Violencia

by Jason Webster

  Remarkably, Granada had existed as an independent state for some two hundred and fifty years. That it withstood Christian assault for so long was due in part to the very mountainous terrain of its kingdom, home to the highest peak on the Peninsula, Mulhacén1, which reaches over 3,200 metres. Granadan survival was also thanks partly to divisions on the Christian side: hostilities between the various kingdoms were added to by repeated civil wars within their respective boundaries. In addition, large bribes in the shape of tributes of gold brought in from across the Sahara helped keep the Christians at bay. Nasrid Granada was a cash cow, and no one in Christian Spain was in a hurry to see it disappear.

  The Nasrid Kingdom of Granada

  The balance was uneasy and fragile, but while it lasted, Granadan culture shone. In the fourteenth century the Nasrids build the most luxurious sections of their Red Fort – Al-Qasr al-Hamra – a wonder of the world and today one of the most visited tourist sites in Spain (second only to Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona). Around the same time, as mentioned earlier, Muhammad V loaned his artisans and builders to his friend, Pedro the Cruel. Moors and Christians settled into a kind of cohabitation which had marked much of the past several centuries.

  All this changed, however, in the final decade of the fifteenth century. And what precipitated the change was a marriage.

  Ferdinand, heir to the Aragonese crown and later the model for Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’, married Isabella, heir to the Castilian crown, at Valladolid in 1469. Both were members of different lines of the Trastámara family, which had ruled Castile since 1369, and Aragon since 1412. The nuptials were celebrated in secret; Isabella had been whisked away from the clutches of her brother King Enrique IV to find refuge with friends, while Ferdinand had made his way from Zaragoza by night in disguise, narrowly escaping death at the hands of an overzealous guard en route at Burgo de Osma. The couple were penniless and had to borrow money from Jewish moneylenders to pay for the wedding. With time they would become the richest and most powerful couple in the world and force into exile the very Jewish friends who had helped them in their time of need.

  Before they did so, however, they had to fight and win many battles.

  Powerful figures within Castile, headed by King Enrique himself, were lined up against Isabella and Ferdinand and were prepared to go to war. The couple’s marriage, followed by a successful accession to their respective thrones, would create a union of the Castilian and Aragonese crowns. This was something which their enemies were keen to prevent, preferring to bring about a union of the Castilian and Portuguese crowns through a proposed marriage between Isabella and the Portuguese king. Isabella, however, was strong-willed and independent and had her own ideas. Unlike the ageing Portuguese monarch, Ferdinand was only one year younger than herself and a far more attractive proposition. Meanwhile Ferdinand had come under the influence of Catalan intellectuals who for some time had been advocating the creation of a political ‘Spain’ – as opposed to a merely geographical one – through the union of Aragon and Castile.

  The irony that the impulse behind what would eventually turn into a unified Spanish state largely originated in Catalonia will not be lost to contemporary readers. It will come as little surprise, however, to see how a country forever racked by civil war could only be forged through yet more civil war. Ferdinand’s father, King Juan II of Aragon, was fighting within his own lands against much of the Aragonese nobility over the succession to the throne and how to deal with a deep economic crisis. Lasting ten years, the war only ended in 1472, shortly before Juan died and Ferdinand became king. Meanwhile in Castile, King Enrique’s death in 1474 sparked a full-blooded civil war over who should succeed him: his half-sister Isabella, wife of the new Aragonese king, or Enrique’s daughter Juana, engaged to be married to the same king of Portugal whom Isabella had rejected. The conflict would last for four years, and Isabella emerged victorious thanks largely to Ferdinand bringing his Aragonese forces (and his own skill as a military commander) into the fight. By 1479 the war was over, but tensions within Castile still remained; the union of the Aragonese and Castilian crowns was anything but secure.

  What helped to cement their power and the joining of the two kingdoms, however, was another civil war – this time the reigniting and completion of the ‘Reconquest’.

