Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The agreement with Columbus was refined, in another document of April 30, a “letter of privileges” that was signed by the monarchs, the faithful Juan de Coloma, and another group of secretaries.36 Columbus was henceforth referred to as “Admiral, Viceroy, and Governor,” not “Governor-General.” It is unclear if that was a demotion, but if so, it was a modest one. It is true that in yet another document of April 30, asking the municipalities of Andalusia to assist Columbus by providing wine, meat, wood, fish, and gunpowder, the monarchs spoke of him as merely their “captain.”37 But that was a more informal note. More important was the fact that the first document was cast—deliberately, one must assume—in the form of a royal grant and was therefore revocable. It included the provision that Columbus could hear all suits, civil or criminal. He could punish those found guilty and even impose a death penalty, though for abuses in that regard he could himself be punished. He could judge cases even in Castile if they concerned commerce in territories that he had discovered.

  All these concessions granted to Columbus were extraordinary. The titles were especially curious. No doubt they were accepted because the monarchs had known since 1487 that the supplicant before them had demanded no less. That had probably delayed agreement. The civil servants would have known that they were giving an authority to Columbus that contrasted with the monarchs’ desire to assert their own authority in all departments. Perhaps that discrepancy, if such it was, can be explained since the powers that Columbus was being given were over territory which was still a figment of the imagination. Still, Viceroy, Governor, Admiral! What titles were these! Far grander, it seemed, than adelantado, the impressive title that had recently been granted to Alfonso Fernández de Lugo in Tenerife, in the Canaries.

  What territories did Columbus expect that he might conquer for Spain? He anticipated finding various islands, but these included Cipangu (Japan) and a mainland (tierra firme), that is, China (Cathay). Yet there was no mention in the Capitulaciones of the Indies, nor of Cathay, though Columbus would take with him letters to the Great Khan and an interpreter who knew some Eastern languages. Perhaps he expected to find a backward territory off China or Japan that he could seize without difficulty? It is unclear. Nor is it obvious what the Crown thought.

  Obviously, there was a mixture of motives. An economic purpose is certain. The monarchs knew that, after the conquest of Granada, they would lose money in the short term. The patrimonial lands of the Nasrids, which were the chief items of booty for the Crown from the conquest of Granada, were small in size and had been ravaged. So it would be silly to neglect what might be another source of income. Cabrero, Santangel, Piñelo, and other Genoese bankers would have taken up this position with the King and Queen.

  A second motive was a desire to outmaneuver the King of Portugal. That may have seemed less necessary in the 1490s than it had been ten years before, but, all the same, Isabel did not want Columbus to escape to serve another court. In the fifteenth century as in the twentieth, rulers allowed their imperial claims to be affected by what their neighbors were thinking.

  The Portuguese had imagined that one benefit of their own expeditions in West Africa would be that they might succeed in outflanking Islam from the rear. That motive could play no part in respect of the westward journeys from Spain. Columbus always insisted that one of his goals was to liberate Jerusalem from the East. But there was at first no other stipulated missionary purpose.38

  Perhaps Fernando and Isabel wanted to support Columbus because of a new Castilian mood of confidence, amounting to what seems to have been a sense of destiny. The monarchs did have a desire “to unlock geography’s closed doors,” as Las Casas would dramatically put the matter.39 Remember the superior education of Isabel. That new mood was expressed that summer by the famous grammarian Antonio de Nebrija, who, in his introduction to his Spanish grammar, dated August 18, 1492, wrote, remembering Rome, that “language was always the companion of empire” (siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio).40 Nebrija, at that time about fifty and a professor at Salamanca University, was the great scholar of the time and was at the height of his influence—a power he did not mind flaunting.

  But also important in explaining the newfound enthusiasm shown by the monarchs for Columbus was perhaps their preoccupation, that spring of 1492, with a different matter: their decision, also reached in the aftermath of victory in Granada, to place a harsh choice before Castilian Jews: to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. The decision on these measures had been made sometime in March, and the decrees on the matter, one for Castile, one for Aragon, were composed by March 31, though they were not communicated to the Jews, nor indeed to anyone, till the end of April. Thus the timing of a new policy toward the Castilian Jews was interwoven with that toward Columbus, though the first seemed much more significant to the monarchs. Columbus was intercepted at Pinos a few days after the decree about Jewry had been written. The Capitulaciones with Columbus were dated April 17, Tuesday of Holy Week, in fact, and the decree naming the choices facing the Jews was published on April 29, Quasimodo (or Low) Sunday.

