Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Centuries of coexistence had produced well-rooted communities, but the passage of time meant the majority of those in the old mudéjar communities of Castile knew no Arabic and had lost the intellectual traditions that once made Spain a famous source of religious, philosophical and scientific wisdom in the Muslim world.20 The Christian image of the ‘wise Moor’ – a man schooled in the superior scientific and philosophical knowledge of the Arab world and, so, worthy of consultation by Christian kings and nobles – had also faded. ‘They have lost their riches and their schools of Arabic,’ the Segovian mudéjar author Isa Gebir lamented in 1462 after translating the Koran and several law books into Spanish. This created real religious problems. ‘Is it possible or not to express the venerable Koran in non-Arabic words in order that those who do not understand the Arabic language can understand it?’ was a question that early in the sixteenth century reached the religious authorities in Cairo from Spanish Muslims, who were also unsure about the rules allowing them to stay on Christian soil. ‘And is it permitted for the preacher of a community whose members do not understand Arabic to give the Friday sermon in Arabic and then explain it in the non-Arabic language?’ The Koran’s ‘unsurpassable literary qualities are based on its wording and construction [in Arabic]. And this [specific quality] is lost when it is translated,’ came one disheartening reply.21

  Two major differences, apart from religion, separated Isabella’s mudéjares from the Jews. They were too few and too poor to be a threat, but they were not alone. Geographically, they had the kingdom of Granada and the Muslim kingdoms of north Africa close to hand, meaning they had places of refuge near by and armed neighbours who could take umbrage on their behalf. In that sense, mistreating Castile’s Muslims carried a higher price than mistreating its Jews – or even the Christian conversos who were being chased by Isabella’s Inquisition. Isabella and Ferdinand had learned this early on, when mudéjares from Aragon travelled to the powerful Mamluk Egypt to complain that their minarets were being torn down, and that tit-for-tat measures should be taken against Christian temples in Jerusalem.22 The Portuguese chronicler Damião de Góis was explicit about this being one reason why King Manuel, who snatched away the children of Jews, did not do the same to Muslim children.

  To punish our sins God has allowed the Muslims to occupy the greater part of Asia and Africa as well as significant parts of Europe, where they have established great empires, kingdoms and lordships in which many Christians live under their yoke in addition to the many they hold as prisoners. To these [Christians] it would have been very prejudicial if the children of the [Portuguese] Muslims had been seized because the latter would seek revenge against Christians living in Muslim lands … And this is why the Muslims were allowed to leave the realm with their children, unlike the Jews.23

  This did not, of course, prevent Manuel later claiming that he had urged Isabella and Ferdinand to do exactly that. The threat that Castile’s Muslims might persuade Christians to turn to Islam was never a major issue for Isabella or her Inquisition. Those who did change religion, the so-called elches, generally fled to the kingdom of Granada.

  Like the Jews, however, the Muslims had been subjected to Isabella’s increasingly strict demarcations. The 1480 meeting of the Cortes in Toledo, one of her first great opportunities to impose her view of society, had seen those Muslims who lived in Christian neighbourhoods forced into the so-called morerías and made to observe dress codes that marked them out as non-Christians.24 Isabella liked order and this measure also fitted her underlying urge for social purity in Castile. She found no contradiction in bullying part of the Muslim community out of their old homes while also protecting it against the attacks of those whose intolerance was based on lesser principles of greed or simple spite. They had fewer rights, but she ensured that these were respected. Rules, in Isabella’s clear-cut world, were there to be obeyed.

