Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  Having reversed Boabdil’s temporary successes, Ferdinand now turned his full wrath on the rebellion in the countryside. Iñigo López de Mendoza, the count of Tendilla, was put in charge of pacification. If any town or village offered resistance to the Christian king, its fields and storehouses were ravaged without pity. To deal with the insurgency at Guadix, Baza, and Almería, the count adopted a brilliant tactic: anyone in the towns who had conspired in the rebellion must face the Christian judiciary; at the same time, any resident was free to pack all his worldly possessions and leave with no questions asked. Since most residents were conspirators and rebels, the three towns emptied. As Arab refugees fled to Africa and to Granada, Christians from the north soon replaced them. This tactic of voluntary rather than forced ethnic cleansing accomplished several purposes at once. The three Moorish bastions became securely Christian, and Granada was flooded with unruly and discouraged refugees.

  After the terrible season of siege in 1489, the Christian forces had been exhausted, and it had taken a year for the king’s resources to be replenished and his soldiers to regain their fighting trim. But in the spring of 1491, some sixty thousand strong, they mobilized in the Val de Velillas northwest of Granada and returned to the battlefield with ferocity. Faced with such overwhelming power and resolve, Boabdil’s Jihad evaporated as quickly as it had begun. Into the summer of 1491, Ferdinand would brook no further delay. He stood on the verge of fulfilling his providential destiny.

  On the vega outside Granada, the king now prepared for the assault on the Alhambra. Some six miles from the walls of the Alhambra, and in full view of its defenders, he began to construct a mock city. Its four streets were laid out in the shape of a cross, with a gate at each point, and a plaza in the center where weapons were stacked. Each quarter of the town was named for the knight who had overseen its construction. The army wished to name the town itself for Queen Isabella. In her modesty, she declined the honor. At her command the town was named Santa Fe, or Holy Faith.

  From afar, the Moors marveled at this mirage, for it seemed that the Christians could construct a city overnight. Its walls appeared to be of brick, but they were made of wood and covered with a wax cloth that looked like masonry. Towers of significant height also appeared quickly, draped with the same cloth, and garrisoned with expert crossbowmen. Of this a poet wrote a generation later:

  Santa Fe is round encirc’d,

  The walls of waxen cloth are made,

  Tents within it shine resplendent,

  Tents of silk and rich brocade

  Dukes are here, and Counts, and nobles,

  Knights and Squires of valor great;

  These King Ferdinand assembles

  To decree Granada’s fate.

  Over the summer, despite regular sallies from the Alhambra, Santa Fe took on a more permanent look. The spark for this permanence came from a lady in Queen Isabella’s court who inadvertently kicked over a lamp and set the draperies of her tent on fire. The blaze spread quickly, threatening the elaborate pavilion of the queen herself. After the conflagration was contained and the ruined gowns and jewels inventoried, the queen expressed the hope that pavilions should be improved to prevent any such accidents in the future. Wooden houses replaced tents, and then brick houses replaced the wooden ones, and within eighty days deep moats paralleled its reinforced walls. The wood for the houses and walls was taken from fruit trees in the surrounding orchards.

  In horror, the Moors watched as their great breadbasket began to disappear before their eyes. For centuries the magic of Granada lay in the nexus between the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and the vega. “Fresh and comfortable vega,” read a Moorish poem, “sweet recreation of ladies and men of immense glory.” And now that beloved and glorious expanse swarmed with locusts that devoured their crops, felled their orchards, and threatened the survival of their city and their faith.

  Supplying Granada became the desperate concern. With the refugees from the east, the population of Granada had swollen to 200,000. The wagon trains from the Sierra Nevada and the granaries and fertile valleys of the Alpujarras were increasingly interdicted by Christian raiding parties. With the disruption of these supply lines, the city began to feel the pinch.

  Still, during the summer, there was time for chivalry. Young bloods from the Alhambra regularly staged raids on the Christian forward positions, defying the sharpshooters in the battle towers, just as Christian rangers scoured the mountain roads for Moorish supply trains. It was not infrequent for the greatest of the fighters to venture out into the median ground, dressed to kill, plumes and banners waving in the wind, and to engage in single combat, with enthusiastic spectators on both sides. The chronicles report that King Boabdil himself witnessed the heroic fight of a Christian knight whose small band was overwhelmed by a superior Muslim force. The next day, Boabdil sent to the defeated Christian knight his very own scimitar, magnificently mounted and packaged, as a sign of his admiration.

  The presence of Queen Isabella added to the luster. Much involved as always in logistics, she regularly ventured out among her troops, mounted on a great steed and clothed in full armor, to encourage them. Of her beauty, her piety, and her courage, the poets and minstrels crooned eloquently:

  Where we part

  Departs my heart.

  Glory hides:

  Sorrow abides.

  Victory vanishes:

  Memory languishes

  And my grief is great.