  As discussed earlier, the ‘Reconquest’ should be seen as a long series of civil wars in the same way that the myriad wars between Christian Spaniards are. Civil conflict is a common denominator of Spanish history and the differences between the various sides can be cultural, ideological, religious or any number of identifiers. Not because the ‘Reconquest’ wars are nominally between Muslims and Christians should they be seen as any different from the other civil wars throughout Spain’s complex national story (in some of which, for example the Spanish Civil War of the twentieth century, religion also played a pivotal role).

  Christian Spain in the run-up to 1492 was far from being a unified nation: Portugal and Navarre were independent kingdoms, while Isabella’s rule in Castile was still shaky following the war which broke out on her accession to the throne. Nonetheless, the joining of the Castilian and Aragonese crowns brought about by Ferdinand and Isabella’s marriage gave the Christian side an advantage over Muslim Granada, whose downfall was largely brought about by its own internal divisions. In the 1480s, dynastic struggles among the ruling Nasrid family led to a full-blown inter-Muslim civil war which saw the kingdom split in two for several years. Christian Spain took its chance and leapt.

  What followed was a ten-year war in which the borders of the last Moorish kingdom were gradually whittled away until all that remained was the city of Granada itself. Ferdinand skilfully used the infighting among the Nasrids to his own advantage, as well as employing gunpowder to great effect with the use of cannon during the long sieges, and primitive handguns among his infantry. This gave his forces a technological advantage which the Granadans, still fighting a more medieval style of warfare, couldn’t match. And with his navy blockading the Granadan ports, no Muslim army from North Africa could be called upon to relieve the struggling Moors. Defeat was inevitable, and on 2 January 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella took their prize. The final campaign of a civil war, itself born out of other civil wars, had come to an end.

  The conquest of Granada had huge ramifications, leading directly to the other momentous events of that fateful year. Ferdinand and Isabella had made history, and victory sealed their joint rule of the greater part of the Peninsula. ‘Spain’ as a political project was no longer an idea, but on its way to becoming a reality as a (largely) united, Catholic state. The king and queen’s energies were now free to turn to other projects.

  One man who had witnessed events in Granada was riding away from the city as it was falling. He was distraught: his plan for a revolutionary naval expedition had been rejected once more by the court. But as he wearily made his way, he was overtaken by a royal messenger calling him back for an audience; in the wake of victory, Ferdinand and Isabella were reconsidering their decision.

  The man, a Genovese merchant and sailor, pulled on his horse’s reins and retraced his steps with renewed hope. In so doing, he changed the world for ever.

  1 Named after one of the last Granadan kings, Muley Hasan, who, legend says, is buried at the summit.

  NO JEW

  The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 did not occur in a vacuum: anti-Jewish sentiment in Castile and Aragon had been peaking for at least a hundred years before. But it did come as a surprise, particularly to Spanish Jews themselves.

  Ferdinand and Isabella’s wedding in 1469 was cause for celebration among the Jewish community. Jewish advisors to Ferdinand had counselled him to go ahead with the marriage and even lent the impoverished prince the money for the moderate ceremonies. The heir to the Aragonese crown had Jewish blood on his grandmother’s side. But more importantly, a strong and stable state was generally considered a better environment for Jews in Spain, with royal protection
given to a minority increasingly subject to violent persecution.

  As elsewhere in Europe, the fourteenth century had been particularly bad for Jews in Spain, not least in the wake of the Black Death of the 1340s, for which they were widely blamed. Growing hostility within Christian Spain to the ‘killers of Christ’ culminated in 1391 with a series of pogroms which began in Seville and spread into Castile and Aragon. Jewish quarters were ransacked and burnt, and many hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jews were murdered. Large numbers of the community converted to Christianity in order to save their skins.

  Things continued in a similar vein into the fifteenth century. One particularly zealous converter of Jews at this time was the Valencian ‘Saint’ Vicente Ferrer. Ferrer’s method was simple: first he sent his thugs into a town or village to stir up anti-Jewish feelings, while he waited at a distance. As the violence escalated and the Jews began to fear for their lives, Ferrer would make his move and ride into town, ‘miraculously’ bringing the violence to a halt. The grateful Jews, amazed by his special powers and thankful for being saved (while, presumably, still scared out of their wits) then converted to Christianity en masse, becoming known as conversos, or ‘new Christians’.