  The decree, written by the Inquisitor Torquemada, provided that “the holy evangelical and the Catholic faith” had to be preached to all the Jews of Castile, and gave them till the end of July to be baptized or to leave the country.41 If, unwisely, as the monarchs judged, they decided to go, they were to be allowed to take most of their movable property with them, but no money, gold, silver, arms nor, indeed, horses. Those who decided to convert to Christianity would be fully accepted in the Catholic community. The decree explained that the last few years in Spain had shown that there were, in the country, many bad Christians—a euphemism for incompletely converted Jews—and that that had been the consequence of the continued possibility of communication with Jewry.42 Peter Martyr commented that the Jews, being generally richer than the Christians, were well placed to corrupt and seduce conversos.43 Remember that the rabbis did not accept that Jews forcibly converted could be considered real Christians.

  The decree must be seen against the background of the establishment of the Holy Office, the Inquisition, in 1480. Since then, about thirteen thousand people had been found guilty of carrying on secret Jewish practices and, as mentioned before, perhaps two thousand had in consequence died. These spiritual deviations had been, so the authorities thought or affected to think, partly because of the continued temptations offered by the presence of Jews with their synagogues, libraries, and often eloquent rabbis. The Crown had tried at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480 to segregate the Jews by a policy of separation, but it seemed obvious that they had continued to hold meetings, to teach, to circumcise conversos as well as Jews, and perhaps to give books of Hebrew prayers to the former; they slaughtered cattle in the traditional Jewish way and ate unleavened bread. The Crown thought that one reason some—many, they believed—conversos maintained Jewish rites and customs was their continuing contact with practicing Jews.

  The monarchs and their advisers apparently thought that because of the weakness of humanity, the “devilish tricks and seductions” of the Jews might conquer Christendom unless “the main cause of the danger,” the Jews themselves, were removed.44 In 1483, the Inquisitors had sought to expel all Jews living in the dioceses of Seville and Córdoba, and indeed many had fled elsewhere, though they had usually remained in Spain. That meant the hitherto Jewish suburb of Triana was empty, ready to lodge sailors, it might have been said. Then there had been various scandalous cases in which Jews and conversos had seemed to be detected in agreement, but in one of the most notorious instances, that of Benito García and the “Holy Child of La Guardia” in 1490 (culminating in an auto-de-fe in Ávila in November 1491), the evidence seems fraudulent.45

  The purpose of the new decree of 1492, as far as the monarchs were concerned (especially Fernando), was to finish with Judaism, but not with the persons of the Jews, who both monarchs hoped would mostly convert to Christianity. Had not the pious Majorcan mystic Ramón Llull, in th
e thirteenth century, proposed a great catechism to liberate the Jews from the influence of rabbis, and suggested the expulsion of those who were recalcitrant?46 The monarchs were also determined to save from “popular wrath” their converso advisers: Talavera, for example, the Queen’s confessor until that same spring; Cabrera, the Marquis of Moya; the treasurer, Alonso de la Caballería; the rising young Miguel Pérez de Almazán, their secretary for international affairs; Hernando de Pulgar, the royal chronicler, who had written a letter of protest to Cardinal Mendoza against the actions of the Holy Office;47 even Luis Santangel, the treasurer of the Hermandad, who had taken the initiative in backing Columbus.

  The decline of the influence of Talavera after the victory in Granada probably explains much. Of course, he had been appointed archbishop of Granada, which, in the circumstances of 1492, was no sinecure. He had been appointed as a man capable of carrying out a difficult task. But he was no longer in daily contact with the Queen. On the recommendation of Cardinal Mendoza, he was succeeded by a formidable Franciscan, Francisco (Gonzalo) Jiménez de Cisneros.

