L’expulsió dels moriscos [1894] by Gabriel Puig Roda, Museu de Belles Arts de Castelló[/caption]Limpieza de sangre (in Spanish), Limpeza de sangue (in Portuguese), both meaning "cleanliness of blood" was a concept of Iberian Modern History. It refered to being ethnically pure "Old Christian", without Jewish or Muslim ancestors.After the end of the Reconquista and the expulsion of Sephardic Jews, the population of Spain and Portugal was all nominally Christian. However, the descendants of the Christian conquerors despised the New Christians, descendants of baptized Jews (Conversos or Marranos) or Mudejars (Moriscos). Besides social and economic causes, the accusation was that the New Christians were false converts, keeping their former religion in their homes (Crypto-Jews). This was sometimes certain, but even people later declared saint by the Church could be suspected. Cleanliness of blood was an issue of ancestry, not of personal religion.
This stratification made that the Old Christian commoners could assert a right to honor (honra) even if they were not in the nobility. The military orders, guilds and other organizations started incorporating in their bylaws, clauses demanding proof of cleanliness of blood. Upward mobile New Christian families had to either contend with their sort, or bribe and falsify documents attesting generations of good Christians. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions had the New Christians as their main targets, since witchcraft was considered more a psychiatrical than a religious issue and Protestantism was promptly suffocated.
[caption id="attachment_9839" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
Damned by the Inquisition - Eugenio Lucas Velazquez[/caption]..........
In spite of the abolition of the rules with the demise of the Ancien Regime, the discrimination was still present in places like Majorca, where no Xueta (descendant of the Majorcan Conversos) priest was allowed to say Mass in the cathedral until the 1960s.
..........
It is estimated that by 1609 there were slightly less than 400,000 Moriscos in Spain, making up almost five percent of the total Spanish population. This percentage increases significantly in areas such as Aragon and Valencia, where Moriscos made up a much higher portion of the regional population. Especially in Aragon, the expulsion of the Moriscos left whole villages empty, large quantities of crops ruined, and the local economy devastated. Beyond its economic cost, the expulsion exacted a high human cost as well: having to leave Spain by sea, many people, including the elderly and children, died in the rough waters of the Mediterranean or found themselves under attack by thieves, brigands, and even regional authorities upon landing in North Africa.
As with its expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and its policies and practices in the Americas during the same period, Spain's treatment of the Moriscos stands as a tremendous scar on its national history. As early as the first decades after the fall of Granada, Spanish authorities began to single out this minority population of several thousand people, harassing them to varying degrees for over a century before expelling them by force.
The expulsion of Moriscos
Definition:
Morisco (Spanish "Moor-like") or mourisco (Portuguese) is a term referring to a kind of 'New Christian' in Spain and Portugal.
From the late 1400s to the early 1600s Moors (Iberian Muslims) were forced to convert from Islam to Catholicism. The Moriscos were expelled by the decree of 1610 from Spain to North Africa after being persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition.
Prior to their forced conversion, the Moriscos were known as Mudejars, and were allowed to practice Islam among Christians with certain restrictions.
[caption id="attachment_9838" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
Expulsion of Moriscos from Granada[/caption]The exact status of Mudejars depended on the capitulation pacts and the later decrees of the kings and Cortes. After the fall of Granada in 1492, the Muslim population was promised religious freedom by the Treaty of Granada, but that promise was short-lived. In 1502, Muslims were given an ultimatum to either convert or emigrate. The majority converted, but only superficially, continuing to dress and speak as they had before and to secretly practice Islam and use the aljamiado writing system. This led Cardinal Cisneros to use a more forceful approach, which resulted in an uprising in 1500 to 1502. This was suppressed, and the Spanish authorities took that as a pretext to void the rights and obligations in the surrender treaty. As early as 1508, authorities banned traditional fashion.
More restrictive legislation was introduced in 1526 and 1527. Moriscos could buy a 40-year suspension of the laws, but in 1568, Philip II of Spain issued an edict for Moriscos to give up their children to be educated by Christian priests. This led to another uprising in the Alpujarras in 1568 to 1571 and the forced resettlement of Moriscos upon its defeat.
The Moriscos were finally expelled from Spain to North Africa in 1610, by Philip III, at the instigation of the Duke of Lerma. Although estimates have varied from as low as 120,000 to as high as 3,000,000 expelled [1], contemporary accounts set it at between 200,000-600,000, with 300,000 being an often quoted number. [2]. Some historians have blamed the following crisis of the Spanish Mediterranean on the replacement of Morisco workers by Christian newcomers, who were fewer and less familiar with the local techniques.
Upon arrival in North Africa, the Sultans of Morocco tried to find a place for these Spanish-speaking people who had been influenced by Christianity.
Today: Genetical Evidence of the eugenetical program after the Reconquista
Two subclades of North African Y-chromosome haplogroup E (labeled E-M81 and E-M78β) have been given an estimated age of ~5000 years, making them useful in detecting historical admixture from Berbers. These markers exist at combined frequencies of 2.2% in Asturians (Northern Spaniards) and 1.6% in Southern Spaniards, suggesting that gene flow from Carthaginian and Moorish colonists was minimal.
(Cruciani et al., Am J Hum Genet, 2004)
.................................................. .................................................. ....................
"The most striking results are that contemporary NW African and Iberian populations were found to have originated from distinctly different patrilineages and that the Strait of Gibraltar seems to have acted as a strong (although not complete) barrier to gene flow.... The Islamic rule of Spain, which began in A.D. 711 and lasted almost 8 centuries, left only a minor contribution to the current Iberian Y-chromosome pool.
"...the origins of the Iberian Y-chromosome pool may be summarized as follows: 5% recent NW African, 78% Upper Paleolithic and later local derivatives (group IX), and 10% Neolithic (H58, H71). No haplotype assumed to have originated in sub-Saharan Africa (read:negroid) was found in our Iberian sample. It should be noted that H58 and H71 are not the only haplotypes present in the Middle East and that the Neolithic wave of advance could have brought other lineages to Iberia and NW Africa.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An analysis of 10 autosomal allele frequencies in Southern Europeans (including Spaniards, Balearic Islanders and Basques) and various Middle Eastern and North African populations revealed a "line of sharp genetic change [that] runs from Gibraltar to Lebanon," which has divided the Mediterranean into distinct northern and southern clusters since at least the Neolithic period. The authors conclude that "gene flow was more the exception than the rule," attributing this result to "a joint product of initial geographic isolation and successive cultural divergence, leading to the origin of cultural barriers to population admixture."
No comments:
Post a Comment