Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  This child who had lost her parents so early turned to the church and its teachings for moral guidance, and Isabella became extremely susceptible to influences from church officials, particularly those who gave evidence of living lives of abstemious self-denial. Cleaning and building the church, purifying it from corruption, causing it to grow, and maintaining it without a taint of stain or heresy became a primary life preoccupation for her. Sin and punishment were recurring motifs for Isabella, who believed that all humans were descended from the surviving sons of Noah, who had sailed to safety when God drowned the rest of mankind in anger over human wrongdoing. She loved the New Testament, but she lived by the rigid morality of the Old Testament. She was always more inclined to claim an eye for an eye than to turn the other cheek.

  Her worldview and religious perspective had been shaped by events that had happened on the other end of the Mediterranean Sea many hundreds of years before her birth. Four men in particular, three men from the Levant, and a fourth, Muhammad, born on the Arabian peninsula, had reported they heard God speaking to them, and each had said and done things that had had repercussions for centuries. The first three were Abraham and Moses, both Jews, and Jesus, born and raised a Jew, who went on to announce a new religion. The lives and actions of these first three men were vividly depicted around her, in the paintings, tapestries, sculptures, books, and illustrated manuscripts that filled the churches and palaces where she spent her days and nights.

  Abraham was a prophet who rejected the worship of idols and embraced the concept of a single, all-powerful God to whom submission in all things was required. He is viewed as the forefather of the Jewish people. Moses was a prophet who introduced the Ten Commandments, a basic code of conduct for moral living, which were words he said came directly from God. Jesus was a Jew who proposed a group of variations on Judaism and called for his followers to proselytize and seek out new converts to their reform faith, which came to be known as Christianity.

  Conflicts from that ancient time would still be felt in Isabella’s Spain. The Christians were angry that the Jews did not accept Jesus’s teachings and their account of the resurrection. Moreover, they believed that Jewish rulers had played a role in Jesus’s death by crucifixion and had later persecuted the followers of Jesus. Jews, on the other hand, believed that Jesus had been executed by the Romans and that they had been unfairly charged with complicity. They did not want to change their beliefs. Obsessing over these different perspectives meant that innocent people born many years after these events had occurred could become scapegoats for religious fanatics and anti-Semites, even as far away as Spain.

  Spain itself made several appearances in the New Testament. At one point Saint Paul said he planned to visit there; Saint Jerome later described the route Paul had taken. Another apostle of Jesus’s, Saint James—or in Spanish, Santiago—was also believed to have traveled to Spain, and although evidence for this journey was scanty, his arrival and burial in northern Spain became an article of faith to the pious Christians of western Europe and made the town of Santiago de Compostela one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Christendom.11 That meant that many Christians in Europe traveled to the north of Spain, through the region known as Galicia, and problems inside Spain during the Middle Ages had political and religious reverberations elsewhere.

  Spain also continued to feel the influences of classical Greek and Roman civilization. Isabella and her family believed themselves to be descended from Hercules, the legendary warrior, half-God and half-mortal. They believed the hero had personally founded the cities of Arévalo, Segovia, Ávila, and Salamanca, places that Isabella knew well. Hercules was particularly associated with an ancient lighthouse, 180 feet tall, dating from the Phoenician era, overlooking the coast of Galicia in northern Spain, in an area notorious for shipwrecks. Its construction would have been viewed as a remarkable engineering feat, even in Isabella’s day. It was a surviving illustration of the ways in which Greek mythology and biblical tales intermingled in the Spanish mind. A history book that Isabella commissioned and helped edit, Diego de Valera’s Chronicle of Spain, published in 1493, highlighted the kingdom’s ties to Greece. The dedication even pointedly referred to Isabella’s ancestral title of Duchess of Athens through her marriage to Ferdinand.

