Miguel de Luna

Miguel de Luna was a Granadan Morisco physician, Arabic interpreter and translator who worked for the Spanish crown during the reigns of Philip II and Philip III. In 1592 he published what he claimed was a translation of an ancient Arabic chronicle of the conquest of Spain. The work recast the Muslim invaders as honourable and tolerant and developed an alternative version of Roderic’s fall, but its supposed source is now recognised as Luna’s own fabrication.

Luna is also widely associated with Alonso del Castillo and the production or interpretation of the Lead Books of Sacromonte, texts that attempted to reconcile Arabic language and culture with an ancient Christian history for Granada. His writings illuminate the intellectual strategies available to Moriscos facing surveillance, forced assimilation and eventual expulsion, while also raising difficult questions about forgery, translation and historical authorship.

Elizabeth Drayson’s The King and the Whore begins with the sparse and contradictory evidence for Roderic’s reign and defeat, then shows how later Christian and Arabic writers turned a political and military collapse into an intimate story of rape or seduction, dishonour and betrayal. Tracing the narrative through chronicles, ballads, drama, opera, historical writing and modern fiction, the study demonstrates how each age reshaped Roderic and Florinda to express different anxieties about gender, religion and national identity. Particular attention is given to Miguel de Luna’s fabricated Arabic history and to the way censorship, romantic nationalism and changing attitudes towards sexual violence altered the legend’s meaning. Elizabeth Drayson’s The Lead Books of Granada follows the Morisco translators Miguel de Luna and Alonso del Castillo, Archbishop Pedro de Castro’s determined patronage, the growth of Sacromonte and the long Roman investigation that ended in condemnation in 1682.