  This gave the authorities a new, self-created difficulty, however, one which the Almohads had struggled with two hundred years before: how to tell if the conversions were genuine. While tempted to slaughter the converts, the Almohad caliphs had stopped short for fear of killing people who had truly become Muslims. The Catholic solution to the problem was to set up the Spanish Inquisition.

  We shall explore the Inquisition in greater depth in a later chapter. For now it needs to be understood as an important step on the road towards the final expulsion of the Jews. At the beginning at least, its target was the converso community.

  From being pro-Jewish at the start of their reign, by 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella’s ears had been turned by growing rumours about ‘false’ conversos – converts to Christianity who were secretly true to their Jewish faith. In that year a Papal Bull gave them permission to set up their inquisition. By 1481 the new persecuting organisation had established its first office in Seville, where the pogroms of 1391 had begun. That same year, dozens of conversos from prominent families were burnt alive in autos da fé – ‘acts of faith’.

  For the time being, however, Jews who had not converted still enjoyed royal protection. But powerful figures within the Church were already planning their eventual expulsion from the Peninsula. Chief among them was a converso himself, the notorious Grand Inquisitor and Isabella’s confessor, Tomás de Torquemada. As the conquest of Granada neared its conclusion, Torquemada seized his chance: in the town of La Guardia, near Toledo, a sixty-year-old converso named Benito Garcia was accused of crucifying a Christian child. Under torture, Garcia named several other conversos and, importantly, Jews as being involved as well. Torquemada set up a special commission to investigate. Not surprisingly, the accused were found guilty and later executed at Avila.

  The case became well known, inflaming anti-Jewish anger even further. And it had the desired effect: a sixteenth-century inquisitor later wrote that the La Guardia ‘murder’ was the decisive factor in swaying Ferdinand and Isabella to sign the expulsion decree.

  The monarchs didn’t waste their time. The exact date is unclear, but by the end of January 1492, only weeks after taking possession of Granada and signing a peace accord in which the Jews were specifically given protection, the royal signatures were on the infamous ‘Alhambra Decree’, the order for all Jews in their kingdoms either to convert or to leave the country. At the end of March the edict was formally issued, being sent to city and regional authorities with the order that it should be kept secret until a formal announcement in May. Jews were given until the end of July to pack and go. Anyone staying after that date who had not converted to Christianity would be subject to summary execution.

  While an estimated one hundred thousand converted and remained, as many as one hundred and seventy thousand people fled Spain over the summer of 1492 (the figures are anything but certain; it is still not known exactly how many were involved). Jewish leaders, some of them close to the royal couple, begged for the decision to be reversed. But to no avail: Ferdinand and Isabella remained firm. The Jews had to go.

  After a presence of over fifteen hundred years, another bright Spanish light was, once again, simply extinguished. Jews had seen Spain – Sefarad – as a promised land in its own right, yet now, forced into exile, they were forbidden from carrying gold, silver or jewels with them, and had to sell their possessions at give-away prices before making their way out of the country. Many fled to Portugal, where, for a hefty price, they were given only temporary refuge. Others went to Navarre, still an independent kingdom – although not for long. Meanwhile, thousands of others made their way to ports where they sought passage across the pirate-infested Mediterranean at the hands of unscrupulous and greedy captains, only to find their entry often blocked on the other side. Many, however, did make it, spreading across the Ottoman Empire, forming the basis of the Sephardic Jewish community, and speaking a fifteenth-century form of Spanish still in existence to this day known as ‘Ladino’.

  They were the lucky ones, however. One particularly tragic outcome lay in wait for a number of Jewish children who were forcefully separated from their parents. A Portuguese Jewish chronicler tells the story:

  Mothers scratched their faces in grief as their babies, less than three years old, were taken from their arms. Honoured elders tore their beards when the fruit of their bodies was snatched before their eyes . . . Several women threw themselves at the king’s feet, begging for permission to accompany their children, but not even this moved the king’s pity. One mother, distraught by this horrible unexplained cruelty, lifted her baby in her arms, and paying no heed to its cries, threw herself from the ship into the sea and drowned, embracing her only child.

