by Hugh Thomas
In Granada, a recent monarch, Abú el-Hassan, had made a beautiful Christian prisoner, Isabel de Solís, into his favorite bride under the name of Zoraya. Hence, naturally, there was hatred between the two families of Abú el-Hassan’s wives.
The war against Granada had sometimes looked a well-matched one; the Spaniards had suffered defeats. But it now seemed certain that the emirate would soon yield, and the war end with a Christian triumph. After nearly eight hundred years, the entire peninsula would be free from Muslim rule. The victory would, if it came, derive from many things: the Muslims’ farming in the vega had been ruined by repeated Spanish raids, talas, carried out after 1482 from the newly conquered city of Alhama. These had destroyed wheat and olives. Other Castilian pressure had also been effective. City after city had fallen, even high-walled Ronda, which had been reputed impregnable; while, in 1487, the surrender to Castile of the port of Malaga seemed to have decided the war. Thousands were captured, hundreds enslaved.18
Granada still had an outlet to the sea over the mountains of the south, through the fishing village of Adra, and so, in theory, reinforcements from North Africa could be obtained. But that help did not come. The Muslim emirates in the Maghreb were friendly to the Nasrids but were at that time ineffective. Only one village outside Granada now provided fruit and vegetables, that of Alfacar, four miles away to the east on the slopes of the Sierra de Huétor. The ambivalent Emir, Boabdil, had once been a prisoner of the Christians, and though he had broken the terms of his family’s agreement with the Spaniards at least once, his loyalty to his own people was now questionable. Similar divisions within Granada had played a part in the Christian victories, especially after 1485, when the Spanish armies had cut the emirate into two parts.
It was not immediately obvious why the Christian campaign against Granada had been embarked upon in the early 1480s. Here were about half a million Muslims, whose rulers surely could have been bullied into reviving the payment of tribute, which they had paid fairly consistently for 250 years. There might be a need to wipe out the memory of 1481, when Mullay Hassan, uncle of King Boabdil, had seized the Christian town of Zahara (while its governor, Gonzalo Saavedra, had been carousing in Seville) and put much of the town to the sword. But revenge had surely been accomplished by Christian victories such as those in Alhama, Lucena, and Ronda.
At all events, a decision to absorb Granada into Castile had been taken at the Cortes (parliament) of Toledo in 1480. The chronicler Alonso de Palencia, who knew Queen Isabel well, believed that she and her husband, King Fernando, had been determined to bring to an end the independence of Granada from the very beginning of their reign. They had made truces with the emirate in the 1470s when they had domestic problems to settle, but when these were resolved, they instructed Diego Merlo, a bureaucrat of Seville, to embark on an offensive against Granada.19
The truth is that that emirate had in the thirteenth and most of the fourteenth centuries been seen by the Christians as just a lordship for Muslims within Castile. The rulers of Granada would sometimes send soldiers to fight for the king of Castile. But it seemed recently that they had taken advantage of the civil wars in Castile and, during one of Isabel’s truces, had broken the old links. Now was the time to prevent such things recurring (this was Fernando’s explanation to the Mamelukes of Egypt).20 The wealth of Granada, though overestimated, was also attractive to the Christians, even if much of it depended on Genoese merchants (the Centurioni, the Palavicini, the Vivaldi) as well as the Datini of Prato, whose trading had linked Muslim Spain to North Africa and thence to Italy, and who might not remain there after the military defeat of the last Nasrids. The Genoese were, of course, Christian, but their entrepreneurs wore that faith lightly.
Fernando and Isabel were certainly anxious to please the Pope, and the nuncio of Pope Sixtus IV, Niccoló Franco, had talked in the 1470s of the danger of the survival of a Muslim enclave in Spain, at the same time as he had spoken adversely of the Jews in Castile. That Pope had issued a crusading bull calling for war against Granada in 1479 and repeated it in another such document, Orthodoxae Fidei, of 1482. The swift conversion of mosques to churches, with a lavish ornament of crosses and bells, had been a mark of all towns captured by Christians. Christianity had always played a central role in the Castilian army. The soldiers in battle were preceded by a silver cross that had been a present from the same Pope Sixtus IV. It was carried ahead of the ensign of Santiago, the patron of the country. The army was also accompanied by the sword of San Fernando, the king who had conquered Seville in the thirteenth century, as well as by the banner of San Isidore, the learned Archbishop of Seville in the seventh. Priests were always available to sing a Te Deum, and archbishops and bishops were often present in battles.
