Sobre el pergamino y láminas de Granada Introduction

When, in 1607, Pedro de Valencia was asked to write this critique Sobre el pergamino y láminas de Granada he was reluctant to do so, aware that his views would be unacceptable to many of his contemporaries. These relics of supposedly early Christian martyrs and the various texts that purported to be from apostolic times had attracted widespread public support. Quevedo had written a treatise in honour of them called Discurso de las láminas del Monte Santo de Granada, which has since been lost.1 Góngora wrote a sonnet whose opening line refers to the many crosses erected on the Sacromonte Hill by pilgrims: ‘Este monte coronado de cruces.’ The poet compares the hill to Mount Etna, under which lay the mythological Titans, banished there after rebelling against the gods of Olympus; under the Sacromonte lay the bones and ashes of the Christian martyrs, spiritual Titans to be revered by pilgrims.2

Valencia finally agreed to give his considered opinion on two grounds: he felt that the cause of true religion demanded that this superstitious travesty be challenged and he was concerned, also, that Spain’s reputation abroad would be adversely affected, unless the case being made in Rome were dropped. The report was written at the request of Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, Primate of Spain and Inquisitor General. Pope Paul V had been pressing for more infor-

1 F. de Quevedo y Villegas, Prouidencia de Dios padecida de los qve la niegan y gozada de los qve la confiessan. Doctrina estvdiada en los gvsanos y persecvciones de Job (Zaragoza: Pascual Bueno, 1700), fol. C4r.

2 L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain. 1500 to 1614 (Chicago/ London: Chicago University Press, 2005), pp. 399–400; L. de Góngora, Sonetos completos, ed. B. Cliplijauskaité (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1981), no. 1598, p. 445.

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mation about the controversial “discoveries” and so Philip III decided to set up a committee of investigation. The Duke of Lerma, in a letter dated 28 October 1607, entrusted the organisation of this group to the Archbishop of Toledo who then requested a preliminary report from Valencia.3

The Parecer is dated 26 November 1607 and, as the committee first met in December, the pressure of time referred to by Valencia in the opening paragraphs of the manuscript must have been con-siderable. Two later manuscripts give the date as 26 November 1618. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the 1607 manuscript was re-submitted in 1618, when controversy about the ‘plomos de Granada’ was at its height.4 There is a description of the three manuscripts in the section ‘The Manuscripts and Editorial Practices.’

The papacy had been requesting, through various papal Nuncios, that it be sent a reliable account of these Libros plúmbeos. Clement VIII had issued a brief on 15 December 1603 asking the Archbishop of Granada, Don Pedro de Castro Cabeza de Vaca y Quiñones, to send the Lead Tablets to Rome. The request of 1607 may have been precipitated by the letters and report sent to the papacy by a Morisco Jesuit, Padre Ignacio de Las Casas. The latter had, initially, accepted the Lead Tablets as genuine but later he became one of their most vociferous critics. Through the Nuncios Ginnasio and Mellini he had sent two reports to Rome, one in July of 1605 to Clement VIII (Clement had died by the time it arrived and it was read by his successor), and the second to Paul V in 1607.5 R. Benítez Sánchez-Blanco has traced his change from enthusiastic supporter of some of the “books” to outspoken denunciator.6

3 M. J. Hagerty, Los libros plúmbeos del Sacromonte (Madrid: Nacional, 1980), p. 43.

4 G. Magnier, ‘The Dating of Pedro de Valencia’s Sobre el pergamino y láminas de Granada,’ Sharq al-Andalus, XIV-XV (1997–1998), 353–373.

5 C. Alonso, Los apócrifos de Sacromonte (Valladolid: Estudio Agustino, 1979), pp. 165–166.

6 R. Benítez Sánchez-Blanco, ‘De Pablo a Saulo: traducción, crítica y denuncia de los libros plúmbeos por el P. Ignacio de Las Casas, S. J’, Al-Qantara, XXIII, 2 (2002), 403–436.

