Dogs of God
James Reston, Jr
• PROLOGUE •
GRANADA, SPAIN
From my terrace in the ancient Arabic barrio of Albaicín, I look across the Darro River to the great red palace of the Alhambra and then down the narrow gorge to the rotund Gothic Royal Chapel, shaped to suggest a crown, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are buried. On the side of the chapel these days a banner hangs to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Queen Isabella’s death, and there is talk again of her beatification as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.
No banners hang on the Alhambra to commemorate the final defeat in 1492 of the glorious, lost culture that was the Caliphate of the Moors. There are, however, other reminders. The memory of the gruesome train bombings in Madrid this year is still fresh and raw. Just as the perpetrators of the crimes of September 11 invoked the Christian Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Islamic perpetrators of the Madrid atrocity sought to justify their mass murder partly by invoking the defeat of the ancient Moors. The crime was supposed to be a long-overdue act of historical revenge for the attack on Muslims in Al Andalus (as the Moorish Caliphate was known).
“You know the Spanish crusade against Muslims and the expulsions from Al Andalus are not so long ago,” the Al Qaeda spokesman said, in taking responsibility.
Far-fetched, hollow, and sinister as this rationale sounds to Westerners, it is important to appreciate that historical resentments are deeply and sincerely felt in the Islamic world. The conflict between the Catholic monarchs of fifteenth-century Spain and the Moorish caliphs of Granada was a holy war between Christianity and Islam. Its ferocity and passion were no less than that of the Crusades or, for that matter, of the conflict that has been allowed to develop in the Middle East today between the West and the Arab world, between Christianity and Islam. Undeniably, in the fertile imagination of some Arab activists, the recapture of Al Andalus for Islam is coupled with the termination of the state of Israel and the end of the American occupation of Iraq. Given the splendor of Moorish culture, this fantasy can have broad emotional appeal.
The Alhambra and the Royal Chapel are the physical monuments to the epic events that happened here in the extraordinary, seminal year of 1492. In the Tower of the Comares across the way, in the exquisite, ethereal Hall of the Ambassadors, it is said that Columbus received his final instructions for his adventure across the Ocean Sea. No artistic bricks or statuary exist to praise or mourn the two-hundred Jewish families who lived in Granada and who were expelled from Spain a few months before Columbus received his royal authority. But when Columbus made his way from Granada to Seville and then on to Palos, from whence he departed for the New World, the roads must have been clogged with Jews departing Spain, scattering across sea and border in response to the Edict of Expulsion of Ferdinand and Isabella and their Inquisition. Columbus sailed on the day after the date set by the Inquisition as the final deadline for the departure from Spanish soil of all Spanish Jews, the fabled Sephardim. The betrayal and suffering of Sephardic Jews comes down to us today as both catastrophe and prologue.
In fact, it is little appreciated, especially by Americans, how intimately the discovery of the New World is bound up with the victory of Christianity over Islam in the so-called Spanish Reconquest, with the expulsion of Spanish Jews, with the terrible Spanish Inquisition, and with the papacy of a Borgia pope. In this book I have tried to make those links. It is one of the enduring ironies of this period that the barbaric, medieval institution of the Spanish Inquisition contributed greatly to the founding of the first modern “nation-state.”
The inclination to ignore or downplay these connections continues today. In the years before the millennium of 2000, the Vatican promised to “purify its history” by looking into the dark corners of its past, such as the inquisitional trial and imprisonment of Galileo in the seventeenth century. Despite this, in June 2004, the Holy See announced that the Spanish Inquisition was really not as bad as it has been portrayed. Fewer witches were burned at the stake, its pronouncement read, and fewer heretics were tortured into conversion than had been previously thought. “Vatican Downsizes the Inquisition” was the headline in the New York Times. Purifying in 1998 turned to sanitizing in 2004.
It has been suggested that the three most important years in American history are 1492, 1776, and 1865. Of these, 1492 goes far beyond American history. It is pivotal as well in Spanish history, in Jewish and Arab history, in World and Church history. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine another single year in the past millennium when so many significant strands of history came together and so changed the world in one swoop: the completion of the 500-year movement to conquer the Moors, the end of the 800-year reign of the glorious culture of Islamic Spain, the consolidation of the modern Spanish state, the sinister explosion of the Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish renaissance in art and literature, the expulsion of the Jews, the discovery of the New World, and the subsequent division of the world between Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence.
Fourteen hundred ninety-two is a year that can aptly be called apocalyptic both in the original meaning of the word, as revelation or disclosure, and in its more modern usage of colossal calamity. That so many important forces of history converged at one time inevitably begs the question whether the hand of God was at work in the confluence. To the Christians, the Arabs, and the Jews of the late fifteenth century alike, there was no doubt. Such great and terrible things do not happen simultaneously at random. Providence had to be involved, and the major players were merely God’s instruments, either for glory or for disaster.
I have woven here a tapestry of the years leading up to 1492 and of the forces that came together in that apocalyptic year. This is not history in the traditional sense; I have not included every fact and date. It is the converging strands that concern me. The story begins with the courtship and fortuitous marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their union unites the principal provinces of Spain, Castile, and Aragon. The story proceeds with the challenge of Portugal’s pretenders to the succession of the Spanish throne.