  The fall of Granada, however, made a huge difference. Suddenly Castile’s Muslim population had multiplied tenfold, with one in twenty people living in Isabella’s lands now mudéjares. With the Jews expelled, rumours began to circulate that the mudéjares would be next. Some Christians refused to do business with them, fearing that they would not be around long enough to honour debts and fulfil bargains. Isabella and Ferdinand angrily denied it. ‘Our will and desire is not, and has never been, to order the said Moors out of our kingdoms,’ they insisted in December 1493, threatening to punish anyone who contradicted them or publicly argued for the mudéjares to be expelled.25

  The war and the years after it saw the kingdom of Granada’s Muslim population halve to around 150,000, and the long-term aim remained to turn Granada into a properly Christian kingdom with tax breaks, land and houses offered to settlers. By 1501 there were 40,000 Christians living in the new kingdom – almost a quarter of the population.26 They were no saints. ‘Most of the people who came to populate the city [of Granada] were men of war or adventurers and many were wholly given up to vice,’27 reported Luis del Mármol Carvajal, a chronicler from later in the century. Prostitutes, outcasts and those who had failed to find fortune elsewhere were all drawn to the city of opportunity, where the rules were new and the pickings easy. They were ‘the shit from other cities’ or ‘those who had nowhere else to draw their last breath’. Some nobles were rewarded, but land gifts were kept small or fractured so that they could not become bases from which to challenge royal power.28

  Granada was Isabella’s proudest achievement. Its pomegranate symbol, with green skin and gold pips, was added to the royal arms and its identity as a separate kingdom respected. She placed it fifth in her list of titles as queen, after Castile, León, Aragon and Sicily – though it was always one of her personal kingdoms, as part of the wider kingdom of Castile, rather than belonging to her husband’s Aragonese crown. Representatives of the city also joined the sixteen other major cities that had a vote in Castile’s Cortes.29

  Isabella and Ferdinand demanded a large degree of control over the church in Granada. This, in part, was because rather than being a source of income it was a huge expense. Isabella had to go through the costly business of building churches – often by transforming mosques – equipping them with chalices, crosses, monstrances (to keep the host in) and, of course, priests. There were no ready-made congregations to pay for the upkeep, though the transfer of some income from mosques helped. Orders were issued for bells to be taken down from old frontier fortresses, where they would no longer be needed to sound the alarm about impending attacks, and smelted down to make even larger ones for churches. Other bells were ordered from as far away as England. Isabella paid for much of this herself and it cost her 9 million maravedís to fund places of worship in Granada, Málaga, Guadix and Almería in 1493 alone. In return she demanded and obtained from the pope almost complete control over church organisation and clerical appointments, though she respected the clergy’s own superiority on doctrine and pastoral work. She and Ferdinand chose the candidates for bishoprics and many lesser posts. In a society in which the church had so much temporal, as well as spiritual, weight that was a considerable concentration of power. It gave her, too, wider control over the quality – and degree of abuse – of a church which was the moral and intellectual foundation of her crusade to purify Spain. It was an important precedent, and this so-called Patronato Real system was extended to other ‘new’ lands, including the Canary Islands, as well as becoming the model pursued in the Americas. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, handed these powers over in 1488, helping to turn the queen’s new kingdom of Granada into the perfect modern, Isabelline state – and a model for her nascent global empire. Borgia had good reasons for acceding to Isabella’s demands. On the one hand, the whole exercise would cost Rome nothing. On the other, few places on earth were producing so many potential new converts to Christianity as the kingdom of Castile. Isabella’s beloved Franciscans were charged with carrying out much of the work of capturing converts among the Muslims, and received lands and properties to set up friaries
in Granada.30

  A letter from Isabella to her bishops in 1501 showed her happily issuing instructions. ‘I have been told that in many parish churches in your bishopric the Holy Sacrament [the communion wafer or, more strictly, the body of Christ] is not treated with the reverence and solemnity that it should be and that it is not kept in a silver box … and neither the cloths nor vessels on the altar are clean, nor are the lamps that should burn in front of the host being lit as they should be,’ she wrote in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘Knowing this I am sure you will change and improve things, as is your duty.’31 It was, at the very least, bold for a monarch whose power was meant to be secular and who was also a woman to issue general instructions to priests about how to prepare for one of the most important parts of the liturgy.