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What, exactly, were this parchment and these Lead Tablets and why had they given rise to immense controversy within Spain and to a diplomatic battle between the papacy and the Archbishop of Granada?7 Their impact on sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Spain has been likened by L. P. Harvey to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in our own time.8 In his book Muslims in Spain 1500–1614 ProfessorHarvey very aptly describes the pergamino and the plomos (both lead discs and plaques) as ‘a sort of supplement to the Acts of the Apostles’, when seen from a Christian point of view.9 However ‘Moriscos were using ostensibly Christian vehicles to convey essentially Islamic messages’ (p. 267). Their enthusiastic reception by many cristianos viejos has to be seen in the context of the struggle for primacy in the Spanish Church between cities such as Toledo, Santiago de Compostella and, since the discovery of the plomos,Granada.10 The plomos ‘proved’ that Granada was the first city in Spain to be evangelised by Santiago and also provided evidence for his Spanish mission. Granada thus acquired a pre-Islamic ecclesiastical history that compensated for its absence from the annals of the Church from 711 until 1492. Sections of the pergamino and all the Lead Tablets are written in Arabic, which is presented as the vernacular language in Hispania at the time of Santiago. St. Cecilius and his disciple Thesiphon are introduced as Arabs who changed their names on conversion to Christianity. The newly-discovered texts also supported the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, a firm belief of many in Spain but one that did not become a dogma of the Church until the nineteenth century. Controversy about the plomos

7 The literature in Spanish constantly refers to libros plúmbeos or “Lead Books.” I have decided to call them tablets rather than books as this is a more accurate description, as will be apparent in the section ‘The Parchment, the Plaques and the Lead Tablets.’

8 L. P. Harvey, The Moriscos and Don Quixote. Inaugural Lecture in the Cervantes Chair of Spanish at University of London, King’s College, 11 November 1974 (London: King’s College, 1975), p. 8.

9 Harvey, Muslims in Spain, p. 265. 10 T. D. Kendrick, St. James in Spain (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 53–59; M.

Barrios Aguilera, Granada morisca, la convivencia negada (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2002), p. 512.

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continued on into the eighteenth century even after the final anathematization by Pope Innocent XI on 6 March 1682.

Discovery of the Lead Box

On 18 March 1588, St. Gabriel’s day (Gabriel was the archangel who conveyed the Qur’ n to Muhammad), the labourers working on Granada’s new cathedral, designed by Diego de Siloë,11 were demolishing the Torre Vieja, the minaret of the former great mosque. This was necessary to make way for the building of the third nave. In all probability the labourers were Moriscos, as Miguel José Hagerty has pointed out that Heylan’s depiction of the event shows them wearing Morisco gorras.12 A lead box that had been tarred both inside and out was discovered amidst the rubble. Padre Ignacio de Las Casas gives its dimension as ‘[…] una caxa de plomo de cerca de una quarta [it is known also as a palmo, which is about twenty-one centimetres or the approximate distance between the little finger and the thumb when the fingers are outstretched] de largo y mas de quatro dedos [a palmo menor or the space between index and little fingers when close together] de alto.’13

11 Diego de Siloë was a sculptor and architect. He was born in the second half of the fifteenth century and died in 1563. On his death his plans were taken over by the architects who succeeded him: Enciclopedia universal ilustrada (europeo-americana), LVI, p. 195, 70 vols, indices and supplements.

12 This engraving is reproduced by Julio Caro Baroja: J. Caro Baroja, Las falsificaciones de la historia (en relación con la de España) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992), foll. p. 120. Franz Heylan produced the engravings used in the large tome rather ironically called Relacion breve de las reliquias que se hallaron en la ciudad de Granada […]. Some of them are reproduced in this book. They are the engravings from the Real Academia de la Historia (RAH).

13 Padre I. de las Casas, Relaçión de las láminas, libros y lo demás hallado en la Ciudad de Granada y çerca de ella el año de 1588 hasta el de 1598 dada a nuestro S. Smo Padre V por Ignaçio de Las Casas de la Compañia de HIS este año de 1607, MS 7187, BNM, fol. 68r.