This epic is spun from the elements of event and character. The major players are giants. Beside the monarchs there is Christopher Columbus; Tomás de Torquemada, the incarnation of the Spanish Inquisition; Boabdil the Unfortunate, the last king of the Moors; João II of Portugal, who missed his chance to sponsor Columbus; the court rabbis Don Isaac Abravanel and Don Abraham Senior; Enrique IV, Isabella’s predecessor and fay half brother; and Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI. The lesser players are no less interesting. They include El Zagal the Valiant One, the great Moorish warrior; the marquis of Cádiz, who was the very paragon of medieval chivalry; the Florentine firebrand, Girolamo Savonarola; and the Cardinal of Spain, Pedro González de Mendoza, who was called “the third king of Spain.”
The human qualities of these characters—piety, greed, bravery, weakness, bigotry, obsession, forbearance, persistence, cruelty, blindness, artistry, and decadence—had an immense influence on how the history unfolded. By no means does Columbus dominate this story, as his voyages have sometimes been allowed to do in American education. I have tried to bring to life this marble man, to put him in his proper context in the events of late fifteenth-century Spain. His shortcomings make his accomplishment no less heroic. For him to have emerged triumphant from this cauldron is truly extraordinary.
Across the way and down the gorge of history, the bells of the Royal Chapel ring out the hours sonorously. In this dry season the wind comes off the plain, across the ocher, tiled roofs of the town, and up my narrow valley. In the distance dogs bark, and the sound echoes off the medieval wall above me, and back down the abyss. And in the evening, the Alhambra is luminous.
JAMES RESTON, JR.
AUGUST 2004
1
The Land of the Infidel
IBERIA
Castile, that flat expanse of tableland in central Spain, some 300 miles across, derives its lovely, lilting name from the Spanish word castillos, or castles, for so many of these daunting crenellated bastions dot its windswept steppe. From the tenth century onward, they had been built one by one as a protection against the ferocious Moors to the south.
With its principal towns of Ávila, Burgos, Segovia, and Valladolid, the territory of Old Castile was first to be liberated from the Mohammedan horde that had swept north into the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century. In pushing the infidels back, Ferdinand I established his kingdom in A.D. 1037. Not many years later, the province of León to the north was joined to it, and the Kingdom of Castile and León made its capital at Burgos. In the decades after Ferdinand I’s death in 1065, the kingdom was expanded south. Toledo was captured in 1085, and Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Madrid were taken soon after. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the forces of Christianity were making steady progress in taking back from the Moors land claimed by the Church. The process became known as the Spanish Reconquest.
The Reconquest was a crusade, every bit as intense as the storied crusades of Godfrey of Bouillon and Richard the Lionheart in Palestine. From the days of Charlemagne in the ninth century, the dream of driving the Arab heathens from the Iberian peninsula had been the sacred calling of every Christian king in the north. Ferdinand I had thrust as far south as Seville before retreating, but it was the recapture of Toledo in 1085 that shocked the Islamic world to its core. For several hundred years, as the Berber dynasty of the Almoravídas in Granada gave way to the fanatical Almohádes, and eventually to the brilliant Nasrids, and as the great Alhambra was constructed above the bowl of the Andalusian vega, there was thrust and counterthrust between Christians and Muslims. Yet, a kind of stasis was established.
But such detente was not to last. In A.D. 1236, Córdoba, the seat of Moorish culture since the eighth century, fell to the Christians, followed by Valencia in 1238, and Seville in 1248. In an elegiac lament, the Moorish poet Al-Rundi wrote of the devastation Moorish Spain felt at its defeat by the infidel.
Mosques have become churches
in which only bells and crosses are found…
O who will redress the humiliation
of a people who were once powerful?
Yesterday they were kings in their own homes.
But today they are slaves in the land of the Infidel.
By the year 1265 the Mohammedan empire, the glorious Al Andalus, had been reduced to the province of Granada and a line of ports around Cádiz.
Despite this upheaval, the 150 years from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fourteenth century would be a period of relative tranquility. It was to become the golden age of diversity in medieval Spain. The Christians comprised half the population of the peninsula, the rest being Jews and Moors. The Jewish population, numbering about 120,000, maintained good relations with the Christian kings of Castile. Under the rulers of the Almohádes, the Jews had been repressed, and they responded by helping the Castilian kings in their perpetual struggle against the Moors. When the Christians seized more and more Moorish territory, they returned the favor, and Jews soon held numerous important posts in the royal court. Meanwhile, Arabs living under Christian rule (called Mozarabs) were tolerated and nurtured. Through them the wisdom of the Arab world, from its science to its arts, was translated from the Arabic into Latin. This trove of learning was then sent north into the largely illiterate principalities of Central Europe.
The reign of the Castilian king Alfonso X (1252–84) represented the high point of this cross-fertilization. Schooled in Arabic and known as El Sabio, the Learned One, Alfonso was responsible for great cultural and social works. Even as he gave lip service to the traditional obligation of Christian kings to confront and conquer the Moors, he set out to create a Christian culture in the north of Spain that was equal in glory to Moorish culture in the south. He ordered both the Koran and the Talmud to be translated into Latin. And he promoted valuable translations from Arabic astronomy that came to be known as the Alfonsine Tables and that would guide the study of astronomy for the next two hundred years until the revolutionary work of Nicolaus Copernicus changed everything.