Those were days when popes and cardinals expected to win their own combats. Bishops surrounded themselves with households of armed retainers. They vied with one another in the splendor of their troops. When necessary, churchmen could fight, and fight they did, their forces being sometimes augmented by mercenaries. They had many political roles. Luis Ortega, Bishop of Jaén, had been a good governor of Alhama after its conquest in 1482, while Archbishop Carrillo had led troops (against King Fernando) at the Battle of Toro in 1475. The bishops of Palencia, Ávila, and Salamanca had respectively led 200, 150, and 120 lancers, paid by themselves, in that same civil war.21
One purpose of the war with Granada was probably strategic: to wrest the southeast coast of Spain from a power that had links with the feared, aggressive international menace of the Turks.22 At least twice in the past, a king of Navarre had sought an alliance with Granada, and so to face Castile with the prospect of a war on two fronts.23 In those circumstances, it could seem, as it had to the nuncio Franco, an outrage that there should still be an Islamic monarchy on the Spanish mainland. The Muslims of the Maghreb might one day recover their confidence and help Granada in the future. In addition, the last century or so had seen much skirmishing along the Christian-Islamic frontier. Foolhardy raiding disturbed every truce and threatened commerce, even if it inspired fine ballads concerning brave commanders on both sides lightly mounted on splendid horses (each riding Moorish style, “a la jineta”), serving beautiful ladies with style or cunning, leading at least to the capture of a herd of cattle. In these ballads, Christians and Muslims were presented as having the same admirable qualities, and villains were absent.
That undisciplined frontier life seemed dangerous to monarchs imbued with a desire for efficiency, and who anyway disliked the idea of aristocrats making names for themselves in conflicts that the Crown could not control. There was always a risk, too, that minor raids might by accident grow into a major war at what might turn out to be an inconvenient moment for other reasons.
Perhaps, also, King Fernando, who had proved himself in earlier wars a successful strategist and commander, feared that the military advantage the Christians enjoyed because of their artillery might one day be matched by comparable Muslim innovations.24
The King’s Florentine admirer, Machiavelli, had a more cynical explanation: twenty-five years later, in The Prince, he would suggest, speaking specifically of Fernando, that “nothing brings a prince more prestige than great campaigns and striking demonstrations of personal abilities.” So perhaps the campaign in Granada was the final settlement of a national challenge, an endeavor in which feuding noblemen might come together in loyal agreement. Machiavelli thought that Fernando had used the conflict “to engage the energies of the barons of Castile who, as they were giving their minds to the war, had no mind for causing trouble at home. In this way, without their realizing what was happening, he increased his standing and his control over them.”25
The Duke of Medina Sidonia, head of the Guzmán family, had thus become reconciled with his old enemy, the Count of Arios, the leader of the Ponce de León family, when he brought his reinforcements to save the latter before the walls of Alhama. Joint service to a common, national cause was drawing these aristocrats together in
a way that they had never contemplated in the days of peace. Then Juan López de Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, an old antagonist of the Queen, had been active against the Muslims in the Alpujarras, the fertile mountains to the south of the city, only the previous year. Rodrígo Téllez Girón, Master of the Order of Calatrava, had opposed Isabel in the civil war in the 1470s; but he died in her cause at Loja in 1482. A national nobility with patriotic loyalties was thus being born.
2
“The only happy country”
Spain is the only happy country …
Peter Martyr, LETTERS, 1490
The court of Spain that had organized the war against Granada was peripatetic. Its annual progress had for generations resembled that of the flocks of merino sheep that were taken from summer to winter grazing grounds and back again. Recently, the royal peregrinations had been mostly in the southeast, for the needs of war had dictated royal movements. But before the hostilities, the center of Spanish power, law, and administration had been nomadic.1 In one year, for example, the monarchs stopped in twenty separate cities, as well as in many villages where they and their suites passed uncomfortable nights between larger towns. They had been to the grain-producing territories in the south and west, as well as the basin of the Ebro, but they had not neglected the less fertile regions, such as Galicia and the Basque country. They went to wine-making areas, such as the rich land around Seville but also the central Duero valley and lower Galicia. They knew as much about seigneurial property as they did about ecclesiastical and royal holdings—those being then the three great divisions of ownership.