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When opened the next day the box was found to contain a little wooden painted plaque of Our Lady wearing a traje egipciano or gypsy-style dress and carrying the Child Jesus, who is holding a little golden apple. Madonna and Child are surmounted by a cross.14 In the box there were, also, a triangular piece of rough canvas (this is how Las Casas describes it, although most modern commentators call it a ‘veil’), a small bone, some grains of blue-black sand, and what was to prove the most exciting find of all, a rolled-up parchment or pergamino. The original pergamino has now been returned to Spain by the Holy Office and the Leiden scholars P. S. von Koningsveld and G. A. Wiegers have studied it in detail. They give its dimmensions as 63,5 by 49 cms (there is a more detailed description in the paragraph entitled ‘The Parchment of the Torre Turpiana’).15 The parchment looked very old and was written in three languages, Arabic, Castilian and Latin. It purported to be an apocalyptic prophecy of St. John the Evangelist concerning the end of the world, and “relics” that dated from apostolic times: the small bone was apparently from the thumb of the protomartyr St. Stephen and the fragment of cloth had been part of Our Lady’s veil. Both objects had been brought to Granada by its first bishop, Cecilius. Seven years later, in 1595, the láminas or “funerary plaques” were discovered, and the first of the libros plúmbeos.

Millenarian Prophecy in 1588

The year 1588 was one for which extraordinary events had been foretold. There was to be a solar eclipse, two lunar eclipses and a grand conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. These conjunctions were associated with major world events and changes in the great

14 This is described in the Relacion breve, p. 6. Las Casas does not mention it. 15 P. S. van Koningsveld & G. A. Wiegers, ‘The parchment of the “Torre Tur-

piana”: the Original Document and its Early Interpreters’, Al-Qantara, XIV, 2 (2003), 327–358.

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religions.16 Astrological predictions for 1588 saw it as the year of cataclysm.17 These forebodings were considered to be based on numerology that derived from Revelation and the Book of Daniel, Chapter XII: since the birth of Christ all history had been divided into permutations of the numbers ten and seven with each cycle closed by some such momentous event. The Protestant theologian Philip Melancthon considered that Luther’s defiance of the papacy had ended such a cycle. Thus a final cycle of ten multiplied by seven, which equalled, also, the period of the Babylonian captivity, signalled 1588 as a year to be reckoned with.18

The astronomical picture of the heavens forecast for 1588 had been drawn up in the fifteenth century by the astronomer Johann Müller of Königsberg, generally known as Regiomontanus. His Latin verses referring to this annus mirabilis and predicting major changes in world empires were known throughout Europe.19 The biographer of the founder of the Sacromonte Abbey, Archbishop Pedro de Castro, cites Regiomontanus as the authority for other astronomical marvels:20

Alcanzo a ver el celebre astrologo aleman, Juan Regio Montano, que avia de ser este año admirable y prodigioso, y pronosticandolo asi […] En Dithamarca, pequeña provincia de la Dania, se dejaron de ver cinco soles en el cielo por el mes de febrero de este año. En Binaria, a la mitad del dia 26 de junio, estando el cielo claro y sereno, se oscurecio de repente el sol, dejandose ver cerca de el, el raro phenomeno de una espada desnuda. En Grifivalidia, ciudad de la Pomerania, el dia 22 de mayo, se dexo ver vn maravilloso pez en cuya piel se admiraban dibujadas, con primor y propriedad, cruzes, letras, espadas, puñales, vanderas, cabezas de cavallos, naves y cosas semejantes.21

16 R. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams. Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 94.

17 R. B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 163–165.

18 G. Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London: Jonathan Cape, 1959), Penguin edition (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 166.