  Once, her curiosity got the better of her, when she insisted on getting a closer look at the Alhambra. Joined by the king and protected by a significant detachment under the command of the marquis of Cádiz, the reconnaissance took the expedition to the hamlet of Zubia, which provided a fine view of the great bastion from the east. The queen had laid down stiff orders to the marquis not to engage the enemy, for she wanted no Christian life lost on account of her sightseeing, not to mention that her eyes were to be shielded from witnessing actual bloodshed. But, seeing this force hovering so close, Moorish fighters poured out of the city, and a brief but quite bloody encounter took place, with the royals scurrying to safety. Later, the marquis apologized to the grateful queen for breaking her orders (and for saving her life) and the episode became known as “the Queen’s Skirmish.”

  There were other diversions, for who should turn up yet again at a war encampment but Christopher Columbus. To many in the court, even perhaps King Ferdinand himself, the Italian seemed like the proverbial bad penny. In Málaga, in Jaén, and now in Santa Fe, here again was this eccentric, prattling on about gold pavilions and Great Khans in Cipangu when there was serious work to be done on the terra firma beneath their feet. At least in Málaga and Jaén a few snippets of useful intelligence might be extracted from him, but the price was his endless blather. The man would not take no for an answer!

  Still, he cheered and warmed Queen Isabella, and that was enough to reduce these grumbles to a whisper. And he came now in the company of the queen’s confessor, Friar Juan, from the Franciscan monastery at La Rábida near Palos. The detractors were well advised to suffer their annoyance in silence or just to ignore the visitor in his borrowed clothes. Ferdinand also kept his counsel, but he was less than enthusiastic about his wife’s deepening commitment to this threadbare dreamer.

  Into the fall of 1491, the situation grew more grave for the defenders of Granada. Boabdil held emergency council of war with his top advisers. Alone among them, his impressive field general, Musa Ben Abil, was petulantly opposed to any talk of giving up. There was still hope, he argued forcefully. The refugees might be a burden, but with them had come another twenty thousand soldiers from the east. The resources were still adequate. The subject of surrender was premature.

  But he was overruled. “What remedy remains to us but surrender or certain death?” proclaimed one vizier.

  With great sadness the council dispatched a venerable governor to King Ferdinand to open talks. Ferdinand received the Moorish envoy graciously. Over the succeeding days,
discussions between envoys were held in secret, sometimes in the Alhambra itself and sometimes in the tiny village of Charriana, three miles from the city.

  By mid-November, an agreement was reached. It contained ten key provisions. If Boabdil received no relief in two months, the city and its fortress would be handed over on the following conditions. Boabdil and his generals were to swear perpetual fealty to the Catholic monarchs. All Christian captives were to be released. No tribute would be exacted from Granada for three years. Three hundred sons of the noblest Granadine families, including the son of Boabdil himself, were to be presented immediately as a guarantee of good faith. Boabdil could choose between certain valleys of the Alpujarras hills as his final domain.

  And then came the more important social provisions, the ones that were to haunt Spanish history for generations. Residents were permitted to remain in their houses and retain their property. Soldiers could retain their arms and horses. And the most important of all: free exercise of religion was guaranteed, including the sanctity of mosques. There was to be no prohibition of Muslim dress or custom, and no interference with the use of the Arabic language. Islamic law would continue to govern the province.

  This agreement was signed on the 22nd day of the Moon of Muharram in the Muslim year of 897, or, as bitter Arab historians of the future would write, “by computation of the Infidel,” on November 25, 1491.

  When the documents were returned to the Alhambra, Boabdil gathered his full council in the Hall of the Ambassadors, the throne room that was the epicenter of Nasarid magnificence. The councilors entered, some for the last time, through the hallway that bore the inscription: “Be brief and live in peace,” the epigraph that had awed so many councilors of the past as they moved into the presence of the sultan. Awed now only by the majesty of their palace and the glory of its passing into history, they sat on the floor before Boabdil the Unfortunate and gazed upward at the magnificent arabesque ceiling of concentric designs. “He who created seven heavens, one above the other,” read one inscription. “You will find no discord in the creation of the Merciful One.” And another:

  “The only conqueror is God.”

  Their great general, Musa Ben Abil, looked around at the downcast, embarrassed, tearful visages of his cohorts and was nauseous.

  “Leave this useless weeping, men of Granada, to the eyes of children and delicate maidens,” he hissed. “Let us be men and expend our emotions, not in the shedding of unmanly tears, but in pouring forth our blood even to the last drop. Let us go forth with the strength of desperation in our muscles and offer the breast of brave men to the enemy’s lance. I am ready to lead you with a heart that will show no hesitation. Let us display valor and dignity that will make our names resound for eternity. Let posterity view us as glorious defenders of our homeland rather than hypocrites who chose only to surrender and save our own skins. Why should we refuse the honorable death of the battlefield?”

  The faces of his audience remained fixed in silence on the polished stone beneath them. “Death is the least of the evils that threaten you. More fearful are the humiliations that are being prepared: plunder of our houses, desecration of our mosques, violation of our wives and daughters, cruel intolerance,” and, in a reference to the Inquisition, “… the burning pile of the bigot.”

