Lost Paradise by Elizabeth Drayson

Author:Elizabeth Drayson [Drayson, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788547444
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Chest containing the funerary relics of the martyrs on the altar of the collegiate church of the Sacromonte.

© Archivo Abadía del Sacromonte

Aerial view of the Abbey of the Sacromonte.

Lukasz Janyst/Alamy

Miguel de Luna is the most fascinating, mysterious and complex of all the personages who play a part in the drama of the Lead Books. When he sat in his Sacromonte house translating the Torre Turpiana parchment he was about thirty-eight years old, born in Granada around 1550 into a noble Morisco family originally from nearby Baeza. As a young man he learned Arabic and studied medicine at the newly founded university in the city. He worked as a physician in Granada but it was authorship that became fundamental to his life as the vehicle through which he conveyed his radical, subversive views. Luna’s treatise on bathing, written in 1592 and reflecting the latest medical thinking, was a thinly veiled political and religious statement about the importance of restoring the prohibited Morisco practice of taking baths, which purported to discuss their therapeutic value from a solely scientific, pragmatic perspective. His ulterior motive was unsuccessful as the treatise was never published, but the very opposite was the case with a work written in the guise of his other profession of translator. The True History of King Roderick (Verdadera Historia del rey don Rodrigo) was published in 1592 as a crucial reinterpretation of the events surrounding the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711, which sought to render the Arab Muslims comprehensible and acceptable to Christian culture. Luna alleged that his history was the translation of an unknown Arabic source he found in the library of El Escorial. The account was very popular, with seven reprintings and translations into other European languages, but it transpired that this ‘true history’ was in fact a colossal fabrication, which fooled many learned people including the two Inquisitors who assessed whether it should be censored or not. Boldly dedicated to King Philip II, Luna’s alternative history aimed to give political and religious legitimacy to the Moriscos’ claim that they had the right to live in Spanish territory, and was written at a time when the Church was acting fast to close out any traces of religious otherness. It ventured towards a utopia of mutual tolerance between Arabs and Christians by capitalizing on Spain’s Achilles heel, the inability to distinguish between illusion and truth.

For Miguel de Luna, words were power at a time when Moriscos in Granada, as well as those in internal exile, were a powerless minority. The most crucial aspect of his life was his ambiguous involvement with the Lead Books, initially as their translator in his capacity as a converted Muslim member of the elite Christian royal establishment. He began work on translations of the first two lead texts in May 1595 and issued a very persuasive report for the king in October, adamantly supporting their antiquity because, he asserted, the great age of the lead they were made from proved they were too ancient to

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