19 Mattingly, Spanish Armada, pp. 166–168. 20 This Abbey was built on the ‘Holy Mountain’, within which the “relics” and

plomos had been discovered. 21 D. N. de Heredia Barnuevo, Mystico ramillete historico, cronologico,

panegirico texido de las tres fragantes flores del nobilissimo antiguo Origen,

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In Spain a self-appointed prophet called Miguel de Piedrola Beaumont had been predicting that in this year of 1588 there would take place a Spanish apocalypse. Most Spaniards would perish apart from a chosen few, who would take refuge in a specially prepared cave in Toledo.22 The Inquisition imprisoned Piedrola and his mantle was taken up by another visionary called Lucrecia de León, who predicted the holocaust for August of 1588. The House of Hapsburg would come to an end because of the sins of Philip II and would be replaced by a new dynasty headed by Piedrola. In Lucrecia’s visions Spain was invaded by heretics and infidels: Lutherans and English would come from the north and west, the Moors would invade from the south and the Moriscos within Spain would rise up in rebellion. Her visions featured a version of the seven-headed dragon of the Apocalypse and heavenly battles. In fact, the cave of La Sopeña outside Toledo had been specially prepared to harbour the elect and had been furbished by Philip II’s architect, Juan de Herrera, though without the approval of the king. Lucrecia’s anti-Hapsburg visions, together with her association with supporters of Antonio Pérez, led to her arrest in 1590.

Although August passed by without any sign of the prophecy being fulfilled, in the following year a new religious order called LaCongregación de la Nueva Restauración was founded. It numbered many illustrious families among its members.23

Reports of unusual events and evil portents were commonplace and prophecy was in the air in this extraordinary year of 1588. The

exemplarissima, y meritissima Fama posthuma del Ambrosio de Granada, segundo Isidoro de Sevilla, y segundo Ildefonso de España, Espejo de Juezes Seculares, y exemplar de Eclesiasticos Pastores, el Illmo y V. Sr. Don Pedro de Castro Vaca y Quiñones […] (Granada: Imprenta Real, 1741), p. 11.

22 Messianic prophecy was commonplace throughout the Iberian Peninsula from the late fifteenth century onwards. Crypto Muslims, crypto Jews and Christians all produced prophets with eschatological warnings of the Last Days, which many believed were imminent: M. García Arenal, “‘Un reconfort pour ceux qui sont dans l’attente”. Prophétie et millénarisme dans la péninsule Ibérique et au Magreb (XVI-XVII siècles)”, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, CCXX, 4 (2003), 445–486.

23 Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams, pp. 127–128.

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Moriscos were obviously aware of the astrological significance of this year, as there are many references to the practice of astrology in the libros plúmbeos.24 In an attempt to provide some guidelines for judging such phenomena the arcediano of Segovia cathedral, Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias, published his Tratado de la verdadera y falsa profecia in which there are many reports of strange happenings and in which he doubts the veracity of the pergamino.25

The Parchment of the Torre Turpiana

The parchment found in the lead box became known as that of the Torre Turpiana, although neither oral nor written history had any record of such a name.26 The parchment claimed to be an apocalyptic prophecy, written by St. John. It was in the style of an Islamic Had th,which date back to the time of Muhammad.27 The Spanish Moriscos termed such prophecies jofores and many of them encouraged them to believe that Islam, the one true religion, would ultimately vanquish Christianity. St. Isidore was cited to praise those who remained on in Al-Andalus.28 Three of the jofores in circulation at the time of the

24 Hagerty, Libros plúmbeos, p. 17. 25 J. de Horozco y Covarrubias, Tratado de la verdadera y falsa profecía

(Segovia: Juan de la Cuesta, 1588). 26 The funerary plaque of St. Cecilius named it thus. Adán Centurión, Marqués de

Estepa, to be mentioned below, considered that the tower was Phoenician. 27 The Had th were the sayings and deeds of Muhammad preserved in the

Traditions. They were authenticated by being traced back to the Prophet by an unbroken line of reputable Muslims: J. Bloom & S. Blair, Islam. A Thousand Years of Faith and Power (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 45.

