Another and more probable legend, however, tells how Aguilar was killed in fair fight by the commander of the Moors. He was the fifth lord of his line who died in combat with the infidels.
This temporary success, however, only aggravated the reprisals of the now exasperated Christians. The Count of Tendilla stormed Guejar; the Count of Serin "blew up the mosque in which the women and children of a wide district had been placed for safety," and King Ferdinand himself seized the key of the passes, the castle of Lanjaron. The remnant of the rebels fled to Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey, where their skill as artificers secured them a living. Thus the first revolt in the Alpuxarras was suppressed.
Half a century of smouldering hatred ensued. The Moriscos grudgingly fulfilled the minimum of the religious duties imposed on them by their outward conversion; but they took care to wash off the holy water with which their children were baptized as soon as they were out of the priest's sight; they came home from their Christian weddings to be married again after the Mohammedan rite; and they made the Barbary corsair at home in their cities, and helped him to kidnap the children of the Christians. A wise and honest government, respecting its pledges given at the surrender of Granada, would have been spared the dangers of this hidden disaffection; but the rulers of Spain were neither wise nor honest in their dealings with the Moriscos, and as time went on they became more and more cruel and false. The "infidels" were ordered to abandon their native and picturesque costume, and to assume the hats and breeches of the Christians; to give up bathing, and adopt the dirt of their conquerors; to renounce their language, their customs and ceremonies, even their very names, and to speak Spanish, behave Spanishly, and re-name themselves Spaniards. The great Emperor Charles V. sanctioned this monstrous decree in 1526, but he had the sense not to enforce it; and his agents used it only as a means of extorting bribes from the richer Moors as the price of official blindness. The Inquisition was satisfied for the time with a "traffic in toleration" which filled the treasury in a highly satisfactory way. It was reserved for Philip II. to carry into practical effect the tyrannical law which his father had prudently left alone. In 1567 he enforced the odious regulations about language, customs, and the like, and, to secure the validity of the prohibition of cleanliness, began by pulling down the beautiful baths of the Alhambra. The wholesale denationalization of the people was more than any folk—much less the descendants of the Almanzors, the Abd-er-Rahmāns, and the Abencerrages—could stomach. A fracas with some plundering tax-gatherers set light to the inflammable materials which had long been ready to burn up: some soldiers were murdered by peasants in whose huts they were billeted; a dyer of Granada, Farax Aben Farax, of the blood of the Abencerrages, gathered together a band of the disaffected, and escaped to the mountains before the garrison had made up their minds to pursue him; Hernando de Valor, of the race of the Khalifs of Cordova, a man of note in Granada, but brought to disgrace by his dissolute habits, was chosen King of Andalusia, with the title of Muley Mohammed Aben Omeyya; and in a week the whole of the Alpuxarras was in arms, and the second Morisco rebellion had begun (1568).
The district of the Alpuxarras was well fitted to harbour a revolt. The stretch of high land between the Sierra Nevada and the sea, about nineteen miles long and eleven broad, is "so rudely broken into rugged hill and deep ravine, that it would be hard to find in its whole surface a piece of level ground, except in the small valley of Andarax and on the belt of plain which intervenes betwixt the mountains and the sea. Three principal ranges, spurs of the Sierra Nevada, and themselves spurred with lesser offshoots, intersect it from north to south. Through the glens thus formed a number of streams—torrents in winter but often dry in summer—pour the snows of Muleyhacen and the Pic de Valeta into the Mediterranean. In natural beauty, and in many physical advantages, this mountain land is one of the most lovely and delightful regions of Europe. From the tropical heat and luxuriance, the sugar-canes and the palm-trees, of the lower valleys and of the narrow plain which skirts the sea like a golden zone, it is but a step, through gardens, steep cornfields, and olive groves, to fresh Alpine pastures and woods of pine, above which vegetation expires on the rocks where snow lies long and deep, and is still found in nooks and hollows in the burning days of autumn. When thickly peopled with laborious Moors, the narrow glens, bottomed with rich soil, were terraced and irrigated with a careful industry which compensated for want of space.[32] The villages, each nestling in its hollow, or perched on a craggy height, were surrounded by vineyards and gardens, orange and almond orchards, and plantations of olive and mulberry, hedged with the cactus and aloe; above, on the rocky uplands, were heard the bells of sheep and kine; and the wine and fruit, the silk and oil, the cheese and the wool of the Alpuxarras, were famous in the markets of Granada and the seaports of Andalusia."[33] It was this beautiful province that the bigotry of the priest was about to deliver over to the sword and brand of the soldier.
