Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The development, on the suggestion of Isabel’s adviser Quintanilla, at the Cortes of Madrigal of 1476, of a national version of the armed brotherhoods (hermandades), which had been set up to ensure order locally, created the semblance of a Castilian police, also with judicial functions: every town had to provide a horseman for every one hundred householders. The first commander was Fernando’s illegitimate brother, Alfonso de Aragón, Duke of Villahermosa.10

  As usual, when monarchs seem to be responsible for great changes, some insist that the transformation began long before the reigns of those particular kings. The historian Tarsicio de Azcona, for example, speaks of the entire family of Trastámara and their supporters as revolutionaries.11 But the feats of these last two members of the family, Isabel and Fernando, were quite special.

  Exactly how many soldiers were assembled at Santa Fe in 1491 for the final battle against Islam in Spain is difficult to say: perhaps there were six thousand to ten thousand knights and ten thousand to sixteen thousand infantrymen, in an army possibly totaling some eighty thousand.12

  Fernando had shown himself prudent as commander in chief, a characteristic he had demonstrated before, in the campaigns against Portugal and the rebellious Castilians. The destruction of Tájara, the siege of Malaga, the capture of the supposedly impregnable Ronda, and the seizures of smaller places such as Setenil (where the King’s grandfather, another Fernando, had been defeated) and Alora (“thou well-walled city, astride the stream”) had been triumphs for him; and he had learned to improvise in adverse circumstances.13

  The Queen, too, in her preparations in Córdoba in 1484, as much as at the siege of Burgos, had shown herself a skillful commissary, a founder of military hospitals, and an efficient provider of artillery, food, horses, and men. Engineers, builders of roads, blacksmiths, and oxen were all required. To organize these was no ordinary task: the army of Castile needed thirty thousand pounds of wheat and barley every day.14

  Outstanding among the leading Spanish commanders was the impetuous Rodrigo Ponce de León, Count of Arcos, red-haired and tall, the hero of both the contemporary chronicler Andrés de Bernáldez and the nineteenth-century American historian William Prescott. Don Rodrigo embodied the idea of a love of chivalry, worshiping honor, valor, loyalty to the monarch, courtesy, and generosity. The Scottish philosopher David Hume correctly reflected that in “the fifteenth century in Spain, chivalry and knighthood were raised by the overflowing imagination of the people to a cult.”15 Ponce de León best embodies that mood.

  Though Don Rodrigo had once supported Juana la Beltraneja and the Portuguese, and broken the royal truce with Granada in 1477 to seize two small Islamic towns the next year, he had also saved the life of Fernando in battle.16 He was an accomplished commander: he had, in 1482, gathered 2,500 horsemen and 3,000 foot soldiers at Marchena and taken them undetected across difficult country to capture the rich city of Alhama—the most remarkable single feat of the war. He had also imaginatively built a wooden fortress capable of harboring 14,000 infantry and 2,500 horsemen to serve the besieging forces outside Malaga in 1487.

  A more cosmopolitan knight was Íñigo López de Mendoza, the sumptuous Count of Tendilla, a nephew of Cardinal Mendoza who became the first governor of Alhama after its fall. He had then been ambassador to Rome and had astounded even the Vatican by his extravagant conduct.17 Neither should we forget the hereditary Constable of Castile, Pedro Fernández de Velasco, Count of Haro, who had been wounded in the face at Loja (the constabulary had been made hereditary in his family in 1472, just as the admiralty of Castile had been given over to the family of Enríquez, a good way of ensuring loyalty). The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the uncrowned monarch of Seville, had meanwhile offered a hundred galleys full of supplies to the royal army for the siege of Malaga.

  These and many other noblemen rode into war as if they had at least glanced at such works as A Treatise on the Perfection of Military Triumph (Tratado de la Perfección del Triunfo Militar) by the Queen’s secretary, Alonso de Palencia, or The Catechism of Knights (Doctrinal de los Caballeros) by the late Bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena.

