Maurophilia and the Moors in Spain Widely read across Europe ever since their first publication, the anonymous “The Abencerraje” (1561) and “Ozmín and Daraja,” from Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), represent the epitome of Spain’s literary idealization of Muslims. Finely wrought literary artifacts, both novellas reflect the intense engagement of early modern Spain with the cultural inheritance of Al-Andalus and offer rich imaginings of life on the Christian-Muslim frontier in what was until 1492 the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.1 “The Abencerraje” depicts the friendship between two knights, a Moor and his Christian captor, while “Ozmín and Daraja” traces the adventures of two Moorish lovers during the war on Granada. Central examples of the tradition of literary maurophilia—the idealization of Moors in chivalric and romance texts—these stories reveal a profound fascination with a culture that was officially denounced. By recalling the intimate and sympathetic bonds that often connected Christians to the heritage of Al-Andalus in Spain, they offer a more nuanced view of the Christian-Muslim divide in the early modern period.
Maurophilia and the Moors in Spain The two texts translated here are part of a varied and fascinating literary tradition that idealized the traditional enemies of Christian Europe—the Moors, or Saracens, as they were known in other contexts. While there are medieval examples of this tradition, it was especially rich in sixteenth-century Spain, particularly because it often contrasted markedly with official policies of discrimination and persecution against Muslims and their descendants. Although maurophilia trades in a series of recognizable topoi—heroic Moorish knights and their beautiful ladies, a courtly setting of elaborate entertainments and chivalric displays—it also emphasizes the place of the Moors in Spain.
Muslims had lived in Iberia since the Berber invasions of 711, settling in most of the peninsula. Over the centuries, the various Christian rulers of Iberia gradually expanded their control, portraying the conquest of territory from the Muslims as a reconquista, or reconquest. This powerful coinage, still used in some quarters today, underscored the Christians’ supposed right to the territory and the inevitability of their advance. In fact, during these centuries there were many versions of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Iberia, from occasional moments of the idealized convivencia (coexistence) imagined by the influential critic Américo Castro to the more frequent arrangements of conveniencia (convenience) noted by historian Brian Catlos. Christian rulers and military leaders frequently established allegiances with the various Muslim kingdoms to further their goals, and the three faiths lived together in a variety of formal and informal arrangements, which generally involved paying a special tax in exchange for religious freedom. Although these arrangements bore little resemblance to modern notions of tolerance and were frequently interrupted by violent episodes of religious persecution, the plurality of religious and cultural forms in medieval Spain made for a rich and rare culture. Life on the frontier between Christian and Muslim territories often involved small-scale conflict, including skirmishes such as the one that leads to the capture of the Moor in “The Abencerraje.” These border raids sought booty and captives who would be ransomed for money.
During the long centuries of the Muslim presence in Iberia, much of the peninsula’s aristocratic culture and its sense of courtly virtue came from the kingdoms of Al-Andalus. Christians greatly admired the elaborate Andalusi architecture, gardens, poetry, horsemanship, furnishings, and fashions they found when they conquered such important cities as Toledo (1085) and Seville (1248), and they soon incorporated them as their own, creating a Castilian culture with many shared elements (Dodds, Menocal, and Balbale 2008, 4): hence the magnificent palace of the Alcázar in Seville, which Pedro I of Castile took over from his Muslim predecessors and greatly expanded. Modeled on the great palace of the Alhambra in Granada, the Christians’ palace is virtually indistinguishable from a “Moorish” building. Whatever their own religion or ethnicity, the artisans who crafted it worked within a local idiom and produced Andalusi architecture, with its decorative tiles, elaborate wood carvings on the ceilings, delicate columns and patios, and so forth.
Over the centuries, this intense engagement with Andalusi forms hybridized Spanish culture to the extent that the “Moorish” origins of many architectural forms, costumes, and even styles of horseback riding were largely ignored; these were instead simply considered Spanish forms. There is a certain irony, therefore, when the fictional Queen Isabella encourages her captive, Daraja, to dress in the Castilian style: inventories inform us that the historical Isabella’s wardrobe was full of “Moorish” wear, from her platform shoes to her tocas de camino (head wraps for travel). The change of dress she proposes to Daraja assumes a clearly marked difference far from the fusion of costumes evident in the period.
This broad cultural exchange and hybridization—in some cases deliberate and conscious, in others simply habitual—is a crucial context for the literary idealization of the Moor (Fuchs 2009). While the maurophile novellas may be idealizing in their focus on chivalry and exalted feeling, they also chart the vivid presence of the Andalusi heritage in quotidian Spanish culture. Beyond showcasing this shared material culture, moreover, the texts respond to specific political and cultural changes over the course of the sixteenth century, making a strong case for a sympathetic approach to Muslims and their Christianized descendants.
