Students of early modern Iberia have long been aware of the important role played by prophecy within the culture of sixteenth-century Spain's population of Moriscos, the nominally Christian descendants of Muslim converts. An ample scholarly literature surrounds the apocalyptic prophecies known as jofores, their prominent place within Morisco understandings of history and contemporary events, and their role as touchstones of community identity for the beleaguered Morisco minority. Mayte Green-Mercado's excellent new book expands on the existing scholarship and recontextualizes the Moriscos and their political culture of prophecy within early modern Spanish, Islamic, and Mediterranean history. In doing so, the author shifts the frame, refiguring the Moriscos as protagonists within their own story and moving Morisco history from the margins to the mainstream.
Over the course of six chapters, Green-Mercado explores the Morisco politics of prophecy as it developed and changed during the sixteenth century. In the first section, she examines the relationship between prophecy and Morisco identity as it developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, in the wake of the forced conversions that followed the first Revolt of the Alpujarras (1499–1501). The author begins by uncovering Morisco ideas about holiness, prophethood, and apocalyptic thought through a close examination of the case of Agustín de Ribera, a young Morisco prophet from Castile investigated by the Spanish Inquisition in the 1540s. Chapter 2 moves from Castile to Granada, where prophecy functioned as a persuasive form of political rhetoric deployed by the leaders of the second Alpujarras Revolt (1568–70), as “the ideological framework according to which the Moriscos were to make decisions” (79), and as a discourse of martyrdom through which they interpreted their experiences. Green-Mercado persuasively argues that prophecy reveals how Morisco political and community identity was an active process, rather than a static, reified object.
The second section expands beyond the boundaries of Iberia to consider the circulation of prophetic ideas and texts throughout the Mediterranean. By placing Morisco prophecies alongside similar texts from Venice and the Ottoman Empire, chapter 3 demonstrates how Moriscos were active participants in an international political discourse that spanned religious and geographic boundaries. The fourth chapter explores the same question through the case of apocalyptic prophecies that circulated in connection with several rebellion plots in Aragón and Valencia in the 1570s and 1580s. In the third section, Green-Mercado shifts her focus again to consider prophecy's function as a language of politics, negotiation, and diplomacy, both within the Morisco community and beyond. Chapter 5 offers an exciting reinterpretation of the well-known case of Gil Pérez, a Morisco who provided to the Aragonese Inquisition false information about a conspiracy to rebel. Green-Mercado's rereading of this case in the light of newly discovered material highlights the ways in which prophecy, including forged prophecy, responded to and reflected the concerns of the Morisco community. The final chapter examines the use of prophetic language as a form of political discourse in Moriscos’ communications with French Huguenots and the French Crown in the years leading up to the expulsion (1609–14), while a final epilogue ties the threads together with a look at prophecy as a form of Morisco historical interpretation.
This brief overview does not do justice to the richness and sophistication of Green-Mercado's analysis, nor to her method, which, as it moves back and forth between the micro and the macro, allows her to unpick the internal dynamics of Morisco communities while simultaneously reinserting those communities within the larger context of the Mediterranean and the Islamic world. Green-Mercado draws on a wide array of sources, including contemporary chronicles; letters exchanged between ambassadors, agents, merchants, spies, and government officials; and jofores and other apocalyptic prophecies found in testimony of witnesses before the Inquisition but also in Arabic and in Aljamiado texts—that is, Romance languages written in Arabic script. (Translations of some of these fascinating, challenging texts are included in an appendix.) Most importantly, Visions of Deliverance tears down the long-standing barriers that have marginalized Morisco history and moves it into the mainstream of its historical context. This excellent book should find a ready audience in readers interested in Morisco history and culture, and in prophetic and political discourse in early modern Islam, Iberia, and the Mediterranean as a whole.