28 L. López Baralt, ‘La problemáticas “profecías” de San Isidoro de Sevilla y de ‘Ali ibnu Yebir Alferisiyo en torno al Islam español del siglo XVI: tres aljofores del Ms aljamiado 774 de la Biblioteca Nacional de París’, NRFH,XXIX (1980), 343–366; A. Chejne, Islam and the West: the Moriscos (Albany: State University of New York, 1983); L. López Baralt, ‘El oráculo de Mahoma sobre la Andalucía musulmana de los últimos tiempos en un manuscrito

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Second War of the Alpujarras were given to Luis del Mármol y Carvajal by the Morisco Alonso del Castillo. Mármol included these in his history of the war.29 These jofores urged the Moriscos to believe that the triumph of Islam over Christianity was nigh. The pseudo-Isidorian prophecy ‘Guay de ti España’ (Woe to thee, Oh Spain) encouraged many Moriscos to join the Revolt of the Alpujarras, convinced that the destruction of Spain was imminent.30 M. García Arenal has suggested a link between the pergamino and the plomos;there was a contemporary belief that the written word had potentially magic properties: treasure hunters believed that: ‘[…] el hallazgo de un antiguo pergamino o escrito precediera y facilitara el hallazgo de un tesoro.’31 There was a tradition among the three religions of the “Book”, Jews, Christians and Muslims, of the discovery of mysterious hidden texts that needed decyphering by the initiated; this hidden manuscript or book was linked to alchemy, the Kabbala and magic in all three religious traditions.32 The historian from Granada, Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza, linked the discovery of the pergamino with that of the Book of Deuteronomy, as described in the Book of Kings (2 Reg 22, 8–10.33 Pedro de Valencia also referred to this passage, in Part II, section 14, albeit from a different perspective: as God authenticated this book he will do likewise for the plomos, if they are geniune. However, the outcome must not be prejudged. (See note 72.)

aljamiado-morisco de la Biblioteca Nacional de París’, HR, LII (1984), 41–57; L.P. Harvey, ‘A Morisco Collection of Apocryphal Hadiths on the virtues of Al-Andalus’, Al-Masaq, II (1989), 25–39.

29 L. del Mármol y Carvajal, Historia de la rebelion y castigo de los moriscos del reino de Granada (Málaga: Juan René, 1600), BAE, XXI, pp. 169–174.

30 García Arenal, ‘Prophétie et millénarisme’, p. 451. 31 M. García Arenal, ‘El entorno de los plomos: historiografía y linaje’, Al-

Qantara, XXIV, 2 (2003), p. 296; F. Delpech, ‘Libros y tesoros en la cultura española del Siglo de Oro. Aspectos de una contaminación simbólica’, El escrito en el Siglo de Oro. Prácticas y representaciones (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1998), pp. 95–109.

32 F. Delpech, ‘El hallazgo del escrito oculto en la literatura española del Siglo de Oro: elementos para una mitología del libro’, Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LIII (1998), pp. 19–22.

33 Delpech, ‘El hallazgo del escrito oculto’, p. 29.

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There is a copy of the pergamino in the library of El Escorial.34 It was made, rather ironically, by Alonso del Castillo who had, probably, been among those who composed it. The document is made up of an introductory section in Arabic followed by what looks like a child’s word sleuth puzzle (48 x 29 little boxes). In each box is a letter and these are written alternately in red and black ink. Most of the letters are from the Latin alphabet but there are some Greek letters interspersed amongst them. On first reading the letters make no sense, but if one follows the advice of Padre Ignacio de Las Casas and reads first the black letters and then the red ones, the prophecy can be decyphered.35 Underneath the prophecy is another section in Arabic. Finally there is a recapitulation of the contents of the two Arabic sections, written in Latin, in a different hand, allegedly by the priest Patricius, a follower of Cecilius.