In 1488, the court had spent January in time-honored Saragossa, moved through Aragon to the enlightened port of Valencia at the end of April, and in May gone down to Murcia, a city whose impressive walls guarded little of interest. The monarchs then separated, the King going to a military camp near the sea, at Vera, the Queen remaining in Murcia. But in August, the court, reunited, had returned to Castile, passing a few days at Ocaña, near Toledo, which, with its abundant waters, was a favorite resort of the Queen’s, before reaching austere Valladolid in September, where Isabel spent the rest of the year, while Fernando went to the rich ecclesiastical towns of Plasencia and Tordesillas, on the Duero.2
Such journeys had marked the fifteen years of the reign of these monarchs. They had characterized, too, the rule of their ancestors.3 Governance for all these rulers implied thousands of hours on horseback: the saddle constituted the real throne of Spain.4 At each stop, cabinets and cases containing papers and registries, chests full of Flemish tapestries and pictures, luxurious dresses and jackets from the Low Countries, files and wax for seals, all carried on mules, would be unpacked.5 Every Friday, whether they were in Seville or Segovia, in Murcia or in Madrid, the monarchs would set aside time for public audiences in which they personally dispensed justice.6
The palaces, monasteries, or castles where the court stayed were much alike: usually constructed around open courtyards, the exteriors designed for defense, not decoration, any attempt at which was, as a rule, confined to the wall above the entrance. Little outside these edifices betrayed how many floors there were within. Most of them had circular towers at each corner that contrasted with the rectangular design of the place, while square-hewn ashlars gave a finish to those corners. The Spanish monarchs thus saw much rough construction in these houses of the noblemen where they passed so much time.
At that time, Valladolid, the largest city of Castile after Seville, was visited by the monarchs and the court more than anywhere else. Indeed, it was almost a capital, and it had benefited: the new chancellery, or supreme court, of Castile sat there permanently after 1480, and that city’s elaborate College of San Gregorio, founded by the Queen’s late confessor, the erudite Alonso de Burgos, afterwards Bishop of Palencia, was among the architectural jewels of the time; though, like its more elaborate neighbor, the College of Santa Cruz, commissioned by Cardinal Mendoza from the outstanding Spanish architect Enrique de Egas, it was still being built. These new colleges seemed to the new generation of bishops and professors to be the keys to learning. Yet it did not occur to Spanish kings to envy, much less copy, the fixed capitals that their sedentary neighbors in Portugal, France, and England—indeed, in Granada—had long ago established. Had not emperors also been itinerant in Rome?7 These royal journeys were hard on both court and advisers, as well as monarchs (especially those who suffered from gout). The wise procuress, Celestina, was caused by Fernando de Rojas, in the great novel of that name, to remark: “He who lives in many places rests in none”; and to quote Seneca: “Wanderers have many dwelling places but few friends.”