The great rebellion in the Alpuxarras lasted for two years, and its repression called forth the utmost energy of the Spaniards. Its records are full of deeds of reckless bloodshed, of torture, assassination, treachery, and horrible brutality on both sides; but they are relieved by acts of heroism and endurance which would do honour to any age and any nation. The struggle was fierce and desperate: it was the Moors' last stand; they felt themselves at bay, and they avenged in their first mad rush of fury a hundred years of insult and persecution. Village after village rose against its oppressors; churches were desecrated, Our Lady's picture was made a target, priests were murdered, and too often horrid torture was used against the Christians, who, for their part, took refuge in belfries and towers, and valiantly resisted the sudden assault of the enemy. We read how two women, left alone in a tower, fastened the door, and armed only with stones which they aimed from the battlements, wounded by arrows, and supported by nothing save their own brave hearts, kept out their assailants from dawn till noon, when relief fortunately came. Another golden deed is told of the advance of the Christian expedition to put down the revolt. The troops had arrived at the ravine of Tablete, a grim chasm, a hundred feet deep, with a roaring torrent at the bottom. The Moriscos had destroyed the bridge, and only a few tottering planks remained, by which a venturesome scout might cross if needful. On the other side of these planks Moorish archers kept their bows at stretch. It is not surprising that the soldiers recoiled from such a crossing; the dancing plank, the torrent's roar, and the Moorish arrows, were enough to daunt the bravest. While the army stood irresolute, a friar came to the front, and calmly led the way across the plank over the torrent, to the very arrows of the enemy, who were too much struck with admiration to think of shooting. Two soldiers sprang after the devoted friar—one reached the other side, the other fell into the hissing flood beneath. Then the whole army plucked up heart and crossing as quickly as they could, and mustering on the other side, charged up the slope, and carried the position. It was a Thermopylæ reversed, with a friar for its Leonidas; a Balaclava galloped upon quicksands; and it redeems a long catalogue of baseness.
The Marquess of Mondéjar, who commanded at Granada, endeavoured by conciliation and generosity to calm the rebellion, which his resolute march into the mountains at the head of four thousand men had to a great extent suppressed; but an accidental massacre at Jubiles, and an act of treachery at Laroles, rekindled the flame of revolt which had been partly extinguished; and the ruthless murder of one hundred and ten Moriscos by their Christian fellow-prisoners in the jail of the Albaycin still further exasperated the persecuted race. Mondéjar was innocent of any share in this bloody work, and was marching with his guard to the prison to quell the disturbance, when the Alcayde met him with the remark: "It is unnecessary; the prison is quiet—the Moors are all dead." After this the Moriscos gained daily in strength, and Aben Umeyya became really lord of the whole district of the Alpuxarras. This incapable and profligate sprig of Cordovan nobility enjoyed his power for a very brief period, however; for in October, 1569, private spite and suspicion led to his being strangled in bed by his own followers, when an able and devoted man, the true leader of the rebellion, and one who could even dare to die for his friend, assumed the title of king as Muley Abdallah Aben Abó.
Aben Abó had to deal with a new opponent. The king's half-brother, Don John of Austria, a young man of twenty-two, but full of promise, superseded Mondéjar as commander-in-chief against the Moriscos, and after a protracted war of letters he convinced Philip of the gravity of the situation and the necessity for strong measures. At last Don John received his marching orders, and after that, it was but a short shrive that the Moriscos had to expect. In the winter of 1569-70 he began his campaign, and in May the terms of surrender had been arranged. The months between had been stained with a crimson river of blood. Don John's motto was "no quarter"; men, women, and children were butchered by his order and under his own eye; the villages of the Alpuxarras were turned into human shambles.
Even when the rebellion seemed at an end, a last feeble flicker of revolt once more sprang up: Aben Abó was not yet reconciled to oppression. Assassination, however, finally convinced him: his head was exhibited over the Gate of the Shambles at Granada for thirty years. The Grand Commander, Requesens, by an organized system of wholesale butchery and devastation, by burning down villages, and smoking the people to death in the caves where they had sought refuge, extinguished the last spark of open revolt before the 5th of November, 1570. The Moriscos were at last subdued, at the cost of the honour, and with the loss of the future, of Christian Spain.
Slavery and exile awaited the survivors of the rebellion. They were not very many. The late wars, it was said, had carried off more than twenty thousand Moors, and perhaps fifty thousand remained in the district on that famous Day of All Saints, 1570, when the honour of the apostles and martyrs of Christendom was celebrated by the virtual martyrdom of the poor remnant of the Moors. Those taken in open revolt were enslaved, the rest were marched away into banishment under escort of troops, while the passes of the hills were securely guarded. Many hapless exiles died by the way, from want, fatigue, and exposure; others reached Africa, where they might beg a daily pittance, but could find no soil to till; or France, where they received a cool welcome, though Henry IV. had found them useful instruments for his intrigues in Spain. The deportation was not finished till 1610, when half a million of Moriscos were exiled and ruined. It is stated that no less than three million of Moors were banished between the fall of Granada and the first decade of the 17th century. The Arab chronicler mournfully records the coup-de-grâce; "The Almighty was not pleased to grant them victory, so they were overcome and slain on all sides, till at last they were driven forth from the land of Andalusia, the which calamity came to pass in our own days, in the year of the Flight, 1017. Verily to God belong lands and dominions, and He giveth them to whom He doth will."