A condemned pirate’s extravagant tale may conceal a true Morisco arms plot

Evidence

Alonso de Contreras, so he tells us, at the lowest point of his many misfortunes, was imprisoned and tortured (by Christian jailers) in an attempt to make him confess to being the “King of the Moriscos” of Hornachos. This was in 1609 (chronological exactitude is not what we can expect in this literary genre, but as we will see, what Contreras alleges that year of all years might just have been true). Contreras tells his readers that some five years earlier (in 1603) he had arrived at “a place called Hornachos” (una tierra que llaman Hornachos, he says, apparently vaguely—he seems to wish to avoid suggesting that he made his way there on purpose), at the time “entirely inhabited by Moriscos, except for the parish priest” (words strongly reminiscent of those used in that report from 1494, “Todos son moros salvo un capillejo” [All are Muslims except a miserable chapel; Gonz´alez Rodr´ıguez 1990, 70]), and there, allegedly by chance, he stumbled on a large cache of arms. … Of all the highly colored incidents narrated, this is perhaps the one most difficult to accept at its face value, and yet can it be that we may have here some approximation to facts that Contreras himself may not have been in a position fully to grasp? — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1707

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter on the Granadan lead tablets via Lopez Madera’s authorship, and to the 1494 report that Hornachos was ‘all Muslims except a chapel’.