But as the legend goes, Ayxa the Chaste snuck into Boabdil’s prison with her maids, tied scarves together, and lowered Boabdil to the ledges above the Darro River, where her confederates were waiting to spirit the prince away to the city of Guadix.
In Segovia, the festival of reconciliation between Enrique IV and Isabella lasted through the Christmas season of 1473 and into the new year. On Epiphany a sumptuous banquet was laid out, with song and dancing and endless courses, and the monarchs ate through most of the day, until in the evening, Enrique, suddenly looking pale and wan, drooped and collapsed. He was carried to his chamber, where he waved his doctors away, for he had always been suspicious of them and their poisons. Perhaps he had good reason, for it came to be widely believed that the king was poisoned by his Jewish physician, a man named Semaya. If it was poison, it was very slow-acting. The episode began a slow, gradual decline in his health, marked by vomit and blood and inattention over many months, until on December 11, 1474, in Madrid, El Impotente died.
Isabella learned of her half brother’s death in Segovia and repaired to the Church of San Miguel for a mass of mourning. Outside the church, a platform was hastily constructed for her exaltation to the throne. Soon after the mass, she appeared radiant before a large gathering of nobles and the papal legate. She cut a dazzling figure, richly attired in a brocaded gown and bejeweled in gold and precious stone.
At the edge of the crowd stood the ghostly figure of her confessor, Tomás de Torquemada.
The cry went up that the king was dead. One by one the nobles came forward to swear their allegiance to their new monarch, and as something of an afterthought, to her husband, Ferdinand, who was not present. After the ceremony, she mounted a magnificent steed, richly caparisoned with fabrics embroidered with intricate designs, and the parade began through the streets. Heading it was a single knight, who held aloft a naked sword to symbolize the power of the throne, and, after the Spanish fashion, to warn all evildoers of the queen’s power to punish. The standard-bearer followed, dressed in a costume of bluish velvet silk bordered with green—blue for loyalty, green for hope. After him, the nobles walked on foot dressed hastily in their finest velvet, and behind them, the queen. A great and jubilant crowd of well-wishers trailed.
The chant became “Castile, Castile, for the very high and powerful lady, our lady the Queen Doña Isabel,” repeated three times, and followed by “Castile, Castile, for the very high and powerful lord, the King Don Ferdinand, her legitimate husband.” From the start, homage to Ferdinand was to be secondary. A few traditionalists grumbled that the queen had appropriated the reins of power which rightfully belonged to the male and the king. But this dissent was drowned out by those who pointed to the accession as hers alone while the king’s was derivative.
During these heady days of transition, Ferdinand had remained in Aragon presiding over a conclave of his unruly nobles. Within a few days of Enrique’s death, he received word of Isabella’s hasty coronation. He recoiled at hearing that she had paraded through the streets of Segovia behind the masculine sword of justice. Why had she gone forward without him? Was some sinister plot at work? Hastening to her side, Ferdinand rode through Castilian towns with great ceremony, showing the flag and scepter of his new role as King of Castile. He did not take seriously the prenuptial concessions he had made. His first priority was to set straight who was in charge in this marriage. Transcending mere “Capitulations” was the obligation of every good and pious Christian woman, even a queen, to honor and obey her husband. He was entitled to this deference. He expected and demanded it. He was in for a surprise.
On January 2, 1475, Ferdinand arrived in Segovia, where Isabella received him warmly. It would not be many hours before their respective delegates got right to the business of power sharing. The Capitulations were read once again. Ferdinand’s councilors emphasized the lack of historical precedent for a royal wife holding power superior to her husband’s. It had never happened in Aragon, and in Castile such an arrangement had not existed for several hundred years. Especially bitter for Ferdinand to swallow was the provision that, should Isabella die, power would pass not to Ferdinand but to their children. Ferdinand, and Aragon, would be marginalized. Isabella stood firm, an iron will beneath her warmth and feminine charm, and her husband had no choice but to acquiesce.
