Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  “Such was the destiny prepared for him in the Book of Eternal Decrees,” wrote an Arab scribe.

  Meanwhile, in the decade after 1492, Jews continued to be scattered like chaff throughout the Old and, soon enough, the New World. In 1497, Portugal followed Spain with an expulsion order of its own, one that was in some respects harsher. Somewhere among the twice-expelled was Abraham Zacuto, who had been appointed the royal astronomer of the court, and upon whose maps and copper astrolabe Columbus had relied in his four voyages.

  Don Isaac Abravanel, the intellectual mentor of the Spanish Jews, settled first in Naples, moved to Corfu, and ended his long, peripatetic life as a minister to the Doge of Venice. Once over his initial shock and bitterness, Abravanel’s thinking about the tragedy of Sephardim began to change. So terrible a tragedy to his people could not stem from the machinations of mere mortals. A wider plan, surely a divine plan, must be at work here, a divine plan for the redemption of the people of Israel. Had not Maimonides said that the future is never bleak? That there would always be hope? That hope often emerged from the darkest hours? Abravanel moved toward an apocalyptic vision of this forced exodus.

  He found his sanction in the book of Daniel, the one book of the ancient text that contained hidden messages about the schedule for the End Times. It was written in Daniel 12:6: “How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?” His role for his own diaspora began to come clear: “to comfort those who stumble in exile and remain of the multitude, to seek out in the Book of the Lord the good word as imparted to his prophets, and to inquire, ”how long will it be until the end of wonders?‘“

  The Jews were, he began to believe, on the cusp of salvation. They were in the last years of the last era of the world, the era of the Messiah. Only from strife, from contention, from suffering and testing could the golden age of David and Solomon come again, as had been prophesied. And then, as God had created the world more than four thousand years before, so he would end it. That end would come, Abravanel now predicted, in the year 1504 of the Christian calendar.

  Italy, meanwhile, was no safe haven. On September 3, 1494, Charles VIII of France crossed the frontier between France and Savoy, and for the next four years, the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, was caught in a vise, largely of his own making, between the invader he had encouraged and the Spanish monarchs he was so eager to please. No less tormenting was the pope’s personal battle with Savonarola. Without shame or hesitation, the Dominican friar from Florence continued his apocalyptic prophecies from the pulpit and his prediction of demise for wicked and wayward princes. In June 1495, he met with Charles VIII of France and threatened one last chance. “Most Christian Prince,” he said, “you have incurred the wrath of God by neglecting that work of reforming the Church which, by my mouth, He had charged you to undertake, and to which He had called you by so many unmistakable signs. This time you will escape from the danger which threatens you. But if you again disregard the command which He now, through me, His unworthy slave, reiterates, and still refuse to take up the work which He commits to you, I warn you that He will punish you with far more terrible misfortunes, and will choose another man in your place.”

  A month later, Savonarola was summoned to Rome. “Come at once to Rome to give account of prophecies for which you claim divine inspiration,” the papal Brief read. Savonarola excused himself from the summons. Then the pope demanded that the friar cease to preach, and instead, the friar carried on his jeremiad without interruption, denouncing Alexander’s crimes with ever greater passion. After a terrible flood struck Rome in early December 1495, Savonarola expressed satisfaction and claimed credit as the Lord’s herald. In 1497, Alexander could stand it no longer. In Florence Savonarola was excommunicated, arrested, tortured, tried, degraded, and then burned at the stake. At the burning place, two Dominicans, dogs now not of God but of the pope, threw a priestly robe over him and then stripped it off symbolically.

  “I separate thee from the church militant and from the church triumphant,” his executioner said.

  “That is beyond thy powers,” Savonarola replied softly.

  In the martyrdom of Savonarola and the corruption of Alexander VI, the Spanish don of the House of Borgia, the meteorology for the deluge was created. In the martyr’s words and writings could be found the inspiration for the concept of justification by faith alone, apart from Rome, which denied Rome’s role as the mediator between God and man. It would be another twenty-five years before the actual deluge broke out in the person of Martin Luther and in the form of the Protestant revolt. Alexander died in 1504, a virtual prisoner of his malevolent son, Cesare Borgia.