  Historians used once to dwell on the clothes used in this perambulatory, bellicose court—rightly, since both men and women dressed to impress. Thus we hear how the English knight Sir Edward Woodville was “sheathed in complete mail” over which he wore a “French surcoat of dark silk brocade.” Horses also often wore silk, and the mules on which the Queen’s ladies rode were, we hear, “richly caparisoned.” The Queen on occasion wore a skirt of brocade. Her friend Felipa de Portugal had such heavy ornamentation on her dress that it diverted the dagger of a would-be assassin at Malaga.18 War thus stimulated every kind of commerce as it always inspires technological innovation. The captains of Castile were living between several worlds.

  Serving these captains were men from all parts of Spain. They were divided roughly into eight groups. First, there were the municipal forces, both cavalry and infantry, the former dominating. All regions of Spain, including remote Galicia and Vizcaya, sent some men. Second, there were the three main military orders, Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava, which had played such a part in earlier wars against Islam. They were mobilized for the last time in this war against Granada. The Order of Santiago furnished about 1,500 knights and perhaps 5,000 infantrymen, the other two a little fewer.19 They did not always perform well: the commander of the Order of Santiago, Alonso de Cárdenas, in 1483 led an attack toward Malaga from Antequera, but lost his way in the Sierra de Ajarquía and was heavily defeated, though he himself escaped with his life.

  Third, the monarchs had a royal guard of one thousand mounted lancers. These were commanded in 1490 by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, a younger son of one of the great families of the city from which he took his name. In his youth a page of Archbishop Carrillo, he fought continuously in the war against Granada from Alhama onward, being wounded in battle and being particularly effective in the unromantic business of the tala, the destruction of agriculture in the vega of Granada. He was already held to be a “mirror of courtesy”: lordly with lords, soldierly with soldiers, at ease in palaces with courtiers, adept at maintaining his equilibrium in all circumstances, especially in combat. His mastery of Arabic made him a good negotiator as well as a warrior. The most feared of Castilian leaders, Fernández de Córdoba was an Achilles without his sulky vanity; indeed, without his heel.20

  Every monarch of Castile had also about fifty bodyguards, the so-called monteros de Espinosa, armed with crossbows, traditionally from the picturesque Castilian town of that name, in a pretty valley in the southern foothills of the Cantabrian mountains. Their task was to preserve the king by night as well as by day.21

  Then, fourth, there were troops deriving from the Hermandad, the police force that had been founded on a national level in 1476 but that was diverted by the war into making a military contribution of about 1,500 lancers and fifty handgunners divided into captaincies. These troops were often commanded by noblemen and used to man garrisons in captured towns.

  It would be foolish, too, to forget the army of servants and slaves who attended the monarchs and all other distinguished members of the court, including churchmen. Perhaps there were a thousand people in the royal service altogether.22 The slaves included Canary Islanders, Muslims captured in earlier wars, and blacks from Africa.

  Members of the Spanish court, the Spanish nobility and the tradespeople, the clergymen and the bakers all usually owned one or two slaves each, and in the case of great men, many more. The Duke of Medina Sidonia in 1492, for example, had ninety-five slaves, many of them Muslim and nearly forty black.23 There may have been about 100,000 slaves in Spain in 1490, Seville having the largest such population. Some slaves could have been the descendants of the many eastern European slaves who had been sold in western Europe during the Middle Ages, giving indeed the word slav to this status of service in place of the old Latin servus.

  The diversity of Spanish medieval slaves was extraordinary
: there were Circassians, Bosnians, Poles, and Russians. Some would have been captured in battles against Granada and might themselves be Muslims. Others would have been bought in the thriving slave markets of the western Mediterranean, perhaps in Barcelona or in Valencia, in Genoa or in Naples. Some slaves were men or women seized in the Canary Islands, even in the still unconquered Tenerife or in the already subdued La Palma or Gomera. Yet others, principally Berbers, came from Spain’s little outpost in northwest Africa, Sahara, on the coast almost in sight of the Canary island of Lanzarote. A few black slaves were bought from merchants in Lisbon who, for the last two generations, had been trading people whom they had acquired on the west coast of Africa, anywhere between Senegal and the Congo, perhaps from Guinea; many were sold by Florentine or Genoese merchants in Portugal, or by their agents in Seville.