  The belief that magical or mythological figures such as Hercules played a role in Spain’s past would not have seemed terribly far-fetched, for awe-inspiring Roman ruins were everywhere. In Segovia, the gemlike town that would prove so central to Isabella’s formative years, the old Roman aqueduct transported clean mountain water from more than twenty miles away, in its last stages bridging a valley ninety-four feet deep. Many other cities in Spain had once been flourishing Roman centers as well, including Seville, Salamanca, and Zaragoza. Some of the most famous Roman writers hailed from Iberia, including Martial, Lucan, and Seneca the Elder; the emperors Hadrian and Trajan had been born near Seville.12

  The land then known as Hispania had been declared a Roman province by Emperor Augustus in 38 B.C., and for the next six centuries the peninsula’s history was intermingled with that of the great Roman Empire. “The Romans built not only highways, theaters, circuses, bridges, aqueducts, and temples; they also brought their political and juridical institutions and their concepts of social and family life,” wrote the French historian Jean Descola.13

  Isabella’s birthplace, the palace in Madrigal, with its chambers facing a central area or patio, was not unique in its Roman-style design. Many homes were similarly built in that fashion, with rooms opening onto an arcade around a central atrium. The inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula adopted Greco-Roman customs and manners, and in time, Spaniards were sometimes referred to as Greeks themselves. In the age-old pattern, religious observance followed political power. The pantheon of Greek and Roman gods held sway until the Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity permissible in 312, beginning a new era of cooperation between church and state. As Christianity became ascendant over pagan forms of worship, the persecutions of Christians by the Romans finally stopped. The imperial endorsement ushered in an explosive expansion in the number of followers of Christianity. Even small villages built their own churches. An ecclesiastical hierarchy linked all the Christian churches throughout the Roman Empire. Five major religious seats developed: Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. Christianity became the primary religion in Europe and throughout the Near East and North Africa.

  As the centuries passed and Rome’s power disintegrated, corruption and persistent waves of foreign invasion weakened the western half of the old Roman Empire. When the Visigoths, people of a Germanic stock, surged down from the Pyrenees into the Iberian peninsula in the fifth century, they quickly asserted dominance in the new power vacuum. Coming from the north, they tended to be blonder and taller than the dark-haired peoples of the Mediterranean. They crafted beautiful jewelry and created their own signature architectural styles. They made their capital in Toledo, in the heart of the peninsula, and eventually declared Christianity to be the official religion. The kingdom ruled by the Visigoths was the place that the historian Isidore of Seville proudly described as the “ornament of the world.”14 Isabella, who possessed the red-blond hair and gray-blue eyes of the Visigoths, saw herself as a descendant of that lineage, and the princess read Isidore’s account of the Visigothic era with avid interest, collecting several copies of his published work.

  The Roman heritage and Christianity became interwoven, with the empire’s cultural and literary legacy preserved in various forms across Europe. By now the Roman Empire had split into two parts. Eastern Europe, with its capital in the great metropolis of Constantinople, became the heart of Christianity and the cultural center for the classical tradition, the home of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe was politically fragmented by the barbarian invasions but retained its religious capital in Rome. Eventually the two branches of Christianity became estranged and developed doctrinal differences. The Orthodox Church in Co
nstantinople viewed itself as maintaining the ancient traditions. In western Europe, including Spain, the Roman Catholic Church had primacy. The two branches of the Christian Church feuded with each other, adherents of each believing they were religiously superior to the other. Snubs became insults.

  Spain was also home to a significant Jewish population, whose ancestors had been dispersed around the Mediterranean as part of their own persecutions by the Romans. They prospered, however, and among the Visigoths, jealousy and anti-Semitism arose. In the 600s, King Chintila ordered all the Jews expelled or forcibly converted. The seventeenth council of Toledo in 702 ordered the Jews enslaved and forbade them to marry. The Spanish did not fully enforce these harsh laws, however, and many Jews managed to carry on in Spain. Some declared themselves Christian for survival, not by choice, and deeply resented their mistreatment at the hands of the Visigoths.

  By the early eighth century, the post-Roman, Germanic kingdoms of western Europe had grown weak and disorganized, leaving the area open to raiding expeditions by a new generation of outside invaders. To the north, the Vikings, explorers and pirates from Iceland, Greenland, and Scandinavia, surged into England, France, and Ireland and murdered, robbed, and terrorized the people living there.

  In Spain, the threat came from the south, in the form of a new religion that built on the Jewish and Christian belief in the existence of a single God but added some notable features. It had been founded by the prophet Muhammad, a merchant who believed that religious truth had been revealed to him. Born in 570, he preached from about 613 to 632. He honored Jews and Christians for their precursor teachings but believed that Islam was the true faith, given to him directly as the final revelation from God. The new religion, called Islam—from an Arabic word that means “submission” or commitment to God—attracted scores of believers, and its burgeoning popularity threatened the existing social order in the Arabian peninsula.

