The English translation of professor Echevarría’s Caballeros
en la frontera is a welcome treatment of
a topic that has received ample attention within Spain as evidenced by
the essay collection La Banda Morisca durante los siglos XIII, XIV y XV [The Moorish Guard during the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries] edited by Manuel García Fernández (Seville, 1996) and Echevarría’s article
“La guardia morisca:
un cuerpo desconocido del ejército medieval español [The
Moorish Guard: an unknown corps within the Spanish medieval armies], Revista de Historia Militar 90 (2000): 55-78, but has been almost ignored
outside of it.
The Moorish Guard in the fifteenth century was royal cavalry and infantry
corps in Castile composed almost exclusively of recent converts to Christianity
from Islam. Because of their desirable skills in frontier warfare,
high social position within their Muslim societies of origin, and willingness
to serve on the Christian side, these individuals came to compose an elite
standing military force that served to protect the Spanish monarch as well
as conduct important missions along the Castilian-Granadan frontier. This
study touches upon many different areas including Military History, relations
between Castile and Granada, and religious attitudes within Castile toward
Muslims and Moriscos.
Echevarría provides in historical overview
of Castile and Granada in the fifteenth century, their respective administrations,
their respective problems—bouts of civil war in both kingdoms, a
struggle between the high nobility and the kings in Castile and the slow
decline of the Nasrid dynasty in Granada—and
the status of the Mudéjar (Muslims
living under Christian rule) communities in Castile. In her
next chapter, she outlines the Castilian policies followed by Juan II (1406-54)
and Enrique IV (1454-74) toward Granada, which consisted of draining it
through a combination of military and diplomatic measures. The constant
conflict at the frontier and within Granada engendered a fluid environment
that permitted many Muslim knights to cross over and serve on the Christian
side. While many were simply exiles or mercenaries, some were brought
together in the royal court to form the Moorish Band. Echevarría’s third chapter is of most interest
to military historians since she argues that the Moorish Guard was part
of the general tendency of the time for the creation of permanently available
forces, and in this way formed a step in the formation of professional
standing armies. She then details how the individual Moorish knights
were paid, how they were armed, and how they adhered almost exclusively
to the lighter, a la jineta, riding technique that favored speed and mobility
over strength. At its height, this corps was composed of 100-150
men, with its own command structure and distinctive dress. Their
remuneration was the responsibility of the royal treasury, although the
records of the raciones moriscas (Moorish
allowances) were kept in their own section perhaps illustrating their importance
to the crown.
In the last section, Echevarría delineates
the process by which the Moorish knights could integrate themselves into
Castilian society, in essence erasing their Muslim origin within three
generations. She makes a point of explaining that not all Muslims
serving under the Christians converted, but those who returned to Granada
or North Africa appear to have been a small minority. She goes to
great lengths, a far too long enumeration of many individuals that made
the transition from Muslim to Christian seemingly without much trouble,
to explain that religious attitudes toward Moriscos, Mudejars,
and even to Jewish conversos, were much
more permissive in the period between 1410-1463 than later when the goal
of an exclusively Catholic society became paramount. It was only
during periods of conflict that the Guards’ status as recent converts
became a liability. In fact, she argues that the dissolution of the
Moorish Guard was caused more by the desire of rebellious nobles to weaken
Enrique IV rather than by the anti-Muslim attitudes always bubbling under
the surface in Castile. After this corps was disbanded, those
that did not convert headed outside of Castile while the others integrated
quietly into society.
As is characteristic of many Spanish historical monographs, the author
has included a lengthy documentary appendix containing no less than 106
excerpted documents in Spanish and English. These were taken from
the Raciones moriscas section
of the Escribanía Mayor de Rentas de Castilla and
include names of individual knights, origins, how much they were paid each
year, and who was given the task of remunerating them. This is an
invaluable resource for any researcher studying Castilian military and/or
financial history.