By the late fifteenth century, the Christians controlled all of modern-day Spain except the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, known as the Catholic Monarchs, pursued this final goal, in no small part to solidify their own legitimacy as rulers over a newly unified Spain. In a series of campaigns over ten years (1482–1492), they gradually advanced on Granada. The fall of the Nasrid kingdom was accelerated by a series of internecine rivalries among the ruling families and leading clans, such as the fictional Moor Abindarráez describes when he relates the tragic history of the Abencerrajes to his Christian captor. These rivalries were chronicled in Ginés Pérez de Hita’s maurophile Guerras civiles de Granada (Civil Wars of Granada) (1595), a historical romance that relates the fall of the city amid a wealth of entertainments, love affairs, and the ballads that commemorate them. The two novellas translated here, though written in the mid- and late sixteenth century, are set in the years of these final campaigns: “El Abencerraje” occurs sometime after the capture of Álora, in 1482 (although there are some internal contradictions in its chronology, as we note below), while “Ozmín and Daraja” takes place in the final years of the war, from the surrender of Baza in 1489 to the fall of Granada itself in January 1492.
When Granada surrendered, the Catholic Monarchs offered terms that would have been recognizable to any medieval ruler of Iberia: in exchange for military and political submission, the Muslims of Granada would be allowed to preserve their religion and culture, simply changing political masters. The treaty even protected recent converts to Islam, allowing them to retain their chosen faith (Harvey 2005, 27). But this initial similarity to earlier peace treaties and accommodations proved illusory. Emboldened by this last step in the consolidation of Spanish territory and eager to promote Christianity as Spain’s exclusive identity, the Catholic Monarchs (who had also, in 1492, decreed the expulsion from Spain of any Jew who would not convert to Christianity) soon began a policy of discrimination against Muslims and of forced conversions. Exasperated by the Christians’ failure to respect the terms of the Capitulations, the Muslims of Granada rebelled against the authorities. As a revered Islamic scholar of the time put it, “If the King of the Conquest does not keep faith, what are we to expect from his successors?” (Yuce Banegas, quoted in Harvey 1990, 339). The Crown then used the rebellion to justify forcing Muslims not only in Granada but throughout Castile to convert or face exile (Harvey 2005, 21–22).
By the turn of the sixteenth century, the Crown of Castile was pursuing the mass baptism of its Muslim subjects. A royal decree of 1502 formalized the requirement compelling all inhabitants of its territories to become Christians, thereby erasing legal guarantees that were in some cases centuries old. While some religious authorities argued for an incremental and syncretic approach to conversion, including the use of Arabic to proselytize, they were quickly overruled by those who favored a more belligerent approach. Thus, many of the Moriscos, as these forcibly converted Muslims were known, became Christians with very little understanding of their new religion or, indeed, much say in the matter. At the same time, the Crown began to pass laws against various forms of Moorish dress and other cultural practices, even beyond what was strictly religious. Yet for the most part, the Moriscos were able to delay the implementation of such laws with a series of generous gifts to the Crown.
Meanwhile, the Crown of Aragon (Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia), which included many more Muslims who had long lived under Christian rule than those in Castile, gradually moved toward enforced conversion. Although Ferdinand resisted applying Castilian policies to his kingdom, Charles V, who ruled over all of Spain, soon expanded the forced conversions to Aragon. Charles swiftly broke his initial promise not to force conversion on his Muslim subjects, and in 1525, an edict was passed decreeing the expulsion of all Muslims from the Crown of Aragon. The point of this edict was by no means to expel the Muslim population but rather to force them to convert (Harvey 2005, 94). In effect, it drove much Muslim worship underground.
For decades, Spain lived in an uneasy equilibrium with its formerly Muslim subjects: by the late 1520s, they all were nominally converted, and basically tolerated, though possibly few believed in the authenticity of a Christianity that had been imposed on them. In fact, some Moriscos, particularly among the elites, soon assimilated seamlessly into Christian society, while others were clearly crypto-Muslims, and there existed a series of syncretic practices between these two ends of the spectrum. Many regions of Spain, including Valencia and Andalusia, had large Morisco populations that continued to be central to the local economies, particularly as they cultivated the great estates of the nobility.
The general situation for all converts to Christianity deteriorated markedly as the Crown sought to identify and police religious divergence. In a Counter-Reformation context in which the fear of Protestantism and other heresies was widespread, the authenticity of converts’ belief became a constant source of concern. Even after the Crown had compelled Jews and Muslims to convert and the Inquisition had persecuted any visible straying from approved religious practice, they could not compel faith or belief. As Deborah Root has argued, the indeterminability of faith may have led to a new definition of authentic Christianity based on genealogy. By this definition, “New” Christians, whether conversos—former Jews and their descendants—or Moriscos—former Muslims and their descendants—could never be “truly” Christian because of their ancestry (Root 1988, 130). Religious difference was thus transformed into a genealogical taint located in the blood and construed similarly to some modern notions of racial difference, while the ethnic difference of conversos and Moriscos was assumed to reflect their religious intractability.
This new and profoundly suspicious attitude toward New Christians was compounded over the course of the sixteenth century by a series of laws that restricted the opportunities available to them and demanded limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) in order to enter certain universities and religious orders, to emigrate to the New World, or to access a number of privileges across the social and political sphere. Many voices across society challenged the statutes, and the hypocrisy of compelling Jews and Muslims—not to speak of the huge indigenous populations of the New World—to convert while withholding from them the full privileges of being an “Old” Christian did not go unnoticed. In his 1606 treatise on the Moriscos, the humanist chronicler Pedro de Valencia argued for “a total mix, in which it is impossible to discern or distinguish which is of this or that nation,” and recommended also that “those who gradually are born to marriages of Old Christians and Moriscos should not be treated as or held as Moriscos, and neither the ones nor the others should be offended or despised” (Valencia 1997, 136–37).