The court scribe tried to put the best face on the sharp disagreement between them with the blandishment: “The love of his wife calmed the king’s ire and obeying his feelings, he assented with good grace to his wife’s entreaties.” Whatever the disparity in their real power, they presented henceforth a united face to their subjects. Their motto became, somewhat disingenuously: “Tanto monta, monta tanto—Isabel como Fernando—As much as the one is worth so much is the other worth—Isabella as Ferdinand.”
Ferdinand and Isabella scarcely had time to catch their breath before a new disaster loomed. The Portuguese king, the estimable, jilted O Africano, Alfonso V, announced his intention to wed the issue of dubious pedigree, La Beltraneja, and signaled his intention to march on Castile to put his lady on her rightful throne. His army was formidable: nine thousand foot soldiers, nearly four thousand cavalry, along with heavy artillery and a contingent of Lombardian engineers. The War of Succession was under way again. In late May, this force entered Spain through Albuquerque and turned north. A week later, Isabella, distraught at the Portuguese invasion, miscarried a male heir to the throne while she was traveling to Ávila.
Through the summer of 1475 the Portuguese army made its way north into the Castilian meseta, occupying the royal town of Arevalo before it moved deeper into Castile, reaching the vicinity of Salamanca and Zamora. Along the way an anti-coronation was held for the young La Beltraneja, and now there were two queens of Castile. After the city of Zamora defected to the Portuguese, the enemy took charge of the strategic town of Toro and laid siege to its fortress, high on an outcropping of rock above.
With this first military engagement of their reign, both Ferdinand and Isabella wallowed in the glory and tragedy and the bathos of war. Before strapping on his armor and heading west, Ferdinand made out his will, providing for the fortunes of his children, granting considerable charitable donations to prisoners of the Moors and for the dowries of impecunious girls. And he expressed his desire to be buried with Isabella, wherever she wished to find her final resting place. “We were united by marriage and by a unique love in life. Let us not be parted in death.” Before he rode off, he dispatched another love message that bore the stamp of every young man on his way to combat: “God knows that it weighs on me not to see your ladyship tomorrow, for I swear by your life and mine that I have never loved you more.”
Meanwhile, in the finest tradition of chivalry, he challenged Alfonso the African to a duel to the death in single combat.
Isabella, in turn, felt deeply her role as the defender of Castile and empress of the armies. Like Joan of Arc or Eleanor of Aquitaine, she wished to ride in glory at the head of her forces, for she was ashamed at the Portuguese presence in Castile and longed for revenge. Now twenty-four years old, she watched wistfully as the troops departed on their mission to lift the siege of Toro’s alcazar and recover the town itself. For the moment she would resist the temptation to go to the front lines.
When only days later that same army returned in retreat, having failed to lure Alfonso into single combat, or to engage the well-entrenched Portuguese defenders, her wistfulness turned to anger. To her husband and her commanders she spoke through clenched teeth. “If you say that women, since they do not face dangers of war, ought not to speak of them, I respond, who risks more than I do? I risked my King and Lord, whom I love above all else in the world, and I risked many noble lords,” she said. “I would wish unknown danger rather than certain shame. Of my feminine fury and your masculine patience, I marvel. By daring to vent my anger I have quieted the passion that naturally grows in the hearts of women. I bare my soul because I do not have the power to lessen the pain nor to drive
it out. The best release for a sufferer is to vent her distress to those who may commiserate with her.”
It was left to Ferdinand to meet this fury. He spoke of their challenge in Toro. The fortress was perched on high ground, above steep cliffs, and his army did not have the artillery to reach the lofty battlements. The enemy had refused battle. In fact, the African had accepted Ferdinand’s invitation to single combat, provided that Isabella and Beltraneja be kept as hostages and prizes. Such an absurd proviso Ferdinand could not honorably accept. What he did not say was that his forces were disorganized and lacked a central command, as individual lords of the realm controlled their own soldiers.
