Studies on the Moriscos, the former Spanish Muslims nominally converted to Christianity, and the Spanish treatment of the Islamic tradition in the Iberian peninsula in the early modern period, have been increasing ever since James Monroe published his Islam and the Arabs in Spanish scholarship (sixteenth century to the present) in 1970. Far more recently books such as Un oriente español: los moriscos y el sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma of 2010 (translated into English in 2013 as The orient in Spain) by Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano have discussed the effect of the Moriscos on the world of learning and the study of Arabic in Spain, while Katrina B.Olds's Forging the past: invented histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (2015) is one of a number of works that examine the consequences of Spanish Christian approaches to the Muslim tradition and the forgeries to which they led. In Admiration and awe Antonio Urquízar-Herrera covers a large part of ground that has already been explored. Other scholars have dealt with it with greater clarity and concision and without the irritatingly trendy use of a pseudo-scholarly jargon, but his own contribution, the analysis of the treatment of Muslim buildings, is nevertheless the result of exhaustive research and contains much that is new.

On the whole Spanish chroniclers writing as the great Muslim cities of Spain were ‘reconquered’ by Christian armies turned their backs on the tradition which the Arabs had established in the Iberian peninsula and which had made cities such as Córdoba centres of civilisation admired throughout Europe. This tendency increased markedly after the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492 and the subsequent attempts to convert or to expel the Spanish Muslims. The idea that Christian scholars propagated was that the Arab occupation was a more or less negligible interlude in the history of a country that had always been fundamentally Christian, and that the Spanish cities had their martyrs to prove it. As evidence forgeries, such as the ‘leaden books of Sacromonte’ in Granada, were supplied, relics were unearthed and ‘ancient’ images were produced. Where the buildings were concerned, as Urquízar-Herrera shows, a slightly different route was followed, at least to begin with. The massive monuments of the reconquered Muslim cities – the Great Mosque in Córdoba, the Giralda in Seville, the Alhambra in Granada – could be regarded as trophies, ‘memorials to Islamic defeat and Christian triumph’, and should thus be preserved. This was how the monuments of Córdoba and Toledo were seen by the early thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. The next step was to leave some of them standing but, in the case of most smaller mosques, to turn them into Christian churches. At almost the same time, however, there was another far more radical plan: to destroy them completely and to build new Christian churches in their stead. This is what happened ultimately, in defiance of the original treaty, to the main mosque in Toledo, first turned into a cathedral, and then torn down and rebuilt. Numerous Islamic buildings were destroyed in the process, but some of the largest and most impressive monuments remained, inspiring ‘admiration and awe’ and demanding justification. This led to yet another step, namely to argue either that the buildings themselves had originally been Christian or that they had been built on the site of Christian monuments. They were consequently scoured for signs of a Christian, usually a Visigothic, origin, and the archaeological research was attended by the discovery of objects which could allegedly also be dated before the Arab invasion. In the effort to deny any debt to Islam it was even claimed that some obviously Islamic monuments, such as the Torre Turpiana in Granada, were actually of Phoenician origin. Elsewhere attempts were made by antiquarians to estabish a Roman origin, and the Arabs were presented as the deliberate destroyers of the past glories of Spain. As in the case of the forged documents, however, Spanish scholars were by no means always in agreement with one another. The more enlightened ones not only refused to accept the spurious evidence but, like Esteban de Garibay, were also more open to the idea that the many centuries of Islamic rule formed part of the common Spanish heritage – an idea that would come into its own in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

While the question of how to deal with the culture of Islamic Spain exercised so many minds, the Spanish authorities were also trying to cope with the problem posed by the Moriscos themselves who, in the sixteenth century, still formed a sizeable proportion of the country's inhabitants. In This happened in my presence Patrick O'Banion, after a clear and competent introduction, gives an English translation of the trials by the Inquisition of the Morisco community of Deza, a small Castilian town not far from the borders of Aragon and situated between Siguenza and Zaragoza. The Moriscos made up about a quarter of the population. With some notable exceptions they had neither been integrated nor acquired the social status of the Judaeo-Conversos, the descendants of converted Jews. For much of the sixteenth century they managed to keep up certain Muslim traditions and to learn Arabic from the far larger Morisco community in Aragon, but the attitude of the Old Christians hardened, largely because of the Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras in the former kingdom of Granada which lasted from 1568 to 1571. In 1569 Deza received a visitation from the tribunal of the Inquisition in Cuenca. The member of the community regarded with greatest suspicion, Román Ramírez the Younger, was by far the best known and the most successful. Although he was, as O'Banion puts it, ‘renowned in the region as a storyteller, healer, and leader in the Islamic community’, and, in his youth, had been arrested for various offences including horse smuggling and duelling, he served frequently on the local town council. He also enjoyed the special protection of the feudal lords of Deza, the dukes of Medinaceli, who, in contrast to the middle and lower classes of Old Christians but like many other members of the higher Spanish nobility, were always favourable to the New Christian minorities and did what they could to alleviate the legislation directed against them. Ramírez died in custody, accused both of being a crypto-Muslim and of a pact with the devil. He was condemned posthumously and his bones were burnt at an auto-da-fe in 1600 attended by the king, Philip iii, his wife Margaret of Austria and his advisor the duke of Lerma.

But Ramírez was by no means the only victim. Many other members of the Morisco community were tried, and of these a number were condemned to the galleys. The charges were typical of Morisco trials at the time. They ranged from blasphemy and palabras escandalosas (which usually consisted of jokes about the Catholic saints and ceremonies), to ablutions, dietary peculiarities – notably the refusal to eat pork or drink wine – and the observance of Muslim traditions in funeral and marriage rites. Among the most heartbreaking documents are letters showing the efforts of the condemned Moriscos to avoid the galleys, but despite the pleas of physical disability a medical committee pronounced them all fit to serve. Nevertheless four of them were found physically unfit when they reached Puerto de Santa María. They were released only to join the other members of the Deza community on their way to exile in 1611.

This happened in my presence is a good introduction not only to the fate of the Moriscos, but also to the history of the Spanish Inquisition. ‘The Inquisition's goal’, writes O'Banion, ‘was not to send sinners to the stake. In fact, turning a heretic over to secular authorities represented a failure, for the Holy Office sought to return sinners to full communion with the Church and God.’ This is something that historians and students of the Inquisition are inclined, all too often, to forget.