  At Ferdinand’s orders, the children were put on board a ship bound for the newly discovered island of Sao Tomé, off the West African coast, ‘inhabited by lizards, snakes and other venomous reptiles, and devoid of rational beings’.

  Finally, when those innocent children arrived at the wilderness of Sao Tomé, which was to be their grave, they were thrown ashore and mercilessly left there. Almost all were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island and the remainder who escaped these reptiles wasted away from hunger and abandonment.

  Meanwhile, back in Spain, the expulsion, which was designed to resolve once and for all the Jewish ‘problem’, had only made matters worse by swelling the numbers of conversos within the population. Santiago’s Other had still not been annihilated, and the Inquisition’s executioners would be kept busy for centuries to come.

  NO WAY

  It’s accepted now that Columbus was not the first European to cross the Atlantic: archaeological research has proved conclusively that the Vikings beat him to it by several centuries. What’s not so well known, however, was that he wasn’t even the first person to make the attempt from Spain. The Arab historian Al-Masudi relates how a captain from Caliphal Cordoba named Khashkhash sailed on a voyage across the ‘Circumambient Sea’ as early as the ninth century. ‘He was absent for a time, then returned with rich booty and his exploit is well known among the Spaniards.’ Frustratingly, Al-Masudi doesn’t provide further details, although a second historian relates how Khashkhash later died in 859 fighting the Vikings, no less.

  Under the Almoravids, a second expeditionary voyage left Spanish shores some time during the first half of the twelfth century under a captain Raqsh al-A’azz, who died. But then a third attempt left Moorish Lisbon to cross the ‘Sea of Darkness’ to find out ‘what it contained and where it ended’. Eight cousins described as ‘adventurers’ set sail, first travelling west for eleven days, then south for a further twelve, at which point they arrived at an ‘island of goats’. The twelfth-century Ceutan geographer Al-Idrisi takes up the story:

  After sailing for twelve m
ore days they saw an island which seemed to be inhabited and there were cultivated fields. They sailed that way to see what it contained. Soon boats encircled them and made them prisoners and transported them to a poor village situated on the coast. There they landed. The sailors found there people with red skin with little hair on their bodies, and with very straight hair on their heads. They were all very tall and their women were extraordinarily beautiful. The sailors were taken to another island, where they were imprisoned for three days. On the fourth day someone came to them who spoke Arabic, interpreting for the chief of that place . . . Then the natives prepared a boat, blindfolded the sailors and sailed with them for three days till they left them on the coast.

  The Moorish adventurers finally made their way back across the Atlantic, and the city of Lisbon named a street in their honour – Darb al-Mugharririn, the ‘Street of the Adventurers’. ‘Red-skinned’ people with very straight hair sound a lot like native Americans, but some historians have concluded that the Portuguese cousins only got as far as the Canaries. What’s curious is that they should have found an Arabic speaker on their distant shore. But then Columbus himself took an Arabic interpreter on his first voyage, expecting him to converse with the natives on the other side. The Moors, in his mind, weren’t only to be found on his doorstep in southern Spain and the Mediterranean, but on the far side of the globe as well.

  Columbus’s voyage of discovery is born out of a Christian victory over Muslims: the fall of Granada meant Ferdinand and Isabella could turn their minds to other matters, while a long and costly war meant they were in desperate need of new potential sources of wealth. Military success over Spanish Muslims also emboldened the Catholic Monarchs to attempt a much greater conquest: Columbus expected to find the eastern shores of Asia – the ‘Indies’ – on the other side of the Atlantic, and Arabic-speaking Christian communities who would ally themselves with Spain in a pincer campaign against the Islamic heartlands, attacking from both east and west in order to conquer Jerusalem. It is interesting to note, however, that his discovery, which would lead to Western Christian culture dominating much of the world, was built on anything but Christian foundations: the technology he used – astrolabes, caravel ships and maps – were of Moorish origin, while the money for the trip (1,140,000 maravedíes) came from the Jewish moneylender Luis de Santángel, a Valencian. In a fascinating development, ‘the three Spains’ – Christian, Islamic and Jewish – combined, despite being ostensibly opposed, to make the Columbus voyage possible.