symbol at odds with French expectations of a secular society. Face veils were also banned in Belgium a few months later, and other European countries are discussing the issue. All of these measures have met with resistance and lawsuits from Muslims living in Europe.22 Controversy over Muslim women’s clothing has also been at the center of debates in North America, especially in Quebec where efforts to ban veils and other religious symbols culminated in the 2013 promotion of a “Charte de la laïcité.”23
A facile comparison between restrictions imposed in twenty-first-century Paris or Montreal and sixteenth-century Granada might seem to suggest intriguing similarities, but ultimately, this comparative exercise is elusive. The contexts of these legislative acts are profoundly different, as are the beliefs about humanity and society on which they are based. Contemporary Western arguments about the veil are overtly grounded in assumptions about equality, openness, and security within a modern secular society, even while anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant sentiments may lurk just below the surface of this discourse. In contrast, legislators in sixteenth-century Granada made no bones about their anti-Islamic and pro-Castilian Christian opinions. Most early modern Christians saw Muslims and Islam in Spain as a recently defeated enemy and a righteously obliterated religion, while many suspected that crypto-Muslims were still dangerous as a potential military and religious fifth column. Christian administrators and inquisitors cherished a mutual goal of creating, by force when necessary, a single unified Catholic Spain. To achieve this goal, in the wake of mass conversions, many saw it as equally necessary to stamp out all earlier habits and customs possibly associated with Islamic life. The reactions to these acts of restrictive legislation, modern and early modern, are likewise fundamentally different. Modern Muslims have responded with appeals to their rights to freedom of religious practice and expression. Francisco Núñez Muley, in contrast, knew that there was no freedom of religion, and in consequence he argued that these practices were not an expression of religious belief.
The details of Francisco Núñez Muley’s defense of Granadan cultural practices in terms of styles of dress, haircuts, use of henna, and visits to bathhouses, will be discussed in the individual chapters of this book devoted to these topics, along with one other distinctive aspect of Muslim custom and practice (mentioned only very briefly in his memorandum): the continuity of Andalusi foodstuffs, foodways, and table manners. Núñez Muley’s arguments reflected their particular late sixteenth-century Granadan context, but the customs and practices that he defended had a much longer history. In the chapters that follow, I will examine the legislation, perceptions, and debates about Muslim appearance (Chapter 2), bathing (Chapter 3), and foodways (Chapter 4) in Christian Spanish kingdoms from the late eleventh century until the late sixteenth century.
Over this five-hundred-year period, there were remarkable changes in Christian attitudes about the continuation of Muslim rites and practices under Christian rule, from a relatively easy acceptance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to increasing hostility during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to eradication in the sixteenth century. This was true both for outright aspects of Islamic law and faith, which were always completely separate from Christian norms, and the more ambiguous aspects of daily life, such as foodstuffs and popular music, that could fairly easily assimilate across the borders of faith. Thus, ordinary habits that had been widely shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Iberia during much of the medieval period, such as regular visits to community bathhouses, became tainted as filthy, disreputable, and un-Christian by the late medieval and early modern period. This book will trace these changes and consider their causes, looking not at the overtly religious aspects of Islamic practice (which are easy to explain) but at the more equivocal but deeply ingrained habits of daily life, which, though widely recognized as Muslim, could also be argued as being merely regional and customary.
In the final clauses of his memorandum, almost as an afterthought after the signature, Francisco Núñez Muley posits two counterfactual situations in order to drive home his point. First, Núñez Muley asks what would happen if
there should be established a decree requiring all Christians to dress like Moriscos and wear their footwear; to cease celebrating weddings in the Castilian way and instead begin celebrating them as Moriscos do; to have no other music but the Morisco zambra and the instruments that accompany it; to bathe in the Morisco baths and to hire only Morisco bath-workers and no others; to speak no Castilian whatsoever but only Arabic; to cease using any Castilian names or surnames; to keep the doors to their homes open at all times. Furthermore, this decree would prohibit women from leaving their faces uncovered in public and require them to cover them as Morisco women do, and it would prohibit Christians from possessing any contracts, registers, or land titles in Castilian—all of these would have to be written in Arabic.24
Second, he follows on this long hypothetical suggestion by asking, what if instead of requiring Castilian Christians to speak Arabic, they were required to speak and write in the Genoese dialect of Italian, would they comply? No, he answers. Even though Genoese is not that different a language from Castilian (certainly “much closer to Castilian than Arabic is”), and both the Castilians and the Genoese are Christian, “they would not comply, but rather they would die and suffer under burdens and punishments.”25
These two hypothetical scenarios are revealing in the degree to which they seek to turn the issue at hand from a question of religious identity (Christian vs. Muslim) to one of linguistic and regional identity (first Granada and Arabic vs. Castile and Castilian, then Castilian vs. Genoese). By extension, the Moriscos were also willing to die and suffer to preserve their regional identity, language, and customs, even while being Christians. Like Francisco Núñez Muley’s memorandum, this is also a book about identity and the structures that support our understandings of identity, but unlike his work, it includes religion as one among many factors creating identity in medieval and early modern Spain.
CHAPTER 2
Clothing and Appearance
Do clothes make the man—or the woman? Should it be possible to know a person’s identity or religion simply from his or her appearance, and can certain clothes, hairstyles, and other aspects of visual identity be mandated by custom and law? Throughout the medieval period, the desirable answer was generally “yes.” Different groups of people should look different, with different vestimentary traditions, whether through self- or communal regulation (according to their own laws, habits, and personal desires) or mandated by external legislation. Prescriptive legal sources, both religious and secular, from medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian spheres, all indicate medieval sentiments in favor of the immediate visual identification of religious, social, and economic distinctions through regulations on dress, hairstyles, veils, belts, shoes, beards, jewelry, and other aspects of personal and collective appearance. One of the most famous iterations of these opinions, codified at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and requiring distinctive “signs” for Muslims and Jews, did not stand alone in the legal tradition.
Meanwhile, the lawyers, clerics, and administrators who upheld sumptuary laws were themselves far from alone in supporting the importance of differential visual identity in medieval and early modern Spain. Artists (and, by extension, their audiences) in Christian and Muslim regions were likewise familiar with the conventions for representing Christian and Muslim appearance, whether in luxury manuscripts produced at the court of Alfonso X of Castile, or in frescoes of courtly scenes adorning the ceilings of the Alhambra Palace in Granada. While it may be argued that neither law nor art necessarily reflected actual lived experience in medieval and early modern Spain, nevertheless, both genres expressed clear and well-understood expectations that Muslims, Christians, and Jews should be visually distinguishable from each other.
And just as different groups should look different, so too members of the same community should appear as such. Thirteenth-century Castilian law had dictated not only that Muslims should dress differently from Christians but also that newly converted Christians (“christianos