My name
is Mercedes García Arenal. I am a research
professor at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research.
My field is cultural history
and history of religions,
history of minorities in early modern Spain.
I've been working at it for many years.
I have been very interested
also in historiography matters regarding Islam
in the early modern Iberian world.
And today I'm going to speak about it not only about the al-Andalus,
but in a more general or wider framework.
At the end of the 14th century,
and both in Italy
and in Spain, but in general in what would be Catholic Europe,
there is a movement, an anti humanistic movement
which is that in front of the
big importance accorded by humanist
to the Greek and Roman past,
there is a reaction
to look for more sacred
origins and for establishing a narrative
which from these origins marks a
religious narrative, a Christian religious narrative,
from biblical times
to the present, mainly the 16th century.
For us, for Spain, it is very important.
The work of a Dominican,
an Italian, Dominican named Annius of Viterbo
Annio de Viterbo in Spanish sources.
This Annio de Viterbo was
very stricken by the sack of Otranto
by the Turks in 1480
and invented, created a prophecy
that he found in an old pergamine etc.,
which prophesied the end of Islam.
But he most importantly wrote, falsified,
a chronicle that he said had been written by a Caldeo,
a Chaldean, called Beroso
with a B, Beroso,
who was an ancient chronicle
which was particularly relevant for Spain.
It spoke of, it was dedicated to the Catholic Kings,
Ferdinand and Isabella, and spoke of the origins of these
two kings
going back to
the what is called the Hercules Egyptian
son of Osiris and grandson
of Noah, the one of the
of the Bible.
He was expanding the Bible narrative
and the important point was the dispersion
in all the world in the Mediterranean world, mainly of
Noah's sons and grandsons to repopulate the Earth.
And to Spain came to Tubal a grandson,
named Tubal. Tubal brought with him
Phoenicians, such as Nimrod,
who was the architect of the Babel Tower,
and this falsification
had an enormous impact in Spain.
The most important official historian of the moment,
Florian de Ocampo, Esteban the Garibay,
both of them working under Charles V, the Emperor.
took
took as real this
Beroso chronicle and
how it allowed
to trace the origins of Spain
over Rome and Greece and so forth,
back to the to the Bible to link
Spanish history to the Biblical
times and locations,
to a sacred past that has been uninterrupted
both by Greece and Rome and of course,
by the Islamic period.
This is one of the many trends that started
what is being called
pious fraud
in which every town, city,
noble person in Spain
started to make discoveries
miracles
sent that proved that the territory in question
had been Christian from the beginnings of the times.
There are many others
like Jerónimo
Roman de la Higuera, a Jesuit
this time, also falsified a chronicle
that he said had been found in the German monastery of Fulda,
attributed to two persons who were real, Dextro
and Maximus, two Romans who had
who had produced a chronicle
which went in the same sense that Annius de Viterbo. Annius the Viterbo
was also very important for Italian history
because he gave a lot of importance to Etruscans.
So this
this historiographical trend,
what it tries to do
is of course erase Islam
from, or limit Islam, from the
history of the Iberian Peninsula,
but because it wants to give it back to sacred
origins, connected it
connecting these origins to the biblical times.
Tubal and the Phoenicians are very important.
And to put an example, Pablo, de Céspedes,
a well-known erudite who worked on the antiquities of
Cordoba, said that then
what is now the mosque cathedral,
the cathedral of Cordoba, that the
the work of this mosque
was too strong and solid to be attributed to the Arabs, and
that it was obvious that Phoenicians
have been building it.
It is also the time of antiquarianism.
So the search for, you know, bones,
coins, ceramics,
who could, that could prove
a very antique origin,
connecting it to Christian to Christianity
was a big wave, a big wave that affects
most of the territories in the peninsula.
As I have said, also in Italy, also in France,
but in the peninsula, it is very strong.
So it is not so much that
they are trying to erase al-Andalus
from the official historiography,
but also that they went to erase
want to erase Rome and Greece.
There is also another trend
which is the idea from the 16th century onwards
that Arabic is an important language to know the history of Spain,
and that Arabic chronicles are important
for this history.
Of course, from Rome,
remember Cardinal Bellarmino, there is a strong effort to limitate
and all this saint all this pious fraud.
But in Spain there is also another fraud,
a very famous one which is known as the lead books of Granada,
which are presumed
ancient texts in Arabic, in old Arabic,
which were a sort of fifth
evangelium dictated in
Arabic by the Virgin Mary to Arab Christians
to his first disciples, who had come to Spain
to propagate Christianity and had been
and had received martyrdom in Granada.
So there is also an effort to consider and incorporate things
Arabic separating Arabic
from its Islamic taints,
saying that also
Arabic can be a Christian language,
and also that the Morisco
converted Muslim populations of this time
had been there
from times old
and had been in fact the first Christians
in the Iberian Peninsula.
Because I will finish with this,
the aim is to sanctify
the whole territory through remains
miracles, saints
invented, of course, most of them.
The cult of Saint James begin
becomes a big, big thing.
And to Christianize this territory,
the effort is to find
its origins in biblical times.