The bishop’s opposition drew a passionate response from the count of Villa Real, Dom Pedro de Meneses. The count was mystified, he asserted, that the bishop of Ceuta should oppose this undertaking, “the ultimate object of which is to spread the Catholic faith from pole to pole.”
“Crowns enrich themselves by commerce, fortify themselves by commerce, and acquire empires by conquest,” he said. “While Portugal is at peace with all the princes of Europe, it has nothing to fear from engaging in an extensive enterprise. It would be the greatest glory for Portuguese valor to penetrate into the secrets and horrors of the Ocean Sea, which are so formidable to the other nations of the world. Thus occupied, our country can escape the idleness engendered in a long interval of peace. Idleness is the source of vice, that silent file, which little by little wears away the strength and valor of a nation.”
Given these eloquent sentiments and the king’s infatuation with Columbus, the bishop of Ceuta put forward an underhanded and ignoble proposition. Why not string Columbus along for some months, require him to produce extensive documentation for the Junta of Mathematicians, and then put his documents into the hands of a Portuguese native to test? What did Portugal have to lose?
To his discredit, João II acquiesced in this unworthy betrayal. A cover story was concocted of a routine mission to the Cape Verde Islands. An experienced captain from the Azores was commissioned to sail due west from Terceira in the Azores. The captain, ironically, was not Portuguese at all, but a Flemish settler named Fernao de Ulmo. Using Columbus’s charts (according to an account later given by Columbus’s son Fernando), Ulmo was instructed to stay that course for forty days, the time the experts imagined that it would take to reach the supposed Island of the Seven Cities.
A few days out, Ulmo’s caravel encountered ferocious storms and the stiff headwinds of the westerlies. Columbus’s vision was absurd, he proclaimed. Ingloriously, he turned back.
Portugal had nothing to lose by betraying Columbus, the bishop of Ceuta had argued to the court. In fact, Portugal lost everything. When Columbus caught wind of Ulmo’s mission and the king’s duplicity, he was understandably furious. The entire circumstantial case he had built over the past six years to support his expedition was exposed to the universe of mariners. In a pique, he began to shift his gaze elsewhere, to other more upstanding patrons and sponsors. He dispatched his brother, Bartholomew, to England to sound out Henry VII, while Columbus himself made his preparations to leave Portugal.
In the centuries that followed, Christopher Columbus was often viewed as he viewed himself: as an instrument of God. Even his rejection by the Portuguese court was seen as divinely preordained. The estimable historian of Columbus’s journeys, Bartolomé de Las Casas, wrote,
“It is best to believe that divine Providence had reserved for the Portuguese the mission of saving the Elect from among the people of the territory we call India, and for the Castilians the mission of showing the way to the Truth to the peoples of the New World.”
Betrayed by the Portuguese, Columbus looked east. He would take his proposition to the vigorous young monarchs of Spain.
12
The Court Rabbis
LISBON
In his betrayal of Christopher Columbus, King João II of Portugal had proven himself to be less than his original billing as the “perfect prince.” Visionary in his support of Portugal’s dramatic southern expansion in Africa, stalwart in his goals, courageous personally, he was nevertheless cold, manipulative, and duplicitous in his personal relations. In one respect his domestic agenda paralleled that of Ferdinand and Isabella: he was determined to reassert the absolute power of the monarchy over the Portuguese nobility. During the forty-three-year reign of Alfonso the African, the aristocracy of Portugal had been coddled and appeased and enriched, especially the most powerful house of all, the House of Braganza. The duke of Braganza was the king’s brother-in-law and had become the chief executive of the crown. At the time of Alfonso’s death in 1481, this mighty lord, wielding his influence from his castle at Vila Vicosa near the Spanish border, held sway over a third of Portugal, including huge acreage devoted to the cultivation of the valuable cork tree. He ruled fifty towns and castles, and was able to muster ten thousand foot soldiers and three thousand cavalry in their defense. Elsewhere lesser nobles governed their domains without royal interference, causing João II to remark in frustration,
“All my father left me are the highways of Portugal.”
