THE STORY OF THE HORNACHEROS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CORSAIR REPUBLIC OF SALÉ – PART 1

This series of posts recounts the story of a group of Spanish Muslims—the Hornacheros—and the role they played in the founding of what eventually became the Barbary corsair republic of Salé.

Salé, located on the Atlantic coast of Morocco,  had been a trading center since the time of the Romans. Starting in the early seventeenth century, however, it rapidly became one of the most important corsair centers of the age.

In order to trace the sequence of events that led to the founding of Salé as a seventeenth century corsair capital, we need to go back to another century entirely, and to a famous year… 1492.

That was the year, of course, in which Christopher Columbus first set sail for the New World. It was also, however, the year in which another less-well-known event happened: the Spanish Recoquista (the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula) culminated that year with the capitulation of the last remaining Muslim Emirate, in Granada.

After the better part of eight centuries, Islamic Spain—al-Andalus—ceased to be part of the dâr al-Islâm.

After the fall of Grenada, tens of thousands of Islamic refugees fled the Iberian Peninsula, dispersing across North Africa. Many remained, though. After all, with a history stretching back eight centuries, they felt Spain to be their homeland.

Initially, the Muslims who had chosen to remain were accorded a degree of religious freedom. But this did not last. Over the decades, they were compelled, with increasingly brutality, to become Christian. These forcibly converted Muslims became known as Moriscos. Despite converting, their communities tended to retain a high degree of cultural cohesion, something the Spanish authorities always remained deeply suspicious of, and it was generally suspected that Moriscos continued to practice Islam in secret.

More and more repressive edicts were promulgated, forcing Moriscos to give up their customary way of dressing, their traditional dietary habits, their Arabic language, their baths. In an official attempt to root out heresy and backsliding in the Morisco ‘new Christian’ population and enforce Catholic orthodoxy, the Spanish Inquisition employed its distinctive combination of property confiscation, interrogation under torture, and, as the ultimate deterrent, execution by burning at the stake in dramatic community autos da fé (acts of faith).

From the point of view of the Catholic Spaniards, none of these approaches worked satisfactorily. Morisco populations were indeed Christianized and integrated into Spanish Catholic society—intermarriage between the two groups was not uncommon—but they also continued to maintain, at least to some degree, a separate cultural identity. And in response to the repressive measures introduced by the Spanish authorities, violent and destructive Morisco rebellions erupted—all of which were brutally put down.

In the early 1600s, the Spanish were not only worried about internal problems related to the Moriscos; they were also worried about events outside Spain. For more than a century, the vanquished, exiled Muslims of al-Andalus had been agitating indefatigably for a return to their lost homeland, nursing a fervent hope that some powerful Muslim ruler—the Ottoman Sultan, the Pasha of Algiers, the Sa’adian Sultan in Morocco—would champion their cause and bring back the glory days of al-Andalus-that-was. In Spain itself, Morisco communities had remained in contact with their North African relatives, some giving secret aid to Barbary corsair raiders when they attacked the Iberian coast.

The Spanish authorities worried that thousands of exiled Muslims from al-Andalus, perhaps with Ottoman backing, would launch an invasion of Spain, and that the local Morisco populations would simultaneously rise up in revolt from within.

It was too much for them.

After considerable debate, the Spanish government settled on a ‘final solution’ to the problem: expel the entire Morisco population from Spain.

This expulsion was an act of ethnic cleansing, with all the brutality and human misery such acts entail. Though it is difficult to assess numbers accurately, a reasonable estimate seems to be that something like 300,000 Moriscos were forcibly removed from their homes, driven aboard waiting ships bound for North Africa  (or, in some cases, herded across the border into France), and cast out of Spain forever.

For these expulsados, as they were known, the situation was filled with misery in every imaginable way. Most were allowed to take only what belongings they could carry. All else they owned was confiscated by the Spanish authorities. As they trudged to the ships that would take them away to exile, many became victims of robbers, and what little property they had managed to salvage was stolen from them. Perhaps as many as a third of the total number died—while trying to resist the expulsion, during sea voyages, or upon arrival in North Africa.

It became official Spanish policy to forcibly take away Morisco children under the age of seven—so that they could be reared as proper Catholics. Thousands were irrevocably separated from their parents.

When the grieving, traumatized Morisco adults eventually boarded the ships that had been prepared to carry them across the Mediterranean, many were forced to pay for their passage. And then, when they finally reached North Africa, they found themselves unwelcome. The Catholic Spanish had seen them as secret Muslims and unreliable Christians; North African Muslims saw them as secret Christians and unreliable Muslims.

In Morocco, the Moriscos’ arrival constituted nothing less than a human tsunami. Tens of thousands arrived overnight.

Mostly, the Moriscos who settled in Morocco have come down to us through history as a faceless mass of desperate refugees. There is, however, one dramatic exception to this: the Hornacheros—so called because they came from the town of Hornachos, in Extremadura, in mid-western Spain, nearish to what is today the Portuguese border.

Morisco communities in general tended to be self-inclusive. The Hornacheros took this to an extreme. They spoke Arabic rather than Spanish. Under a veneer of nominal Catholicism, they practiced Islam (among other things, circumcising their male children before baptism and then telling the priests who performed the baptismal ceremony that the children were born that way). They bribed the local Inquisitors and Spanish officials to stay out of their business, and they essentially ran their town as an independent republic.

The Hornacheros had also bribed the Spanish King, King Philip III, with the princely sum of 30,000 ducats (a huge amount of money), for the right to keep weapons—a right denied to other Morisco communities. So they were well armed. They had a reputation for killing and robbing travelers, doing so with the weapons they had induced the king to allow them to keep, and there were stories of mass graves filled with their victims in the fields outside the town. They were also reputed to be running a large-scale counterfeiting operation.

They seem to have been—or perhaps had been forced to become—a sort of Morisco cosa nostra.

The expulsion of the Spanish Moriscos was accomplished in stages, each stage preceded by an official royal edict of expulsion. On December 9, 1609, one such royal edict was issued for Granada (in southern Spain), Murcia (in southeast Spain), and Andalusia (southern Spain again)—and for the town of Hornachos.

The Hornacheros had such a notorious reputation that they were specifically singled out for expulsion.

Try as they might, the  Hornacheros could not bribe their way out of this situation. Spanish troops arrived to escort them out of Hornachos—or drive them out should that prove necessary. Life as they had known it was over, and ahead lay only uncertainty…

For more on the story of the Hornacheros, how they ended up in Morocco, and how they became instrumental in launching the (in)famous corsair republic of Salé, see The Story of the Hornacheros and the Founding of the Corsair Republic of Salé – Part 2.