  He paused, waiting for a response. But there was none. “Do you believe for a minute that the Christians will be faithful to the promises they have made to you?” he continued with contempt. “Will the king who led them to conquest be as generous a victor as he is a fortunate enemy? Be certain he will not. Do not deceive yourself. These Christians are thirsty for blood…”

  “Let the will of God be fulfilled,” Boabdil mumbled. “The heavens have decreed the ruin of our homeland in the unfortunate horoscope of my birth.”

  “I see well that the spirit of the multitude has become feeble,” the general responded deflectively. “Their hearts have sunk. But there is ever one refuge for the true noble. He can seek shelter in death. I for one prefer to die in freedom, rather than to live for the sorrows and humiliations that are coming. For myself, by Allah! I will not see them.”

  With that he strode out of the hall, mounted his horse, and rode away through the gate of Elvira.

  There would be no succor for Boabdil. No legions of an African emir or an Egyptian sultan appeared to rescue the Unfortunate One. The grip on the last bastion of Spanish Islam was tight and complete. There would be no miracles. Secret though the negotiations were meant to be, word of the capitulation slipped out, and once again Boabdil’s life was in imminent danger. He sent word to Ferdinand that the date for the handover should be moved up. January 2, 1492, or the 4th day of the Moon Rebie Primera in the year 897, was set.

  At dawn that day, all the treasures of the Alhambra that could be packed up were loaded onto wagons. Boabdil, his mother, and family were ready for their journey into obscurity, exile, and death. At the appointed moment, by prearrangement, three volleys of cannon roared from the fortress as a signal. Out of the low, gray eastern light the advance party of the Catholic monarchs came into view. Leading the procession was the Cardinal of Spain, Don Pedro González de Mendoza. Behind came the king’s group. On the banks of the Genil, it stopped. The cardinal proceeded warily up the incline, known as the Hill of Martyrs, and toward the great bastion. From the Alhambra, accompanied by fifty knights, Boabdil came down to meet the prelate. When they were face to face, Boabdil said,

  “Go, sir, and occupy these walls and fortresses in the name of your powerful kings. God, who is all powerful, has chosen to give this city to them for their deserving merits, and for all the sins of Arabs.”

  As his final request, Boabdil asked that the gate by which he had left the Alhambra for the last time in the Tower of the Seven Floors be closed up and never used again.

  They rode on to King Ferdinand. When he was close, Boabdil made to dismount as a sign of homage, but Ferdinand raised his hand to stop him. This time, there was to be no groveling. When they were side by side, Boabdil kissed the king’s right arm—and then handed him the keys of the city.

  “Since Allah decrees it, take these, my lord, the keys to this paradise. Myself and all those who are inside are yours. Use your success with clemency and moderation.”

  “Do not despair in your adversity,” Ferdinand responded graciously. “What bad fortune has taken from you will be restored through our friendship.” And then he added, significantly, “And do not doubt the sincerity of our promises.” At this point, Boabdil’s hostage son was brought forward and reunited with his father. Boabdil then asked to be introduced to the knight who would govern Granada. The count of Tendilla rode forward. Boabdil slowly removed from his finger a magnificent gold ring in which a precious stone was mounted and on which was etched the stamp of authority.

  “With this stamp Granada has been governed,” Boabdil said. “Take it so that you too may govern. May God give you more fortune than I.”

  The cardinal took the keys, and his party passed calmly back up the hill, along the gorge of the Rio Darro, toward the gypsy caves in the Sacromonte, and entered the fortress by the Gate of Justice. Above the delegation, the houses and narrow streets of the Albaicín were deathly silent, for the populace had shut themselves up in darkness. After an anxious hour, as the royal party watched from below, the standard of the Nasrid dynasty was lowered on the Tower of the Comares and the banner of Castile was hoisted up in its place. Upon that banner the motto of the messianic kingdom fluttered in the wind: Unum ovile et unus pastor—One flock and one shepherd. And after that, the great silver crucifix which the late pope, Sixtus IV, had given to Ferdinand, and which the king had carried in his train from the beginning of the crusade, was raised on the crenellated wall.

  At this sign, the situation was safe. The queen, dressed now in a long, elaborately embroidered Moorish caftan, rode forward to join her husband. Once they were together, knights knelt to express their homage to the new King and Queen of Granada. A wi
tness was to write later, “They appeared more than mortal, as if sent by Heaven for the salvation of Spain.”

  In the next four days, under the supervision of the count of Tendilla, the army secured the city. Swiftly, the count proceeded to break the cardinal promise of the monarchs to respect Islam and its sacred sites, as the main mosque of the city was reconstituted as a Christian cathedral. General Musa’s prophecy was coming true much more quickly than even he might have expected. On January 6, the day of Epiphany, the Catholic monarchs entered Granada. The heroic and bombastic strains of Te Deum laudamus (We praise Thee, O God) wafted through the empty stone streets, belted out by the royal chapel choir.

  Meanwhile, Boabdil’s sad procession took a back road to avoid passing through the city and wound its way south. At the rise of the hill called La Cuesta de las Lágrimas (the Hill of Tears) that would take the Moors to the valley of Purchena that Boabdil had chosen as his domain, the party stopped. Boabdil cast his eyes back over the valley for his last look at his city and wept. A councilor rushed to comfort him.