  Isabella never forgot that Muslims were religious infidels. A small tolerated minority is one thing. A large tolerated minority, as she had already shown with the Jews, is quite another. Her first instinct was to trust her spiritual guide, Friar Hernando de Talavera. Here was a good, holy man who could surely convert many Muslims. Sincere and incorruptible, he was an example of the kind of devout, well-behaved churchman whom Isabella wanted, and she chose Talavera to be her first archbishop of Granada. If he had persuaded a queen to kneel before him when she confessed, surely he could do the same to lowly Muslims. Talavera worked hard to win souls. His evangelists spoke Arabic, and translations of Christian prayers and psalms were distributed. He adapted local cultural customs and combined them with Christian ones. At Corpus Christi processions the Moorish zambra and other dances were incorporated (though, providing proof of Spanish Christianity’s cultural permeability, these were already included in other places in Castile). Forcible conversion was out of the question. ‘Jesus Christ never ordered that anybody be killed or bribed to observe his law, because he did not want forced obedience but rather that it be willing and free,’ the Castilian writer Juan Manuel had observed 180 years earlier. Alfonso X, the Castilian monarch who would go down in history as ‘the Wise’, had come to a similar conclusion in his great thirteenth-century law book, the Siete Partidas. ‘Christians work to lead Moors towards our faith and convert them through good words and reasoned preaching, not by force or bribery,’ he wrote.32

  Not only was this a Castilian tradition dating back centuries, but it was also reflected in the Granada peace deal. ‘It is agreed and established that no Moor be forced to become a Christian,’ this stated. Talavera had limited success, doing best in the Albaicín.33 His advice to the converts was to go beyond mere observation of Christian rites. ‘In order that your conversion does not upset born Christians, and so that they do not suspect that you still hold the Mohammedan sect in your hearts, it is advisable that you imitate the customs of good and honest Christians in their habits of dress, shaving, eating, preparing the table and cooked foods, making them the same way, and in the manner you walk, give and take things and, above all, in the way you talk, abandoning as far as possible the Arabic language, making it a forgotten thing,’ he said in a circular that was printed and handed to new converts.34

  In his advice to avoid upsetting old Christians, Talavera was probably thinking of the conversos, whose problems with the Inquisition had much to do with popular prejudice against the cultural customs of Jewish origin maintained by some families. He knew this from personal experience, for Talavera was from a converso family himself. The fact that Talavera felt obliged to advise Granada’s converts on their cultural behaviour shows just how giant a leap Isabella and her religious counsellors expected them to make. It was not just their religion they were meant to forget. Their language, food and daily customs were also expected to disappear. It is not surprising that only a limited number opted for the change, despite the gifts and other advantages that came with being a Christian. Yet Talavera was clear that forced conversions were out of the question. ‘Bringing them into the holy faith by force is something that should never be done, especially among adults,’ he wrote. It was a sin, he added, to baptise an adult who had not had at least eight months’ preparation.35

  The peace capitulaciones included a clause protecting the elches. ‘It is established and agreed that if any Christian had become a [Muslim] Moor in the past, no one should be so bold as to abuse or insult them in anything and that, should this happen, they shall be punished by their royal highnesses,’ they read. This phrase contradicted church laws which, at least according to the Inquisition’s interpretation, stated that all apostates were punishable. Just as it had lobbied for the expulsion of the Jews, so the Inquisition now barged its heavy-booted way into the delicate issue of dealing with Granada’s Muslims. For the first eight years of her rule over Granada, Isabella was happy to see her own royal laws (as contained in the capitulaciones) override the more rigorous and inflexible laws of the church. But the Inquisition was one of her most important innovations and something to which she was fully committed. Being nice to the elches had been a political necessity in the early days of her reign over Granada’s Muslims. Several months after installing herself in the Alhambra, however, she was ready to change her mind. Perhaps the sound of the city’s Muslims being called to prayer reminded her how people from other parts of Europe looked down on her kingdoms because they tolerated the presence of Islam.

