2009 1

Arabica 56 (2009) 495-528 brill.
nl/arab
The Religious Identity of the Arabic Language and the

Aair of the Lead Books of the Sacromonte of Granada*
Mercedes Garca-Arenal
CSIC (Madrid)
Abstract
This article deals, in the rst place, with the religious identity of the Arabic language as dened
by the ongoing debate, in 16th-17th century Spain, about its identication with Islam. Many
new Christians of Muslim origin (Moriscos) tried to break this identication in an eort to sal-
vage part of their culture, and specially the language, by separating it from Islam. I will argue
that the Morisco forgery known as the Lead Books of the Sacromonte in Granadaan Arabic
Evangile dictated by the Virgin Mary to Arabic disciples who came to Spain with the Apostle
Saint Jameswas part of this eort. When the Lead Books were taken to the Vatican to be
informed, they were studied by Maronite scholars who decided that they were written in
Muslim Arabic and therefore could not be authentic Christian texts. The Maronites were
engaged in creating and consolidating their own version of Christian Arabic to dene and legit-
imise their own position inside the Roman world. The second part of the essay adresses the
theological considerations and the defence of dierent cultural identities which are implied in
these dierent versions of Arabic.
Keywords
Moriscos, Arabic Language, Granada, Lead Books, Religious forgery, Maronites.
Is Arabic an Islamic language? The rather provocative question with which

I have chosen to open this article was a widely debated one in 16th-and
17th-century Spain. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was
a question which was nearly always answered in the armative, whereas the
following study will focus on those contemporary voices which sought to
break the simple identication between faith and language and show how a
negative answer to the question might be possible. These eorts were mainly,
but not exclusively, made by Moriscos, i.e. Christians of Muslim origin who
* This essay was in origin a lecture delivered in October 2008 at the Harvard Center for
Middle Eastern Studies. I am grateful to the Center for its invitation: the discussion by profes-
sors and students contributed greatly to this text. The research was funded by the project
Orientalismo e historiografa en la cultura barroca espaola (HUM2007-60412/FILO).
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/057053909X12544602282277
496 M. Garca-Arenal / Arabica 56 (2009) 495-528
tried to salvage parts of their identity and culture from the religious change
recently imposed upon them by Spanish civil and church authorities. Such
attempts to defend an identity by retaining Islamic cultural features, regarded
as separate from religious characteristics, will be considered here in the
context of an especially relevant case studythe late 16th century forgery
of what generally became known as the Lead Books of the Sacromonte of
Granada (or in Rome, the Laminae Granatenses). As we will see, it was no
coincidence that the Lead Books should appear in Granada, the last Spanish
city to be conquered from Islam.
The Parchment and Lead Books of the Sacromonte of Granada
In 1588, during the construction of the new cathedral of Granada on the site
where the main Muslim mosque had previously stood, a group of workmen
carrying out the demolition of one of the mosques minarets, known as the
Old Tower (and afterwards as Turpiana Tower), found a chest containing an
ancient-looking parchment that was written in Latin, Arabic and Spanish
and appeared to date back to the period of the Roman emperor Nero. The
chest also contained some bones and ashes which seemed to be human
remains and were immediately identied as relics of the local Christian
martyr Saint Cecilio, together with a cloth that had supposedly belonged to
the Virgin Mary. The parchment contained a prophecy by Saint John, and
predicted the coming of both Islam and Martin Luther.
In 1595, seven years after the discovery in the Turpiana Tower, and for a
series of consecutive years thereafter, a group of circular lead plates appeared
in the caves of Valparaso, today known as the Sacromonte. The texts that
they bore were written in a so-called Solomonic script which was in fact
nothing more than a slanted and pseudo-archaic form of Arabic without dia-
critic marks. These texts seemed to constitute a new gospel, transmitted by
the Virgin Mary, which among other thingssuch as the presentation of a
vision of Christianity as close to or syncretic with Islamexplained that the
relics found in the Turpiana Tower were those of a group of Paleochristian
Arab martyrs who had travelled to Spain with the apostle Saint James and
who had been converted and given religious teaching by him before meeting
their deaths in Granada. The names of these martyrs were given as Cecilio,
Hiscio and Tesifn. The rst Christian settlers in Granada had, in this version
of events, been Arabs and the Virgin Mary had spoken in Arabic to her faith-
ful followers. In one of the Lead Books, entitled Certidumbre del evangelio
[Certainty of the gospel] the Virgin gave the following reply when asked who
would be the future saviours of the faith: os certico que los rabes es una
M. Garca-Arenal / Arabica 56 (2009) 495-528 497
de las buenas naciones i su lengua una de las buenas lenguas. Excogila Dios
para exaltar su santa lei i su evangelio sagrado i su iglesia santa en el nal del
Tiempo i soi mandada obrar con ella lo que fue obrado por las Tablas de
Moiss [I assure you that the Arabs is one of the good nations [sic] and their
tongue one of the good tongues. It was chosen by God to exalt his holy law
and his sacred gospel and his holy church at the end of Time and I am com-
manded to do with it that which was done by the Tablets of Moses.].1 In this
way, the Arabic language acquired the status of a vehicle of Christian revela-
tion, and the Virgin Mary was shown to be the fundamental agent of its
transmission.
The aim of the Sacromonte forgeries was to establish a common historical
origin for Spanish Christians and Arabs and to present a vision of Christian-
ity as close to Islam in which no mention was made of the Holy Trinity, the
divine nature of Christ or the worship of images. The Arabic language thereby
acquired a character that was at once primal and eschatological or chosen. In
addition, the texts demonstrated the antiquity of Castilian Spanish, which
was represented as dating back to a period before the existence of Latin, and
revindicated the antiquity in the Spanish Peninsula of the Arabic language as
spoken by these Christian martyrs, thus creating a separation between Arabic
and Islamic religion. As if all this were not enough, the texts proved the spiri-
tual pre-eminence of the church of Granada at a time when several Spanish
cities were disputing the right to become the nations Primal See; they pro-
vided support for the polemical dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and,
nally, they showed that the apostle Saint James had travelled to Spain. That
is to say, there were so many vested interests in believing the ndings to be
true and miraculous that their initial success was virtually guaranteed. This
success relied on support from the Granadan church hierarchies, led by
Archbishop Pedro de Castro, but even received a certain amount of backing
from the Crown itself. The current consensus among scholars is that the Sac-
romonte forgeries were probably put together in Morisco circles. I myself
have proposed in previous articles that the forgeries may have been linked to
the noble Granada-Venegas family, of Nasrid origins.2 The actual authors of
the texts probably included the interpreters and doctors Alonso del Castillo
and Miguel de Luna, gures close to Archbishop Castro who in turn became
translators of the texts that had been discovered. Francisco Lpez Tamarid,
Morisco priest, prebendary of the cathedral and interpreter for the Granadan
1
Contemporary Spanish translation by Alonso del Castillo, Biblioteca Nacional de Espaa,
Madrid, ms. 6637, fol. 3 v.
2
For example, M. Garca-Arenal, El entorno de los Plomos: historiografa y linaje, Los Plo-
mos del Sacromonte: Invencin y tesoro, ed. M. Barrios and M. Garca-Arenal, Granada-Valencia,
University of Valencia, 2006, p. 51-78.
Inquisition, may also have played some part. Authorship and translation
became entangled, creation and reception inextricably intertwined, in a fasci-
nating process that was to last for several decades.
The appearance of the Lead Books of the Sacromonte led to the produc-
tion of masses of subsequent documentation as Archbishop Castro, an ardent
defender of the ndings, ordered numerous transcriptions and translations of
the texts. Several contemporary humanists were asked to give their opinion
on the authenticity of the parchment and the Lead Books, giving rise to acri-
monious debates, and there was also a huge explosion of popular devotion
and veneration for the relics that had been found. The aair dragged on for
more than a century and was not completely closed even when the Vatican,
after a lengthy assessment process that had begun in 1645, decided in 1682,
during the papacy of Innocent IX, to anathametize and prohibit the Lead
Booksthough not the relicsby declaring them to be a falsehood.3
My intention here is to focus on just one aspect of the debate surrounding
the Lead Books, that which relates to the language in which they were writ-
ten. I am particularly interested in the verdict of the Vatican experts that the
texts could not be Christian because, among other reasons, they were written
in Muslim Arabic. During the debate on the Sacromonte ndings, theologi-
cal considerations became entangled with the defence and legitimisation of a
various dierent ethnic cultures.
The issue of whether Arabic was a Muslim language should be seen in the
general context of 16th century Spain. In the rst place, there was an ongo-
ing debate among the various civil and church authorities concerning those
areas of human life which should be subject to religion, and whether or not
certain gastronomonic, hygienic, linguistic and festive customs should be
regarded as signs of religious allegiance. Put dierently, the question was
whether it was possible to separate certain cultural features from the proper
observance of religious ritual and sincere belief, or whether it was necessary
to eliminate the former in order to allow the full development of the latter,
which was the position which eventually prevailed. This question was part of
a larger theological problem relating to the evangelisation and conversion
of the Moriscos and of the native Indians of the Americas. This theological
debate revolved around whether it was proper to preach to catechumens in
their own language rather than Castilian Spanish, and asked whether the
theological concepts of Catholicism were not distorted when they were
conveyed in another language which perhaps implicitly invoked a dierent
3
All this issues are adressed in M. Barrios Aguilera and M. Garca-Arenal (eds.), Los Plomos
del Sacromonte. Invencin y tesoro, Valencia-Granada, University of Valencia, 2006.
conceptual and dogmatic eld. The risk, the argument ran, was that of
encouraging syncretism among the newly converted. Or that neophytes
might be lulled by the familiarity of their language into converting to a reli-
gion they did not properly understand. It was, then, a debate which had to
do with the untranslatability of faith. It ultimately came to require discussion
of the identity of other Arabic-speaking Christians: on the one hand, Spanish
Mozarabs (Christians with Arabic culture), and on the other, as a result of
their decisive role in the Vatican process of analysing the texts of the Lead
Books, the Maronites, Syrians and other Arabic-speaking Eastern Christians
who had been present in Rome since the 1620s but had been the object of
Catholic missions in Rome since the late 16th century. All of this led to a
complex series of identity-based claims which turned language into both the
hostage and instrument of diverse theological and social issues. It is this com-
plexity which I will now try to break down into its constituent parts.
Granada Conquered
Granada was taken by Christian forces in early 1492, after the signing of a
capitulation agreement negotiated during the nal months of the previous
year. The terms of the agreement were extremely generous towards the van-
quished occupants of the city and its surrounding region. They allowed for
the continued legal observance of Islam and provided assistance to all those
Muslims who wished to move away from Granada to North Africa.4 How-
ever, it must also be remembered that for Iberian Christians, Granada had
embodied for more than a century the messianic hope of a widespread
renewal of Christianity.5 In a climate of intense missionary zeal dominated by
a so-called Pauline spirit (i.e. the current of thought which defended the
idea that the sanctifying grace of baptism erased the origin of those who
received it, thus helping to create a unied body of Christians), a series of
measures were taken which aimed to evangelise and assimilate the population
of Muslims who continued to live throughout the old kingdom of Granada.
The Hieronymite friar Hernando de Talavera was appointed rst archbishop
of Granada in 1492, and he immediately put into place various policies
designed to attract the Granadan Muslim population towards baptism, and
to do so within the legal framework laid out in the capitulation agreement
of late 1491, which included a ban on the use of coercion to bring about
4
M. Garrido Atienza, Las Capitulaciones para la entrega de Granada, Granada, 1910.
5
S. Pastore, Il Vangelo e la spada. LInquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460-1598),
Rome, 2003, p. 108 .
conversions. This point was stressed in Talaveras Instrucciones [Instructions]