Gently but firmly, he berated his queen for her lack of patience and want of encouragement. “I had believed that in returning in despair I would hear from you consoling and encouraging words. Women are always dissatisfied, and you in particular, my Lady, since the man who could satisfy you is yet to be born.” They were not ashamed, nor was this the final battle. “No one is as obliged to please women or to benefit the world as the man is to satisfy his own honor.”
After the shame of the first non-battle of Toro, the determined queen took a more active role in military affairs. She met with commanders, deployed troops, dispensed orders, and conferred with Ferdinand on military strategy. Through the fall of 1475 the African spread his troops between various fortresses in western Castile. Through the winter, Ferdinand challenged his adversary at Zamora and Burgos. Late in the winter, both bastions fell. Isabella personally rode to Burgos to accept its surrender. The tide seemed to be turning.
Then on March 1, 1476, at a place called Peleagonzalo outside Toro, Ferdinand caught Alfonso’s army in the open. The battle was pivotal. Though the Portuguese force, which had the edge in numbers, fell smartly into battle formation, the Castilians seemed to have the greater motivation. The natives were commanded by a cardinal in full battle gear, who led a ferocious cavalry charge that sliced through Portuguese lines. His name was Pedro González de Mendoza; when he was not leading cavalry charges, he had replaced Archbishop Carrillo as Isabella’s most important religious adviser and confessor. The second Battle of Toro lasted three hours. While its outcome was inconclusive, the Castilians ruled the field at the end of the day.
The Battle of Toro virtually ended this long struggle over succession. Rebellious towns in the west of Castile, in the Extremadura and León, seeing that the momentum had shifted to the Spanish monarchs, came over to Isabella’s side quickly afterward. It would be another three years before the Treaty of Alcáçovas formally ended the War of Succession in 1479. In that agreement, Portugal recognized Isabella as the rightful Queen of Spain, with sovereignty over a vast and expanding kingdom from the Pyrenees to Andalusia, only the Moorish emirate at Granada yet to be pacified. Spain’s right to the Canary Islands was also conceded, and the islands would soon become a critical way station in the explorations across the ocean. Castile conceded Portugal’s right to the Portuguese discoveries along the coast of Africa, while Spain claimed dominion over any lands that might be discovered to the west of the Canaries.
And finally, the Treaty of Alcácovas also ended the long-running melodrama of La Beltraneja. Instead of marrying Alfonso, she entered the Convent of Santa Clara in Portugal and dropped from the pages of history.
With the evaporation of the foreign threat in 1476, Ferdinand and Isabella turned their gaze to pacifying their own vast domain and subduing defiant, rambunctious nobles… by any means necessary.
5
The Lady
and Her Brotherhood
MADRIGAL DE LAS ALTAS TORRES
With their victory at the Battle of Toro complete, Ferdinand and Isabella, the glamorous young monarchs of a new Spain, surveyed their vast dominion and wondered how in the name of God it could be governed. For three quarters of a century the land had been torn asunder by dissension, rebellion, weak and corrupt kings, foreign invaders, dishonest prelates, independent fiefdoms, ambitious and greedy nobles, and wanton criminals. Its roads were unsafe. Murder was rampant. Thieves and robber barons had plunged the land into anarchy. Poverty was everywhere. Plague and disease were horrific. But with Portugal defeated, France, for the moment, at bay, the Moorish Caliphate in the south weak and shrinking, and the issue of succession settled, security and consolidation were the watchwords of the day.