The possibility of actually making the distinctions required by the purity of blood laws depended on individuals somehow being legible and transparent—as though past religious affiliations really did manifest physically. But there was no visible difference among these people, many of whom had intermarried for centuries and whose families had converted long ago. Religious identity was never crystal clear, and the higher the stakes, the more likely dissimulation became. In this context, literary representations of characters who passed, deliberately impersonating other identities, became part of the ongoing debates about tolerance and assimilation, underscoring the impossibility of ever firmly distinguishing among subjects (Fuchs 2003, 3). Thus, as we discuss below, the dazzling series of identities adopted by the protean hero of “Ozmín and Daraja” makes him impossible to classify or restrain.
Beyond the challenge posed by the purity of blood statutes, the uneasy equilibrium in which Moriscos had existed for decades was challenged when the Crown finally decided to implement the repressive legislation against their culture, passed in some cases decades earlier. The laws forbade “Moorish” garments, music, and celebrations, as well as, crucially, the use of Arabic. The proposed enforcement led in 1568 to a widespread uprising in Granada, known as the War of the Alpujarras (a remote mountain range near Granada where the rebels took refuge). The uprising took the Crown by surprise and proved very difficult to quell: it raged for over two years, and entire towns were laid to waste when they offered resistance. The consequences of the uprising were utterly devastating for the Moriscos: many were enslaved as war booty, and the rest were exiled from Granada and resettled elsewhere in Spain.
By the end of the sixteenth century, when Alemán published Guzmán de Alfarache, the Moriscos had suffered through decades of cultural repression, internal exile, and persecution. Yet Alemán portrays a world only one hundred years earlier in which both Ozmín and Daraja are admired and desired. The constant foregrounding of the attraction that Moors hold—for Christians as for other Moors—is one of the signal ideological interventions of this maurophile text and particularly striking in contrast to the heightened anti-Morisco rhetoric of the late sixteenth century.
By the 1580s, the Crown had become convinced of the Moriscos’ supposed intractable difference and was seeking a final solution to the problem they ostensibly posed as internal others. Anti-Morisco pamphlets anathemized them as a bad seed, a race that represented the stubborn root of evil within Spain, in a heated rhetoric that denied them even the most basic humanity. Conveniently, getting rid of the Moriscos would also cancel any debts owed to them and make their property available to Old Christians. Some counselors suggested deporting the Moriscos to Africa, but others worried that they would only attack Spain from there. Wild schemes were floated to settle the Moriscos on the coasts of Newfoundland and to castrate them so that they might not reproduce (Harvey 2005, 294-97). Although Spain had expelled its Jews in 1492, these unprecedented proposals were now being made as a way to deal with converted Christians, however nominal their belief may have been. (As we have noted, Moriscos ran the gamut from crypto-Muslims to fully assimilated Christians, but the proposals made no such distinctions.) By the turn of the seventeenth century, a policy of expulsion seems to have been agreed on, and all that remained was to work out the details. From 1609 to 1614, a series of decrees compelled the expulsion of the Moriscos under pain of death. This time, no conversion could ensure their place in Spain: indeed, many of the families expelled had been at least nominally Christian for over a century.
The extraordinary fate of Muslims and Moriscos in the loaded century between the fall of Granada and the final expulsions makes maurophilia a particularly trenchant genre. Far from fanciful or fashionable confections, as some early critics held, maurophile texts advance a powerful argument for the place of the Moors and their descendants within Spain (Fuchs 2009). From the striking interfaith friendship in “The Abencerraje” to the irresistible Muslim lovers of “Ozmín and Daraja,” these texts legitimize “the Moor” and implicitly link their sympathetic protagonists—all of whom, we are told, have a long line of descendants—to the Moriscos that readers might have encountered in their own time.
In wide circulation across Europe from the early modern period on, these texts contributed to the development of European Orientalism, while indelibly linking Spain to its Moorish inheritance. While they may have helped popularize the notion of an exotic Spain abroad, however, within Spain they played a very different role, insisting on the quotidian reality of Moors and Moorishness and on their indisputable place in the Spanish imaginary as in its society.
“The Abencerraje” The anonymous novella “The Abencerraje” tells of a Moorish knight, Abindarráez, of the unfortunate clan of the Abencerrajes. After his noble family is decimated in internecine palace struggles in the city of Granada, Abindarráez is brought up in exile by the governor of Cártama. He falls in love with the governor’s daughter and his supposed sister, Jarifa. Once they discover, to their great relief, that they are not actually related, they decide to marry in secret. The text opens with Abindarráez on his way to meet Jarifa, a journey interrupted by Rodrigo de Narváez, governor of the frontier town of Álora, and his Christian knights. In a skirmish, Abindarráez fights them valiantly but is nonetheless defeated and taken captive. When Narváez learns of his captive’s interrupted nuptials, however, he frees him on Abindarráez’s solemn word as a knight that he will return to his captivity. Abindarráez journeys on, consummates his secret union with Jarifa, and only then explains his vow to her. She insists on accompanying him back to captivity, expressing her surprise at the strong bond between the two men. Narváez welcomes them generously and, in a show of great magnanimity, decides to let Abindarráez and his bride go free, refusing to accept any ransom for them.
