The Hand of Fatima

  Often on those occasions they sought out each other’s eyes from their separate places inside the church. When their gazes met, they spoke volumes. The Virgin Mary was the vital link between their two beliefs, exactly as suggested by the lead plates, although nothing had come of Hernando’s efforts on that score. As Rafaela commented when they were alone at night, how, if not thanks to her intercession, had a Morisco and a Christian woman managed to escape Seville? How, if not thanks to the intercession of Mary, had God permitted such a happy marriage between a follower of the Prophet and a devout Christian?

  On those holy days, whenever Hernando saw a horse of any description, Rafaela trembled to see how his eyes narrowed nostalgically. She could not help wondering whether she had done the right thing in deciding to flee with him, if she had not condemned him to a sterile, monotonous life. Far from his books and his projects, he must be bored, if not miserable.

  And yet without fail on those days of obligation, her husband showed her she had not made a mistake. He played with little Musa and Salma, tenderly hugging and kissing them. When they were out in the fields where no one could see them he also tried to teach them numbers and arithmetic, and whatever else he could think of that did not need paper or writing tablets. The little ones soon grew tired of lessons that could not possibly be of any use to them, and instead demanded he sit with them to listen to the stories Miguel told. Then at night when they were back in their home, the two adults talked about their children, the future of Amin and Laila, who had almost reached adulthood, as well as about the work in the fields, life in general, and a thousand other things. Afterwards they would retire to the small bedroom they shared and make tender love.

  They rose at dawn one working day to continue with the arduous labour of the olive harvest. Hernando had to shake the children, who were curled up asleep on a straw mattress, to wake them. After a frugal breakfast, they set off for the fields through the morning mist, before the sun had time to burn it off. As they set to work, none of them spoke. Rafaela was worried: against her wishes, her body was telling her she had become pregnant again. How could she bring another child into this world of poverty and suffering?

  At mid-morning they paused for something to eat. While they were doing so, they caught sight of Román, a lame old man who always stayed behind in the hamlet, walking slowly towards them with the aid of a rough stick. They saw him in the distance pointing towards them to direct two men on horseback.

  ‘Don Pedro,’ Miguel said in surprise when he saw the strangers.

  ‘Who’s that with him?’ Rafaela asked, concern etched on her face.

  ‘Don’t worry, Don Pedro would never do anything to harm us,’ her husband reassured her, although his voice was not completely steady.

  The two men cantered over to them.

  Hernando stood up and stepped a few paces in front of his family to receive them, just in case. His fears were calmed when he saw the smile on the nobleman’s lips, and so he motioned for Rafaela to come and join him.

  ‘Good day to you,’ Don Pedro greeted them, jumping from his horse.

  ‘Peace,’ replied Hernando, casting a glance at the other rider. He was of average height and richly dressed, but not in the Spanish style. His beard was neatly trimmed, and he had a penetrating gaze. ‘Have you come to see what’s going on in your lands?’ said Hernando, holding his hand out to Don Pedro de Granada.

  ‘No,’ the nobleman replied, taking Hernando’s hand and gripping it tight. His smile broadened still further. Rafaela clung to her husband while Miguel tried to keep the children away from them. ‘I’ve brought good news.’

  With that, Don Pedro searched in his garments and pulled out a document. He passed it to Hernando.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ he queried when he saw his friend standing with the letter unopened in his hand.

  Hernando looked down at the document. It was sealed. When he looked more closely at the seal, he saw it was the royal coat of arms. He hesitated, and began to tremble. What could it be about?

  ‘Open it!’ Rafaela urged him.

  Miguel could not resist seeing what was going on, and struggled laboriously over to them, his crutches sinking in the soft earth. The children ran alongside him.

  ‘Open it, Father!’ Turning towards his eldest son, Hernando nodded and broke the seal.

  He began to read the document out loud: ‘“Don Felipe, by the grace of God King of Castile, León, Aragón, the two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Portugal, Navarre, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia and Majorca . . .”’ Without realizing it, his voice fell to a murmur as he read out the long list of Philip III’s titles: ‘“Archduke of Austria . . . Duke of Burgundy . . .”’ until eventually he was reading it under his breath.

  No one dared interrupt him. Her hands clasped tightly together, Rafaela tried to guess at the contents by the almost imperceptible movements of her husband’s lips.

  ‘The King . . .’ Hernando began, his voice thick with emotion. ‘The King personally exempts us from the expulsion decree, that is, Hernando Ruiz from Juviles and his children. He acknowledges that we are old Christians, and therefore restores to us all those properties seized on his behalf.’

  Rafaela could not contain a sob that was a mixture of laughter and tears. ‘What about Gil and the duke?’ she managed to stammer.

  Hernando began to read again, in a loud, firm voice: ‘“We so decree in the name of our sovereign lord to all the nobles, prelates, lawyers, barons, knights, judges and sheriffs of the cities, towns and other places in our realm, together with His Majesty’s bailiffs, governors, all other ministers, citizens and residents of his kingdoms.”’

  He showed Rafaela the letter: she burst into tears. Hernando opened his arms wide and she flung herself into them.