  The number of slaves was not surprising. Slavery had never died since the days of antiquity in the Mediterranean and, if anything, had been given a boost by the wars in Spain between the Christians and the Muslims. Christians customarily made slaves of their Muslim captives; and Muslims did the same with Christian prisoners, sometimes taking them to North Africa to work on public undertakings, just as Christians employed their Muslim slaves for building. Many slaves were employed as domestic servants, but others worked in the sugar mills in the Atlantic islands (the Azores, Madeira, or the Canary Islands). Some were hired out by their masters for wages. Christian law, as seen in the medieval King Alfonso’s Siete Partidas, and Muslim law, as enshrined in the Koran, carefully indicated the place a slave should occupy in society. Sometimes slaves could hold property, and sometimes they could buy their liberty. Sometimes they were treated better than servants by their masters. Masters had complete power over their slaves except that they could neither kill nor mutilate them; and no Jew or Muslim in the Christian kingdoms could have Christians as slaves. These slaves were taken for granted, and no protest of any sort was contemplated. It was obligatory to treat slaves humanely. But no one thought that the institution should be abolished.

  Slavery had come to seem uneconomic, it is true, in northern Europe. The English, the northern Franks, and the Flemings already found it better to pay for labor when feudal bonds declined. But the Muslim world, above all the Ottoman Empire, depended absolutely on slavery for its smooth running; and, at this time, the slave trade across the Sahara still exceeded in volume and value the coastal commerce managed by the Portuguese.24

  The Crown of Castile also had its own version of the feudal system, for next among the combatants outside Granada were the vassals who received either land or an income in return for their service. About one thousand of these men were usually paid daily wages. To them should be added both cavalry and infantry from towns in the royal domains.

  Many noblemen also contributed substantial forces. The lords concerned did not wish their men to be fitted into any national command structure. All the same, the monarchs often gave such nobles a specific rank to encourage them to provide men. Thus the Duke of Alba had the designation of captain-general. The nobles of Castile were unenthusiastic about the war, but those of Andalusia were more committed and often rode at the head of several hundred men.

  A few soldiers, too, had been attracted to the army by the chance offered of purging their guilt for some crime on condition that they served.

  The soldiers developed some national spirit. Peter Martyr de Anglería, the Italian courtier, wrote to the Archbishop of Milan asking: “Who would have believed that the Asturians, Gallegos, Basques, and the inhabitants of the Cantabrian mountains, men accustomed to deeds of atrocious violence, and to brawl on the slightest occasions at home, should mingle amicably not only with one another, but with the Toledans and the wily and jealous Andalusians; all living together in harmonious subordination to authority, like members in one family, speaking one tongue, and nurtured under a common discipline?”25 Much the same reflection would occur to the historian Fernández de Oviedo in Panama a generation later.26 It was the need to present a common front against an enemy that brought the Spaniards together. Even in the thirteenth century, Catalans had fought at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa against the Muslims under the command of a king of Castile.

  There were, finally, in the Spanish army many foreigners. Was this not a crusade? One Portuguese captain who fought was Francisco de Almeida, who within fifteen years would become the first viceroy of the Portuguese possessions in India. One can explain his presence by the fact that earlier in the century, Isabel’s great-uncle Henry the Navigator, before he began to sponsor expeditions to West Africa, had wanted to take part in the conquest of Granada. The Duke of Gandia, son of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, had also made an acte de présence in the war in the 1480s. A few Swiss mercenaries were there, led by Gaspar de Frey, and earlier in the war, at the siege of Loja, there had been Sir Edward Woodville, brother of the Queen of England,27 who had brought three hundred men, some from that northern land itself, others from Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Burgundy, mostly armed with battle-axes and longbows. Some men from Bruges came, too—of whom one, Pierre Alimané, captured by the enemy, escaped from Fez by winning the heart of one of the Muslim princesses. Genoese ships belonging to Giuliano Grimaldi and Pascual Lomellini, in the service of Castile, guarded the Straits of Gibraltar.