How might they take advantage of the victory over Portugal? How could they exert greater control over an empire that had almost doubled in size? They turned, in 1476, to an ancient tradition known as the hermandad, a religious brotherhood of vigilantes. The first instance of such militants was recorded in the twelfth century when some effort had to be made to protect the stream of pilgrims who walked over the Pyrenees and across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. This first hermandad patrolled the route of the pilgrims, much as the Templars patrolled and protected pilgrims who traveled to Jerusalem in the Holy Land. In succeeding centuries, these vigilante bands spread arbitrarily across Spain, as contiguous cities and towns sought to protect the roads for travel and commerce between them from thieves and killers. The vigilantes were given broad powers, including summary execution. In a curious turnabout, executions took place first, and trials were held afterwards. Execution, medieval style, was by bow and arrow. A target was pinned to the condemned man’s heart. The firing squad lined up, and each individual bowman was rewarded or fined for the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of his shot.
In April 1476, only a month after the Battle of Toro, the monarchs convened a Cortes, or national congress, at Isabella’s birthplace of Madrigal de las Altas Torres to consider the security of the patrimony. There, the delegates petitioned the monarchs to create a national constabulary, and to control it from the top.
“The order must come from on high,” they petitioned; “then it will have the greater vigor and force.”
It was determined that the hermandades would be expanded and institutionalized into a national police force. Every municipality in the realm was ordered to establish a hermandad within a month; for every one hundred citizens, there should be one hermandad policeman. By recruiting the force mainly from the ranks of the peasantry, the hermandad was by definition a check on independent feudal lords, great and small, who were exploiting and oppressing and robbing the poor, and worse, challenging the authority of the crown. Since this royal constabulary was beholden to national rather than local control, its justices of the peace had the power to override local judges and grandees. It quickly became apparent that the new royal militia could be very useful in collecting taxes as well.
The blessing of the Church was also conferred upon the hermandades. At Madrigal, they were given the name Santa Hermandad, the Holy Brotherhood. In case of resistance by nobles opposed to the creation of an armed police force with powers superseding their own authority, the Cortes put forward the timeworn rationale of needing the national police as a protection against foreign invasion. This pretext was convenient. The effect was, of course, to centralize power and to spread fear through the land, especially among dissidents against the crown. At Madrigal the nobles had accepted the reconstitution of the national force as a temporary expediency. But the sovereigns quickly perceived its usefulness, and it would last for another twenty-two years.
The hermandad was the main focus of the Cortes of Madrigal, and its consequences were far-reaching. It could be argued that only through the rigorous enforcement of the law by a vigilant police could Spain be truly united and be transformed from a feudal into a modern state. But the national police was not the only measure considered. Bowing to a pressure that never seemed to disappear, the Cortes returned to the state of Jews and Moors in the kingdom. On this matter, it turned the clock back once again ominously. The Cortes vacated a law that forbade the jailing of Jews and Muslims for debts owed to Christians. More insidious, the body passed a regulation requiring Jews and Muslims to wear an insignia of their persuasion on their clothing. Henceforth, Jews and Muslims were barred fr
om holding office in local communities. The joining of a national police with repressive religious persecution pointed the way to disaster.
Apologists for the monarchs argued emptily that these measures protected Jews from the arbitrary persecutions and abuses of radicals by standardizing the regulations for the whole kingdom. Each repressive and racist measure built upon a century of persecutions in Spain and moved the kingdom closer to its odious final solution. In their complicity Ferdinand and Isabella bear the major blame.
In 1476 in Old Castile, there were fifteen grand families and fifty second-rank noble families, as well as an entire cast of minor, threadbare nobles. In fact, Spain had a higher proportion of nobles relative to the general population than any other country in Europe (10 percent as opposed to 1 percent in France). The principal nobles sported various titles such as duke, marquis, count, and viscount; lesser nobles, in shades of Cervantes, often had trouble affording horse and sword. To a large extent, the stature of the powerful houses had been attained through successful commercial ventures over the generations. The archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña, for example, was the scion of the Acuña family, which had dominated the powerful guild of sheepherders. Valladolid had long been the domain of the hereditary admirals of Castile. The hermandad was meant to break the power and independence of these families and guilds.
Dogs of God Page 6
