devoured alone after he has survived many blows
He saturates a vast nation with his blood.
The case of the Holy Child of La Guardia was exceptional in many respects, not least of which was the speed with which it moved from interrogation to trial and disposition. The propagandistic and psychological value of the case accounts for this dispatch. But the majority of cases took far longer to be adjudicated. If nothing else, the Inquisition was patient. To mold all the hearsay and confessionals into a coherent and plausible form took time. There was no rush. And sometimes when coherence and plausibility could not be achieved, condemnation came anyway.
For the thousands upon thousands of suspects, the bulk of incriminating evidence rested upon reports of the converted Christian being caught secretly observing Jewish rites and customs. Sins of both commission and omission could get a converso into big trouble. The list of forbidden acts was long. First, there were the revealing dietary practices.
If a person abstained from eating fat or lard, it was probably due to the Jewish requirement to avoid pork in any form. Since it is difficult to distinguish bovine fat from pork lard, both were forbidden.
If a person made a habit of cooking a stew containing vegetables, meat (if available), and spices for twenty-four hours and served it at midday, this was probably hamin or the traditional Shabbat warm meal of the Jewish Sabbath.
If a converso was caught eating matzo at Passover, he was surely a secret Jew commemorating the swift exodus from Egypt and slavery when the Jews barely escaped the wrath of the Pharoah.
If a woman removed the sinew before cooking a piece of meat, she was surely thinking of the episode, beloved in Jewish lore, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord, and the angel touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and it went out of joint, and the angel proclaimed that Jacob’s name would no longer be Jacob but Israel. In the Book of Genesis it is written: “Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank which is upon the hollow of the thigh unto this day because he [the angel] touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank.”
If someone was seen eating raw eggs upon the death of a loved one, he was probably observing the Jewish belief in eggs as the source of life. This was a custom peculiar to Spanish Jews of the time.
If someone else was noticed tossing bits of dough into the fire while he was kneading bread, he was probably thinking of the days of the Temple in Jerusalem when sacrifice was the means of worship.
And if a converso ate meat during Lent or was seen fasting on Jewish holy days of Yom Kippur and Purim or going barefoot on these days, he or she was in trouble. For according to the Talmud, four things are forbidden on Yom Kippur, the major fast day in the Jewish calendar: eating, drinking, sexual intercourse, and wearing footwear. On Purim, a minor fast day called the fast of Esther, Spanish Jews also went barefoot.
Then there were the suspect signs involving cloth. It was dangerous to be seen putting out a fresh tablecloth for Friday night dinner and wearing clean clothing on Saturdays, for this was surely a sign of welcoming the Jewish Sabbath and celebrating it in a festive atmosphere. Other dangerous practices were the presence of a Hebrew Bible in the house or a grandfather blessing a child by passing the hand over the forehead. The latter suggested the Jewish emphasis on the veneration of the elders and came from the incident in the Bible of Isaac blessing his son Jacob. A grandfather blessing a grandchild, usually on the eve of Sabbath, was (and is) a Jewish tradition of transmitting the blessings of the elder, accrued during a long life, from generation to generation.
It was perilous to speak well of Jews or give them alms; to rest on Saturday and work on Sunday. It was deadly to ignore the Lord’s Prayer at a Christian service or not know the words to the Nicene Creed, to neglect to make the sign of the cross or fail to kneel when the Eucharist was raised heavenward by the priest. For the eyes of the inquisitional police were everywhere.
The case of one Brianda de Bardaxi is representative of the process. She was a thirty-year-old housewife and conversa who lived a quiet, ostensibly pious, reasonably comfortable existence in northern Aragon. But Brianda’s relationship with her mother was troubled, for the matriarch seethed with resentment over her belief that her daughter had taken too large a portion of the family estate. The seventy-year-old mother lived in Barbastro with her widowed daughter-in-law, who also passionately disliked Brianda.
After the Inquisition was established in Aragon in 1484 under the leadership of Torquemada, Brianda de Bardaxi was called to the Holy Office. Given the threat implicit in the Edict of Grace, she presented herself promptly for questioning. Being assured of the secrecy of her testimony, encouraged to demonstrate her sincerity by providing evidence against others, and governed by the transcendent instinct to protect herself and her property, she provided a few seemingly harmless and trivial anecdotes from her childhood. When she was five years old, she said, she had once witnessed her mother fasting until nightfall. At age ten she remembered hearing a woman named Violate Fayol utter a few words in Hebrew and had seen her barefoot. When the girl asked the woman why she was barefoot, the woman replied that this was a day for Jews to fast. And then at age fifteen she had again seen her mother fast, together with her boarder, Brianda’s sister-in-law. Promptly, the mother and sister-in-law were called in for questioning. There could scarcely be any doubt about where the testimony against them had originated.
Several years passed, years in which the first inquisitor of Aragon had been poisoned, and the second, Pedro Arbués, had been murdered at the altar in the Cathedral of Saragossa. In the reign of terror that followed, Brianda’s mother and sister-in-law were brought to trial and sentenced to do penance for their lapses. In their interrogations, they named Brianda and charged that she had been an enthusiastic participant in the fasts about which she had originally told the inquisitors. And so Brianda was brought in for depositions both in 1485 and 1486. Two years later, on February 9, 1488, charges were filed against her, and the case moved to a more serious stage.
