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the incredible story of the “leaden books”
At the end of the 16th century, two moriscos dreamt up the idea of falsifying some scripts - known as the “leaden books” because they were enclosed in sheets of lead - which they then “found” in a cave of the hill, in the hope of improving their sorry lot as Christians of Arab origin, given that after the bloody Moorish uprising of 1568, any trust the old Chrisitans may have had in the religious sincerity of the new Christians had sunk to its most abysmal point.
These tablets preposterously described, in Arabic, the martyrdom of Granada’s first bishop and patron saint, San Cecilio, presented as a pre-Islamic Arab who had introduced himself into the peninsula at the time of the Roman colony and converted to the faith of the persecuted Christians, sharing the same fate as them. The hoax was cleverly designed to drum up sympathy for those beleaguered moriscos who had not been expelled several years before due to the rebellion, and for many years the lie worked, at least for the Church, which lost no time in building an enormous abbey in the “sacred” place, as a center for “romerías” or mass pilgrimages, which it continues to be today.
To paraphrase one of the many authors who have written on the subject, “the false discovery dramatically stimulated the religious fervour of the granadinos, in a century when faith in the Catholic doctrine was being weakened by the new reform movements then raging everywhere”. The Vatican finally denounced the counterfeited Arab texts, but it took a very long time to do it, precisely because the two moriscos had also “found”, along with the leaden plates, the supposed relics of the saint who had been brutally executed in the 3rd century.
As we know, the churches of Andalucian towns did a thriving trade with the bones, locks of hair and other anatomical parts of outstanding Christians, even buying and selling whole corpses which were then displayed (and in some cases are still displayed) in glass-covered coffins, since the presence in a church of holy relics increased its prestige in the eyes of the faithful, who in turn increased their donations. This type of commerce seems despicable to us today, but in those superstitious times it was seen as being quite normal: the faithful needed miracles, and the relics improved their chances of getting them. The two moriscos’ daring attempt to advance their political interests by making an opportune discovery was in itself nothing new, since centuries earlier the remains of Saint James (Santiago) were found in much more incredible circumstances in Galicia, just when the military drive of the Reconquest was most badly in need of a new religious site to defend.
When the Vatican did intervene - almost a century later -it did so with characteristic shrewdness, hanging on to the part of the story which served its purposes and dumping the rest: the Pope declared that the “books” which claimed that the saint was an Arab were fake, but that the relics found with them were genuine. In this way it shook off the embarrassing link with Christendom’s traditional enemy while keeping alive what had then become the centerpiece of the highly popular shrine of the Sacromonte.