  The man who eventually changed Isabella’s mind was the powerful archbishop of Toledo, Jiménez de Cisneros, who had followed the royal court to the city in November 1499, just before Isabella left the Alhambra for a six-month sojourn in Seville. Cisneros and Talavera were, in some ways, remarkably similar. The two friars were Isabella’s favourites. Both had been her confessors and both had fought against being promoted to positions of authority, preferring the simple, spiritual life of the friary. On Isabella’s insistence, however, they had been raised to the highest clerical positions. The ascetic, hairshirt-wearing Talavera famously locked up the city’s prostitutes in his own palace during Lent, preaching to them for an hour a day and telling them that the devil used them like mules. Cisneros, who had given up his worldly goods to enter a friary at the age of forty-eight, also wore hairshirts, slept on the floor and had retired to a shambolic country hut before being sent to court as Isabella’s confessor. Similarities between the two men ended there. In Cisneros, a future inquisitor general who had been named archbishop of Toledo after Mendoza’s death (and allegedly had to be physically restrained from running away when Isabella surprised him with the appointment), Talavera had a natural foe. While the latter believed in slow conversion by festina lente, or making haste slowly, the former favoured compelle intrare, or compelling people to enter. But Cisneros was senior to Talavera and in his mind church law was supreme. Isabella’s need for careful compromise had also disappeared and Talavera had had his chance. Cisneros’s inquisitorial methods were now unleashed on those who had been promised royal protection. Granada’s elches had, in short, been duped. So, too, had their fellow Muslims.36

  43

  The End of Islam?

  El Albaicín, Granada, December 1499

  The two men who pushed their way through the narrow streets of the Albaicín on their mules were already infamous as part of a new breed of Christian enforcers who were riding roughshod over the peace agreements signed eight years earlier. Cardinal Cisneros had been in the city for only a month or so, but already both the spirit and the letter of the peace agreements signed eight years earlier were being ignored. Men like the officer of justice, or alguacil, Velasco de Barrionuevo and his sidekick Salcedo were trying to oblige the elche converts to return to Christianity. This they did by exploiting a loophole in the peace capitulaciones that allowed for elche women and their children to be questioned ‘in the presence of Christians and Moors’. Although Talavera was Granada’s archbishop, Cisneros was free to stamp his own authority on the city. Not only was he Spain’s senior churchman, but Isabella and Ferdinand had also appointed him inquisitor in the city. Tension rose as Cisneros’s men began to baptise the elches’ small child
ren without their parents’ permission, ‘as the [ecclesiastical] law permits’. Barrionuevo’s presence in the Albaicín now lit the fuse of rebellion. The accounts vary. In one Barrionuevo was trying to snatch a young girl to be forcibly baptised. In another he was hunting for two brothers after forcing his way into their mother’s house.1 Either way, the result was the same. ‘Thinking that this would [eventually] happen to them all, they rebelled and killed the official who had gone to arrest one of them, and they barricaded their streets and brought out the arms that they had hidden away and they made new ones as well as they prepared to resist,’ according to a contemporary account. Cisneros claimed that his men had simply been attacked while plodding along on their mules and that the Albaicín’s iron forges had quickly turned out 500 lances, as if the rebellion had been carefully plotted in advance.2

  It took Talavera and the Count of Tendilla, the two old men who had successfully administered the city and ensured a relatively harmonious coexistence between the Christian newcomers and the original inhabitants for the previous eight years, three days to calm the mudéjares of the Albaicín. Tendilla used troops and diplomacy, even depositing his wife and children as ‘hostages’ and guarantors of the peace. An amnesty was offered to all those who were baptised. Talavera’s hagiographers have him serenely parading the cross while mudéjares kissed his robes – an unlikely scene, given the tension. Other reports suggest he was pelted with stones before turning back. Isabella and Ferdinand were furious to begin with, blaming the clumsiness of Cisneros – who appears to have fled to the safety of Santa Fe. ‘He has never seen, and does not understand, the Moors,’ wrote Ferdinand. ‘Brains, not stringency’, were needed, he fumed, with only those responsible for killing Barrionuevo to be punished – and, he belatedly insisted, no forced conversion ‘as that is not a good thing’.3