Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Conquest, Rape, and Marriage: Forced Miscegenation in the Hapsburg Empire

2011; College of Letters and Science of the University of California Santa Barbara; Issue: 17 Linguagem: Inglês

1540-5877

Lucas A. Marchante Aragón,

Spanish Culture and Identity

When confronting one of Juan Goytisolo’s Spanish editions of his novel Don Julian (1970), I was puzzled by the publishing house’s resort to an image of the Giralda, Seville’s cathedral’s bell tower, for the cover’s illustration. The novel bitterly denounces the aversion for anything Muslim in the cultural desert of Franco’s neo imperial and fundamentalist Christian Spain of the twentieth-century Cruzada, while it exposes the debt that the Spanish construction of national culture has with those same despised Muslim roots. The choice seemed odd for a reader whose perception of the monument came mediated by his education in the transitional period between the long fascist dictatorship and the new Spanish democracy. The new contingency made us unjustly perceive this icon of the city of Seville as one of the symbols of Franco’s folkloric and populist image of Spain mass reproduced in a myriad of kitschy object. Why using this image as a paratextual element for a novel that precisely tries to undermine the image of Franco’s Spain? Our new pro-European construction of identity rejected the Francoist Ministry of Tourism slogan “Spain is different” that was used to promote Spain as a brand abroad in a way that reduced the country’s image to that of the southern regions “re-conquered” from Islam in the middle ages. Upon closer examination, once the filter which conditioned this reception was set aside, the image could not be more appropriate. The original twelfth-century minaret is a remnant of the old great mosque of Seville, which had been badly damaged by an earthquake in the XIV century. What had been one of the tallest buildings of medieval Europe, soaring up to 269 feet, was topped in the sixteenth century by a belfry structure in the mannerist style. Finally, in 1568, a colossal weathervane, thirteen feet high, in the shape of a Minerva-like victorious warrior matron that symbolizes the triumph of the Christian faith was raised to crown the tower. The decisions for these architectural actions on the Islamic monument, which had been admired and left untouched since the year of the conquest of Seville in 1248, are related to the arrival in the Andalusian city of men who were close to the circles which promoted the idea of Charles V as universal monarch. These circles, led by the emperor’s chancellor Mercurino Gattinara, 1 an avid reader of Dante’s De Monarchia, included the Emperor’s confessor Garcia de Loaysa, who would be made archbishop of Seville in 1539; Alonso de Manrique 2 before him; and ultimately, Fernando de Valdes, General Inquisitor who met the Emperor in Flanders (Guillen 76-77). In the eyes of these men