to the clergy of his diocese.6 The Instrucciones constitute a highly important
document in any attempt to understand Talaveras pastoral work. They con-
tain, among other things, the norms to be followed by the Moriscos of the
Albaicn, the citys main Muslim quarter, with denitions of that which it
was considered fundamental for a Morisco to do in order to become a good
Christian and to be seen as one.7 The Instrucciones urged Moriscos to aban-
don and forget all the ceremonies associated with their former religion,
including their celebratory birth customs and funeral rites. The text also
urged them gradually to give up their language, clothing and footwear, as
well as their manners of shaving, cutting their hair and eating. Talavera also
ordered all those who knew how to read and write to have books in Arabic
containing Christian prayers and an Arabic translation of the Psalms, stating
that these will be given to you. This particular measure went against the
spirit of a rule later laid down by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isa-
bel in Seville in February 1502, in a clear demonstration of the tensions and
dierences of opinion which arose during the crucial years of the turn of the
century: the ruling Spanish monarchs commanded the new converts to learn
the fundamental prayers in Castilian and Latin, but not in Arabic.8 As for
Talaveras promise that psalms would be given to you, there is no evidence
that an Arabic translation of the psalms was either carried out or distributed
during the period. What exactly had the archbishop thought of doing? Was it
his intention to sponsor a new translation, or to resort to one already made
by the Mozarabs?9 I will return to this question, as it is an important one in
the consideration of which Christian Arabic texts may have been known to
the authors of the Lead Books.
Talavera saw language as a fundamentally important instrument in the task
of approaching the new community of indels. With the aim of preaching in
the language of the natives of Granada, the new archbishop sought out priests
who had some knowledge of Arabic and he even made an attempt to learn
the language himself. Whenever he preached to Muslims, Talavera was
accompanied by Arab converts whom he used as interpreters. Some of these
6
J. Domnguez Bordona, Instruccin de Fr. Hernando de Talavera para el rgimen interior de
su Palacio, Boletn de la Real Academia de la Historia, XCVI (1939), p. 785-835, en su conver-
sin se guarde la capitulacin que sus Alteas tienen con los moros erca desto.
7
A. Gallego y Burn and A. Gmir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada segn el
Snodo de Guadix de 1554, Granada, 1968, (reed. Granada 1996), p. 161-163.
8
F. Pereda, Las imgenes de la discordia. Poltica y potica de la imagen sagrada en la Espaa
del 400, Madrid, 2006, p. 275-276.
9
A Mozarab translation of the Psalms is held at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana of Milan and has
been edited by Marie-Thrse Urvoy.
men had converted before the Christian conquest, or were noblemen who
had joined the Castilian elites. Such was the case of the converted nobleman
don Gonzalo Fernndez Zegr, previously a member of the Nasrid aristoc-
racy, and whose last will and testament mentions as one of his merits that he
had helped to platicar e monestar a los vezinos nuevamente convertidos de
esta cibdad e su tierra e Guadix . . . en atraellos en conocimiento de nuestra
santa fe catlica [talk to and admonish the newly converted inhabitants of
this city and his land and Guadix . . . to attract them to knowledge of our holy
Catholic faith].10
One man who witnessed Talaveras preachings in the mountainous Alpu-
jarra region of Granada was Francisco Nez Muley, another convert of
noble origins.11 Half a century later, in 1567, Nez Muley wrote a Memo-
rial addressed to Granadas Audiencia, or royal court of appeals12 (a text
referred to later in this article) in which he vividly recalled how Talavera not
only respected the Arabic language but even incorporated the traditional
music of the Granadan Arabs in the liturgy by concluding the mass with the
Arabic ybara qun rather than the traditional dominus vobiscum. All in all,
Talaveras position was a highly ambiguous one: he belonged to that group of
individuals who tried to build bridges by seeking out and accepting in the
culture of others that which he thought was acceptable and integrable; at the
same time, as is shown by the text of the Instrucciones, he was convinced of
the need to bring about a radical change in the ways of being, thinking and
feeling of his catechumens.
Talavera made the precept of annual confession one of the key moments of
his pastoral. One of the main advantages of the use of Arabic by his aravi-
gos (i.e. Arabic-speaking) priests was that they were able to hear the confes-
sions of new converts.13 At the same time, and for the six years during which
10
Amalia Garca Pedraza, La asimilacin del morisco don Gonzalo Fernndez el Zegr:
edicin y anlisis de su testamento, Al-Qantara, XVI (1995), p. 45.
11
M Jess Rubiera, La familia morisca de los Muley-Fez, prncipes merines e infantes de
Granada, Sharq al-Andalus, 13 (1996), p. 156-168. B. Vincent, Histoire dune dchance: la
famille des Fez Muley Grenade au XVIe sicle, Cahiers du CRIAR, 21 (2002), p. 69-79.
12
The complete text can be found in the appendix to B. Vincent, Introduccin to the re-
edition by A. Gallego Burn and A. Gmir Sandoval, Los moriscos del Reino de Granada segn el
Snodo de Guadix (1554), Granada, 1996, p. XXXIX-LII. This text is now available in English
translation, Francisco Nez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audience and
Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. and trans. Vincent Barletta, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2007.
13
See the recommendations made to the clergy of the bishopric of Granada in 1500: El
cura o beneciado que no supiere la lengua arbiga no conese a ninguno . . ., B. Vincent,
Reexin documentada sobre el uso del rabe y de las lenguas romnicas en la Espaa de los
moriscos, El ro morisco, Granada-Valencia, University of Valencia, 2007, p. 116.
he enjoyed full autonomy in the management of his diocese, Talavera sur-

rounded himself with alfaques ( faqih) who enabled him to become well-
informed about Muslim religious principles and permitted him to create a
clergy capable of teaching the Christian faith in Arabic. His personal library
contained one copy of the Quran translated into Latin and another in ver-
nacular Spanish.14 Talavera was, in short, a cristiano arbigo [Arabic Chris-
tian], to use the words with which Raymond Llull preferred to dene
himself.15 Under Talaveras supervision, his confessor the fellow Hieronymite
Pedro de Alcal16 composed two works which were published in 1505, mak-
ing use of the printing press which Talavera had ordered to be set up in Gran-
ada in 1494: these works were the Vocabulista in Arabico, an Arabic dictionary,
and the Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua arbiga [Art of easily learning the
Arabic tongue].17 The Arte included a basic catechism for the evangelisation
of the Moriscos, written in an Arabic transliterated into Latin script to facili-
tate the task of the priests. The Vocabulista was a dictionary of the variety of
Arabic spoken in Granada, and would have been just as useful to Muslims as
to Christians. In order to compile such a work, Alcal must have had assis-
tance from the Granadan Arabic scholars from the archbishops circle men-
tioned above.18 By embarking on a dictionary of Arabic dialect, Alcal was
venturing into completely uncharted territory. It was impossible for him to
fall back on precedents that would help him in the task of nding Arabic
terms for Christian concepts and religious practices. His dictionary was sim-
ply the work of a speaker of Arabic immersed in a milieu where Arabic was
still the language of the majority. At the point in his Arte para ligeramente
aprender la lengua arbiga where he had to explain to new converts the con-
14
Quintn Aldea, Hernando de Talavera, su testamento y su biblioteca, Homenaje a Fray
Justo Prez de Urbel, Studia Silensia, Silos, 1976, III, p. 513-547.
15
D. Urvoy, Lide de christianus arabicus , Al-Qantara, XV (1994), p. 497-507.
16
A friar of the Hieronymite order like Talavera himself, Alcal was, according to Garrido
Aranda, a converted Muslim, born in Granada before the conquest of the city. See A. Garrido
Aranda, Papel de la Iglesia de Granada en la asimilacin de la sociedad morisca, Anuario de
Historia Moderna y Contempornea, 2-3 (1975-76), p. 69-104; F. Martn Hernndez, Un semi-
nario espaol pretridentino, el Real Colegio de San Cecilio de Granada, Cuadernos de Historia
Moderna, XVIII (1960).
17
There is a recent edition: A. Lonnet (ed.), Les textes de Pedro de Alcal. dition critique,
Paris-Louvain, Peeters, 2002.
18
R. Ricard, Remarques sur lArte et leVocabulista de Fr. Pedro de Alcal, tudes et docu-
ments pour lhistoire missionaire de lEspagne et du Portugal, Louvain, AUCAM, 1930; E. Pezzi,
El problema de la confesin de los moriscos en Pedro de Alcal, Homenaje al P. Daro Caba-
nelas, Granada, 1987, I, p. 433-444; G. Drost, El Arte de Pedro de Alcal y su Vocabulista:
de tolerancia a represin, Las prcticas musulmanas de los moriscos andaluces (1492-1609), ed.
A. Temimi, Zaghouan, 1989, p. 57-69.
cept of confession, regarded by Talavera and the entire Catholic church as a

