The new constabulary challenged the historic autonomy of the nobility, which for centuries had been codified in a concept called the fuero viejo, or old jurisdiction. The fuero viejo defined the balance of power between the crown and the noble families. Traditionally, the crown could arbitrate questions of justice, could declare war, and dispense royal honors and positions. Beyond that, the nobles ruled their roosts as mini-kings. Outside Castile, in other parts of the far-flung kingdom, and in Ferdinand’s kingdom of Aragon especially, the fuero was even stronger than in Castile.
But a new age of centralized authority was beginning.
In her mid-twenties, with several years as queen behind her, Isabella was developing into a formidable woman and leader. She could be soft and feminine, flighty and overindulgent in her dress, owning roomfuls of elaborate gowns and closets packed with jewels and gold ornament. She could be merciful and tender, promotional of the arts and literature. She went out of her way to bolster the authority of her insecure husband. Yet Isabella had another, fiercer quality: she possessed great personal courage. In 1476, the year after her coronation, hearing of an insurrection against her local authority, she hastened from Tordesillas to Segovia. Upon reaching the city, she found it under siege by a raging mob that was on the verge of stringing up her chosen mayor. Rejecting the advice of her terrified councilors to shore up the castle gates against the rabble, she instead threw them open and then strode confidently into the mob.
“Tell me what your grievances are, and I will do all in my power to redress them,” she called out to the startled protesters. They wanted the marquis sacked and replaced with someone more progressive.
“It is done,” she replied, “and you have my authority to turn out any of his officers who are still in the castle.” Before long the mob was chanting, “Long live the Queen!”
While she was independent and self-reliant, she was, of course, exceedingly devout, pursuing her daily and even hourly prayers with the vigor of a nun. Her watchword came from St. John the Evangelist, the author of the book of Revelation: “Make me passionately virtuous in your image and zealous for the faith.” That very piety led her to appoint the most bloodless and rigid of the clergy as her closest advisers.
It was this unshakable, rigid faith that gave her character its hard, unforgiving side. She could be narrow-minded and stubborn and uncompromising, especially where religious principle was involved. Her confessor, the Dominican priest Tomás de Torquemada, narrowed and hardened her character further. In 1477, the queen became a tertiary sister of the Dominican Order. Yet it was in this very faith that she derived her strength and moral courage. Everywhere, she confronted the contempt and disrespect toward her sex. A woman as leader? Even as the nobles addressed her as “most powerful Queen and Lady,” they murmured that her skill and forcefulness in the affairs of state made her masculine. This common slur merely underscored the fact that she was a woman of great forcefulness.
In the year after the Cortes of Madrigal, largely due to the institution of the hermandad, most of Old Castile had fallen into line, and through the efforts of Ferdinand, Navarre was pacified. Isabella felt that she could turn her attention to the more unruly territories of the Extremadura and Andalusia. The Extremadura, that windswept, sparsely populated arid region along the Portuguese frontier, had welcomed the Portuguese invasion during the War of Succession and remained sympathetic to the claims of Isabella’s rival, La Beltraneja. This rolling, empty expanse of wheat fields and holm oak possessed some of the greatest estates of Spain, which were held by the powerful families of Ponce de León, Guzmán, and Villena. These lords were accustomed to operating without interference from mere kings. Now the queen swept through their country with her entourage, establishing a regional hermandad, presiding over symbolic legal proceedings, demanding deference to the crown, subjugating resistant castles, and restoring peace and order. In the face of formidable opposition, and not inconsiderable personal danger, she was defiant and unafraid.
“I have come to this land, and I do not intend to leave it, nor to flee danger nor to shirk my duty,” she said. “Nor will I give comfort to my enemies who cause such pain to my subjects.”
On this campaign south she tarried memorably at the remote village of Guadalupe, where she prayed before the dark carving of the Virgin Mary, said to have been fashioned by St. Luke himself. Like the many pilgrims who had preceded her, and the mariners, like Christopher Columbus who was to come there later, she was transported by the holy shrine. It was her paradise.
Seville was then the southernmost town of Castile and the kingdom’s most populous metropolis, with 45,000 residents. The traditional capital of Andalusia, a city divided by the Guadalquivir River, it was the principal inland port of Isabella’s kingdom. Twenty leagues from the sea, it was the embarkation point for Spanish explorations to the south and west and teemed with sailors, teamsters, beggars, urchins, thieves, and tradesmen—“the people of the river,” Cervantes called them later. Its impressive wooden pontoon bridge, supported by seventeen barges, was clogged with traffic that crossed over from the city’s center to the commercial barrio of Triana. After Christian forces had reconquered the city in A.D. 1248, among the first acts of the new rulers was to reconstitute the Almohad mosque as a Christian cathedral, dedicating it to the Virgin Mary. The mosque itself had been demolished in 1402, and upon its ruins, plans were made to erect the largest cathedral in the world, an epic task that would take a hundred years. But relics of Seville’s Moorish past outshone the gigantic, prosaic Christian shrine. Rising above the gargantuan cathedral was the magnificent twelfth-century Moorish belltower, the Giralda, and across the plaza, the Moorish fortress, the Alcazar, within whose walls were rooms and patios and salons of such exquisite artistry that they were rivaled in that time only by the striated mosque at Córdoba and the salons of Granada’s Alhambra. Amid this splendor of lost elegance, Isabella took up residence above the Patio of the Dolls.