The novella was first published in 1561 and exists in at least three slightly different versions. The anonymous edition of 1561 presents itself as a fragment of a historical narrative, under the title Parte de la crónica del ínclito infante don Fernando, que ganó a Antequera [Part of the Chronicle of the Famous Prince Don Ferdinand, Who Conquered Antequera]. Critics have not reached any definite conclusions about the novella’s authorship, even though its two subsequent versions appear within authored works: although it was not part of the original publication of the wildly popular pastoral Diana, by Jorge de Montemayor (1559), it was included as an interpolated tale in the 1561–62 edition of the text, as well as in its many subsequent editions and translations across Europe. It also appeared as one of the items in Antonio Villegas’s literary miscellany, the Inventario, of 1565. Both of these authors are generally presumed to have been conversos, who often voiced some of the most powerful veiled criticisms of Spanish orthodoxy in their literary production. Critics have speculated that the generous depiction of the Moors and of Christian-Muslim friendship in “The Abencerraje” made it a powerful and controversial text in a time of increasing official repression of the nominally converted Moriscos—hence the anonymity of the original version. Yet the popularity of the novella was such that it was subsequently included in authored texts, essentially authorizing it and hugely expanding its readership.
Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti convincingly argues that “The Abencerraje” expresses the political and economic preference for tolerance of a particular class—the landed aristocracy of Aragon, which employed many Moriscos as agricultural workers and had no wish to see them persecuted by a centralized monarchy of which it was deeply suspicious. The anonymous Corónica version includes a striking dedication to Jerónimo Jiménez de Embún, an Aragonese nobleman who participated in the local resistance to the persecution of Morisco vassals by the Inquisition and other agents of the centralized state (Carrasco Urgoiti 1972).
Beyond this specific address, the novella offers a powerful vision of friendship between Christians and Moors. Israel Burshatin has argued that the Christian, Narváez, always has the upper hand in the text, from his initial defeat of Abindarráez to his ability to decide on the fate of the lovers (Burshatin 1984, 197). While “The Abencerraje” may not portray the absolute parity of Moors and Christians, however, it emphasizes that their friendship as chivalric equals is both rare and worthy. The bond between the knights begs the question of what collective ties might follow from the individual allegiances chronicled in the text.
The novella appears particularly interested in questions of memory and memorialization. This was a freighted issue in sixteenth-century Spain: how, after the fall of Granada, were the Moors to be remembered? What was to be their place—and that of their descendants—in the now stridently Christian nation? “The Abencerraje” subtly addresses these questions. The opening and closing paragraphs of the more sophisticated Inventario version, on which our translation is based, link the individual connection between Narváez and the Moor to broader historical concerns, emphasizing the importance of fame and historical memory.
The Christian hero Narváez, governor of Antequera and Álora, is literally larger than life. A historical figure by that name participated in the conquest of Antequera in 1410 and became governor of the town; he died some years later, in 1424. He cannot thus be the Narváez who governed the second town, Álora, taken by the Christians only in 1482. The conflation of at least two separate historical figures in one character, “famous for his virtue and feats of arms,” suggests that the text engages with Spain’s recent history at an allegorical rather than a documentary level. It also signals a concern with the broad progress of the war on Granada rather than with any specific encounter, so that the plot takes on an almost metonymic quality.
Nonetheless, the text insists from the very start on the importance of fame and commemoration. No sooner is Narváez named than we are told that “he fought the Moors with great valor, and especially in the campaign and the battle for Antequera he performed deeds worthy of eternal memory, were it not that our Spain takes such skill for granted. For it is so natural to Spain and so common here that anything one does seems too little; unlike for the Greeks and Romans, who in their writings turned men who once risked death into immortals and set them amongst the stars.” The reader might reasonably expect that this narrative, with its praise of Narváez’s virtue, will fill the gap left when Spain takes its heroes for granted, providing the missing story of war and conquest. Yet instead of supplementing the absence of epic, the narrative takes a very different turn, moving quickly from the epic and historical mode of the introduction and the initial encounter between Abindarráez and his Christian captors to chivalric romance, a mode more appropriate for narrating the friendship between the noble protagonists and the love story of Abindarráez and his beloved. Given the delicacy of the exchanges between captor and captive and Narváez’s generosity to the Moor, the frontier becomes a space of friendship rather than the front line of a protracted conflict.
This romance refiguration is expressed in the intense ties that bind the two men. The analogy between Abindarráez’s erotic captivity—a Petrarchan conceit—and his actual confinement is an organizing principle of the novella. Abindarráez curtails Narváez’s power over him, explaining that he has been defeated by another: “You may well kill me,” said the Moor, “for I am in your hands, but I cannot be conquered except by the one who once conquered me.” Yet the remarkable closeness that develops between the two men makes the metaphor reversible: if love is like captivity, then captivity is a little like love. Abindarráez’s vow to return to Narváez both recalls the earlier promises exchanged by the lovers and anticipates the secret marriage, binding the two knights as closely as Abindarráez is bound to Jarifa.