key instrument of control over beliefs and consciences, Alcal came up
against a considerable problem: there was no word in Arabic that could trans-
late the idea of a confession of sins, and no Islamic religious practice that
even resembled it. Alcal therefore spent many pages discussing the subject,
explaining that confession was a kind of spiritual cleansing with parallels in
the Muslim guadoc or ritual cleansing of purication.19 However, confession
was not the only term which constituted an obstacle for Alcal. There were
several other Christian religious terms which it was not possible to include in
his lists or which he chose not to, such as baptism, Holy Spirit, redemption
etc. In the opinion of Arnald Steiger, it was strange that Alcal should choose
to translate God as Allah, whereas in the religious works used to catechise the
American Indians, such as the Nahuatl, God was never translated as Theotl,
but was always referred to as Dios, God.20 There are other parts of the text
which reveal the diculty of Alcals undertaking, such as the point where he
translates the phrase The priest, because he is the vicar of God, as al-faqh
li-annahu halfat Allh. It would be hard to produce a translation with more
clearly Islamic overtones, and Alcal worked in this way through a whole
series of Christian rites and words, seeking out Muslim equivalents and nd-
ing such corresponding terms as mosque for church, mih rb for altar, or
salt for mass.21 One hundred years later, the Morisco Jesuit Ignacio de Las
Casas, who worked assiduously as an evangelist among the Moriscos of
Valencia and Granada and played a key role in denouncing the aair of the
Lead Books,22 was to insist on the hazards of Alcals approach.
In 1499 Ferdinand and Isabel made a new visit to Granada in the com-
pany of Cardinal Cisneros, the queens confessor. They were not impressed by
what they saw. The conversion process had not advanced quickly enough and
the city was still largely Islamic. At that time, the Granadan Inquisition had
only just been established, with Diego Rodrguez de Lucero being appointed
the rst Inquisitor of the city in September 1499. However, the dierences in
attitude and approach between archbishop Talavera and the Inquisitor soon
19
Este es el verdadero lavatorio y alimpiamiento de los pecados, e no aquel que los moros
hazen, lavndose los pies y piernas y partes del cuerpo vergonzosas, en el bao o acequia, el qual
lavatorio non poda lavar sino la suciedad corporal . . . mas la sancta confesin alimpia e sana las
suciedades espirituales, E. Pezzi, El problema de la confesin de moriscos en Pedro de Alcal,
Homenaje al Prof. Daro Cabanelas, Granada, 1987, p. 433-444.
20
A. Steiger, Contribucin a la fontica del hispano-rabe y de los arabismos en el ibero-rom-
nico y el siciliano, Madrid, 1932 (reed. Madrid, 1991).
21
Ricard, Remarques . . ., p. 223-24.
22
R. Bentez Snchez-Blanco, De Pablo a Saulo, crtica y denuncia de los Libros plmbeos
por el P. Ignacio de Las Casas, S.J., Los Plomos del Sacromonte, p. 217-251.
became so palpable that King Ferdinand was forced to appoint Cisneros as a

special inquisitor for the whole Granadan territory just two months later, in
November 1499. This did not prevent the Inquisition bringing charges
against Talavera himself at the end of that same year, for the Franciscan
Cisneros in turn had his own ideas about the best way to tackle the conver-
sion of the Muslims. The measures which Cisneros promoted are only known
by the reaction they provoked among the local population. In December
1499 there was an important revolt against them in the Albaicn, during
which the Christian authorities completely lost control of a large part of the
city for a period of several days. Talavera and the Count of Tendilla, the main
military authority in the kingdom, managed to persuade the rebels to surren-
der by promising that no reprisals or other measures would be taken against
them as long as they kept promises to convert to Christianity. However, Cis-
neros was quick to try to take the credit for the subsequent series of mass
conversions. His biographers related how he ordered the public burning of all
those books written in Arabic that could be found, with the exception of
those of a scientic nature, which were sent to the University of Alcal,
founded by Cisneros himself.23 Again, it has to be emphasised that this event
is only known to us through the biographers of Cisneros, who relate it as one
of his glorious deeds. It is not corroborated by any other source; neither do
we know the extent or proportions of the alleged or symbolic burning of
books. Nor do we know what kind of books, nor how many of them, might
have been found in a city that had been abandoned by its civil and religious
elites several years earlier. The fact that the Inquisition was in future years to
conscate many volumes in Arabic seems to show that Cisneros cannot have
been entirely successful in his aims. In October 1501, a royal command was
published which ordered the burning of all those copies of the Quran which
could be found within the kingdom of Granada,24 but autos da fe carried out
in Granada between 1550 and 1571 show several Moriscos charged with pos-
sessing copies of the Quran and other religious texts.25
The pressure on Muslims continued, as did the mass conversions. Between
18 and 25 December 1499 some 3,000 Muslims were baptised, and this led
to an uprising in the early months of 1500 which spread to the Alpujarras
and the mountains around the nearby city of Ronda. Meanwhile, Pope Alex-
23
Juan de Vallejo, Memorial de la vida de fray Francisco Jimnez de Cisneros, ed. Antonio de la
Torre, Madrid, 1913, p. 35.
24
According to a document published by Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, Los mudjares de
Castilla en tiempos de Isabel I, Valladolid, Instituto Isabel la Catlica de Historia Eclesistica,
1969, n 146.
25
AHN. Inquisicin, Legajo 1953, n 5, penitentes 4, 5, 16, 24.
ander VI congratulated Cisneros on the conversions that had been achieved26

and once the uprising had been quelled, the capitulation agreements of 1492
were revoked.27 In 1502, the Catholic Monarchs decreed the compulsory
conversion to Christianity of all Muslims living anywhere in the territories of
the Crown of Castile.
The ocial end of Islam as a religion in Spain did not mean the end of the
Arabic language, or even the end of its use for evangelising purposes. The
Company of Jesus, shortly after its foundation in 1540, took a close interest
in the question of the evangelisation of the Moriscos, creating in 1545 a
bilingual school for Morisco children in Ganda which eventually failed,
partly because of a lack of teaching sta with a knowledge of Arabic, and
partly because of Morisco resistance to the idea of educating their children at
such an institution. In Granada the Company founded the Casa de la Doc-
trina in the Albaicn, and this turned out to be a more signicant undertak-
ing. Jesuits of Morisco origin were to take part, such as the well-known father
Juan de Albotodo or Ignacio de Las Casas, already mentioned above.28
Later in the century, one man who followed a similar line to that of Tala-
vera was Martn Prez de Ayala, one of Spains representatives at the Council
of Trent who in the mid-16th century ruled over the two Spanish dioceses
which had the largest Morisco populations, Guadix (1549-1560) and Valen-
cia (1564-1566). Ayalas view was that knowledge of Arabic was essential for
the instruction of the new Christians and he therefore asked the Emperor
Charles V for thelogos arbigos i.e. theologians who knew Arabic and
could be entrusted with the tasks of instruction. Ayala also made it compul-
sory for the confessors of Moriscos to be able to speak Arabic. In 1554 he
convoked a diocesan synod in Guadix for the evangelisation of the newly
converted and ordered the composition of a catechism in Arabic, the Doc-
trina Cristiana, which was translated by the beneciary priest of Guadix, Bar-
tolom Dorador,29 into a transcribed version, in latin script, of the common
Granadan Arabic dialect. Like Alcal, Dorador used terms such as mih rb for
altar, faqh for priest, or salt for mass. In his catechism, Dorador recorded
the information that Martn de Ayala los domingos acostumbraba yr a
predicar y ensear a estos nuevos Cristianos a una parrochia de esta ciudad . . .
26
S. Pastore, Il vangelo e la spada, p. 114.
27
J. Meseguer Fernnez, Fernando de Talavera, Cisneros y la Inquisicin granadina, La
Inquisicin espaola, nuevas miradas, nuevos horizontes, ed. J. Prez Villanueva, Madrid, 1980,
p. 371-400.
28
Francisco de Borja Medina, La Compaa de Jess y la minora morisca (1545-1614),
Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 57 (1988), p. 4-137.
29
M. Paz Torres, Bartolom Dorador y el rabe dialectal andaluz, Granada, 1971. The original
is in Bibliothque Nationale dAlger, mss. n 1389.
Yo soy su intrprete, porque muchos destos nuevamente convertidos no

entienden bien la lengua vulgar castellana y suelo declarar y volver en Arvigo
lo que el ha predicado en lengua vulgar, con la mesma orden y casi sin perder
punto [was in the habit on Sundays of going to a parish in this city to preach
to these new Christians and teach them . . . I am his interpreter, because many
of these newly converted people do not understand the common Castilian
tongue well and I usually state and turn into Arabic what he has preached
in the common tongue, in the same order and almost without missing a
point].30
During his time in Guadix, Martn de Ayala wrote another catechism,
printed after his death by his successor in the diocese of Valencia, Juan de
Ribera.31 However, although he used Ayalas catechism, Riberas stance was
radically opposed to that of Ayala as far as the use of Arabic was concerned.
Ribera spoke of such a strategy in the following terms: Buscar predicadores
que sepan arbigo sera imposible y quando los uviesse no convendra ense-
arles [a los moriscos] en aquella lengua, por falta de trminos para manifes-
tar los principales misterios de nuestra fe y los que se buscan equivalentes por
circunloquios no slo no explican la fuerza, pero las ms de las veces dicen
errores en nuestra religin, lo que fue causa que yo desistiera de aprender
arbigo [To look for preachers who knew Arabic would be an impossible
task and even if they were to be found it would not be convenient to teach
them [the Moriscos] in that language, because of the lack of terms to convey
the principal mysteries of our faith, and those equivalents which are found by
the use of circumlocution not only do not explain its force, on most occa-
sions they express errors in our religion, which is the reason why I gave up
learning Arabic].32 At about the same time the Morisco Jesuit Ignacio de Las
Casas defended the need to preach to the Moriscos in Arabic,33 but warned
of the risks of doing so, such as the fact that neophytes might think that
equivalent terms covered equivalent or similar practices, i.e. that because
the terminology was the same, the practices and beliefs could not be much
30
Apud M. Paz Torres, Don Martn de Ayala y la catequesis de los nios moriscos, Home-
naje al Prof. Daro Cabanelas, Granada, 1987, I, p. 509-517.
31
Catecismo para instruccin de los nuevamente convertidos de moros, Valencia 1599.
32
R. Garca Crcel, Estudio crtico del catecismo de Ribera-Ayala, Les morisques et leur
temps, Pars, 1983, p. 161-168.
33
Quin jams vio, para convencer los nimos, no solo hablalles en lengua tan brbara
para ellos como la suya para nosotros y tan obscura e innitelligible, sino aun prohibilles la suya
materna tan amada naturalmente como la propia madre, que por eso tiene tal apellido de
materna. Apud Youssef El Alaoui, Jsuites, Morisques et Indiens. tude comparative des mthodes
dvangelisation de la Compagnie de Jsus daprs les traits de Jos de Acosta et dIgnacio de Las
Casas (1605-1607), Paris, 2006, p. 287.
dierent. To illustrate this point, Las Casas cited the case of a preacher who
assured Moriscos that conversion no les quitaba su lengua ni hbito ni su
Dios, sino llamandoos dixo- muzlamn, que quiere dezir salvos . . . echan-
doos un poco de agua en las cabeas os llamaran naara que quiere dezir
christianos o naareos y signica defendidos y amparados como lo sereis de
los reyes christianos y de toda Espaa [did not deprive them of their lan-
guage nor clothing nor God, but calling youhe saidmuzlamin, which
means saved . . . pouring a little water on your heads they will call you naara
which means Christians or Nazarenes and it means defended and protected,
as you will be by the Christian kings and the whole of Spain].34 Las Casas
insisted that preachers, in addition to knowing Arabic, needed to be good
theologians in order to be able to explain and invent terms to dezir trinidad,
personas divinas, divina esencia, unin hiposttica Dios y hombre, sacramen-
tos, missa, comulgar y confessar, absolver y otros trminos sin nmero que
para los moros en su secta son tan inauditos como entre nosotros el Alcorn y
sus ceremonias [express Trinity, divine persons, divine essence, the hypos-
tatic union of God and man, sacraments, mass, the taking of communion
and confession, absolution and countless other terms which are as unheard of
among the Moors in their sect as are the Quran and their ceremonies among
us].35 The main point I would like to emphasise for the argument being
developed here is that in Spain in the second half of the 16th century there
was a complete lack of tools or reference works in Arabic that would allow
the doctrinal principles of Catholicism to be conveyed in a standard, accepted
manner.
This is not the place to review the dierent restrictive measures and the
toughened stance towards Moriscos which came into place after the 1520s.
An assembly met in the Royal Chapel of Granada in 1526 and banned the
speaking of Arabic and its use in public documents, but it clearly failed in its
aims. This prohibition was only truly imposed by a royal decree of 17
November 1566, which was ratied on 10 December 1567. This law forbade
all uses of spoken or written Arabic and gave Moriscos a deadline of three
years to learn Castilian Spanish. It also banned Arab surnames, clothing and
dierentiating marks, as well as music, baths, and the possession of slaves and
weapons, and it contained a series of other measures which upset the Grana-
dan Morisco population. Their consternation also had economic motives, as
Morisco contracts and property deeds were to be revoked. The ruling was the
34
Youssef El Alaoui, Jsuites, Morisques et Indiens, p. 122.
35
Idem, p. 180.
nal straw for many in Granada and was the main reason for the Morisco
revolt that led to the war of the Alpujarras (1568-1570).
It is clear, nevertheless, that osmosis rested on nding a common language
for old Christians and Moriscos. For the newly converted, the built-in meanings
and values of the words and idioms which formed the very pattern of their
conciousness necessarily brought about at least partial acceptance of the cul-
ture in which they had grown up. Even for non-conformists, linguistic com-
munity involved the speaker or writer in tacit dialogue with much that he
rejected, a dialogue depending upon agreed on terms and evaluations.36 Many
Moriscos were conscious of this: thus one of the leaders of this revolt in
the Alpujarras, Aben Daud, proclaimed that He who loses the Arabic
tongue loses his law.37 For his part Diego de Ordez, chaplain to the
princess Eleanor, sister of Charles V, complained that the damned sect
would last for as long as the Mahommedan language continued to exist.38
Christians, wrote Las Casas, reciben molestia en oyllos [hablar rabe]
[are bothered by hearing them [speak Arabic]]39 and automatically identied
knowledge of the language with being a Muslim.40 In the words of the scholar
Nicols Antonio porque no puede dexar de darle a los buenos castellanos,
hallarse en Granada, i ver que se habla de una parte y otra en Arabigo, lengua
que nos acuerda los ierros en que la tuvieron los Mahometanos [it cannot
fail to disturb good Castilians to nd themselves in Granada and see that on
all sides Arabic is spoken, a language which reminds us of the errors in which
it was held by the Mahomedeans].41 In other words, identication of the lan-
guage with the Islamic faith was unavoidable in a place like Granada where
memory of the conquest was still fresh and had been exacerbated by the
revolt of the Alpujarras. Christians remembered the errors in which it was
held but above all, they remembered the errors in which we had been held:
the mere sound of the Arabic language left everyone under suspicion and was
a reminder of a non-Christian past which there was a great desire to erase.
36
Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: the Intellectual and Social landscape of La
Celestina, Princeton, University Press, 1972, p. 143.
37
Luis del Mrmol Carvajal, Historia del rebelin y castigo de los moriscos del Reino de Gran-
ada, Madrid, Atlas (Biblioteca de Autores Espaoles, xxi), 1946, p. 179.
38
B. Vincent, Reexin documentada sobre el uso del rabe y de las lenguas romnicas
en la Espaa de los moriscos, El ro morisco, Granada-Valencia, University of Valencia, 2007,
p. 117.
39
Ignacio de Las Casas, Jsuites, p. 419.
40
As Miguel de Luna himself said in a letter to the Archbishop of Granada Pedro de Castro:
si no vale justicia ms de solamente dezir sabe la lengua Arbiga, es morisco, atropllenle sin
oyrle. Rezia cosa es. Archivo de la Abada del Sacromonte, Leg. VII, 1. f. 889.
41
Papeles varios of Martn Vzquez Siruela. Mss. Biblioteca Real de Palacio, II/158.
However, some voices struggled to present a dierent interpretation and it