During the sovereignty of Alfonso the African, especially its second half, when the African was confident in his rule, Portuguese Jews had enjoyed a golden age of prosperity. But now João II sought to tighten the grip on the Jews of Portugal, who he felt were in league with the nobles. Here too Portuguese history mirrored that of Spain. In 1391, as anti-Semitic violence flared up across the border, Portugal experienced a lesser version of the same. Jews were ordered to wear badges of their faith. They were herded into walled ghettos with guarded gates and barred from being out after sunset. In 1404, Jews were declared to be ineligible for royal service. In 1449, as the anti-Jewish rebellion turned violent in Toledo and then spread to other Spanish towns, so too in Portugal were Lisbon’s three ghettos attacked. Unlike Spain, however, Jews in Portugal defended their enclaves successfully. Thereafter, Alfonso adopted a more conciliatory policy, bringing Jews into his inner circle and relaxing the restrictions on them.
Among the chief beneficiaries of this benign attitude was the House of Abravanel. Dating back to the fourteenth-century rule of Alfonso X the Learned, and claiming roots in the royal House of David itself, this distinguished Jewish family had provided prominent confidants and financiers to both Castilian and Portuguese kings, as they had in turn been leaders and rabbis of their respective Jewish communities. When the anti-Jewish measures in Spain became intolerable around the turn of the previous century, a branch of Abravanels had fled to the safe haven of Portugal, leaving behind a considerable part of their wealth.
During the reign of Alfonso the African, the scion of this family, Don Isaac Abravanel, was an influential member of the royal inner circle. Born into wealth and privilege in 1437, the son of Don Judah Abravanel, who was the chief financier to the crown, Don Isaac distinguished himself first as a scholar and a philosopher. In his early literary life he wrote a commentary on the book of Deuteronomy, addressed the thought of the great Jewish scholar of the twelfth century, Maimonides, and delved into fundamental questions of political philosophy.
Given the course that Abravanel’s own life would later take, his philosophical position on monarchy as a form of government is noteworthy. In the perfect society, a judge rather than a king represented the best leadership for people, he argued, for a judge best reflected the will of God. In the realistic world, however, a king was an acceptable substitute. A king, he wrote, also enjoyed divine sanction and guidance, and he was entitled to absolute obedience, even if that king was a gentile and even if he was a tyrant. In time, this political stance would involve great peril.
As his father grew old, Don Isaac Abravanel was increasingly drawn into the realm of business and politics. Eventually, in the 1460s, he succeeded his father as the king’s chief financial officer and head tax collector. By his own account, he lived a charmed life. “Tranquilly I lived in my inherited house in fair Lisbon,” he wrote. “God had given me blessings, riches and honor. I had built myself stately buildings and chambers. My house was the meeting place of the learned and the wise. I was a favorite in the palace of Alfonso, a mighty and upright king, under whom the Jews enjoyed freedom and prosperity. I was close to him, was his support, and took delight in being in the king’s shade. While he lived, I frequented his court.”
In King Alfonso’s court, Don Isaac was a popular figure, for he was urbane and voluble. He cut a striking figure: round moonface, piercing eyes, sharply defined nose, high forehead crowned with a yarmulke, and a full white beard that covered his expansive chest. As the scholar gave way to the businessman, he amas
sed an immense fortune not only through his service to the crown as a tax collector but in the family enterprise of banking and textile trade with Flanders. By the end of the 1470s the Abravanel fortune was so immense that the king applied to him for loans.
Abravanel’s devotion to his people had been proven many times over. When Alfonso conquered the ports of Arzila and Tangier in 1471, the victorious Portuguese brought home thousands of captives who were enslaved. Among them were 250 Jews. The thought of Jewish slaves appalled Abravanel, and he set out to buy back their freedom. Gathering a commission of Jewish elders, Abravanel raised the necessary funds and then personally rode through the country to find and free them, and incorporate them in the Jewish fold.