When Abindarráez returns with his bride in order to keep his promise, Narváez expresses his concern for Abindarráez’s wounds, which Jarifa had somehow missed as she and her lover consummated their union. Jarifa is profoundly unsettled at the realization that a greater intimacy—the symbolically laden wounds in the thigh and the arm—binds the two men. It is important to recover the intensity of this homo-social relationship in order to appreciate how fully “The Abencerraje” reimagines Moorish-Christian relations. The chivalric bond transcends the heterosexual union between Abindarráez and Jarifa, and replaces the more common fiction of exogamous romance—the love of a Christian man for a Moorish woman—through which Moorish-Christian relations were often managed in cultural fantasy.
The text’s closing emphasis on posterity returns us to the crucial questions of how this notable friendship will be remembered. In a letter to Jarifa thanking her for the rich gifts that she and Abindarráez have sent him, Narváez reiterates how monumental his own actions seem to him, once again emphasizing the national over the individual: “Fair Jarifa: Abindarráez has not allowed me to enjoy the real triumph of his captivity, which consists in forgiving and doing good, and since never was a mission offered me in this land so noble or worthy of a Spanish captain, I would like to enjoy it fully and to craft a statue of it for my posterity and descendants.” With this gesture of commemoration, Narváez’s feat of generosity becomes exemplary. By presenting the governor as a model subject, worthy—at least in his own eyes—of a national monument and national fame, “The Abencerraje” offers itself as a monument to coexistence and amity. And whereas Narváez, in the text, does not actually have any descendants, the text imagines for itself a reading audience that will treasure and commemorate its central gesture of friendship. History may recall Narváez as a conqueror of Antequera, but the statue that he longs to erect and the literary monument that actually immortalizes him both focus on his generosity to a Moor. “The Abencerraje” thus supplies a different kind of history, one in which religious difference and political allegiance matter much less than nobility and individual friendship.
Unlike many of the maurophile texts that follow, “The Abencerraje” makes virtually no mention of religion. The differing faiths are primarily invoked, in fact, to note that they make no difference to the friendship between Narváez and the Moors, when Jarifa’s father urges Abindarráez and Jarifa to send the knight a generous gift and “keep him henceforth as a friend, even though we are of different faiths.” Conversely, many of the subsequent maurophile fictions, including “Ozmín and Daraja,” place their sympathetic Moorish characters on some kind of path toward Christianity, whether because they have secretly always wished to be Christians, because they suddenly see the light, or, more cynically, because conversion seems the politic approach to the situation that they face. “The Abencerraje” is striking for its sympathy for Moors qua Moors, with no intimation whatsoever that these are Christians in the making or future converts. Of course, these Moors are literary constructs who cite Greek myths and communicate easily with Christians, but their very depiction makes a point about their familiarity.
“The Abencerraje” was hugely influential both within Spain and beyond. In countless ballads, the story of the lovers Abindarráez and Jarifa was repeated across Spain. Included within the sensationally popular pastoral romance Diana (1562), the novella was read and translated wherever that best-seller went. Its central topoi—aristocratic and chivalric courtliness, material opulence, beleaguered love in the context of war—were picked up by Pérez de Hita for his historical romance, Civil Wars of Granada. So popular was the figure of the Moorish knight that when Cervantes’s famous would-be knight, Don Quixote (1605), lies wounded after his first sortie, he imagines himself as Abindarráez, confounding the neighbor who tries to assist him:
One cannot help but think that the devil made Don Quixote recall stories suited to the events that had occurred, because at that point, forgetting about [the chivalric knight of ballad tradition] Valdovinos, he remembered the Moor Abindarráez, when the governor of Antequera, Rodrigo de Narváez, captured him and brought him back to his domain as a prisoner. So when the farmer asked him again how he felt and what was wrong, he answered with the same words and phrases that the captive scion of the Abencerraje family said to Rodrigo de Narváez, just as he had read them in the history of Diana, by Jorge de Montemayor, where they are written, and he did this so deliberately that as the farmer walked along he despaired at hearing such an enormous amount of foolishness. (Cervantes 2003, 42–43)
The appeal of Abindarráez trumps the Moor’s traditional role as the enemy of the chivalric knight, leading Don Quixote to identify with him instead. Don Quixote (and presumably Cervantes) thinks of “The Abencerraje” in the context of the pastoral Diana, one of the few books saved from Don Quixote’s library when it is consigned to the flames. It represents for him a comfortingly familiar literary idealization, shared by the pastoral, the “Moorish,” and the chivalric romance, as so many delectable flavors of a favorite treat. Yet for Cervantes’s novel as a whole, this fleeting romance identification has important consequences. It reminds us that despite its protagonist’s strong misgivings at his own story being narrated by an “Arab historian” (the second narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli), he identifies more easily with the Moorish hero of “The Abencerraje” than with its Christian, chivalric protagonist. This brief passage thus provides strong evidence of how the maurophile novella tempered anti-Muslim and anti-Morisco prejudice, if only on the page.
“The Abencerraje” was widely disseminated in the early modern period. By the middle of the seventeenth century, over twenty-four editions had been published as part of Montemayor’s Diana in cities throughout Spain, Flanders, Italy, and Portugal. During this period, also as part of Montemayor’s Diana, at least twelve editions of at least two different French translations, six editions of two different German translations, and six editions of Bartholomew Yong’s English translation were published. Even beyond the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “The Abencerraje” continued to be a seminal story for conceptions of “the Moor” across Europe, as well as for Romantic orientalism, including Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le dernier Abéncerage. As its broad and enthusiastic reception across the centuries signals, the text’s vision of a chivalric friendship that transcends religious difference holds an enduring appeal.