is to those voices that I will now turn.
The Defence of the Arabic Tongue
The decree of late 1567 caused, as I have said, great consternation through-
out the Granadan population of Muslim origin. This feeling gave rise to
Nez Muleys Memorial, mentioned earlier. In his complaints to the Audi-
encia of Granada and his request that the order be revoked, Nez Muley
made an attempt to fence o all those areas which today would be considered
part of an ethnic culture from that of Islamic belief and practice. Thus he
pointed out how clothing and dress varied from one Spanish region to the
next without the religious soundness of its wearers being called into question,
and argued that the clothing of the Moriscos of Granada should also be con-
sidered an example of regional dress, appropriate to the natives of the land.
Nez Muley repeatedly insisted on describing the Moriscos as natives of the
region who belonged to it, and not alien members deserving of treatment as
strangers or outsiders. He particularly insisted on trying to keep the use of
the Arabic language separate from the practice of religion, and he alluded to
the existence of Eastern Christians who spoke Arabic without anyone there-
fore calling into question the sincerity of their Christian beliefs: Vemos venir
a los cristianos, clrigos y legos de Suria y de Egipto vestidos a la turquesca,
con tocas y cafetanes hasta los pis; hablan arbigo y turquesco, no saben
latn ni romance, y con todo eso son cristianos. [We see the Christians,
priests and laymen come here from Syria and Egypt dressed in the Turkish
manner, with wimples and kaftans down to their feet; they speak Arabic and
Turkish, they know no Latin nor any Romance tongue, and despite all this
they are still Christians.] He later returns to the same argument: Pues vamos
a la lengua arbiga, que es el mayor inconveniente de todos. Cmo se ha de
quitar a las gentes su lengua natural, con que nacieron y se criaron? Los egip-
cios, surianos, malteses y otras gentes cristianas, en arbigo hablan, leen y
escriben, y son cristianos como nosotros . . . [Let us consider the Arabic
tongue, which is the greatest inconvenience of them all. How is one to take
away from the people their natural language, the one in which they were
born and bred? The Egyptians, Syrians, Maltese and other Christian peoples
speak, read and write in Arabic, and they are Christians like us]. Ignacio de
Las Casas used the same arguments in his short but very interesting treatise
in defence of the Arabic tongue.42
42
Ignacio de Las Casas, De la bondad y facilidad desta lengua arbiga, Jsuites, p. 590-596.
Nez Muley also wrote the following paragraph on the state of the
language among the Granadan population: Cuntas personas habr en las
villas y lugares fuera desta ciudad y dentro della, que aun su lengua rabe no
la aciertan a hablar sino muy diferente unos de otros, formando acentos tan
contrarios que es solo oir a un hombre alpujarreo se conoce de que taa
[regin] es? Nacieron y crironse en lugares pequeos, donde jams se ha
hablado el aljama ni hay quien la entienda sino el cura o el beneciado o el
sacristn y estos hablan siempre en arbigo: dicultoso ser y casi imposible
que los viejos aprendan en lo que les queda de vida . . . [How many people
must there be in the villages and other places outside this city as well as
within it who do not even speak their own Arabic tongue properly, but speak
it very dierently from each other, in accents so dierent from one another
that as soon as one hears a man from the Alpujarras start to speak one knows
from which taa [region] he is? They were born and brought up in little places,
where Spanish was never spoken and no-one understands it apart from the
priest or the beneciary or the sacristan, and those men always speak in Ara-
bic: it will be very hard and almost impossible for the old men to learn in
what remains of their lives . . .] Nez Muley presented a fragmented linguis-
tic panorama with strong dialectal features and striking internal dierences,
especially in the rural areas and the Alpujarras. Specialists agree that Grana-
dan Arabic continued to be used as a spoken and written language in the
kingdom of Granada throughout the rst half of the 16th century, and that it
only died out towards the end of the century.43 This obliges us to ask what
kind of Arabic was spoken by the Moriscos discussed so far in this article. Las
Casas wrote that he knew the Arabic he had learned as a child in Granada,
but that when he arrived in Rome he realised that it was a bastard Arabic
which, furthermore, he could not read or write, and that it was in Rome
where he learned the classical form of the language.44 Alonso del Castillo had
learned classical Arabic from Nicolas de Clnard (1495-1542), the famous
humanist and philologist who had travelled to Granada in what turned out
to be the vain hope of perfecting his Arabic, a failure which led him to travel
on, a few years later, to Fez in North Africa.45 Castillo was an interpreter for
the Granadan Inquisition, cataloguing books and writings conscated by the
43
Juan Martnez Ruiz, Ausencia de literatura aljamiada y conservacin del hispano-rabe y
de la entidad arabo-musulmana en la Granada morisca (siglo XVI), Chronica Nova, 21
(1993-94), p. 402-425.
44
Ignacio de Las Casas, Jsuites, p. 575-576.
45
Este testigo es natural deste Reyno y criado en la lengua arbiga y la ha estudiado precep-
tivamente con mucho cuidado y la oi de Clenardo y del beneciado Leones que la saba muy
bien, declared Castillo in 1595, when he said that he was more than seventy years old. Archivio
per la Congregazione della Dottrina della Fede, Stanza Storici, R7-c, f. 288v.
Holy Oce, as well as others from the Royal Chapel in Granada and the
Library of El Escorial, where he worked for many months. One of the collec-
tions of which Castillo took charge when he was working for the Inquisition
came from Baeza,46 home to none other than Miguel de Luna. So how did
Luna and Lpez Tamarid, an interpreter for the Holy Oce after Castillo,
manage to learn classical Arabic? What teachers and learning tools were they
able to benet from? The answer to this seems clear: they must have used the
works of Pedro de Alcal, which were circulating in printed form. But what
were their sources and their connection with Arabo-Islamic culture? The
interest or anxiety of Miguel de Luna concerning his need to be able to con-
sult and even borrow books from El Escorial is very revealing. Furthermore,
and given that the forgery they produced was supposed to be an ancient
Christian text, which were the Christian texts written in Arabic that they were
able to read, and how were they able to resolve the conceptual and termino-
logical problems which, as we have seen, were so thorny for their contempo-
raries? This problem will be examined later, but rst I would like to discuss
Luna in more detail, as a gure of particular relevance to my argument.
Miguel de Luna
Nez Muleys line of argument in defence of the distinguishing cultural fea-