With his independent voice, Don Isaac had opposed the War of Succession as a war of aggression. Wars of aggression, he had written, were ill-advised and counterproductive, leading often to the bankruptcy of the aggressor state. That described the condition of Portugal after its defeat in 1478. Still, with his credo of strict obedience to the ruler, Abravanel loaned King Alfonso over 1 million reals to finance the nation’s recovery afterward.
All this changed in 1481 with the accession of João II to the throne. In his determination to smash the power and independence of the nobles, the young king spread a wide net. At first, João adopted measures that undermined the judicial and economic powers of the nobility. Then he challenged their very nobility by forcing the lords to produce for review the documents that underpinned the claims to their fiefdoms. Naturally, the nobles rebelled at these stiff measures.
Since Jewish financiers had deep ties with the wealthiest lords—ties that ironically had greatly enriched the Portuguese crown—the sentiment in João’s court turned sharply anti-Jewish. Always lurking just below the surface in prior reigns, anti-Semitism suddenly became overt, rampant, and fashionable. The court poet, Garcia de Resende, gave voice to it. Jews, he wrote, were two-faced and deceitful. They pretended to serve the king, but really had their own agenda and did not respect or abide by the law. “With their charming ways, they pretend to ingratiate themselves, but behind your back, they will try to cheat you. Beware of their supposed friendship.”
For several generations the House of Abravanel had had particularly strong ties to the House of Braganza; quickly Don Isaac fell out of favor and came under suspicion. During the months that the relations between the crown and the nobility disintegrated into open strife and secret conspiracies, Abravanel had been living with his family in the countryside, partly to escape the plague which was still raging through the streets of Portuguese cities. But in the fall of 1482, he returned to Lisbon to find a transformed place. In what he saw, Abravanel gave way to despair.
“From the day our City was laid in ruins, our Temple destroyed and our people exiled, we have known neither peace nor respite,” he wrote to a friend. “The nations amongst whom we live do not stop taking council and devising means for assailing and harming us. And if we do enjoy peace for a brief moment, we are soon terrified by frightful news of savage persecution against the remnants of Israel coming from all the corners of the earth. What man who is subjected throughout life to the fear of enemies would grieve when his last hour arrives? Weep not for the dying among Israel and do not bemoan them! Weep for those who are cast from one misfortune to another, and for whom God has blocked all avenues of relief. For honor has departed from Israel, and I wish we were all dead and no more given to scorn and derision, to contempt and humiliation.”
In May 1483, when the king’s agents discovered secret communications between the duke of Braganza and Ferdinand of Aragon, João had the pretext for the crackdown he coveted. Even though the contacts with Spain were innocent, the duke was immediately arrested and charged with treason. A purge of all the duke’s co-conspirators got quickly under way. Within hours of the duke’s arrest, Don Isaac Abravanel was summoned to appear before the authorities.
And so the classic dilemma of his forefathers faced yet another brilliant Jew and yet another Abravanel. That the king was capable of the most extreme measures, Don Isaac had no doubt, for he had come to see João II as a greedy and brutal tyrant. That the charges were a fabrication was obvious. “There was no violence in my hands and no deceit on my lips,” he would say later. Subsequent events proved him right about the imminent danger, for the duke of Braganza was summarily executed as a traitor in June 1483 and all his lands confiscated. A death warrant for Don Isaac himself was issued. To flee would leave his family in jeopardy, and almost certainly mean the loss of his entire fortune. The king was bent on robbery, Don Isaac believed, for it was absurd to think that he could be a secret agent against the crown he had served so well and faithfully. His writings alone might prove his innocence, for as a matter of belief, he opposed rebellion of any sort against established authority. Later, he would confess to having had discussions about rebellion.
“I discussed with some of the great nobles this question of rebellion against a king. They maintained that a revolt against a tyrannical king is justified. I am convinced it is not.” A forthright defense of his honor was out of the question. He had no choice but to flee.
“I forsook the woman whom the Lord designated for me and the children whom God graciously bestowed on me,” he said.