“Ozmín and Daraja” “Ozmín and Daraja” looks back to “The Abencerraje” for the idealization of the Moors and for its chivalric milieu, but its later date makes its positive portrait of the Moors, whom Spain had increasingly persecuted and marginalized over the course of the sixteenth century, much more striking. As we noted above, by the 1590s many in Spain had given up on the possibility of ever assimilating the Moriscos into Spanish society, and there was already significant discussion of banishing them from the country. By reprising the positive portrayal of “The Abencerraje,” therefore, “Ozmín and Daraja” makes a striking pro-Morisco intervention into the debates.
The story follows the pair of lovers after Daraja falls captive to the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, at the taking of Baza during the war on Granada, shortly before the Christian triumph in 1492. The location is significant: Baza was the area with the most voluntary conversions to Christianity in the late fifteenth century and saw particularly close relations between local elites and the Christian conquerors. Daraja’s bilingualism and the resulting difficulty in categorizing her are established immediately: “She spoke Spanish so well that it would have been difficult to tell that she was not an Old Christian, for as a fluent speaker she could pass for one.” Although the novella is set much earlier, Daraja’s linguistic passing corresponds closely to the linguistic assimilation of many Moriscos by the late sixteenth century, and her ability to negotiate Christian culture more generally proves crucial to the story.
While Daraja languishes as a pampered prisoner in the house of a Christian noble, the desperate Ozmín takes on a variety of disguises in order to reach his beloved, from a lowly gardener to a Christian knight. Both he and Daraja succeed in manipulating the affections of the Christians: while Daraja plays one suitor off the other, Ozmín befriends them and impresses everyone with his dexterity in bullfighting, horsemanship, and jousting. The lovers’ story is ultimately resolved only through the intervention of the monarchs, who convert the couple to Christianity and enable their marriage. Given the many instances of deception throughout the story, however, the conversion seems like just one more instance of the protagonists’ resourcefulness when facing overwhelming opposition. So although it may seem that the sympathetic representation of Moors in the text depends on their progress toward Christianity, that final goal is obliquely questioned and challenged by the constant duplicitousness into which the characters are forced.
This later example of the maurophile novella thus echoes the humanist emphasis in “The Abencerraje” on tolerance and amity across confessional divides but adds a baroque twist in the protean transformations and strategic opacity of its protagonists. It also signals the genre’s engagement with the political realities of the late sixteenth century, in that even its most sympathetic Moors must be brought into the Christian fold by the narrative’s end. If “The Abencerraje” inaugurates the maurophile genre, then, “Ozmín and Daraja” takes it to its most elaborate, and politically urgent, form.
Although entirely set in southern Spain, the novella has strong echoes of Heliodorus’s far-ranging ancient romance, the Aethiopica, or, as it was sometimes known, The Loves of Theagenes and Clariclea. This Byzantine romance had grown wildly popular in Spain from the moment it was rediscovered and translated from the Greek, with seven editions between 1554 and 1616. Alemán’s tale echoes several of Aethiopica’s main elements: two sympathetic lovers separated by the heroine’s captivity, an emphasis on their sexual purity, even as they resort to all kinds of deceit and dissimulation in order to be reunited, and even a scene in which one of the lovers is asked to serve as a pander for the other (McGrady 1966, 50–51). These traces of the Byzantine romance conjure sympathy for the lovers as a couple, foregrounding their fully reciprocated passion rather than exoticizing the female Moorish beloved as is so often the case in the ballad tradition.
The place of “Ozmín and Daraja” within Guzmán de Alfarache also suggests intriguing connections between the maurophile novella and the popular picaresque. If “The Abencerraje” was a fitting addition to the idealized world of the pastoral Diana, the far more cynical and knowing “Ozmín and Daraja” finds its place within a picaresque universe. Although, of necessity, we have translated only the maurophile tale here, it is important to note the many rich connections with its picaresque context. Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache is the cynical, first-person story of a pícaro (rascal) coming of age and of his many unsavory adventures. Repentant and reformed, he tells his story, ostensibly as a cautionary tale. Critics have long debated the authenticity of Guzmán’s reformation and the reliability of his first-person narrative voice. Alemán himself led a colorful life, which provided ample material for his description of marginality in the novel. He was born and lived much of his life in Seville, where “Ozmín and Daraja” is set. He was often taunted as Poca Sangre, or “little blood,” for his possible converso origins (Alemán 1997, 15). Always short of funds and picking quarrels with the powerful, he was constantly in trouble with the law, even while serving the Crown as an accountant and a judge.