tures of the Granadan population, i.e. his presentation of the Christians of
Muslim origin as natives of the land rather than the descendants of foreign
invaders who could be newly expelled from the country, as well as his defence
of the idea of language as entirely separate from religion, can also be found in
the work of Miguel de Luna. Luna was a Morisco physician, translator and
interpreter from Granada who is mainly known as the author of a false his-
torical chronicle which claimed to be the translation of an Arabic manuscript
written by an apocryphal historian named Abentarique whose work Luna
alleged that he had come across in the library at El Escorial. The aim and
main narrative thread of this work, Lunas La verdadera Hystoria del Rey Don
Rodrigo, published in Granada in 1592, are clearly dened as displaying
the nobility and past glories of lineages of Moorish origin. The book is also a
history of the Islamic invasion of Iberia in which the Peninsula is saved by
the recently arrived Muslims from the evil and corruption of its Visigothic
46
Dario Cabanelas, El morisco granadino Alonso del Castillo, Granada, el Patronato de la
Alhambra, 1965 (reed. 1991), p. 198.
rulers.47 At the same time, the work is also a mirror of princes in which
rulers are urged to distinguish between good and evil subjects independently
of the religion which those subjects profess.
Miguel de Luna was a royal interpreter and the author of a short treatise in
defence of baths. He was also, from the very moment of the discovery of the
parchment and Lead Books of the Sacromonte, a translator of those texts
who worked in the service of Archbishop Pedro de Castro, as well as being an
active apologist for their authenticity. It has to be said that there was a
remarkable consistency to Lunas activities. Throughout all his work, his strat-
egy was to defend and preserve cultural features of Morisco identity by sepa-
rating them o from the Islamic religion, with particular stress given to the
importance of defending the Arabic language. Luna liked to present himself
as a cristiano arbigo or Arabic Christian. His work aimed, above all, to re-
write the origins of the history of Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula in
such a way that the population of Arab origin would be considered natives
of the land (an integral part of one of us), so that its members would not
be expelled as foreign invaders but could gain access to honour and privilege.
It is a strategy which exactly coincides with that of Nez Muleys Memorial
and other Moriscos in the social and intellectual elites who sought to build
bridges which might provide them with a way into Christian society and
thereby become assimilated within it and enjoy its privileges, while at the
same time holding onto a series of cultural characteristics which they were
unwilling to give up, without this fact necessarily meaning that they were still
Muslims in pectore. One outstanding example of such a group of Moriscos is
the Granada-Venegas family, mentioned above as possible sponsors of the
Sacromonte forgeries. I will not repeat here arguments which I have outlined
elsewhere,48 but it is worth emphasising that this family ordered the compo-
sition of a genealogical work, Origen de la Casa de Granada49 which did not
hesitate to argue that the Granada family belonged to the line of the Nasrid
royal family and even claimed family ties with the royal lineages of Hispania
47
M. Garca-ArenalF. Rodrguez Mediano, Mdico, traductor, inventor: Miguel de
Luna, cristiano arbigo de Granada, Chronica Nova, 36 (2006), p. 187-231; id., Miguel de
Luna, cristiano arbigo de Granada, La historia inventada? Los libros plmbeos y el legado
sacromontano, ed. Manuel Barrios and Mercedes Garca-Arenal, Granada, University of
Granada, 2008, p. 83-136; id., Jernimo Romn de la Higuera and the Lead Books of the Sac-
romonte, in K. Ingram (ed.), The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond,
Leyden, Brill, 2009, p. 243-268.
48
M. Garca-Arenal, El entorno de los Plomos: historiografa y linaje, Los Plomos del Sac-
romonte, p. 51-78.
49
Manuscript copy in the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Coleccin Salazar y
Castro, B-86.
in the period prior to the Muslim conquest, thus giving themselves both a
Gothic and a royal origin. The work also outlined the familys philo-Christian
activities during the period of Muslim occupation. Lunas work followed the
same line: his writings always imply the demonstration of the existence of
Moors or arbigos who are good Christians, and it is in this direction that
he seeks to inuence the authorities and society in which he lived. Like so
many other Spaniards of his time, Luna seems to have sought to open up a
means of integration in a society which was dominated by the statutes of
limpieza de sangre (blood purity) and had closed o all access to honour and
glory to a huge number of people. What Luna, like others of his contempo-
raries, tried to do, was to propose an alternative history of this society. It was
a history which necessarily traced itself back to its holy Christian origins, in
line with the ocial narrative of an emerging proto-national historiography,
but one which permitted the inclusion within the national story of those
groups who were in fact destined to be left on the marginsthe Christians
of Islamic or Jewish origin.
Luna and the Language of the Lead Books
As I have pointed out, Miguel de Luna, possible author of the forged texts,
played an active part from the very beginning of the Sacromonte aair as
translator, promoter and apologist.
But Luna was not the only man called upon to give his opinion on the
texts. Almost every scholar in Spain who had some knowledge of Arabic was
asked to write a report. All of these scholars, with the exception of the puta-
tive authors already mentioned above, came to the conclusion that the texts
were clearly a forgery, and pointed out that the Arabic in which the Lead
Books were written was modern Granadan Arabic and contained numerous
dialectal uses. Some of the Eastern translators who were invited to come to
Spain to give their view, such as Marcos Dobelio, placed even greater empha-
sis on the obviously Maghrebian nature of the Arabic used in the texts.50 The
famous humanist and biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano also pointed out
50
Marcos Dobelio, Nuevo descubrimiento de la falsedad del metal, mss. 285 in the Biblioteca
de Castilla-La Mancha en Toledo, f. 41 Conforme a esta razn, cmo puede el autor dar
prueba de ser Arabe oriental, nacido y criado en Arabia en los tiempos de Cesar Augusto o de
Tiberio y no repara que escribe y habla como Occidental idiota y brbaro, lengua comn a
todos los ignorantes y vulgares rabes de Occidente como se puede ensear en l diferentes
libros escriptos en Espaa de personas que no savan ni tenan regla en el componer y menos
en el escribir, solo siguiendo la provincia de su lenguaje natural (da ejemplos de palabras
mal escritas). For Dobelio, see F. Rodrguez Mediano and M. Garca-Arenal, De Diego
that the parchment text made use of theological concepts which did not exist
at the time of the Apostles but had been coined during the rst religious
councils. The same point was made by Pedro de Valencia with reference to
the Lead Books: Que el nombre de Trinidad y esenia, que se pone en el
ttulo de un libro, y llamar terera persona al Espritu Santo, son del lenguaje
escolstico posterior a aquellos tiempos [The terms Trinity and essence,
which are placed at the head of one of the books, and referring to the Holy
Spirit as the third person are features of the scholastic language which came
after those times].51 The interpreter Francisco de Gurmendi, in a Libello
which he wrote to denounce the falsehood of the Lead Books after working
on a translation of them, drew up a list of passages which he considered to
have been taken from the Quran.52 Above all, Gurmendi highlighted the use
of Islamic terms, such as the word tahhara, which was usually used to describe
the guadoc or purifying cleansing ritual, and was used in the text to mean
baptism instead of the word taammada, the term more usually employed by
Arabic-speaking Christians. This was the rst instance of the deployment of
such conceptual arguments which, as we will see, were later used by the East-
ern Christians, mainly Maronites, who examined the texts in Rome. Gur-
mendi himself had learned a form of Arabic which was unrelated to that used
in Granada.
Whereas in previous sections of this article I have discussed those men in
Spain who knew Arabic at the time of the appearance of the Lead Books as
either belonging to or being immersed in the Arab-speaking milieu, these
scholarly reports now bring us into contact with another type of background
altogether. Arias Montano and his disciple Pedro de Valencia were humanists
whose knowledge of classical Arabic derived from their philological work as
biblical scholars, and from their profound knowledge of Hebrew. Arias Mon-
tanos arguments against the veracity of the parchment were quite clearly
those of a biblicist and theologian. Gurmendi was a nephew of Juan de
Idiquez, member of the State Council and former secretary to Philip II, and
was therefore well-connected at court. Gurmendi was appointed royal inter-
preter of Arabic by Philip III in 1615, after the death of Alonso del Castillo,
and at El Escorial was given the task of cataloguing the books from the col-
lection of sultan Muley Zidan of Morocco which had been seized by Spanish
ships in 1611. Gurmendi had learned classical Arabic with two Eastern
de Urrea a Marcos Dobelio, intrpretes y traductores de los Plomos, Los Plomos del Sacromonte,
p. 297-333.
51
G. Magnier, Pedro de Valencia, Francisco de Gurmendi y los Plomos de Granada, Los
Plomos del Sacromonte, p. 209.
52
Archivo de la Abada del Sacromonte, Granada, Leg. IV, 2, . 126r-128v.
Christians who had come to Spain for the express purpose of taking part
in the translation of the Lead Books, Marcos Dobelio and Juan Bautista
Hesronita, the archbishop of Mount Lebanon,53 a man discussed in more
detail below.
In the meantime, the translator, report-writer and apologist Miguel de
Luna constructed his own arguments. In his report, copies of which are pre-
served both in the Sacromonte and in the Vatican,54 Luna defends the antiq-
uity of the books discovered, which he believes to be older than the sect of
Mahommad, because there is nothing in them which bears the slightest
resemblance to anything in the Quran from the theological point of view.
According to Luna, both the writing-script and the vocabulary used were
those of an older version of the language than that which is recorded in the
Quran, and he describes the script itself as a kind of writing known as Solo-
monic. Luna claims to be familiar with this sort of script because he has seen
it widely used in ancient books, such as the work entitled Clavcula de
Salomn55 and the sigillos de arte magica natural [books of secrets on natu-
ral magic] attributed to Solomon and others which he had the opportunity
to consult at El Escorial. Later I will return to the time Luna and Alonso del
Castillo (who was there in the nal months of 1573 and the early months of
1575)56 spent in the Royal Library of El Escorial and some of the sources
they may have consulted there. My interest now is in emphasising the way in
which Luna points to the absence of diacritic marks in the script and con-
cludes that it therefore dates to a period before the Quran, because such
marks were brought into Arabic in order to x readings of the Muslim holy
texts. The lack of these marks and of vowels were presented as one more piece
of evidence proving that the text predated the preaching of Muhammad. This
was the rst step towards legitimising the Arabic language: its existence,
rstly, in the period before the preaching of the Prophet of Islam, and
its continued use by Christians before, during and after such preaching. It
is in this sense that it is particularly interesting that Luna should insist on
53
Grace Magnier, Pedro de Valencia, Francisco de Gurmendi y los Plomos de Granada,
Los Plomos del Sacromonte, p. 201-216.
54
Archivio per la Congregazione della Dottrina della Fede, Stanza Storici, R7c. Lunas report,
. 280v-282, that written by Alonso del Castillo, . 283v-289v and that by Lpez Tamarid,
245v-246v.
55
One of the most legendary and widely read treatises on magic, extensively used in Spain
throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. There is a very ample bibliography, but see, for exam-
ple, J. Caro Baroja, Vidas mgicas e Inquisicin, Barcelona, I, 1991, especially chapter VII, El
libro mgico (la Clavcula de Salomn).
56
Dario Cabanelas, El morisco granadino Alonso del Castillo, Granada, 1965 (reed. 1991),
p. 75.
associating the text of the Lead Books with the name of Solomon. In a col-
lection of letters and reports belonging to the Marquis of Mondjar,57 there is
a document containing a detailed discussion on the characteristics and origin
of the so-called Solomonic script in which some of the leading European
Orientalists of the day gave their views. These men included Joseph Scaliger,
Brian Walton, Athanasius Kircher and the Maronite Abraham Ecchellensis, a
man of great importance in the recently created Propaganda Fide of Rome
and a professor of Arabic at the Sapienza University. According to this erudite
correspondence, there were two possible hypotheses to account for this script:
one, that it was a version of the Arabic script oered by Solomon, as a special
gift, to Hiram, the king of Tyre who ruled over the famous Phoenicians who
had built the Tower of Babel and arrived in the Iberian peninsula with the
descendants of Noah and were the rst settlers of Andalusia.58 Relations
between Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre are mentioned in several Biblical
passages, where there are also references to the ships of Tarsis. According to
the Flemish scholar Johannes Goropius Becanus/Jan Gerartsen, writing in
1580, these ships had sailed westwards, and this version of historical events
proved to be very successful among historians of Andalusia.59 Another related
version was the approach favoured by Ecchellensis, and held that the script
was created by Solomon himself, who oered it as a gift to the Queen of
Sheba. This second version is also very striking, because Echellensis was at
that time involved in translating Arabic scientic books60 and was concerned
to cleanse this science of its Islamic connections by tracing its origin back
to Sheba and Solomon.61
Another man who intervened in the controversy surrounding the language
and Solomonic script of the Lead Books was the well-known Jesuit Jernimo
Romn de la Higuera, author of several chronicles on the origins of the city
of Toledo, its saints and Mozarab lineages. Romn de la Higuera wrote a
57
Biblioteca Nacional de Espaa, Madrid, ms. 9881: Varias cartas de erudicin.
58
Jaime Alvar, El descubrimiento de la presencia fenicia en Andaluca, La Antigedad
como argumento. Historiografa de arqueologa e historia antiga en Andaluca, Sevilla, 1993,
p. 153-170.
59
Ibid., p. 155.
60
The rst of which was his version of al-Syt, De proprietatibus, ac virtutibus medicis, ani-
malium, plantarum, ac gemmarum, tractatus triplex, auctore Habderrahmano Asiutensis Aegyptio,
Paris, 1647. See G. Gobillot, Abraham Ecchellensis, philosophe et historien des sciences, in
B. Heyberger (ed.), Orientalisme, sciences et controverse: Abraham Echellensis (1605-1664), Pars,
2010, and G. Gobillot, Les approches de lIslam au XVIIe sicle travers la science et la phi-
losophie, in B. Heyberger, M. Garca-Arenal et al. (eds.), LIslam visto da Occidente. Cultura e
religione del Seicento europeo di fronte allIslam, Milan-Geneva, Marietti, 2009, p. 39-73.
61
P. Rietbergen, A Maronite Mediator Between Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean Cul-
tures: Ibrahim al Hakilani, or Abraham Ecchellense (1605-1664), Lias, 16 (1989), p. 13-42.
report62 in which he expressed his support for the Phoenician version of