  ‘Your new son will be born in Córdoba,’ Rafaela whispered tearfully in his ear.

  ‘How has this come about?’ Hernando asked.

  Don Pedro gestured him to one side. As they walked in the olive grove, he presented his companion: André de Ronsard, an ambassador at the French embassy at the court of Spain. ‘The honourable lord has another letter for you.’

  The three men came to a halt in the shade of a gnarled old olive tree. Feeling inside his cloak, the Frenchman handed him a second document. ‘It’s from Ahmed I, the Sultan of Constantinople,’ he announced. Hernando looked enquiringly at him, and the Frenchman explained, ‘As you must know, following the expulsion of your people from Spain, many Muslims escaped to France. Unfortunately, our population often robbed, mistreated, or even killed these exiles. These outrages came to the ears of Sultan Ahmed, who immediately dispatched a special ambassador to the French court to intercede with the French monarch on behalf of the deportees. Agí Ibrahim, for that is the ambassador’s name, succeeded in this effort, but while he was in our country he also received another request, which he transmitted to the French embassy at the Spanish court. That was to win a pardon for you and your family . . . whatever the cost. And I can assure you, it cost a great deal.’ Hernando waited for a further explanation. ‘That’s all I know,’ Ronsard said by way of excuse, ‘I was merely informed that when we achieved this we were to seek out Don Pedro de Granada Venegas; and that he would probably know your whereabouts because of the lead plates. I was simply told I should accompany him to give you the Sultan’s letter.’

  Hernando opened it. The neat, brightly coloured Arabic characters were stylishly written by an expert hand. He shuddered, and then started to read the letter silently. As she had planned, Fátima had travelled to Constantinople, where she had handed the gospel to the Sultan in person. Ahmed I thanked him for his defence of Islam and for having sent the gospel of Barnabas to him. Above all, though, he was grateful for the way he had kept the spirit of Islam alive in the Córdoba mosque by praying before the mihrab. Who in all the Muslim world had not heard of him?

  The Sultan, as the letter went on to explain, was building the world’s largest mosque in honour of Allah and his Prophet in t
he city of Constantinople. It was to include six tall minarets and a vast dome, and was to be covered in a mosaic made up of thousands of blue and green stones. Even so, the Sultan recognized that however beautiful the new mosque might be, it would never reach the heights of the symbol of the victory over the Christian realms of the West.

  The Sultan continued:

  It is my wish and that of all Muslims that you continue to praise and glorify the ‘peerless Creator’ within the walls of what once was the greatest mosque in the West; that, even if it is in whispers, the prayers to the one God continue to be heard from your mouth, and when you are no longer there, from the mouths of your children and your children’s children. That your prayers mingle with the echoes of the murmurs of the thousand upon thousands of our brothers who have prayed on that spot, so that on the day that God so decrees, through you and your family the past will join the present which, with the help of the All-powerful, must surely arrive.

  The doctors of religion consider it vital to find the original of the gospel that the copyist claims to have hidden back in the time of al-Mansur. God willing, we will do so. We would give anything to have it in our hands, because the Christians will never give credence to a mere copy.

  Your wife greets you, wishes you happiness, and encourages you to continue with the fight you began together. We will take care of her until death unites you once more.

  Fátima! She had forgiven him!

  The sound of his children’s laughter brought him back to reality. He looked across at them: they were running and playing among the olive trees. Miguel was encouraging them, while his wife watched with a smile on her face. Yes, his family was his greatest achievement . . . Hernando sighed. Why had it not been possible for the two peoples to live together in peace? It was then that he noticed Muqla, who was standing apart from the others. He was quiet, and looked serious as he regarded his father. They were all his children, but Muqla was the one who had inherited the spirit forged out of eight centuries of Muslim history in these lands. He would be the one who carried on his work.

  At that moment, Rafaela saw how close father and son were and, as if realizing what was going through her husband’s mind, went up behind Muqla and rested her hands on his shoulders. The boy leant back against her and entwined his fingers in hers.

  Hernando gazed tenderly at his family, then raised his eyes above the tops of the olive trees. The sun was high in the sky. In the clear blue heavens, for a brief moment he saw clouds forming a huge hand of Fátima that seemed to be protecting each and every one of them.

  The history of the Morisco community in Spain, from the conquest of Granada by the Catholic monarchs to their final expulsion, is one of the many episodes of xenophobia in our history. Other examples include Almanzor’s attacks on Jews and Christians and the infamous expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic monarchs. The conditions for the surrender of Granada established very generous terms for the Muslims. They were allowed to keep their language, religion, customs, properties and authorities; eight years later, however, Cardinal Cisneros imposed the forced conversion of the Moriscos, as well as the elimination of their culture, the establishment of new, onerous taxes, and the curtailment of their administrative autonomy. The so-called ‘new Christians’ became increasingly exploited and reviled, while their previous rights were severely restricted.