  Cisneros belonged to a noble family without money. He had been born in Torrelaguna, a town near Madrid and close to the pass of Somosierra, controlled by the Mendozas as long ago as 1436. So he was already nearly sixty. His father had been a receiver of tithes for the Crown. Dry, tall, bony, with a long face, a protruding upper lip, a large nose, and bushy eyebrows, looking a little like a greyhound, always enveloped in a cloak of rough cloth, he had small, black, lively eyes and a rather strident voice, corrected by a careful pronunciation. He ate much but drank little. Selfless, austere, modest, devout, a lover of culture, he was physically strong and single-minded. He hated corruption. He worked eighteen hours a day, effectively, often reducing his advisers to exhaustion. Peter Martyr said, with his customary exaggeration, no doubt, that Cisneros had the acuity of Augustine, the abstinence of Jerome, and the severity of Ambrose.48 He wore a hair shirt, it was said, he frequently scourged himself, he experienced ecstasies, and he conversed with long-dead saints.

  Cisneros had studied at the University of Salamanca, lived in Rome, been archpriest of Uceda, to the north of Madrid, and was for a time in the clerical prison of Santorcaz because of a quarrel over the nomination to that benefice, for which he was punished by Archbishop Carrillo. He then worked in Sigüenza for Cardinal Mendoza, who saw in him a man of the future, since he showed himself an exemplary administrator. He became a Franciscan in 1484, in the new monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo, changing his Christian name from Gonzalo to Francisco. He joined the Observants, the most austere of the Franciscan sections, in the monastery of La Salceda, Segovia, founded by Fray Juan de Villacreces. He soon became the superior there. Fearing (Martyr said) “the inconstancy of the world and the snares of the devil, he abandoned everything in order not to become caught up in pernicious gratifications and delights.”49 He sought to carry through the Observants’ reform in the Franciscan order, destroying the easygoing subdivisions with zeal. But though he belonged to a mendicant order, he was born to command, not to beg.50

  Mendoza ordered his protégé Cisneros to accept nomination as the Queen’s confessor, fearing that otherwise he might refuse. Isabel took to him; indeed, she found in Cisneros, Martyr wrote to his old patron, the Count of Tendilla, what “she most ardently desired, a man to whom she can disclose in tranquility her innermost secrets … this was the cause of her extraordinary content.”51 Cisneros was a determined reformer who gave the Spanish Church as much strength as he gave the Queen. He would soon found a new university in Alcalá, the Complutense, concentrating on theology, based on an Observant Franciscan study house established twenty years before. He republished the rules of his own order. He was much concerned with improving the music and liturgy of the Church and was also anxious to preserve the Mozarabic ritual, which had survived the long period of Muslim domination. Though the decree of 1492 expelling the Jews was probably written by the Inquisitor Torquemada, Cisneros may have influenced its wording, its ruthlessness, and its simplicity. Surely it was he who insisted to the monarchs after the fall of Granada that in their realms there should be no more infidels.52

  This decree of March 1492 astonished the Jews of Spain. There had been, as we have seen, increasingly strict regulation of Jewish life: the Cortes of Toledo had insisted on the establishment of ghettos, a physical separation between Jews and Christians.53 Then there had been the expulsion of the Jews in Andalusia. They had virtually ceased living in cities and were more to be found in minor towns and villages. But nobody had had any expectation that anything like full expulsion was likely, for they had always been defended by the Crown. The Jews realized that the decree was aimed primarily at conversion, not at exclusion; but they also knew that the monarchs had miscalculated.

  Three of the most prominent Jews are said to have gone to the King. These were Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Señor, and Meir Mehamed. Abravanel came from a family of Castilian Jews that had fled to Portugal after the persecutions of 1391. He had been the treasurer of King Afonso V of Portugal and had been the chief tax collector and financial adviser of the Duke of Viseu, who was said to have tried to overthrow the Portuguese monarchy in 1484 and had then been executed. Abravanel, like the Duke’s descendants, the Braganza family, had gone to Spain, where he had prospered, collecting taxes for the leader of the Mendozas, the Duke of Infantado, as he had earlier done in Portugal. He lent the monarchs substantial sums for the war against Granada. He had often expressed himself strongly about the conversos and had declared that they as a class were being falsely accused of secret Judaizing, as he, a Jew, should know.54 He himself had strong Hebraic views and believed that the Messiah had already been born and would manifest himself soon, probably in 1503.55 As for Abraham Señor, he had been the treasurer of the Santa Hermandad before Luis de Santangel and had raised much money at the time of the siege of Malaga to ransom the Jews of that city. He had been judge of the Jewish communities, too. Meir Mehamed was his son-in-law, and was a rabbi as well as a tax collector.