events, writing of the Phoenicians who were of the same branch as the Arabs
and in their language and clothing [my emphasis] were all one people. Such a
statement also served to answer another of the great objections made by
doubters of the veracity of the Lead Books, who asked how it was possible
that Arabic could have been spoken in the Peninsula in a period before the
Muslim invasion. The contemporary chronicler Luis de la Cueva was of
the view that Granada was built by Arab Phoenicians (he described the
Turpiana Tower as the work of Phoenicians) and in passing he defended the
antiquity and Christianity of the Moriscos, descendants of early Arabic-
speaking Christians. De la Cueva also related the Phoenicians to Solomon,
arguing that the Phoenician king sent timber and workmen for the building
of the famous ships, as well as Phoenician captains to sail them.63 Ignacio de
Las Casas, although he argued very strongly against the authenticity of the
Lead Books,64 used in his treatise in defence of the Arabic language the same
arguments as Luna and all those who separated the existence of the language
in the Peninsula from the Muslim invasion, arguing that it was brought in by
Arabic-speaking Phoenicans. De Las Casas cited the ocial chroniclers of the
Spanish Monarchy, i.e. Esteban de Garibay (1533-1599) and Juan de Mari-
ana (1537-1624), to prove the use of Arabic in the Council of Seville of 619
and the translation of the Bible that was made into Arabic in that city so that
Christians might be able to read it in their language.65 He thus made refer-
ence to the two leading historiographical authorities of his age, whom he
cited on the same terms as Abentarique, the alleged author of Miguel de
Lunas La verdadera hystoria, which de Las Casas used to demonstrate that the
Arabic language desde aquellos siglos hasta oy no se a dexado de usar en
estos reynos [from those centuries until today has not ceased to be used
in these kingdoms].66 The Mozarabs, who as Arabic-speaking Christians
62
Archivo de la Abada del Sacromonte, Granada, Leg. 2, fol. 47.
63
Luis de la Cueva, Dilogos de las cosas notables de Granada y lengua espaola y algunas cosas
curiosas. Sevilla, 1603, reed. Granada, Archivum, 1993, G-Gi/ 51-52.
64
As well as the work by R. Bentez cited in note 19, see the letters and reports he sent to
the Vatican in the early years of the 17th century, ACDF, St. St. R6-a, . 238 and and 383
and .
65
Ignacio de Las Casas, Jsuites, p. 594-595.
66
Ignacio de Las Casas, Jsuites, p. 595-596: En la iglesia de sant Marcos de la ciudad de
Toledo que es una de las de los murabes, est sepultado en la pared un sancto perlado de
aquella imperial ciudad y en su lauda o piedra . . . en latn tiene alrededor por orlo y adorno
desta mesma piedra latina quatro versos en letra y lengua arbiga de los quales colleg que este
sancto arobispo era oriental y patriarcha y deva de presidir en aquella ciudad ass a los mora-
bes de su nacin como a los dems christianos, ni la pusieran en lauda de sancto perlado ni por
orlo . . . del latn, siendo lengua de sus insignes enemigos. De todo lo qual se collige claro quan
provided a continuous link with the Christianity of the period before the
Islamic conquest, inevitably became an important source of legitimacy. Mari-
ana, in his inuential and pioneering Historia General de Espaa (VII, 3)
wrote: At the same time, there was Juan, prelate of Seville, who translated
the Bible into the Arabic language with the intention of aiding the Christians
and Moors, because the Arabic language was widely and commonly used all
the while when ordinarily Latin was neither used nor known. There are sev-
eral versions and translations that are conserved until this day and may be
found and used in various parts of Spain. Thus was a defence made of the
use of Arabic by the Christians of al-Andalus as the language of revelation
and writing in face of a tradition which had made Latin the sacramental lan-
guage of the church.
Possible Christian Arabic Sources for the Lead Books
The only Arabic texts produced by the Mozarabs which have survived to the
present day are the complete translations of the Gospels, the Psalms and the
Canons,67 but it can safely be assumed that the Bible was also translated in its
entirety by the Christians of al-Andalus. There were clearly Arabic transla-
tions of the Christian Bible in several parts of Spain during the lifetime of
Mariana.68 At El Escorial, for example, there was a work entitled Liber Evan-
geliorum versus in Linguam Arabicam a Joanne Episcopo Hispalensi qui ab Ara-
bibus appellatur Said Almatrud tempore Regis Alphonsi Catholici. Alonso del
Castillo examined this text and included it in his Indice de los libros Arbigos
que estn en la librera de San Lorencio el Real [Index of Arabic books at the
library of San Lorenzo el Real].69 Miguel de Luna, in his report on the parch-
ment text, claimed that he had seen in El Escorial a Pentateuch in an ancient
Arabic script which resembled that used in the parchment.70
Like Castillo and Luna, Lpez Tamarid visited the library at El Escorial
and had the opportunity to work on the Arabic resources held there. Lpez
Tamarid was the author of a Compendio de algunos vocablos arbigos [Com-
usada ha sido esta lengua en Espaa no solamente de los mahometanos sino de los muy precia-
dos christianos antes y despus de la prdida destos reinos.
67
M.-T. Urvoy, Le Psautier mozarabe de Hafs le Goth, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du
Mirail, 1994.
68
Hanna Kassis, The Arabization and Islamization of the Christians of al-Andalus: evidence
of their Scriptures, Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, ed. Ross Brann, Bethesda (Maryland),
CDL Press, 1997, p. 136-155.
69
D. Cabanelas, El morisco granadino Alonso del Castillo, p. 185 and .
70
ADCF. St. St. R7-c f. 284 v.
pendium of some Arabic words] which was heavily drawn upon by Sebastin
de Covarrubias for his pioneering dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana
[Treasure of the Castilian language], and he catalogued manuscripts of books
conscated by the Granadan Inquisition.71 More notably, in 1565 he exam-
ined an Arabic copy of the Gospel of Saint John which had been taken by
the Inquisition from among the goods belonging to a Morisco doctor by the
name of Master Andrs, who was from Sorbas in Almera. Interestingly,
Lpez Tamarid had himself been the beneciary priest of Sorbas and vicar of
Vera in Almera before becoming an interpreter for the Inquisition.72 This
manuscript of the Gospel of Saint John was held at El Escorial and later
became the property of the cathedral of Len.73 This proves that Lpez Tam-
arid had worked with an Arabic version of the text by Saint John in the
period before the appearance of the parchment. This text was in fact a copy,
made in Fez in 1421, of a 12th-century Mozarab parchment containing the
gospels of John which is still kept at the Qarawiyyin Library in Fez. It is curi-
ous to see this Morisco interest in obtaining copies of Christian religious texts
in Arabic, which they clearly used for religious polemical ends, as has been
shown by Van Koningsveld in his studies of gospels which circulated among
Muslims living in Christian territories. In one such copy of the gospels dated
1493, the colophon reads: the purpose of copying it was to take note of the
traditions of the Jews and the Christians and of their despicable beliefs, of
the source of their religion on which they base themselves so that the events
of the previous religious communities and the excessive errors they commit-
ted will become clear to those who look into this book, who read it and listen
to it. They will then believe that the religion of Islam is the most superior
of all religions.74
Several modern studies of Mozarab texts have shown what is thought to
be an Islamization of the religious vocabulary used by Christians in al-
Andalus.75 Many examples of such Islamization have been identied, such as
71
C. Ron de la Bastida, Manuscritos rabes en la Inquisicin granadina (1582), Al-
Andalus, 23 (1958), p. 210-213.
72
A. Domnguez Ortiz and B. Vincent, Historia de los moriscos. Vida y tragedia de una
minora, Madrid, Bibliotheca de la Revista de Occidente, 1978, p. 150-151.
73
P.S. Van Koningsveld, Christian Arabic manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula and
North Africa: a historical interpretation, Al-Qantara, XV (1994), p. 427-428.
74
Ibid., p. 431.
75
M.-T. Urvoy, Inuence islamique sur le vocabulaire dun Psautier arabe dal-Andalus,
Al-Qantara, 15 (1994), p. 509-517; M. Penelas, Linguistic Islamization of the Mozarabs as
attested in a late-ninth-century chronicle, Language of Religion, Language of the People. Medie-
val Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Munich, Fink Wilhelm, 2006, p. 103-114. H. Kassis, The
Arabization and Islamization of the Christians of al-Andalus: evidence of their Scriptures,
Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, ed. Ross Brann, Bethesda, Maryland, 1997, p. 136-155.
calling Abraham Ibrhm H all Allh; use of the term h awriyyn for the
apostles instead of rusul (h awr is the word used in the Quran for Christs
disciples), or use of the word mih rb for altar or kitb to translate the notion
of religious law, as well as al-h aqq and yawm al-h aqq to designate the day of
Final Judgement. Those terms which have been highlighted by modern ana-
lysts of the Mozarab texts were precisely the same ones which aroused the
suspicions of Marcos Dobeilo, a Christian of Kurdish origin who was a pro-
fessor of Arabic at the Sapienza and who was invited in 1610 to come to
Spain and carry out a new translation of the Lead Books. Dobelio is a well-
known gure to all those who have studied the Sacromonte aair, and even-
tually wrote a fascinating treatise in which he argued that the books were a
fraud carried out by Moriscos.76 In his arguments he referred to the language
used in the Lead Books, which was not scholastic Arabic, and he pointed
out a number of terms which in his view could only have been written by
Muslims: Apstoles Hawariyyun los llaman los Plomos en lugar de rasul
[the Apostles are called Hawariyyun instead of rasul],77 como recuerdo haber
leydo en los Evangelios y epstolas de San Pablo cuya antigedad de ms de
mil aos y otros libros de la sagrada escriptura que he recorrido en esta len-
gua, hallo que todos llaman a los Apstoles arrosulo [as I recall having read
in the Gospels and the epistles of Saint Paul whose antiquity goes back more
than a thousand years and other books of holy scripture that I have read in
this language, I nd that all of them call the Apostles arrosulo]78 and he
focuses on exactly the same points that have been described by modern schol-
ars as part of the process of Islamization of Mozarab texts: llama a Abraham,
Ibrahim jalil Allah, amigo de Dios, que es frase mahometana. [it calls Abra-
ham Ibrahim khalil Allah, friend of God, which is a Mahommedan phrase].79
He also discusses the word kitb as a translation of the idea of religious law,
and insists that such a usage is not to be found in any of the Christian works
written in Arabic which were held in Rome.80
76
Marcos Dobelio, Nuevo descubrimiento de la falsedad del metal, ACDF, St.St. R7-c, . 7-176.
Quotations are from the copy in the Biblioteca de Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo, ms. 285.
77
Ibid., . 18-19.
78
Ibid., . 18-19.
79
Ibid., f. 63.
80
Ibid., . 12-13, No pueden considerar estos (los laminarios) que en la lengua rabe se
hallan otros libros de la escriptura sagrada ms antiguos o al menos de mil aos y ms, los unos
traducidos del original hebreo, otros del Chaldeo y otros del Griego, y muchos libros compues-
tos por los Obispos y Patriarcas antiguos de la dicha nain que residieron en tiempo de los
Reyes rabes Gassanitas. . . . que todos fueron cristianos dejando otros libros que se hallan en
Roma y quanto ms en Oriente tocantes a la Ley de Dios . . . . 4-5 hallo que en ninguna
manera corresponden (los Plomos) con las frasis y estilo de los libros que me acuerdo aver leydo
en la librera Vaticana intitulado Vida de Christo compuesto por los rabes cristianos.
Dobelio was not the rst Eastern Christian to come into contact with the
Lead Books, as he had been preceded by the Archbishop of Mount Lebanon,
Juan Bautista Hesronita, in about 1608.81 The latter wrote letters to the Pope
warning him of the dangers of the Lead texts and told him of the importance
of stopping the widespread diusion of manuscript versions of them.82 At
about the same time, Ignacio de Las Casas insisted on the need to send
the plates to Rome and have them examined by Maronite experts.83 Like
Gurmendi, de Las Casas was well aware of the existence of another version
of Christian Arabic, the main features of which had been discussed and
dened by scholars in Rome.
The Laminae Granatenses and the Vatican Experts
Marcos Dobelio was just one of a number of translators who travelled from
Italy to Spain at the behest of Archbishop Castro. The archbishop wanted to
have the texts examined by as many dierent translators as possible, but he
was also keen to delay by every possible means the moment when the texts
would have to be sent on to the Vatican, which for its part spent many years
requesting the documents so that they could be examined and ocially
assessed. The transfer of the Books eventually took place in late 1645,84 when
the Vatican appointed a committee of six experts who laboured for the next
fteen years on the extraordinary task of transcription of the Solomonic
text, nally producing a denitive version in cursive Arabic script with dia-