But Seville had its dark side. In the magical thinking of 1477, with its nightmares of the apocalypse and its dream of a second coming, and with the “Jewish heresy” perceived to be more rampant there than anywhere else in Spain, it was believed that the Antichrist would make his appearance in Seville before the final battle between good and evil. This emissary of the Devil would take power there, before the messianic king, called “the Hidden One” or “the Bat,” could arrive to confront and defeat him. The Bat would then move on to conquer Granada, and free Spain at last of its infidels. Once Spain was secured for Christ, the Hidden One would complete the triumphal vision of Christian conquest by traveling to the Holy Land and securing Jerusalem. It would not be long before Ferdinand began to see himself as the Bat, while Isabella was put forward, perhaps even in her own mind, as the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.
The past century added to Seville’s reputation for terror. In the terrible year of 1391, Seville was the site of the first large-scale slaughter of Jews. The tirades of a rabble-rousing, Jew-hating priest and agent provocateur, Ferrón Martínez, had sparked the killing and stealing. The Jewish quarter was attacked, and four thousand of Seville’s Jews were murdered. Their property was plundered as greed merged with hatred. Martínez’s mobs rampaged through the narrow streets of the ghetto. Seville’s outbreak became the catalyst for similar pogroms across Castile and into Aragon. This purge was quickly dubbed the “guerra santa contra los Judios—holy war against the Jews.” Some of the great houses of Jews in Seville were donated to favorites of the Castilian king.
And it was in the Seville of the late fourteenth century that the insidious choice of death or baptism was first advanced. The pressure to convert had continued unabated for another twenty-five years, until by 1412 nearly twenty thousand Jews had forcibly “converted” to Christianity. Once Jews converted, they were free to reclaim their old jobs.
For the previous decade, before Isabella’s arrival in Seville in 1477, two of the most prominent, wealthy, and independent lords of southern Spain
had competed and occasionally warred against each other for ascendancy. The balance was currently tipped in favor of Don Enrique de Guzmán, the count of Medina-Sidonia, over Don Rodrigo Ponce de León, the marquis of Cádiz.
But matters were by no means settled. The marquis of Cádiz was blithely levying taxes on wine, bread, and fish without royal authorization, to support his private armada, while the count of Medina-Sidonia was mobilizing the conversos of Seville to resist the royal imposition of a hermandad in his city. As Isabella approached the city, the duke lobbied his converso supporters, stressing that the founding of the hermandad would be a disaster for them. With their support, Guzmán stationed four hundred conversos in the city’s fortress to resist the queen’s interference. Isabella knew she must tread lightly. If she needed to pacify the powerful lords, she also needed their support, for Andalusia was a strategic borderland with the hostile forces of Portugal on one side and the infidel Caliphate of Granada on the other.
The queen entered Seville to a tumultuous welcome. In the cheers of her subjects, the resistance of the count of Medina-Sidonia quickly melted away. Isabella made it clear that she had come to Seville and to Andalusia to quell lawlessness and to stamp out tyranny in the region, for there was strife between powerful nobles in Córdoba and Jerez as well. Toward that end, she held a weekly public audience in the Grand Hall of the Alcazar, in which she sat upon a golden throne and personally arbitrated and adjudicated local disputes, listening patiently to long-winded pleas for mercy, and even ordering an occasional execution, all in the service of God and for the peace and security of the state, of course. The count of Medina-Sidonia found it difficult to compete with this exercise of royal power, but he continued to urge the conversos in his camp to resist. He would come to regret it. In due course, both the duke and the marquis prostrated themselves before her. The marquis of Cádiz handed over fortresses in Jerez and the Alcalá de Guadaira, which he had fortified against her.
During her weekly audiences an impressive array of prelates and caballeros stood at Isabella’s side, in a display of religious and secular solidarity. In the antechambers of the Alcazar the clergy began to argue that a hermandad in Andalusia would be inadequate to pacify these influential lords permanently. A strong civil guard, answerable only to the crown, would be markedly strengthened, they again whispered, with a vigorous Inquisition, for the strongest supporters of local hegemony were conversos in high places, and these influential men were all secret Jews. In the city with the largest Jewish population in Spain, heresy was rampant, especially in high places, they whispered, and it needed to be rooted out. The plague of heresy had spread from local grandees to the general public. Especially forceful in making the argument for an inquisition was Alfonso de Ojeda, head of the Dominican monastery of San Pablo, who seemed to be equally gifted in his rabble-rousing from the pulpit and his whisperings to the queen in the fragrant gardens of the Alcazar.
On so grave a matter as the convening of an Inquisition, Isabella wished to consult with her husband. In September 1477, Ferdinand arrived from Aragon and was greeted warmly by his queen. His stay was short, but significant. After his departure, the chronicler wrote matter-of-factly, “The king stayed some days in which the queen became pregnant.” No doubt the matter of an Inquisition was discussed, but nothing definite was decided.