  Queen Isabella died in the same year. In her final days she wrote an extensive will. In it she defined her preparations for her Day of Judgment, chose her angelic protectors, confessed certain regrets about her exercise of absolute royal power, and sought to make peace with her maker. Her choice of saints was unsurprising. First among them was the Virgin Mary, “Queen of the Heavens and Lady of the Angels.” Once again, she associated herself, as others had done repeatedly, with the Woman of the Apocalypse in chapter 13 of the book of Revelation. She threw herself on the mercy of St. Michael, the prince of the angelic cavalry, to “defend my soul from that cruel beast and old serpent who will want to devour me.” She also invoked the spirit of St. James the Moorslayer, the patron saint of Spain, and of St. Dominic, the spiritual leader of the Inquisition and its hounds of God, who showed himself as an evening star to the eve of the end of the world. In her last hours, her passion as both Inquisitor and Crusader was undiminished. Her survivors, especially her husband, were not to cease their efforts to “conquer Africa, to fight for the Faith against the Infidel, and to honor the holy Inquisition against the depraved heretic.”

  She requested that she be buried in the Alhambra in Granada, her grave to be marked only with a plain stone.

  The death of Isabella was a particular blow to Columbus, for he lost his most devoted supporter. In his second, third, and fourth voyages—in which Puerto Rico, the Antilles, Jamaica, Trinidad, Venezuela, and the isthmus of Central America were discovered—his reputation and standing with the Catholic monarchs, especially with King Ferdinand, had gradually declined, until he ended his life stripped of virtually all the honors and privileges that had been conferred upon him after the first voyage. Disease and a headlong plunge into slavery marred the second voyage. With its military expeditions into the heartland of Hispaniola, Columbus became the first conquistador of the New World, paving the way for the cruelties of Balboa, Cortés, Pizarro, and Coronado, who came later. To her credit, Queen Isabella called a halt to Columbus’s slaving in 1495.

  What great virtues Columbus had as visionary and explorer, he lacked as administrator and viceroy. The communities of the New World disintegrated into chaos and rebellion. His communications became increasingly incoherent, self-pitying, and grandiose. To the calculating Ferdinand, whose preoccupation was power and gold, these communications were particularly offputting. The situation reached its low point in the third voyage when the monarchs relieved Columbus of his command, and he was brought home in chains to be mocked once again in the royal court. On his fourth and last voyage, he was shipwrecked and marooned in Jamaica for a year, surrounded by hostile natives, contending with mutiny among his crew. From the cabin of his beached craft, with no prospect of immediate rescue, he wrote in despair to the monarchs:

  “All that is left to me and to my brothers has been taken away and sold, even to the cloak that I wore, to my great dishonor. It is believed this was not done by your royal command. The restitution of my honors and losses, and the punishment of those who have inflicted them, of those who plundered me of my pearls, and who have disparaged my admiral’s privileges, will redound to the honor of your royal dignity. The glorious memory will survive for Spain. I implore Your Highnesses’ pardon. I am ruined. Hitherto I have wept for others. Now have pity upon me, Heaven, and weep for me, earth. Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth, and j
ustice. I did not come on this voyage to navigate for gain, honor, or wealth. I came to Your Highnesses with honest purpose and sincere zeal, and I do not lie…”

  He was rescued. In the last year of his life he was to return to his role as supplicant to the royal court. But things had changed. With Isabella gone, the throne of Castile passed not to Ferdinand but to their daughter, Juana, and her husband, Philip of Austria.

  The embittered Ferdinand receded into the role of mere regent, though he remained the King of Aragon. Once again (if temporarily) Castile and Aragon were separate domains. It was to this manipulative, marginalized, jealous, self-absorbed widower that Columbus appealed to restore his privileges and honors. But Ferdinand greeted the Admiral’s requests with evasion, delay, and indifference, all clothed in flowery and comfortable words. His focus was on various schemes to have the crown of Castile restored to his head.

  “It appears that his Majesty does not think fit to fulfill that which he, with the Queen who is now in glory, promised me by word and seal,” Columbus wrote. “For me to contend for the contrary would be to contend with the wind. I have done all that I could do. I leave the rest to God, whom I have ever found propitious to me in my necessities.” He died in Valladolid on May 20, 1506.

  Only a few months later, in September 1506, Philip of Austria, known as “the Handsome,” died abruptly and conveniently. Since Philip’s wife, Juana, known as “the Mad,” was insane, the Spanish nobles had no choice but to restore Ferdinand to the throne of Castile. For the next ten years, ruling in close association with his inquisitor, Jiménez de Cisneros, Ferdinand presided over the expansion of Spanish sovereignty in the Caribbean and the conquest of various provinces on the North African coast.

  But these gains were peripheral to the prophecy that had been laid out for him. When in 1516 he was told he was dying, he protested that this could not possibly be. For, he muttered, he had not fulfilled his destiny as the Bat who would follow the conquest of Granada with the recapture of Jerusalem for Christ.

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