Within Guzmán de Alfarache, the story of Ozmín and Daraja is related to the young pícaro and his companions by a priest in order to pass the time as they travel between Seville and the neighboring town of Cazalla. Although the tale, with its incomparable and noble protagonists, certainly reflects the idealizing tradition of maurophilia, it also betrays certain picaresque affinities. Ozmín’s serial disguises, episodic adventures, and menial positions cannot help but recall those of a pícaro, and both he and Daraja ably trick their masters—whether employers or captors—in order to achieve their own goals. If the idealizing novella is tarnished by these traces of the picaresque, the picaresque is also enriched by these clearly positive instances of resourcefulness and self-fashioning: both texts notably foreground characters’ reinvention of themselves and their abandonment of their origins. Perhaps the greatest constant between the interpolated tale and its frame is the unreliability of compelled speech—as also, we might add, of compelled belief or morality. What can one actually believe of what Ozmín and Daraja say to the Christians who surround them, given how little leeway for expression, much less for action, they enjoy? And how does their tactical, strategic relation to the truth throughout the novella overshadow their conversion at the end? The problem of unreliability and interestedness is foregrounded in the succinct account that the narrator, Guzmán, gives us after the priest’s story is over: “We had listened to that story in complete silence for the whole way, until we arrived within view of Cazalla. He seemed to have timed it perfectly, even though he told it to us at greater length and with a different soul than I have recounted it here.”
Within the novella itself, words often mean very different things to different listeners, and the reader is forced to confront this relativism. When Ozmín needs to communicate with Daraja in her friend Doña Elvira’s hearing, he sings an Arabic song, as Doña Elvira scornfully dismisses the “savage” who “hums nonsense.” When the noble Don Rodrigo entreats Ozmín, who is disguised as a gardener, to persuade Daraja to convert so that he, an Old Christian, can marry her, Ozmín’s equivocal answer suggests the relativism of religious fervor: “The same reason with which you seek to bind me, Don Rodrigo, will make you believe how much I long for Daraja to follow my faith, as I have countless, multiple times persuaded her. My own wish in this matter is none other than your own.” The priest who is narrating the story emphasizes the equivocation, lest the reader miss it: “The Moor had not lied at all in what he said, had his true meaning been understood.” Religious difference is thus both marked and relativized by the exchange: everyone is equally attached to his or her religion, at least until the end of the story.
If religious difference is carefully negotiated, cultural difference tends to disappear in the aristocratic Seville of the text. The story features as local color many of the entertainments that Pérez de Hita and the Moorish ballads had made so central to maurophilia. There are many pages devoted to the splendor and excitement of bullfights and especially the games of canes, in which quadrilles of lavishly costumed riders executed a set of maneuvers on horseback while throwing light reeds at each other. Yet the bullfights and the equestrian games are here Christian affairs, their Moorish origins largely unremarked. Daraja provides the occasion for the festivities, which are an attempt to cheer her up, but no Moors officially participate. The single exception is Ozmín, who covers his face and pretends to be a foreigner. For Alemán, exquisite horsemanship is a local trait: the riders on their jineta saddles—an Andalusi heritage—seem one with the horse, he claims, “For in most of Andalusia—in Seville, Córdoba, Jerez de la Frontera—children are placed—so they say—from the cradle onto the saddle, just as in other places they are given hobbyhorses to ride.” Local style has so fully absorbed the Andalusi heritage that Christians practice “Moorish” forms without particularly remarking upon them (Fuchs 2009).
Amid shared cultural practices, the narrative underscores the protagonists’ ability to negotiate the two camps. The disguised Ozmín is sought out by Don Alonso, another Christian suitor for Daraja’s hand, in order to challenge Don Rodrigo. Ozmín proceeds to tutor Don Alonso not in the Moorish equestrian games, as one might expect, but in jousting. His double expertise—and particularly his striking ability on horseback “on both saddles”—finally lead Alonso to doubt Ozmín’s assumed identity as a laborer.
As these aristocratic rapprochements suggest, class trumps religion as the significant divide in the world of the text, echoing “The Abencerraje.” Noble Moors are as heroic and ideal as Christians, if not more so, and Daraja is constantly desired by the Christian nobles, even though she ends up with her rightful spouse. Despite the constant suggestion of threatening suitors, the greatest threat to the couple’s happiness comes from an unruly mob of yokels, who do not play according to any rules that Ozmín can figure out. And despite the fact that the lovers spend almost the entire story forced to equivocate about their true identity and beliefs, their final conversion—no questions asked—grants them inclusion in the Christian polity, projected into the future via their “illustrious lineage.” Ozmín and Daraja’s origins never get in the way; no one in this world worries about purity of blood, although they are quite exercised about class. Moreover, both Christians and Moors share a culture so thoroughly marked by Andalusi forms that any acculturation is relative. For these noble Moors, at least, there is nothing foreign about Spanish culture (Fuchs 2009).
The tale of Ozmín and Daraja is particularly unorthodox and ideologically slippery because of its belatedness. If the 1561 “Abencerraje” ended with the conversion of Abindarráez and Jarifa, it would not hold for us the same interest as a powerfully ambiguous maurophile text. But by the time Alemán wrote his story, the legal repression of the Moriscos, the uprising in the Alpujarras, the forced resettlements, and the increasing calls for a definitive solution to the Morisco “problem” had fundamentally changed the situation. Only in this radicalized context could the conversion of the protagonists and their virtually forced abandonment of their religion be read as a sympathetic resolution. Ozmín and Daraja represent that first, presumably most reluctant, generation of Moriscos; their idealization, their desirability, and, most important, their cultural compatibility with the Christians who surround them offer up the possibility of full assimilation for their descendants. This inclusive stance toward Moorish origins offers a brave alternative, however compromised, to the contemporary arguments against supposedly unassimilable and recalcitrant Moriscos, even if some of the ethnic animus against them is redirected against the lower classes.
