The Recycling of an Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory into an anti-Morisco one in Early Modern Spain: The Myth of El Vengador, the Serial-Killer Doctor.

Abstract

Faced by a major crisis – a looming bankruptcy and the need to keep financing its onerous military and naval operations against the Protestant Dutch rebels – King Philip III of Spain and his favourite the Duke of Lerma summoned representatives (procuradores) from the towns of Castile to gather in Madrid for a parliament (cortes) in 1607. As was usual when the Crown asked its subjects to give their approval to extraordinary increases in fiscal revenue, the procuradores sent by the towns aired grievances and petitioned for their redress in exchange for the supply of more taxes. Financial turmoil and foreign wars were nevertheless not the only concern on the minds of the procuradores. Their petitions reveal concerns with domestic problems, including the status of the large population of Moriscos – the descendants of Muslims forced to convert to Christianity in the early sixteenth century. Suspicions about the religious sincerity of the large population of Moriscos and fears about their political loyalty to the Spanish Crown were reaching fever pitch in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Long-standing cultural differences, the revolt of the Moriscos of Granada in 1568-1571, the arrest and conviction by the Inquisition of many Moriscos for the crime of apostasy (the secret practice of Islam), and fears about their allegedly exponential demographic growth combined to create a poisonous atmosphere in which the Morisco population as a whole, much like the conversos of Jewish ancestry, fell under a pall of suspicion.