Now an acquaintance named Gilabert Despluges stepped forward with his two daughters. Also a converso, he was under suspicion for apostasy, and his wife had already been burned at the stake. The Despluges family testified to having heard Brianda proclaim herself to be a secret Jew. Yet another acquaintance swore that she once heard Brianda say about the assassinated and martyred inquisitor, Pedro Arbués, that “his only fault was that he purchased testimony.” This of course would constitute a libel against the famous martyr of the local church.
Three more years passed. But then on February 17, 1491, she was examined for the sixth time. In this interrogation, Brianda added a few details to her prior testimony. It was true that when she was five or six years old, she had actually ingested one or two mouthfuls of matzo, but she had not found the stuff tasty. Further, she remembered that at age twelve she had been offered the Jewish stew, hamin, on the Jewish Sabbath in the household of her accusers, Gilabert and María Despluges, but had refused it. This refusal had nearly caused a fistfight with Gilabert’s daughter, María Despluges. (María Despluges had been penanced in 1488 when at her auto-da-fe she was pardoned and avoided the confiscation of her property as a reward for her pious service of providing testimony against Brianda. For his part, her father, Gilabert, accomplished little by his accusations against Brianda. Ten years later, he followed his wife to the scaffold and was burned at his own auto-da-fe.)
As the case was referred to inquisitional headquarters in Saragossa, the Bardaxi matter was getting serious enough that a counsel was appointed to defend her. By regulation, the Inquisition provided him. But the lawyer put up a surprisingly spirited defense. He drew up a list of forty witnesses who swore under oath that Brianda de Bardaxi was a sincere and devout Christian, who observed the obligations of Catholicism faithfully, prayed every day, frequently ate fat and lard, contributed her money generously to the benefit and succor of the Church, and had applied to the pope to provide her with
a confessor. Further testimony swore that upon the murder of Pedro Arbués, she had sent a servant to dip a cloth into the miraculously liquefied blood of the martyr, had kissed the cloth and forced her household staff to do the same.
With this body of exculpatory testimony, the preponderance of the evidence was now weighted in Brianda’s favor. By the Inquisition’s math, however, the charges against her were only half proven. In order to condemn her, a fresh confession was needed. One last time she was commanded to confess and confess more or she would be tortured. Stoutly, Brianda maintained her innocence and professed her readiness to be tortured. However, she said with incredible courage, anything she might say in the torture chamber would be invalid, for it would be the fruit of fear and agony. When it was over, she would deny everything she had said.
This was taken for impertinence and disrespect, and she was hustled off to the torture chamber. Over the next three days the water torture was administered repeatedly, with predictable results. On the trestle, she was commanded to enumerate the Jewish rites she had observed. She replied that she would need some help. What were the those Jewish rituals anyway? The inquisitor enumerated them. By the third day she was saying that she had observed them all. Which ones? The ones you mentioned.
On the third day she was again brought before the chief inquisitor and yet again commanded to confess the Jewish rites she had performed. You can torture me a hundred times, she said, and a hundred times I will confess and afterward I will recant my confession.
Such contempt for the inquisitional court could not be tolerated, and so she was returned to the torture chamber, where they stripped her naked. Instead of the water treatment, she was prepared for the bone-crushing remedy called the strappado (in which the wrists are tied, the body hoisted, and then dropped the length of the rope). But the fear and pain of the past three days had taken their toll. At these preparations, she fainted unconscious to the floor, her body temperature turned cold, and she had to be returned to her prison. The charges against her remained unproven.
On March 28, 1492, the year of the apocalypse in Spain, Brianda mounted the scaffold at the Church of Our Lady of Grace. At last, the Inquisition had moved its suspect to the place it wanted. At this auto-da-fe she mumbled the words that the Inquisition required: that she had in fact eaten lard, that she learned the Jewish rites at the home of her accuser, Gilabert Despluges, that she had rejoiced at the death of the inquisitor, Pedro Arbués, and had said that his only fault was that he purchased testimony, and that as a child she had eaten Passover bread.
At this litany of sins, the inquisitor condemned her in the name of Christ: “We find that we must declare and pronounce her suspect of the crimes and heresy and apostasy which she has abjured. As these suspicions must not remain unpunished, we assign to her as penance that she never again commit these crimes and errors. We condemn her to imprisonment at our discretion, reserving such other penance as we may see fit to impose. We condemn her in the costs of the case, the taxation of which we reserve to ourselves.”
She was sent to the tower of Saldaña, where she was to confess and receive the holy sacrament three times a year. One third of her property was confiscated.
And so in the grand scheme of things, Brianda de Bardaxi had done her part to support the war against Granada. The proceeds of her property, along with the stolen wealth of tens of thousands of others, was tossed into the war chest that the Inquisition was providing to the Catholic monarchs to complete the Christian Reconquest of Spain. In the last few years of that historic war, the Inquisition was the Christian army’s paymaster.
