Spain ultimately reified divisive ideologies. Many of the morisco catechists—especially those who promoted or made possible Arabic-language doctrinal materials—sought some degree of accommodation in order to facilitate sincere conversion and remake Nasrid subjects into Castilians. Nevertheless, the specificity of polemic-informed, ethnographic, Arabic-language catechisms ended up participating in the normative process of differentiation which created the morisco subject.

Where polemic had come to be tempered in the sixteenth-century morisco catechisms, and was sometimes even replaced by persuasion, after the outbreak of the second Alpujarras war, divisiveness dominated discourse about morisco subjects. Nevertheless, new “morisco” catechisms were produced in the latter part of the seventeenth century in Spain, yet with a starkly different tenor from those produced between 1496–1566 and showing a renewal of polemics on both sides.57 Polemic written by moriscos who held fast to some or most elements of Muslim faith emerged in its own right as a robust genre which responded to some of the of the conversion strategies of the morisco catechisms like, for example, the cultivation of morisco stories about Jesus (Cardaillac 1977, pp. 234–35). Meanwhile, Christian authorities turned away from persuasion in favor of polemic in their approach to morisco evangelization after 1566. The major sign of this shift was a change from instructional catechisms to dialogic texts in the 1580s and 1590s. Such dialogues adopted the format of the polemical Antialcoranes which had done so much to revive anti-Islamic polemic in sixteenth century Spain (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 1993, pp. 93–94). It was in these same years that debates over the “morisco question” began in earnest, manifesting in a junta in 1587, at which point government officials and some clergy began to design a program to legitimate and carry out what would be the morisco expulsion of 1609–1614 (Sánchez-Blanco 2014, pp. 105–6). These later texts diverged in format and tone from the earlier accommodationist catechisms, yet they owed much to earlier authors who had effectively created a distinctive category of nuevamente convertidos de moros, who were subject to a Christian body politic but not accepted fully as part of it.

This process of differentiation across the Hispanic Monarchy had not happened in a vacuum, nor were the moriscos the only group subject to this process. For example, conversion programs, missionary linguistics, and imperial legislation were also tools of creating and reifying difference among the newly converted indigenous populations of Spanish territories in the New World. Scholars have long recognized the influence of Reconquista ideologies, along with conquest and settlement patterns, on the Spanish conquest of the Americas.58 Rather than an eternal template which was imposed on the New World, however, we might begin to consider the mutual influence of strategies of rule by differentiation in the Peninsula and across the Empire. Beginning in 1508, for example, royal councils would establish many of the questions and parameters which would come to govern debates about the status of the nuevamente convertidos de moros, as well as the emerging categories of Indios in other parts of the Hispanic Monarchy. The consensus of these meetings (in Burgos, Madrid, Monzón, and again in Burgos during the famous junta of 1512) was that the Spanish crown had an obligation to incorporate all new subjects into the body of the Church so as to properly protect them as members of the body politic (Suárez Fernández 2012, p. 27). Of course, the diversity of the peoples subject to such an order meant that policies and practices diverged widely across the Empire, and most Spanish clergy did not equate the various newly converted populations. Indeed, foregrounding differences between indios and nuevamente convertidos de moros may have helped codify the perceived political danger of moriscos who were, after all, descended from a traditional enemy who had, until relatively recently, ruled over Iberia itself. Nevertheless, parallels emerged, particularly through catechetical programs which made use of vernacular languages and dovetailed with incipient ethnographic projects which allowed local churches to adapt to some local customs (Wasserman-Soler 2020, pp. 158–59; Pagden 1982, p. 189). As these customs were observed, noted, and codified into catechetical projects, practitioners of such customs were rationalized into a new kind of political subject. This process, as described by Wynter, represents a deposing of theological subjecthood for political subjecthood governed by the state apparatuses emerging in the sixteenth century (Wynter 2003, p. 269 and passim). The case of morisco catechisms within the broader context of Spanish empire shows that confessional conflict and theological conceptions still had an important role to play.