Prophecy and Rebellion: The Grand Morisco Conspiracy of 1575

On September 1570, the Dominican friar Miguel Pinedo wrote to the Tribunal of Zaragoza warning the inquisitors that the Aragonese Moriscos were plotting “treasons against the Gospel, the Faith, and against his Majesty…basing their intentions on vain prophecies that circulate among them.” These suspicions coincided with the information gathered by the Aragonese inquisitors scarcely two months earlier. On July 1570, a Morisco from the town of Villafeliche had confessed that “the Turk had gathered his prophets, and they had discovered in their law that the Moriscos would take up arms.” Since the beginning of the Morisco uprising in Granada in 1568, there was fear that the Moriscos of the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia would join their brethren of faith to stage a general rebellion. It was a well-known fact that apocalyptic prophecies had helped fuel the rebel movement in Granada, and news about the circulation of prophecies in the Crown of Aragon during the post-bellum period alerted the authorities about the possibility of a new insurrection.

This paper will study the so-called “grand conspiracy” plotted by the Moriscos of Valencia and Aragon in 1575. By closely analyzing inquisitorial trials against Moriscos, in conjunction with Morisco apocalyptic texts known as jofores, it aims to shed light on the centrality of prophecies in Morisco conspiracies. While political and social developments played a role in the Moriscos’ production and belief in prophecies, the presence of prophecy affected the manner in which cultural and political resistance was articulated by groups of Moriscos through a discourse directed towards enhancing communal identity. As this paper will show, through the deployment of prophecies the Moriscos attempted to (re)create the Islamic Ummah, strategically situating them at the center of the imperial struggle for the control of the Mediterranean.