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SCENE FROM THE INQUISITION
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
EXPULSION ORDER, MARCH 31, 1492
(Ávila Municipal Archives, from Beth Hatefutsoth Photo Archive, Tel Aviv)
TORQUEMADA CONFRONTS THE CATHOLIC KINGS OVER EXPULSION COMPROMISE
(Ya’akov Brill, from Beth Hatefutsoth Photo Archive, Tel Aviv)
JEWS EXPELLED FROM SPAIN
(Beth Hatefutsoth Photo Archive, Tel Aviv)
MOORISH EMIRS APPEAL TO THE CATHOLIC MONARCHS
(Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando)
COLUMBUS AT LA RÁBIDA
COLUMBUS‘S ROYAL LETTER OF INTRODUCTION TO ORIENTAL POTENTATES SUCH AS THE GRAND KHAN OF CATHAY
(Archivo de la Corona de Aragón)
CARAVELS SAILING
(Museo Naval de Madrid)
ALEXANDER VI‘S BULL DIVIDING THE WORLD
(Biblioteca de las Indias)
THE DEATH OF ISABELLA, 1504
(Museo del Prado, Spain)
19
The Will of Allah
BAZA
After the fall of Málaga in 1487, half of the last Moorish kingdom was in Christian hands, while the greatest prize of all—Granada and its Alhambra—was in the hands of Ferdinand’s lapdog, Boabdil the Unfortunate. East of the Alhambra, however, Boabdil’s uncle, El Zagal the Valiant, still ruled the last three Moorish strongholds of Guadix, Baza, and Almería, as well as large portions of the Alpujarras hills south of the towering ridgeline of the magnificent Sierra Nevada. The valleys of these hills, fed by the snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada, were among the most fertile and prosperous in Iberia. Besides the orchards and fertile fields of the Alpujarras, the finest silk in Spain was spun here.
Even in this shrunken domain, El Zagal remained powerful and dangerous, and he was soon to demonstrate it. From the cities and villages, he could still mobilize an impressive army of fifty thousand tough, battle-hardened mountain soldiers, who moved fast and who were expert in the tactics of surprise and ambush. After Málaga, the old warhorse called a complement of these fighters to arms for an expedition to the northwest, as much to bolster the spirits of his despondent followers as to recover lost ground. Slipping out of Guadix, he marched north of Granada into the province of Jaén, where he burned villages and rampaged in the countryside around Alcalá la Real, slipping away to Guadix again, heavy-laden with booty, before the Christian side could mount a counterattack.
To Ferdinand, it was pointless to accept the gift of Granada from Boabdil until El Zagal was subdued, and his three strongholds captured. And so, secretly, Ferdinand and Boabdil negotiated a devil’s agreement: the keys of the Alhambra would be handed over only after Baza, Guadix, and Almería came into Christian hands. When the exchange was consummated, an extensive fief east of Granada would be conferred on Boabdil, and he would be able to live luxuriously in peace and security as Ferdinand’s vassal. Only Boabdil’s mother, the sultana, Ayxa the Chaste, knew of this cowardly deal, and she was none too pleased. Already Boabdil was so loathed by his subjects that they would certainly rip him limb from limb had they known what treachery was afoot.
In the spring of 1488, Ferdinand mobilized his army east of the Moorish dominion in the city of Murcia. His force was smaller than usual, fourteen thousand foot soldiers and four thousand cavalry; worse, the Christian soldiers were bursting with overconfidence. They entered Moorish lands along the coast, easily took the seaside village of Vera, and made for Almería. This ancient, proud port had been founded by the Phoenicians before the time of Christ, and since the Moors captured the city in the eighth century, they had built a formidable alcazaba, or fortress, on a bluff above the port during the reign of the great Abd ar-Rahman III in the tenth century when Almería was the eastern jewel of the Umayyad dynasty in Córdoba. In the first centuries of Moorish rule, Al
mería eclipsed Granada in glory, epitomized by the rhyming couplet “Cuando Almería era Almería, Granada era su alquería—When Almería was Almería, Granada was her farm.” The governor of the city was El Zagal’s cousin and brother-in-law, Prince Cidi Yahye, a proud and seasoned warrior.
As the Christian force drew close to Almería, it encountered increasingly formidable resistance. When King Ferdinand came within sight of the city itself, he appreciated its strength immediately. His current force was wholly insufficient to mount a substantial assault on the bastion. After gathering the intelligence he might need for a future campaign, he withdrew and directed his army north to Baza.
There he was in for a bigger surprise. In this equally formidable bastion, El Zagal personally awaited him. As the marquis of Cádiz and his advance guard came whistling into the valley, El Zagal pounced upon it ferociously, driving the Christian soldiers into the warren of gardens outside the town and proceeding to slice the invaders up. As with the first Battle of Loja, Ferdinand was administered an instructive horse-whipping. He had made the mistake of entering hostile territory, short on men and artillery, full of empty pride. Before he lost more of his finest chivalry for no reason, he gave the order for a speedy withdrawal.
Dogs of God Page 24