  The army was organized in groups known as batallas; the vanguard being as a rule headed by the Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, the rearguard either by the Constable of Castile (Pedro Fernández de Velasco) or Diego Fernández de Córdoba, marshal of the royal pages (the elder brother of Gonzalo, the “Gran Capitán”). The King would expect to ride just before the rearguard, flanked by two companies of soldiers recruited by the authorities in Seville and Córdoba. A thousand or so artillery wagons would travel behind him.28

  Mention of artillery recalls that the Christians fought this war as if in two eras; the knightly orders, with their religious sense of brotherhood, recalled the high Middle Ages, as did the heavy lances, spears, halberds, and pikes as well as longbows and crossbows. The Castilians also had medieval siege inventions such as bastidas, which enabled attackers to rise to the tops of walls; “royal stairways” by which infantry could be hauled by pulley to the battlements of the defenders; leather-covered tents enabling the Castilians to approach walls at ground level; as well as large catapults. Miners from Asturias might be asked to dig a hole beneath the walls of besieged towns.

  But the artillery wagons seemed to be of a new age. New weapons included the arquebus, invented about 1470, which for the first time enabled a single soldier to have a powder-fired weapon.29 Lombards (or mortars)30 were even more innovatory, being cannons twelve feet in length, made of iron or bronze, two inches thick, and held together by iron rings; they threw balls of stone, sometimes a foot in diameter, as many as 140 a day, sometimes weighing 175 pounds; or they might fire globe-shaped masses of inflammable ingredients mixed with gunpowder. Would Ronda have fallen without the lombards, Alcalá el Real? The war had thus been a modern one in which sieges were carried to success by artillery. The latter had enabled the Castilians to mount attacks on city after city, capturing, as it were, “one by one” the grains of the “pomegranate” (“Granada” is the Spanish word for that fruit).31

  Many of these new weapons, such as the two hundred pieces of artillery, mostly made in Écija, between Córdoba and Seville, needed not only explosive gunpowder but expensive Burgundians, Germans, or Frenchmen to service them. Still, Francisco Ramírez, one of the best new soldiers who had done much damage in blowing up the walls of Malaga, came from Madrid, while many of the cannonballs came from the Sierra Morena, especially from the town of Constantina.

  There was one more sign of modernity among the leaders in the Castilian-Aragonese army, one thing that distinguished the men and women at the court of Ferdinand and Isabel from all their predecessors: many of them were readers, some of them owned books, those new “golden objects” made possible for the first time in 1450 by Gutenberg in Germ
any and, after about 1470, by printers in Spain, principally in Seville, Valencia, and Segovia (the first press seems to have been that set up in Segovia in 1471 by John Parix of Heidelberg). Many printers were Germans—the result of a growing commerce with Germany in which the printing capital, Nuremberg, figured substantially, though Castile also imported German metal objects, linen, and fustian.32

  As yet, few books contrived to entertain. But there were learned publications, soon there would be engravings, and there were editions of the classics. The letters of Cicero to his friends were available, as were the works of Ovid and Pliny. There was Ptolemy’s Geography; there was St. Augustine’s City of God; and, shortly, there would be novels. Indeed, one of the finest of these, Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, appeared in 1490 in over seven hundred copies in Valencia.33 It would be considered by Cervantes the “best book in the world …” because “the caballeros in it are human beings, not dummies.…” It is a lascivious volume, especially the last chapters. It also well reflects the blend of savagery and chivalry in war at that time; its cosmopolitan component can be seen from the brief appearance in it of Sir Anthony Woodville (an elder brother of Edward) as the “Senyor d’Escala Rompuda,” while the first part of the book treats of a Muslim invasion of England that is defeated by the Earl of Warwick.