  The Morisco revolt in the rugged, beautiful region of the Alpujarra was a direct consequence of that people’s constantly deteriorating situation. We know about it thanks to two detailed accounts by the chroniclers Luis de Mármol Carvajal (Historia del rebelión y castigo de los Moriscos del reino de Granada) and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (Guerra de Granada hecha por el Rey de España Don Felipe II contra los Moriscos de aquel reino, sus rebeldes: historia escrito en cuatro libros). This was a war that both sides pursued with the utmost cruelty, although the atrocities committed by the Moriscos are better known, owing to the incomplete nature of the Christian accounts. In spite of this, one of the few voices raised to explain, though not to justify, these excesses was that of the Spanish ambassador in Paris, who, in the letter quoted on page 18, related how an entire village was complaining that its women were raped by the priest, and that their children were born with the stigma of his blue eyes – as is the case of the protagonist of this novel. However, the Christian side also committed atrocities. Massacres (the worst example of which took place in the village of Galera), the forced enslavement of the defeated Moriscos and extensive pillaging were common. For this reason we should give credence to events such as the deaths of more than a thousand women and children in the square at Juviles, and the sale of a similar number of both groups at public auction in Granada, as related in these chronicles.

  This butchery was carried out by soldiers and commanders who were not part of the regular forces, and whose sole aim seems to have been personal enrichment. The chronicles constantly give prominence to the efforts to win spoils and share them out, to ambition being the only strategy, and to desertion by men satisfied with the booty they had accumulated.

  Together with this, I have also tried in my novel to present an image of the conflicts and conditions within the rebel camp until the Moriscos, abandoned to their fate by Algiers and the Turks (as they had been before and would be again), were defeated by the professional Spanish soldiers. The taking of hashish to instil courage, the use of aconite as a poison on arrow tips, the arrogant attitude of the squad of janissaries sent from Algiers, the corsairs and the inclination some of them had for young boys: all this appears in the books of the chroniclers of the time. Also, in the work Mahoma by Juan Vernet, it is noted that according to Arab legend, several of the Prophet’s swords reached al-Andalus, as I describe in my novel.

  The Alpujarra uprising ended with the deportation of the Moriscos of Granada to other kingdoms in Spain. In the case of those taken to Córdoba, like the protagonists of the novel, their exodus led to the death along the way of a seventh of those expelled, as seen from the study Los Moriscos en tierra de Córdoba by Juan Aranda Doncel.

  The defeat, the dispersal of the Moriscos, the discriminatory laws (which also had the result of rendering useless any attempts at assimilation) did not resolve the problem. There are many reports and opinions from the time which not only made this clear, but proposed terrifying ‘final solutions’. As a consequence, there were also many plots, all of which failed. Among the most serious was the one at Toga, which is recounted in the novel and which was thwarted as a result of the documents the King of England sent to the Spanish monarch following Elizabeth I’s death and the Anglo-Spanish treaty. In his book The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion and Expulsion, the historian Henry Charles Lea states that the 120,000 ducats the Morisco community promised to pay on that occasion to secure the support of the French King for the insurrection were in fact handed over in Pau; while Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent in their Historia de los Moriscos; vida y tragedia de una minoría, maintain that this never in fact happened. However, the payment, or the offer to make it, does seem to be true. For plot purposes, I have decided the payment was made, and have fictitiously put this down to the profits made from counterfeiting money – a real economic scourge which occurred above all in the kingdom of Valencia, where in 1613 the municipal treasury was bankrupted, leading to the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of fake ducat coins. The Moriscos were directly accused of this counterfeiting. Several Berbers were present at Toga, but the aid was not meant to come from Algiers or the Sublime Porte, but from Christians.

  The sufferings that the children went through – and here I am referring to the Morisco children, innocent victims of their people’s tragedy – merit an in-depth study. There is a wealth of references for this: first and foremost, there is proof of the slavery into which children under eleven were forced during the Alpujarra uprising, despite the royal edicts. From our viewpoint, it is also hard to consider all those over eleven as being adult. In second place, once the war had finished, there was the handover
of the children of deported Moriscos to Christian families; there are documents that confirm legal processes in favour of these children who were trying to recover their freedom once they reached the age of majority. Third, there was a fresh enslavement of children after the rebellions in the Valencian mountains (Vall de Laguar and Muela de Cortes). Finally, there exists documentation on those children aged under six who were kept in Spain when the definitive expulsion of the Moriscos took place. There are accounts that some families managed to send these children to France (the prohibition was on sending them to Barbary) and that others succeeded in getting round the royal decree by setting sail for Christian countries and then changing course at sea for the African coast. In the novel, several hundred of these children are said to have been detained in Seville. In Valencia, almost a thousand of them were handed over to the Church, and the viceroy’s wife used her servants to abduct an unknown number of them and looked after them to prevent them falling into the hands of Satan, as would have happened if they had gone to ‘Moorish lands’.

  Following their expulsion, the Moriscos from the village of Hornachos, an enclosed, warlike community, settled in and later took control of the corsair port of Salé, next to Rabat. In 1631 they negotiated with the King of Spain to hand over the town to him on several conditions, including that of the return of the children of whom they had been robbed. From kingdom to kingdom, village to village, there are many examples of communities where the youngest children were taken from the Moriscos.