It is true that Isabel, then pregnant, had lingered in 1478 in Seville, while her husband, Fernando, repaired to Barcelona and to Saragossa to face what were perceived as threats from Islam and from France. Sometimes, too, the King would choose a place to stay a few days where the hunting was good; and both monarchs would often be found in Jeronymite monasteries,8 such as that fine agricultural enterprise, La Mejorada, near Medina del Campo, or the Franciscan foundation of El Abrojo, near Valladolid, in order temporarily to escape the world.9
These stately travels had benefits: Fernando and Isabel had visited nearly every part of Spain and delivered justice there to plaintiffs. English monarchs sometimes stayed all their days in the home counties, French ones rarely left the Île de France. But Spanish rulers knew their own realms better than those others did theirs. When they sought to establish a balance between conflicting demands for land, they knew the practical effects of their own judgments. They also met provincial men who, they noted, might become good public servants.10 It was all the more important to carry out these journeys because the kingdoms were fragmented. Fernando and Isabel had, whenever necessary, met their four Cortes (parliaments), of Cataluña and Aragon, of Valencia as well as of Castile. In 1486 they had even been in remote Galicia, primarily to repress the insurrection of a count of Lemos. Once there, however, they had not only supervised the destruction of twenty castles of potentially rebellious noblemen but had visited Santiago to pray before the tomb of the apostle St. James, and they commissioned the great Egas to build the hospice next to the late Bishop Diego Gemírez’s cathedral—an edifice that, it was hoped, might constitute a school for doctors as well as a refuge for pilgrims.11
The monarchs had also been twice to Bilbao, while Fernando had been to Guernica in 1476, and sworn there to respect the fueros (rights) of Vizcaya. The only part of Spain they had not visited was Asturias, cradle of their kingdom though it was. Oviedo, the ancient capital, remained cut off behind high mountains, which a distant ancestor of Fernando and Isabel, King García of Asturias, had crossed in 912, never to return.12
The journeys of the monarchs were echoed, if not matched, by those of their grandest noblemen. For they, too, often had property in several parts of the kingdom and moved between these possessions regularly.13
The cities of Castile where the monarchs stayed can be seen in the drawings of the Flemish painter Anton van den Wyngaerde. True, the artist was active two generations later, and some of the cities that he carefully sketched grew in the interval; in the light of this increase, in the mid-sixteenth century, Fray Ignacio de Buendía wrote his curious play El Triunfo de Llaneza, protesting against the migration of peasants to the towns in search of money. While Barcelona boasted about 25,000 people in 1512, there were over 40,000 there in Wyngaerde’s time.14 In Buendía’s day, depopulation was marked in the countryside. The character, too, of some cities changed; the new cathedral in Seville was only finished in 1506. After 1492 Granada built churches. But there is no guide so detailed as that of this Fleming, and many of the towers, palaces, streets, and walls in 1490 must have been much as they appear in his elegant representations.
The German painter Christoph Weiditz, of Strasbourg, recorded how the people of Spain looked. Again, his skillful “costume book” was also compiled later, but fashion did not change quickly and Weiditz’s knights, ladies
, sea captains, and black and Muslim slaves of 1528 would have been recognizable to the traveling monarchs of 1490. Are they caricatures, his laughing merchants, his buxom countesses, his pensive sea captains, his hardworking servants and slaves, and his bumptious horsemen?15 Even a superficial reading of the one Spanish masterpiece of the time that retains its savor today, La Celestina, suggests that the men and women of 1490 were much as Weiditz depicted them.
The court implied, first and foremost, the presence of the Queen and the King, placed in that order, for Queen Isabel was the more powerful of the two. Her collaboration with King Fernando was thought a marvel at the time, and it is difficult to think of another example of two married sovereigns acting so successfully together. William and Mary in England? The power of the former was far greater than that of the Queen. There had been two kings in Sparta and two consuls in Rome, but such precedents are inadequate. Perhaps surprisingly, the success of this matrimonial collaboration has never led to a repetition of their example.
These monarchs were much seen about in Santa Fe in 1491, usually on horseback. We can glimpse Isabel’s purposeful character from looking at her statue, praying intelligently in the Chapel Royal of the cathedral of Granada, as designed by Felipe de Bigarny.16 Fair-haired, blue-eyed, and white-skinned like most of her family, the Trastámara, we see her, too, in many portraits.17
In 1491, Isabel was forty years old, having been born in 1451 in a palace of her father, King Juan II of Castile, in the small but many-towered town of Madrigal de las Altas Torres in Castile, a day’s ride south of the market city of Medina del Campo. It was not a monumental building, merely one for occasional residence on a royal journey. When King Juan died in 1454 and was succeeded by Isabel’s older half-brother, Enrique IV, she removed to Arévalo, twenty miles to the east, where she lived for seven years with her increasingly senile mother. There were many mudéjar buildings there and other reminders of what the Christians had conquered, mudéjares among them. In Arévalo, they and the Jews were tolerated minorities, and the rabbi and his son were well known there for their eloquence. As a child, Isabel often visited the Franciscan monastery outside the town, founded, it is said, by St. Francis in person; she became fond of that order, and would even ask to be buried in a Franciscan habit. The Castilian childhood of Isabel marked her: the heat in summer, the cold in winter, the wild winds, the isolation of the towns.
