The Spanish Moriscos, Muslims nominally converted to Christianity and their descendants, many of whom were suspected of continuing, or reverting to, their Islamic observances, have received growing attention in the last decades. Mercedes García-Arenal has been a pioneer in examining their cultural background and their contribution to the world of learning in Spain. Now, together with Rafael Benítez Sánchez-Blanco, she has provided a long introduction to the trial of Jerónimo de Rojas, followed by a transcription of the trial itself in the original Spanish. De Rojas, who was born in Extremadura in about 1557, was a Morisco shopkeeper in Toledo. He was arrested by the Inquisition in 1601 on the basis of a single denunciation by an avowedly hostile witness. In the course of his imprisonment further charges against him were supplied by his cell-mates. He was burned at the stake two years after his arrest. The authors of this book explore every possible detail of the trial and the context in which it occurred. One of its more striking features is the audacity of the defendant, his insistence on performing ritual Islamic ablutions and prayers in his cell, and his attempts to convert his fellow prisoners. The most damaging evidence against him came from a man of considerable distinction, the Mercedarian friar Hernando de Santiago who found himself in the same cell. Hernando de Santiago, a preacher much admired by the king and by a fellow Mercedarian, Fray Gabriel Téllez, better known as the playwright Tirso de Molina, seems to have been imprisoned as the result of intrigues within the Mercedarian order, but also on account of certain passages in his Consideraciones, a collection of his Lenten sermons. Unfortunately we are left wondering what these passages could have contained. At all events it was to Fray Hernando that De Rojas expressed his many doubts about Christianity and described his own conversion to a strict form of Islam by the Moroccan nobleman ʿAbd al-Karīm Ibn Tūda (referred to by De Rojas and others as ‘alcaide Abentute’), who had returned to North Africa after over twenty years of exile first in Portugal and then in Spain. In their interrogations, which included questioning under torture, the inquisitors tried to present De Rojas as a member of a wider conspiracy. They failed, even if he was in touch with some of the leading members of the Morisco community such as Miguel de Luna. His sentence to the stake was opposed by the most senior and experienced of his interrogators, but the Supreme Council of the Inquisition overrode his opinion. As García-Arenal and Sánchez-Blanco point out, this was a moment when the attitude of the Spanish government to the Moriscos was hardening while preparations were being made for their expulsion in 1609. The execution of Jerónimo de Rojas is one of a number of dramatic episodes pointing towards the final tragedy, and the edition of his trial is an important contribution to our knowledge of a grim moment in Spanish history.
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