critic marks, accompanied by a Latin translation and collation. Each of the
six experts (Giambattista Giattini, Athanasius Kircher, Ludovico Marraccci,
Antonio dellAquila, Filippo Guadagnolo and Bartolommeo da Pettorano)
carried out his own separate version, and then the versions were compared.
Doubts and dierences were listed and discussed at length before a nal ver-
sion was eventually produced, together with a glossary of terms and obscure
phrases. All in all it was a painstaking example of detailed philological endea-
vour which even today remains admirable and it is preserved in the archives
81
For the translators who came from Italy, see F.R. Mediano and M. Garca-Arenal, De
Diego de Urrea a Marcos Dobelio . . ., p. 328 .
82
ACDF, St, St. R6-a, . 238 and and 277 y .
83
Letter dated 27 June 1603, ACDF, St. St. R6-a, f. 530.
84
The long drawn-out aair of Roman eorts to be sent the texts can be seen in detail in
Carlos Alonso, Los apcrifos del Sacromonte (Granada), Valladolid, Estudio Agustiniano, 1979.
of the Holy Oce, where it forms part of the trial process which led to
anathematization.85
It goes without saying that the general atmosphere in Rome was very dif-
ferent from that which prevailed in Granada. In Rome, there was an extraor-
dinarily high standard of knowledge of Eastern languages, with a great
number of gures devoted to their study; in Rome, no-one harboured any
doubts about the importance of the use of Arabic in tasks of evangelisation.
It is not possible to outline here, however briey, the story of how Rome had
from the late 16th century onwards become one of the main centres for the
study of Arabic and for the printing and translation of books and the collec-
tion of manuscripts. Two events in this story stand out, however.86 One was
the foundation in 1584 of the Maronite College of Rome, whose remarkable
role in the transmission of the culture of Eastern Christians in Europe is well
known. The other early 17th century circumstance which helped towards an
especially fruitful development of the knowledge of Eastern languages was
the formation of the Propaganda Fide. This pontical dicastery was set up in
1622 to co-ordinate, under the leadership of the Pope, the missionary activ-
ity of all the various religious orders.87 From the moment of its foundation,
the Propaganda Fide sought to teach Eastern languages, especially Arabic, to
missionaries who needed to be trained to spread the principles of the Catho-
lic faith by evangelising among Muslims and catechising the Eastern churches
in accordance with the principles of Trent. The Propaganda Fide saw lan-
guages as the crucial and most precious tools of its apostolate. It combined
the teaching of languages with that of religious controversy in accordance
with a programme drawn up by its rst secretary, Francesco Ingoli. Rome saw
itself as a centre of diusion of works which would be useful for conversion
and evangelisation in the dierent languages, of which Arabic was one, that
were needed by its religious gures. It had to carry out the role of spreading
Catholic religious culture within a framework of submission to the Popes
universal authority over missionary work.88
85
ACDF, St. St. R6-b, R6-c, R7-a, R7-b, R7-c, R7-d, R7-f.
86
Nasser Gemayel, Les changes culturels entre les maronites et lEurope. Du Collge de Rome
(1584) au Collge de Ayn-Warqa (1789), Paris, Cariscript, 1984, and Pierre Raphael, Le rle du
Collge maronite romain dans lorientalisme aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles, Beirut, Universit Saint-
Joseph, 1950.
87
G. Pizzorusso, La Congregazione di Propaganda Fide e gli ordini religiosi : conittualit nel
mondo delle missioni del XVII secolo, Religione, conittualit e cultura. Il clero regolare nellEuropa
di Antico regime, Cherion, ed. M.C. Giannini, 43-44 (2005), p. 197-240; G. Pizzorusso, La pre-
parazione linguistica e controversistica dei missionari per l'Oriente islamico: scuole, testi, inseg-
nanti a Roma e en Italia, in B. Heyberger, M. Garca-Arenal et al., LIslam visto da Occidente.
Cultura e religione del Seicento europeo di fronte allIslam, Milan-Geneva, 2009, p. 253-288.
88
G. Pizzorusso, Il papato e le missioni extra-europee nellepoca di Paolo V. Una prospet-
The Propaganda Fide also set up, in 1626, a polyglot printing press which
became an intellectual centre of the rst order where the production of books
in a wide variety of languages, including Arabic, served as a stimulus to the
knowledge of languages and encouraged the presence of foreign scholars who
helped in the preparation of its various editions. These scholars often also
took up teaching and translation posts and played roles in other institutions,
especially the University of La Sapienza, where a succession of leading Ara-
bists occupied the chair of Arabic studies,89 or in the various colleges of for-
eign languages which existed in centres such as San Pietro in Montorio, the
Collegio Urbaniano, the Collegio Romano and so on.
The post at the Sapienza was occupied by the Maronites Vittorio Scialac
and Abraham Ecchellensis. The latter took the chair in 1636 and left it to go
to France in 1640, although he returned to Italy in the following decade.
Ecchellensis was succeeded by Filippo Guadagnolo, who also worked as a
scriptor at the Vatican Library. Guadagnolo, a member of the Order of the
Minor Clerks Regular, held the post until 1656, the date of his death, and
was replaced by Ludovico Marracci, a member of the Chierici regolari della
Madre di Dio who remained in the job until the end of his long life in 1699.
Marracci had a very close relationship with Echellensis, whom he visited
every day during the period when the latter was living in Rome in order to
make use of his magnicent collection of Oriental manuscripts. Both Gua-
dagnolo and Marracci were Italians who had learned Arabic from Maronite
teachers, and both were authors of very well-known and widely read scholarly
works. Guadagnolo was the author of an Apologia pro christiana religione pub-
lished by the press of the Propaganda Fide in 1631 and 1637; Marracci was a
translator of the Quran, and the author of a glossary and another work refut-
ing the Islamic religion.90 The two men were thus living examplars of the
close relation that existed between the Arabic language and controversy. As
teachers and polemicists, they also played a key role in the revision and cen-
sorship of Eastern books for the Inquisition in Rome and for the production
of books by the polyglot press of the Propaganda Fide. The Propaganda Fide
entrusted a committee with the task of carrying out a canonical Arabic ver-
sion of the Bible which took many years to complete under the watchful eye
tiva di sintesi, Die Auenbeziehungen der Rmischen Kurie unter Paul V. (1605-1621), ed.
A. Koller, Tbingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2008.
89
F.M. Renazzi, Storia dellUniversit degli studi di Roma, Rome, Pagliarini, 1803-1806;
E. Conte, I maestri della Sapienza di Roma dal 1514 al 1787: i rotuli e le altre fonti, Rome, 1991.
90
M.P. Pedani, Ludovico Marraci : la vit e lopera , in G. Zatti (ed.), Il Corano. Tradu-
zioni, traduttori, e lettori in Italia, Milan, IPL, 2000, p. 9-30 ; id., Ludovico Marracci e la conos-
cenza dellislam in Italia, Campus Maior, Rivista di Studi Camaioresi, 16 (2004), p. 6-23,
Maurice Borrmans, Ludovico Marracci et sa traduction latine du Coran, Islamochristiana, 28
(2002).
of the Inquisition and was nally published in 1671. This committee was
made up of Guadagnolo and Marracci, Athanasius Kircher, the Franciscan
Antonio dellAquila, who was the author of an Arabic grammar, and the
Jesuit Giambattista Giattini. During the committees early years, Abraham
Ecchellensis was also a member, and was then replaced on his departure for
France by Bartolommeo da Pettorano, a missionary and trusted translator
from the Holy Oce. In other words, the very same men who later made up
the committee appointed by the Holy Oce to analyse the Laminae Grana-
tenses had already worked together on this earlier project. All of them also
worked within the Vatican bureaucracy on the translation of letters and doc-
uments received from the East, and as occasional interpreters. To sum up, the
Arabic language in Rome thus had a role in university teaching, the struggles
of polemical activity, control over translations, bureaucratic work and the
establishment of centres of linguistic and religious education for missionaries.
As far as the latter were concerned, it was necessary to lter and control the
Christian texts to which they had access, and top priority was given to the
translation into Arabic of the Psalms and the Doctrina Christiana of Roberto
Bellarmino, translated by the Maronites Vittorio Scialac and Gabriel Sionita.
The Maronites monopolised the canonical Arabic versions of the Christian
texts, in a clear attempt to forge a place of their own within the complex
world of Rome at a high point of the Catholic Reformation. They also sought
to legitimise their role and leave no room for doubts concerning the
unchangeable orthodoxy of their Eastern Christianity.91 One of their main
tasks in hand was to show that this orthodoxy had not been contaminated by
long centuries of co-existence with followers of Islam. Their religious texts
had clearly been inltrated by Islamic terminology during the Middle
Ages,92 and such terminology now had to be replaced. From the moment of
their arrival in Rome, with clothing, beards and styles of hair which marked
them out as Orientals, the Maronites had been faced with the need to estab-
lish their legitimacy as fully-edged Catholics and this led them to polemicise
with Armenians, Syrians, Nestorians and Orthodox Christians. Theirs would
be the denitive Arabic version of Catholicism, translated into a language
which they elaborated with the greatest of care and from which they were
particularly interested in purging all connotations of vocabulary used in
Islamic religious texts. One clear representative of this collective eort is
Abraham Echellensiss monumental Arabic-Latin dictionary, a manuscript
91
Bernard Heyberger, Les chrtiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Rforme catholique, Rome,
cole franaise de Rome, 1994, p. 412.
92
Samir Khalil Samir, Rle des Chrtiens dans la civilisation arabe, Eastern Crossroads.
Essays on Medieval Christian Legacy, ed. Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala, Piscataway, New Jersey,
Gorgias Press LLC, 2007, p. 11.
copy of which is still held at the National Library in Paris.93 The vocabulary
contained in the dictionary, which has almost 7,000 entries on 337 double-
sided folio pages, is exclusively Christian and almost entirely free of Islamic
terminology, and is therefore of little practical use in the translation of Islamic
texts. Even those Islamic terms which do gure are only provided with Chris-
tian meanings. Such is the case of the word zakt, dened as puritas, animi
candor, innocentia, without any mention being made of the word alms.
Or the term ginn, which if translated as devils allowed religious controver-
sialists to attack Islam for allegedly saying that the Prophet had devils among
his adorers, and is translated by Echellensis simply as spiritus, genius, dae-
mon. Ecchellensis cannot have been unaware of the Islamic connotations of
such terms, for as we have seen he was in almost daily contact with Marracci
during the years when he was engaged on his translation of the Quran. It
was, rather, that he chose to separate out or make a discrimination between
Christian and Islamic Arabic. His aim was, in fact, to create and lay down
the guidelines for a Christian form of the Arabic tongue. Indeed, all the men
mentioned here worked very hard on this same task, whether through their
translations or in their glossaries, where one and the other kind of Arabic
were rarely mixed, as in the dictionary of Quranic terms compiled by Vitto-
rio Scialic and Gabriel Sionita.94 Marracci himself seems to have written a
Quranic glossary in which murikn is translated as associates, krn or
kur as indels, al-rh al-qudus as the equivalent of Spiritus Sanctitatis,
rasl legatus, kalima verbum, kitb liber, gayb arcanum, al-Mash
Christus or Messias, al-Tawrt Pentateuchus, al-hira novissimum
saeculum and ganna Paradisus.95
The committee which undertook the translation of the text of the Laminae
Granatenses and the accompanying report on it therefore had a background of
working together. Its members had spent years on an Arabic translation of the
Bible, and each of them had individually reected and worked on the best
means to discriminate between what was to become the established and canon-
ical form of Christian Arabic and a distinct, Islamic, form of Arabic. They were
in no doubt that it was the second of these forms that had been used in the
writing of the texts of the Lead Books, and thus it was that they submitted the
following list of Mahometan terms as part of their nal report:
93
Nomenclator arabico-latinus, (Bibliothque nationale de France, ms. arabe 4345). Alastair
Hamilton, Abraham Ecchellensis et son Nomenclator arabo-latinus, in B. Heyberger (dir.),
Orientalisme, science et controverse : Abraham Ecchellensis (1605-664), Turnhout, Brepols
( Bibliothque de lcole des Hautes tudes , Sciences Religieuses), 2010.
94
Dictionarium Arabo-Latinum ex Alcorano et celebrioribus authoribus, BnF, ms arabe 4338.
95
M. Bormans, Ludovico Marracci et sa traduction latine du Coran, Islamochristiana, 28
(2002), p. 81.
PARS PRIMA
LAMINAS GRANATENSES
Mahumetanicis verbis, sententiis, fabulis, erroribus respersas esse