On June 30, 1478, Isabella gave birth to a son, to the great relief and joy of the court. That the crown now had a male heir was cause for great celebration. A covey of courtiers and prelates were present in the birthing chamber. They were there to certify, as tradition demanded, that indeed the prince was the offspring of the king and queen.
Three days of festivities marked the blessed birth of the baby, Juan. A few days after that, the infant’s baptism into the Christian faith was accomplished with great and triumphant fanfare in a chapel draped with silk and satin. The Cardinal of Spain and archbishop of Seville, Pedro González de Mendoza, officiated, while a host of dignitaries, including two godparents—the papal nuncio, Niccolò Franco, and the duchess of Medina-Sidonia—looked on proudly. In the feel of the ceremony was a hint of reference to the birth of Christ with the kings of Orient in attendance.
“Clearly we see ourselves given a very special gift by God,” a chronicler wrote, “for at the end of such a long wait, He has desired to give him to us. The queen has paid to this kingdom the debt of virile succession that she is obligated to do. It is clear that this queen is moved to do things by divine Inspiration… God has chosen the tribe of Isabella which he prefers.”
Within a few weeks, Isabella’s confinement was over. In late July, she put her mind to the next traditional ceremony for her son and heir, his presentation to God. Days before this service, which would take place on August 9, 1478, an upsetting omen appeared in the heavens and sent fear through the land. On July 29, a sudden and unexpected eclipse of the sun plunged Spain into darkness during the day, a darkness so intense that stars were visible in the heavens. Terrified about what this meant for the land and for the Catholic monarchs and for tiny Don Juan, people rushed to their churches for solace.
Meanwhile, the momentous question of an Inquisition hung in the air, until the queen was back on her feet. It was not as if the idea was something new. The institution had existed, in name only, for 250 years in Aragon. This was the “Old” Inquisition, in which the victims were few and randomly chosen as examples of heresy. In 1474, Ferdinand had revived a quiet Inquisition in Sicily, a move that elicited no particular interest in Spain. But in 1477 the monarchs received a visit from the inquisitor of Sicily, which brought the question to the forefront. The inquisitor came to Seville to reconfirm his right to possess one third of all properties confiscated from convicted heretics.
That great riches might be obtained by an Inquisition captured Ferdinand’s immediate interest, but there might be a more profound benefit in consolidating royal authority over the vast empire. Isabella resisted. She could not approve of harsh measures, especially against a group like the conversos who had faithfully served the crown, measures which seemed so inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ. The Sicilian inquisitor met her resistance with colorful tales about the fear that the Inquisition induced in his flock. The Inquisition was a powerful instrument of social control, he said. It could be used with equal effectiveness across the social spectrum, from the nobility to the common people alike. Seville was an especially good place to start a vigorous Inquisition. The towns of Toledo and Burgos might have just as many Jews and conversos, but in unruly Seville, conversos held the highest positions of power, from the mayoralty down, and they were supported by the duke of Medina-Sidonia, who must be laid low. Seville could serve as an object lesson for the rest of the kingdom.
Meanwhile, Ferdinand, seconded by Friar Ojeda and the papal nuncio to the Spanish court, appealed to the queen’s conscience. They trotted out the old arguments that the conversos, along with unbaptized Jews, insulted Christian relics and icons, and even engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children as a mockery of Christ’s death on the Cross. In the face of this passionate invective, Isabella’s opposition faded.
A report containing the slurs against the New Christians was widely circulated, as Isabella reluctantly instructed the Castilian ambassador in Rome to solicit from the pope, in her name, a papal bull authorizing the establishment of an Inquisition for Castile.
On November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV issued his bull Exigit sincere devotionis. It authorized the Catholic kings to appoint inquisitors in Castile for the purpose of expunging heresy that was rampant throughout the land. It specifically pointed to a deviation by certain Christians, who “after having been duly baptized” had reverted to the Jewish “superstition” and who were secretly engaging in the ceremonies, rites, and customs of Jews. By vesting the power of appointment in the hands of Spanish royalty rather than the Vatican, it was assured that from the outset, the Spanish Inquisition was in the control of royal secular authority, not a foreign entity, even if t
hat foreign entity was the Vicar of Christ. Of particular interest to Ferdinand was the provision in the pope’s bull which authorized the crown to fine the culprits and confiscate their holdings, and to deposit the sizable proceeds into the hard-pressed royal treasury.
With this papal authority in hand, Isabella was still hesitant. Instead of appointing inquisitors, she appointed a commission to investigate the scope of heresy in Seville, and actively to encourage any lapsed Christians to renew their faith. This was a stopgap measure that would block a true Inquisition from getting started for two years. But the pieces were in place. Sitting on Isabella’s Commission of Inquiry was Archbishop Mendoza and the most vociferous advocate of a crackdown, Friar Ojeda.
Thus, the strands of future Spanish history were coming together in the years 1478 and 1479. The hermandad would soon be joined with an Inquisition and, together, employed as an instrument of terror and obedience. The ever-strengthening persecution of Jews was a harbinger of a final solution.
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Leathery Turtles
and Ravening Wolves
Dogs of God Page 7