On May 31, 1483, under cover of darkness, and with the king’s posse close on his heels, Isaac Abravanel crossed over the Castilian frontier. He arrived at the tiny Spanish town of Segura de la Orden, not far from Plasencia.
He was now the subject of a far more powerful Catholic king.
For nearly a year Don Isaac Abravanel settled down in his small border town, where he would find himself comfortably among many friends and co-religionists, for the Plasencia region was filled with Jewish refugees who came there after the expulsion of Jews from Andalusia in early 1483. But Don Isaac was not idle. His presence in the region became quickly known, and he was soon surrounded by admirers from the extensive Jewish communities in the area and importuned to lecture on the early prophets. He threw himself into scholarship, and his literary output was astonishing. In one five-month period alone, he wrote commentaries on the books of Joshua, Judges, Kings, and Samuel, four volumes comprising over 300,000 words.
“When I lived in royal courts, I had time only to dally with books,” he would write later. “It was only when I became a wanderer on the face of the earth, going destitute from kingdom to kingdom, that I became a student of the Book of God.” During this period in the borderlands, he may not have been entirely destitute. By remaining close to Portugal yet beyond the reach of João’s agents, it is likely that he found ways to smuggle out some of his wealth, and to stay in contact with his family.
It was not destined that so talented and valuable a man as this would languish for long in his ivory tower. In March 1484, probably upon the suggestion of the princes of Braganza, Ferdinand and Isabella summoned Don Isaac to the Spanish court. The court was then convened at the Cortes of Tarazona in Aragon, where the recommendations of the Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, about the organization of the Aragonese Inquisition were under consideration, along with other stiffer measures against the Jews and conversos of Spain. Aragon was on the cusp of its first auto-da-fe.
Don Isaac seemed blind to the treacheries of the court he was entering. Gratified and flattered to be called to the brilliant court of the Spanish monarchs, and seeing this as an opportunity to build again a fortune such as the one he had lost in Portugal, he seemed to give little thought to who this king was or what the king’s long-term agenda might be. The worrisome harbingers of the Jewish future were evident. The Cortes of Tarazona was building on the actions of the Cortes of Toledo two years before, when the establishment of ghettos for Spanish Jews became a strict and enforced policy. The Jews of Seville had already been expelled from the city that was the ancestral home of the Abravanel family. Any resettlement of new Jews there was prohibited. At Tarazona, the Jewish “heresy” and the Jewish “superstition” were phrases on every
tongue. The Talmud, wrote the chief chronicler of the Spanish monarchs, “contains very dark, abominable lies against the law of God and against the law of nature and the law of the scripture.”
Ferdinand had developed into a mature, energetic, deceptive, and dangerous leader. His messianic vision of himself was taking shape, not only as the liberator of all Spain but as an instrument of God in the coming apocalypse to purify the world. He was beginning to think of himself as the Bat, who would complete the mission of freeing first Spain and then Jerusalem from the pollution of the infidel, whether that non-Christian was converso, Moor, or Jew. And yet the king masked his intentions and his greed in smooth flattery and in high-minded expressions about the common good and Christian charity. Three years after Don Isaac arrived in the Spanish court, the Jews of Castile were still describing Ferdinand as “a just and righteous” leader, even as Ferdinand was exploiting the hatred of Jews and conversos to advance his political aims.
For these qualities of cunning and political clarity, Niccolò Machiavelli would later make Ferdinand a model for his “new Prince.” “Nothing makes a prince so esteemed as when he personally accomplishes things rare and exemplary,” Machiavelli wrote in his masterwork. To Machiavelli, Ferdinand was the “first king among Christians.” “At the beginning of his reign he attacked Granada, and that undertaking was the foundation of his state. First he did it when his country was at peace and without a hint of opposition: he kept the minds of the barons of Castile occupied with this undertaking, and they, thinking of that war, did not consider making any political changes. By this means he acquired prestige and power over them without their becoming aware of it…”
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