Anglo-Spanish Relations in Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar: Snapshots of Exile, Race and Nation in the Early Modern World

Diaspora and exile are entangled with important topics in sixteenth-century England and Spain: race, multilingualism, national identity, and empire. As nationalism in early modern European kingdoms coalesces around ideas of racial and religious purity, many of their subjects become othered—Catholics become a “minority” in England after the messy process of the Reformation, just as Spain’s moriscos and conversos (Spaniards of Hispano-Muslim and Hispano-Jewish descent) do after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela establish the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 to interrogate the confessional purity of Spanish Jewish and Muslim converts to Catholicism. Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar explores the webs of identity, resistance, language and diaspora in late sixteenth-century Spain through the character of Luzia Cotado, a conversa of Madrid whose linguistic ties with the Sephardic diaspora becomes the source of a great magic power. Luzia becomes embroiled in an occult competition sponsored by Antonio Pérez, the secretary of Philip II, who is trying to find a way to counterbalance England’s victory in the 1588 Armada.

In historical fiction, history itself is the source of worldbuilding. Bardugo’s novel shows us how many of the events formative to early modern England and Spain’s nation-building are entangled with the turbulent process of alliance and empire building. The 1588 Armada casts a long shadow over the book, showing the way in which the fate of crypto-Jewish minorities like Luzia are intertwined with transnational power struggles. The Folger Shakespeare Library has a significant cache of diplomatic and political papers documenting Anglo-Spanish relations leading up to and after the 1588 Armada. For instance, in De Conquestu Angliae per Hispanos, a collection of letters and intelligence reports from the Habsburg empire and its allies written in Latin, Spanish and Italian, we can see why the Spanish court thought that the Armada would succeed. In letter written in Castilian sent in the years leading up to the Armada, a Spanish diplomat in Scotland assures Philip II that the Armada will find support in Scotland because of Anglo-Scottish tensions. He discusses Scottish anger at Elizabeth I for her persecution of English Catholics and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. He also assures Philip II of the boy king (referring to King James VI)’s support of Spain for the reasons outlined above. He wasn’t wrong in his diagnosis, but he was mistaken in supposing that Scotland would welcome an invading army so close to its own borders.

In The Familiar, Philip II’s secretary Antonio Pérez becomes a major vehicle for the plot by sponsoring the competition for a “white magic” sorcerer who will help Philip II regain the power and prestige that he lost through the failure of the 1588 Armada. Pérez is a fascinating historical figure who is right at the center of Anglo-Spanish cultural exchanges and political rivalry at the time. One of the secretaries of Philip II, Pérez led an ostentatious and luxurious life in court and was known to be a charming ladies’ man. He was also fond of plays and spectacle. He also ran an extensive network in the criminal underworld (similar to Victor de Paredes, a character who sports considerable similarities with Pérez). In the novel and in history, Pérez has to escape from Spain after losing Philip’s favor for successfully plotting the assassination of Juan de Escobedo, another secretary in Philip’s civil service. Pérez becomes a refugee in Elizabeth’s England, leading to his becoming memorialized by Shakespeare as Don Adriano de Armado in his play Love’s Lavor’s Lost (first published in 1598). In contrast to Luzia, who is seized by the Inquisition for her practice of magic and her Jewish roots, Pérez becomes a celebrity immigrant (for a while) who is valued for the inside information he can provide of Philip and his bureaucracy. Pérez and Luzia show us how the fate of immigrants in the early modern world (and today) is varied, determined by a range of factors, including their class, race and political alliances.

The Folger has a wide range of books of Pérez’s letters and books, which he published after his exile from Spain. This includes Cartas de Antonio Perez Secretario De Estado Que Fue Del Rey Catholico Don Phelippe II de este nombre  Para Diversas Personas Despues De Su Salida De España (The Letters of Antonio Perez, Former Secretary of State to the Catholic King Don Philip II, written to different people after his leaving Spain), which collects the letters he wrote to such figures as Elizabeth I, the Earl of Essex, King Henry IV of France, and other luminaries. Essex was Pérez’s patron in England and his death, he lost considerable influence at the Elizabethan court.

The most fascinating aspect of The Familiar is Luzia’s identity as part of Spain’s crypto-Jewish minority and the way in which Bardugo transforms her diasporic language—aljamiado— into a source of magical power.  My own research often touches on the entangled histories of Spanish conversos and moriscos, two groups whose racial othering intersects in telling ways. Spanish Jews and Muslims were both “officially” expelled from early modern Spain — the Jews upon the Conquest of Granada in 1492 and the Muslims shortly after, in 1509. Those that remained were forced to convert and are called Cristianos Nuevos or New Christians. New Christians were perceived to be of impure blood, the target of the Inquisition’s limpieza de sangre statues. While a number of conversos and moriscos did indeed become practicing Catholics, many held on to their faith as crypto-Jews and Muslims. Exile and expulsion of these two minority groups also continued, sometimes voluntarily (as a result of state persecution) and sometimes involuntarily. One of the most spectacular examples of the latter was Philip III’s 1609 Order of Expulsion of the Moriscos, in which all Spaniards of Hispano-Muslim descent were ordered to leave Spain. This resulted in the exile of anywhere between 300,000 to 1 million Spaniards, depriving Spain of a skilled labor force, and creating a pan-Mediterranean diaspora.

The Folger Shakespeare Library has a number of documents related to Spain’s 1609 Order of Expulsion of the Moriscos and its associated propaganda material. One of these books is Valencian priest Jaime Bleda’s 1610 book, Defensio Fidei in causa Morischorum Regni Valentiae totiusque Hispaniae (Defense of the Faith in the Cause of the Moors of the Kingdom of Valencia and also the whole of Spain). While the book is written in Latin, it is prefaced with a Spanish language authentication from Philip III signed “Yo el Rey” (I the King). In Philip’s preface, he endorses Bleda’s book by commending Bleda for his hard work: “El qual auiades compuesto con mucho estudio y trabajo” ([that] which you have composed with much study and labor.” In the book, Bleda mounts a racially charged public relations campaign to different audiences. In one section, he addresses the Pope saying, “And do not suppose, most Holy father, that I fabricate their crimes, [those of the Christians without Christ, whose religion they have taken from the cradle, who follow the Mahometan rites and none of the Christian religion.” As we can see, this xenophobic rhetoric is both generalizing and contradictory. Bleda’s text gives us a snapshot of Islamophobia in early modern Europe as a discourse deployed to persecute groups of people and reimagine them as minorities and exiles.

Exiles and immigrants are mobile bodies, suffering the privations of disruption and dislocation. Memorably, in Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare and his collaborators call for compassion to be shown towards recent immigrants, asking Londoners to feel empathy for their plight. The archives show us that while the fate of immigrants varied due to race, class and access to resources, they are nevertheless all central to the imaginative life of the nation.