  The three begged the King to abandon the decree. Fernando apparently said that he would consider the matter. Encouraged, the three Jews offered him 300,000 ducats if he canceled the decree altogether; that is, 112 million maravedís, fifty times more than the projected cost of the expedition of Columbus. Fernando was tempted but finally refused, saying that his decision had been a joint one with Isabel.

  Abravanel says that he spoke to the King three times—to no avail. He and Señor then went to the Queen and said that if she thought the Jews could be brought to surrender by this kind of measure, she was mistaken. Jews had existed since the beginning of the world, they had always outlived those who had tried to do away with them, and it was beyond human capacity to destroy them. Those who tried to do so always brought divine castigation on themselves. Abravanel asked Isabel to influence Fernando to withdraw the decree. She replied that she could not think of such a thing even if she had wished it: “The King’s heart was in the hand of the Lord as water in the rivers. He turns it whithersoever he wills.” She begged them to convert.56

  The two Jewish leaders decided that the Queen—or was it Cisneros?—was more responsible than the King for the decree. In that, they were wrong. No evidence suggests that the two monarchs differed on this or on any other important matter. Yet the long stay that Isabel had had in Seville in 1477–78 had been a bitter experience for her, since she had seen such laxity that she supposed radical measures were necessary if the Church was to be saved. Hence the Inquisition, hence the attempted segregation of Jewry, and hence now the tragic decree imposing the sad choice.

  Abravanel and his companions then separated. Abraham Señor converted to Christianity, as did his son-in-law, Meir Mehamed, along with the most prominent rabbi, Rabbi Abraham. The ceremony of baptism was performed in June in the church of the Jeronymite monastery of Guadalupe, and the monarchs were the godparents. Señor became Fernan Núñez Coronel and Mehamed, Fernan Pérez Coronel. But A
bravanel went to Naples. There he wrote continuously, his house was ransacked by the French army in 1495, and later he went to Venice, where he died. He remained an inspiration long after his death.57

  The reluctance of the Jews to convert was much greater than the monarchs had supposed would be the case, for many remained “pertinacious and unbelieving”; and many rabbis did “whatever they could to strengthen them in their faith.” Thousands decided to leave Spain. Some conversos left, too. Still, friars were everywhere to be seen trying to persuade Jews to convert, and some were successful. For example, a famous preacher, Fray Luís de Sepúlveda, went to the towns of Maqueda and Torrijos, and secured the conversion of almost all the Jews there. Nearly all the Jewish population of a hundred people in Teruel is said to have converted. But the upheaval was all the same considerable. Emigration meant the hasty sale of houses and furniture, of heirlooms and cattle, of vineyards and property. The Jews mostly went to Morocco or to Portugal, and the accounts of their ill treatment in the first supposed haven are distressing.

  The figures are disputed. Thus one historian considers that, out of 80,000 Spanish Jews in 1492, 40,000 left.58 Another, writing at much the same time, thought that there were 200,000 Jews in 1492, of whom again half converted. The most learned Spanish sociologist of Jewry also thought that there were 200,000 Jews in 1490, of whom 50,000 converted.59 We are in a world of inspired guesses. There were 216 Jewish districts in Castile in 1474, in which perhaps 15,000 families lived. For Aragon there is no figure. But certainly something over 50,000 Jews left, probably over 70,000.

  Thus ended the Sephardim, a brilliant Spanish culture, at the very same moment that Spain was about to embark on innumerable new conquests in the New World. Henceforward there would, in theory and in law, be no Spanish Jews, only converted Jews, conversos, some being the descendants of converts of the era of persecution in the late fourteenth century, others of those who converted, like Rabbi Abraham Señor, in 1492. Many of these, despairing of Castile, played a part in the New World. Their journeys there might sometimes have been illegal, but they went all the same. Other Jews, themselves well received in the Ottoman Empire and in Italy, lived on to adorn the lives of their new countries, though often experiencing profound nostalgia for the quarters they had to abandon so suddenly.60