Verba mahumetanica in Laminis
Ex multis pauca seligata, nullis citatis locis, quia passim tum in laminis, tum
in Alcoranis ac Mahumetanorum libris occurrunt:
pro templo, quod vulgo dicut Mascheo seu Meschita

pro Adito templi /Templi adytum, seu Apsis
et pro Prelatis et Antistinibus sacrum
pro revelare, seu divinitus mittea sacros libros
pro hominibus, seu humano genere.
pro Idololatria tempora ante Mahumet advenere
pro gendre quoda serici seu aestis pretiosa
pro negatione sanctissima Trinitatis
pro Deo prout est Dominus Angelorum, hominum et
Geniom
pro Idolatris et Christiani
pro die Judici extrema
pro Indelibus
pro iis qui negant signa divina et . . . Alcoran
pro beato in Paradiso
R7-e
Mahumetanicis verbis, sententijs, fabulis, erroribus respersas esse
Indeles
Negantes signa divina, praesentim Alcorano
Habitatores Paradisi
Habitatores Gehenne
Muadus iste temporaneus
Patria Eclesias
Religio praesertim Mahumetanica
Meditatis rerum divinarum sepe (saepe) pro Alcorano
Directo Dei sem predestinatio
Homines et Genii
Inter Sapha et Marua, duo Montes in Mecca
Via recta: pro Mahometanismo
Poena, presertum
Damnationi
Dies certa, presertim
Iudicii
Tabula custodita
error crassur
commutare veritatem cum errore
Judea
Hora, pro die Judicii
Duo pondera, id est homines et genii

nelis, nolis
Adiutor
et devastare et restaurare terram
Patientiae pulcra
sucessor: de iis qui post Mahumeti imperius
Puricatio: pro circuncisiones ac Baptismo
Dealbatipro Apostoli Christi
Nazarenitas: pro Christianitate
spiritus Dei: pro Christo Domino
His et aliis huiusce modi nocibus Alcoranus alg q Mahumetanorum Libri referieti
sunt: Christiani Arabes vel nunquam vel rarissime cusuntur et illis quiidem pemcis.
The conclusion at which the Vatican experts arrived was that the Lead Books
were impious and profane, full of Mahometan terms which showed hatred
towards the Christian religion, and that even those sections which were clean
from a doctrinal point of view could not be considered completely reliable
because they were expressed in terms belonging to another religion and there-
fore invoked another religious culture.
A close reading of the list transcribed here enables us to see that it includes
terms used by Pedro de Alcal, and also in Mozarab texts. They are the same
terms which we have seen being employed over and over again throughout
this article. But it is worth asking whether this was in fact the case, i.e.
whether the terms really were indicative of an Islamic background, or to
what extent they were. The Roman Maronites had succeeded in creating a
Catholic and theological version of the Arabic language over the course of the
17th century. But before that period no such version had existed, so that it
seems legitimate to ask whether the Mozarab texts were really as Islamised as
they now seem to be. Did the cristianos arbigos of the Peninsula actually
have any other way of conveying certain terms and categories? From Pedro de
Alcal to Bartolom Dorador, they were all faced with the same diculties.
There is, of course, no doubt that the Lead Books of the Sacromonte were a
forgery, and that there was Morisco participation in the scheme. The ques-
tion I am raising, through the study presented here, is that of the extent to
which we can use the vocabulary and terminology employed in the texts to
decide that they were fundamentally Islamic.
Finally, it is of course ironic that it was the very same Eastern Christians
alluded to by Nez Muley or Ignacio de Las Casas in their defence of their
identity as cristianos arbigos who, as part of a defence of their own iden-
tity, denounced the Iberian Moriscos as irredeemable Muslims whom it
was impossible to integrate in the Catholic world. The Maronites successful
inclusion in that world was thus partly achieved and legitimised by the exclu-
sion of others who were in some ways akin to them.
Copyright of Arabica is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed
to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,
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to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,
users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

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Arabica 56 (2009) 495-528 brill.

The Religious Identity of the Arabic Language and the

Is Arabic an Islamic language? The rather provocative question with which

The Parchment and Lead Books of the Sacromonte of Granada

conversions. This point was stressed in Talaveras Instrucciones [Instructions]

he enjoyed full autonomy in the management of his diocese, Talavera sur-

cept of confession, regarded by Talavera and the entire Catholic church as a

became so palpable that King Ferdinand was forced to appoint Cisneros as a

ander VI congratulated Cisneros on the conversions that had been achieved26

Yo soy su intrprete, porque muchos destos nuevamente convertidos no

However, some voices struggled to present a dierent interpretation and it

The Defence of the Arabic Tongue

Nez Muleys line of argument in defence of the distinguishing cultural fea-

Luna and the Language of the Lead Books

report62 in which he expressed his support for the Phoenician version of

Possible Christian Arabic Sources for the Lead Books

The Laminae Granatenses and the Vatican Experts

Mahumetanicis verbis, sententiis, fabulis, erroribus respersas esse

pro templo, quod vulgo dicut Mascheo seu Meschita

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