Cross-cultural Movement in the Name of Honour: Renegades, Honour and State in Miguel de Cervantes’ Barbary Plays

Abstract

Miguel de Cervantes’ work displays a broad range of people who transgress the limits defined by gender, ethnicity, nation and religious denomination. In recent Cervantes scholarship, this motley crowd of cross-cultural identities has been seen as examples of Cervantes’ opposition to the racially based identity politics of State and Church in Counter-Reformation Spain. However, Cervantes’ Barbary and Turkish captivity plays suggest that cross-cultural identities may also, and quite to the contrary, be viewed in relation to the limited reach of the State's power and its limited capacity to define, shape and control its subjects. This becomes particularly clear in El gallardoespañol where the soldier Fernando de Saavedra,in an act of disobedience to the king, crosses the border between the Christian and the Muslim world to become a renegade in order to defend his anachronistic and self-assertive idea of honour. If we are to understand the connection between honour and cross-cultural identity in El gallardoespañol, we should not look at the identity politics of State and Church, but at the way in which the play is concerned with the Spanish maurophilia.

Notes

¹Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain. Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003), 3.

²Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World. How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York/Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 253–66.

³Maria Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers. A Captive's Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2002), 191.

⁴ Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, Hispanic Issues 7 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992). See also Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991).

⁵This change in perspective away from the mechanisms of control (the State) to the subject him- or herself is partly influenced by Anthony J. Cascardi's answer to the above-mentioned collection of essays, Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain. In his Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State U. P., 1997), Cascardi adds the following note to the general argument in Culture and Control: ‘I suggest that an analysis of any culture's “mechanisms of control” requires a corresponding analysis of the “subjects of control”. For if culture can indeed be studied in terms of its “control mechanisms” then it is necessary also to ask, who were its subjects and how did they become subject to control?’ (111). In this article I have been concerned with showing how ‘subjectification’ (in the sense of submission to state central power) constitutes a fundamental subject matter in Cervantes’ works.

⁶Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2 vols (Paris: Armand Colin Éditeur, 1990 [1^st ed. 1966]), II, Destins collectifs et mouvements d'ensemble, 610–13.

⁷Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes. Ensayos críticos (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterrra, 2010), 51.

⁸ Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes, II, Teatro. Los tratos de Argel, La destrucción de Numancia, Ocho comedias y entremeses, Biblioteca Castro (Madrid: Turner, 1993), 168. Further references to Cervantes’ plays are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.

⁹‘Calles, calles, Saavedra. —cese tu melancholia; / tórnate moro si quieres—y versa qué te daria: / darte he villas y castillos—y joyas de gran valia. / Gran pesar ha Saavedra—de esto que oír decía. / Con una voz rigurosa, —de esta suerte respondía: / —Muera, muera Saavedra—la fe no renegaría, / que mientras vida tuviera—la fe yo defendería’ (El Romancero viejo, ed. Mercedes Díaz Roig [Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1999], 108–09).

¹⁰Garcès, Cervantes in Algiers, 188.

¹¹Garcès, Cervantes in Algiers, 219.

¹²Minni Sawhney, ‘Cervantes’ Cosmopolitan El gallardo español during an Earlier Clash of Civilizations’, Theatralia: Revista de Teoría del Teatro, 5 (2003), 167–76 (p. 172).

¹³Gethin Hudges, ‘El gallardo español: A Case of Misplaced Honor’, in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 13.1 (1993), 65–76.

¹⁴Márquez Villaneuva, Moros, moriscos y turcos de Cervantes, 50–51.

¹⁵Maurophile literature was codified as a genre by the French Hispanist Georges Cirot in a number of articles reprinted in Bulletin Hispanique, 1938–44. Subsequently, many Hispanists have discussed how the fact of these positive representations of the Moors was related to Spain of the Inquisition. According to Luce López-Baralt, the highly commendatory descriptions of Moors dressed in gorgeous clothes, sporting brilliant jewels and shining weapons seem to represent a glaring contrast to ‘the Moor of flesh and blood [who] was forbidden his own cultural identity’ (Islam in Spanish Literature [Leiden: Brill, 1992], 209–10). For a discussion of maurophile literature, see Chapter 7, ‘The Two Sides of the Coin: The Moor in Spanish Renaissance Literature’.

¹⁶Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, Primera parte (1595), ed. Shasta M. Bryant (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000), 25.

¹⁷The dominant role played by the military order of Calatrava in Guerras civiles indicates that the action takes place in a period before the establishment of a strong centralized power. The order was founded in Castile in the twelfth century as a military branch of the Cistercian Order. The Order consisted of monks who became knights, in other words. However, being a knight was in complete agreement with being a monk, since to both of them it was a question of spending their lives fighting a heroic battle, whether against Muslims or against passions, doubt and temptations. The knights of Calatrava were landowners on a grand scale and wielded their authority over thousands of peasants and vassals. Many of the order's members could muster armies of as many as two thousand knights. It enjoyed the privileges of political autonomy, and in spiritual and religious matters it was second only to the French superior of the Cistercian Order. During the fifteenth century generations of Castilian kings strove to win influence in the choice of the Grand Master of Calatrava in an attempt to contain the Order's power and autonomy. See Joseph F. O'Callaghan, ‘The Affiliation of the Order of Calatrava with the Order of Cîteaux’, Analecta Cisterciensia, 16 (1960), 3–59 and ‘Chivalry’ in Catholic Encyclopedia, <www.new-advent.org./cathen/>.

¹⁸Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, ed. Bryant, 30.

¹⁹Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, ed. Bryant, 30.

²⁰Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, ed. Bryant, 30.

²¹Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation. Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

²²Michael Harrigan, Veiled Encounters. Representing the Orient in 17 ^th -Century French Travel Literature (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008), 50.

²³ La Araucana, in which Alonso de Ercilla sets up the Araucanians as an equal foe in order to enhance the heroism of the Spanish soldiers, is an exception.

²⁴Quoted from Roger Boase, The Troubadour Revival. A Study of Social Change and Traditionalism in Late Medieval Spain (London: Rougledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 113–14.

²⁵Boase, The Troubadour Revival, 114.

²⁶ Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes, I, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Biblioteca Castro (Madrid: Turner, 1993), 396–97.

²⁸ Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes, I, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 474.

²⁷The awareness of a loss of individual significance was widespread. Boase quotes from the Italian Andrea Navagero's travel-book from his journeys in Spain and France, Il viaggio fatto in Spagna et in Francia (1563), in which the wars of Granada were described the following way: ‘Fu gentil guerra, non vi eerano anchor tante artigliarie come cone dopoi, & molto piú si potevano cognoscere i valent’ huomini, che con se ponno hora’ (Boase, The Troubadour Revival, 114).

³⁰Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa, 51.

²⁹Ellen G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press 1983) 51.

³¹Juan Goytisolo, Crónicas sarracinas (Barcelona: Ibérica, 1982), 60–61.