Like “The Abencerraje,” “Ozmín and Daraja” was widely read in its original and in translation in early modern Europe. Before the end of the seventeenth century, as part of Guzmán de Alfarache, the story of the two Moorish lovers was published at least twenty different times in its original, eighteen different times in French, twelve different times in English, nine different times in German, five different times in Dutch, and five different times in Italian. It was also translated into Latin. In its wide dissemination, it offered an idealized vision of assimilable and hugely sympathetic Moors, intimately connected to Spain and eminently deserving of their place within it, while nonetheless recalling the strategic dissimulation into which repression had forced their descendants, the Moriscos, in the fraught century of their forced conversions.
Our Translations We have based our translations on standard critical editions of the texts: Francisco López Estrada’s edition of “El Abencerraje (Novela y romancero),” first published in 1980, and José María Micó’s edition of Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, originally published in 1997. López Estrada’s edition is based on the Inventario edition of the novella in 1565, arguably the most careful and complete one, and also the only one that includes a prologue. Micó bases his work on the last edition of Guzmán that Alemán himself corrected: Seville (1602), in a copy from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, with occasional corrections based on the princeps (Madrid, 1599). Since we are dealing with regularized and critically edited texts, we have not faced significant problems of variant readings.
We have also consulted Bartholomew Yong’s early modern translation of “The Abencerraje” in his Diana of George of Montemayor (1598) and James Mabbe’s translation of “Ozmín and Daraja” in The Rogue, as his 1622 version of Guzmán de Alfarache was known. Both of these translations were produced in a world where chivalry and jousts were still familiar, and their chosen registers offer important insights into the texts’ imaginary. Mabbe (or “Don Diego Puede-Ser,” as he punningly referred to himself in the prologue to The Rogue) was an expert translator who also tackled Cervantes and other writers. Unlike Yong, who takes significant liberties with the text, Mabbe goes out of his way to capture details and hew close to the original; his translation is both inspired and inspiring.
Contextual Materials 
This volume offers a number of materials that serve to contextualize the two novellas. Besides a comprehensive historical-literary chronology and a bibliography, we include examples of maurophile literature influenced by or related to the novellas: a sample of popular ballads and an excerpt of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Civil Wars of Granada. We also offer an overview of legislation and other official documents on the Moriscos, tracing the arc of their official repression from the fall of Granada to their expulsion in 1609–14, and an excerpt of the well-known petition by the Morisco advocate Francisco Núñez Muley against the repressive legislation.
A Note on Coinage Three different kinds of coins are mentioned in the novellas: the Zahene gold piece, the doubloon, and the double doubloon. All three were made of high-quality gold. The Zahene gold piece, referenced in “The Abencerraje,” was a Moorish coin still used during the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. The doubloon and the double doubloon that appear in “Ozmín and Daraja” are Spanish gold coins printed with a coat of arms. Doubloons had a coat of arms on each side, whereas double doubloons had two coats of arms on each side and were worth twice a normal doubloon (Vigo 1997, 36).
Here we have calculated their approximate worth at the times the novellas were first published, yet it is important to note that by the sixteenth century, gold coins were rarely used as currency but rather considered precious objects whose value exceeded an exchange value. Elvira Vilches (2013) explains this unique value of gold coins by the late sixteenth century with the following example: “Already in 1567 Tomás de Mercado [in Suma de tratos y contratos] explained that doblones, a piece of 2 escudos, were outstanding coins whose bright golden glitter he compared with that of a fine pearl or precious stone. He also noticed that the beauty and greatness of doblones make them suitable for royalty and the aristocracy because they rarely were minted and thus were held as precious objects of exceptional value” (“Coins, Value, and Trust,” 103). Thus, the gold coins cited in theses novellas, like their Moorish protagonists, were relatively obsolete but still treasured for their “exotic” value and aristocratic charm.
Zahene gold piece = a gold coin worth 425 maravedís.2
Doubloon = a gold coin worth 850 maravedís.
Double doubloon = a gold coin with four coats of arms,
worth 1,700 maravedís.
1 Throughout this introduction, we alternate the more precise terms “Muslim” and “Andalusi-derived” with the all-purpose “Moor” and “Moorish,” since the latter two more closely approximate the term moro, widely used in the period, and also capture the ambiguous connection between “Moorish” subjects and the Muslim religion, the various polities of Al-Andalus, and an increasingly marginalized “race” of Moriscos over the course of the sixteenth century. All translations are ours unless otherwise noted.
2 The maravedí (after 1497) was not a coin but rather a monetary unit of measurement. In 1550, a laborer earned approximately 40 maravedís a day, and by the end of the sixteenth century, he or she would earn 85 maravedís a day (Nalle 1999, 131). In this context, the sums of 6,000 doblas zaenes (2,550,000 maravedís) and 1,000 doblados (1,700,000 maravedís), cited respectively as ransom amounts in “The Abencerraje” and “Ozmín and Daraja,” exceed what average day laborers could have made in an entire lifetime.