These tables were produced by a collaborative effort of fifty astronomers in 1252, including a clutch of Arabic astronomers and an important Jewish astronomer named Yehuda ben Moses Cohen. They sought to plot the path of the planets as a series of intricate and interrelated epicycles and to describe the constellations beyond the planets. In the Alfonsine Tables, the Arabic names for certain stars like Altar, Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Vega were used. Later, Alfonso was said to have remarked, apocryphally no doubt, that if he had been present at creation, he could have given the Good Lord some hints.
Under the Learned One other technical fields were also enriched through the translation of Arabic science. Arabic chemical words came into European languages: alkali, alcohol, camphor, elixir, syrup, talc, and tartar. Mathematical terms like azimuth, zero, sine, root, algebra, nadir, and zenith came from the Arabic, as did botanical names like ginger, lilac, jasmine, myrrh, saffron, sesame, lemon, rhubarb, and coffee. Modern Spanish contains approximately eight thousand words derived from Arabic.
The humanities and arts also found their patron in Alfonso. Under this remarkable king a seminal collection of medieval poetry and music was compiled, as well as an illustrated book of games, Libro de los Juegos, about dice and chess played on boards of different sizes. Historical memory was important to him as well. He encouraged the writing of a history called Crónica General, insisting that it be written in the language of the common man. By this simple act, Castilian became the standard for written and spoken Spanish. Alfonso also initiated the formation of a comprehensive legal code, Las Siete Partidas, which among other things removed his kingdom from papal influence. This remarkable achievement had one glaring deficit, however. It associated all Jews with the Antichrist, declaring them to be helpmates of the Devil, and the prime villains in the last days of the coming apocalypse.
Alfonso’s cultural influence was to last well beyond his death. Much original literary work, including the prose of Infante Don Juan Manuel and the poetry of the archpriest of Hita, was created in what became known as the School of Alfonso. Better as a man of letters than a leader of men, he nevertheless added the port of Cádiz to the Kingdom of Castile, in an arrangement with his vassal, the Moorish king of Granada.
After the fall of Córdoba to the Christian side in 1236, the center of Islamic Al Andalus shifted to Granada. Its natural circumstance protected the province of Granada better than Córdoba. Its capital city, also called Granada, was built on the slopes of the massive Sierra Nevada, the highest mountains in all of Spain. These daunting and gorgeous peaks, rising over 11,000 feet, separated Granada from its seaport of Málaga to the south. Their highest peak, the Mulhacén, is named for the father of the last Moorish king. Between the Sierra Nevada and the coast, only fifty miles south, lie the Alpujarras Mountains with their rich and fertile bottomlands. Málaga was then the richest seaport in Spain. It was a bustling hub of trade with North Africa and Venice, Constantinople and Alexandria.
After the Moorish conquest of Spain in the eighth century, the emir of Al Andalus had been a vassal of the caliphs of Damascus and Baghdad. But this western outpost of Islam was the first of the Muslim provinces to break free of its Oriental masters. When the Mongols destroyed the caliphate in Baghdad in 1258, the independence of Al Andalus was solidified, and the Spanish Moors began to relate more to Europe than the Middle East. In arts and agriculture, learning and tolerance, Al Andulus was a beacon of enlightenment to the rest of Europe. In the fertile valleys of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana rivers, as well as the terraced slopes of the Alpujarras, agriculture surpassed anything elsewhere on the continent. Moorish f
iligree silver- and leatherwork became famous throughout the Mediterranean. In engineering, the skill of the Spanish Moors had no parallel, and the splendor of their architecture was manifest in the glorious mosque of Córdoba, the Giralda and Alcazar of Seville, and the Alhambra of Granada. Its excellence in art and literature, mathematics and science, history and philosophy defined this brilliant civilization.
Among its finest achievements was its tolerance. Jews and Christians were welcomed, if not as equals, then as full-fledged citizens. They were permitted to practice their faith and their rituals without interference. This tolerance was in keeping with the principles of the Koran, which taught that Jews and Christians were to be respected as “peoples of the Book” or believers in the word of God. Jews and Christians were assimilated into Islamic culture, and occasionally, Moorish leaders helped to build Christian houses of worship.
In 1248, work began on the colossal Alhambra in Granada. With its thirteen towers and fortified walls above the ravine of the Darro River, the river of gold, the red palace took shape over the next hundred years. The extraordinary rooms of its interior—the Courtyard of the Lions, the Hall of the Two Sisters, the Court of the Myrtles—were finished at the end of the long process under the reign of Yusef I in the mid-fourteenth century. With their arabesque moldings and gold ornament and vegetal carvings, these rooms became the wonder of the world. Most stunning of all was the Courtyard of the Lions, whose Oriental feel was more reminiscent of Japan than the Middle East and whose vision was to replicate the Garden of Paradise.
Dogs of God Page 1