The pergamino in El Escorial is of course a copy. The detailed study by van Koningsveld and Wiegers of the original document (its authenticity is vouched for by the fact that it was returned to Spain by the Holy Office in the year 2000) makes the following points: the Arabic sections are completely devoid of diacritic marks and there are virtually no vowels. There are also ‘many fancy and hybrid elements’: Pedro de Valencia also noticed this: ‘No a menester Dios im-bençiones, ni pergaminos, ni láminas ni algedriçios, pintados con letras de diuersos colores, y dicçiones griegas y latinas puestas por las márgenes y dentro inútilmente para gala, y para haçer estraordinaria y vendible la mercaduría’ (fol. 17r-17v). Letters are connected contrary to usual practice, some letter forms are vaguely reminiscent of Hebrew and Syriac script and others like Greek script. All the Arabic passages employ a deliberate process of mystification which usually results in an ‘incomprehensible and meaningless text.’36

The Leiden scholars describe in detail all the sections of the parchment and compare some of the early translations. In all the Arabic sections the lack of diacritic marks and vowels can give rise to

34 A. del Castillo, Traslado del pergamino de la Torre Turpiana, Esc. R. II. 15. 35 Las Casas, Relaçión, fols 68v–69r.36 Van Koningsveld & Wiegers, ‘The Parchment’, pp. 329–330.

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great ambiguity.37 Thus, translators who approached the text unobjectively could make the translation fit their particular viewpoint. For example the opening passage of the pergamino as translated by Alonso del Castillo and Miguel de Luna refers to the Trinity. Yet, as the Morisco author al-Hajar pointed out, in a reference to this passage in his autobiographical Kit b N sir ad-d n (The Supporter of Religion against the Infidel), the text speaks of mutab ba which means ‘una esencia pura y no mezclada.’38 There was no linguistic justification for translations such as ‘Deidad Diuina trina y vna’ (M. de Luna, leg. VI, 1, fol. 1r, AS), ‘essençia diuina trina y vna’ (A. del Castillo, leg. VI, 2. fol. 1r, AS) or ‘muy honorífica Trinidad’ (A. del Castillo),39 but they did fit the fervent expectations of many in Granada.40 A passage from the Libro de los fundamentos de la ley has quite different meanings in the translation of Valencia’s associate Francisco de Gurmendi (1617) and that of the Marqués de Estepa (1632). Gurmendi’s version reads: ‘Mandó a los apóstoles […] que él que se purificase con el agua, creyese y hiciese buenas obras sería bienventurado’, which Gurmendi links with the Morisco rite of purification, the guado or guadox;Estepa translates thus: ‘Y él que fuere bautizado con agua y creyere y obrare justamente será salvo.’41

37 Van Koningsveld & Wiegers, ‘The Parchment’, p. 329; Harvey, Muslims in Spain, p. 385.

38 Al-Hajar , Ahmad ibn Q sim, Kit b n sir al-d n ‘al ’l-qawm al-k fir n, eds P. S. van Koningsveld, Q. al-Samarrai & G. A. Wiegers (Madrid: CSIC, 1997), p. 197.

39 Hagerty, Libros plúmbeos, p. 18. Hagerty’s source is also the archive of the Sacromonte and he gives the reference of C-28. He does not give a date. The earlier translation from the Sacromonte was ostensibly made for Archbishop Juan Méndez de Salvatierra who died on 24 August 1588. It is dated 5 May 1588.

40 L. F. Bernabé Pons, ‘Los mecanismos de una resistencia: los libros plúmbeos del Sacromonte y el Evangelio de Bernabé’, Al Qantara, XXIII, 2 (2002), p. 485; M. J. Hagerty, ‘La traducción interesada. El caso del Marqués de Estepa y los libros plúmbeos, Homenaje al prof. Jacinto Basch Vilá, II (1991), pp. 1179–1186; J. Godoy Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones(Madrid: RAH, 1868).

41 Gurmendi wrote his Libelo segundo in response to a memorial of a supporter of Castro. The memorialista’s assertion that the passage referred to the sacrament