  Muhammad lived in Mecca, but as opposition to him grew, he moved to the nearby city of Medina. From there he turned and began a campaign against his former hometown. He launched raids against trading caravans, seizing valuable booty and hostages. While some Christians and Jews supported Muhammad, those who opposed him or cooperated with his enemies were exiled with loss of their lands, enslaved, or executed. By the time of his death, Muhammad was ruler of western Arabia. The Muslims spread the faith by evangelization and also by sending armed bands of believers to attack centers of opposition. Most of Palestine and Syria were seized in the 630s; Egypt was taken in 642. It was a wholesale colonial expansion. The Muslims occupied the southern half of the Byzantine Empire and replaced its leaders with people of Arabic origin. “Property and wealth . . . were redistributed on a grand scale,” writes the historian John Esposito.15

  Islam presented unique challenges to Christianity. It was a competing religious philosophy, another proselytizing faith that established set patterns of worship and codes of behavior that followers found satisfying and helped their societies function more smoothly. “From its birth, the Islamic religion was the chief contender with Christianity for the hearts of men; Islamic civilization was the nearest neighbor and deadliest rival of European Christendom,” wrote the historian Bernard Lewis.16

  Modeling their behavior on that of their warrior prophet Muhammad turned out to be an excellent blueprint for territorial expansion. Muhammad in fact had urged his followers to expand their dominions, calling on them to seize property and wealth through force of arms. Many captives were taken in these raiding excursions and distributed into the tribes and families of their captors. The female family members of defeated rulers were turned into wives or concubines. This process created an administrative and military machine that allowed Islam to explode into many areas almost simultaneously. Many men were eager to join the marauding forces, to expand the faith, to enrich themselves, or to find adventure.

  Timing was also key to the Islamic successes. The Byzantine and Persian Empires had just finished fighting in prolonged conflict to the point of exhaustion. When the Muslim insurgency developed, they lacked the will and the resources to defend themselves.

  The Muslims’ conquest of Spain came with blinding swiftness in 711, just twelve years after they vanquished North Africa. Full details of the conquest have been lost to time because the Visigothic civilization was destroyed and the Muslim culture superimposed, and as ordinarily occurs, history is told by the victors. A rare surviving Christian document, called the Chronicle of 754, blamed the almost-instantaneous disintegration of the Visigothic state on internal tensions that had left the kingdom unable to mobilize in the face of an outside threat. A new king, Roderic, had climbed to power in 711, but he was unpopular and inexperienced at ruling. A rival leader, angry at Roderic, aided and encouraged the Muslim invasion. The Christian chronicler described the invasion as horrific, with cities burned to the ground, men crucified, children killed, and looting everywhere. He compared the invasion to the great disasters of history, to “Adam’s fall, to the fall of Troy, to the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem and to the sack of Rome, writes historian Roger Collins.”17

  Muslim accounts mirror that story but present the facts from a triumphant perspective. To them, the attack was religiously justified because Muhammad had said it was divine will that “every one of the regions . . . shall be subdued by my people.”18

  The fullest account of the invasion comes from the Arab historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad Al-Maqqari, who wrote that events began with a preliminary foray by two vessels of soldiers who raided Andalusia, in the south of Spain, and came home “loaded with spoil.” They reported that they found a “a country with delightful valleys, and fertile lands, rich in all sorts of agricultural productions, watered by many large rivers, and abounding in springs of the sweetest waters.”19 The leaders of the foraging trip marveled at how close this bountiful land was to North Africa. “It’s not an ocean, but only a narrow channel,” one said to another, explaining the likely ease of conquest.20

  Then a Berber warrior named Tarif Abu Zarah launched a larger raid with between five hundred and one thousand soldiers and returned with “a rich spoil and several captives, who were so handsome that Mu’sa and his companions had never seen the like of them.” And when word of his successful expedition spread, “everyone wished to go to Andalus,” Al-Maqqari wrote.21

  A third and even more devastating raid was soon on its way, again led by Abu Zarah. He laid waste what fell in his path, burning down the homes of residents and destroying a church “very much venerated” by the residents, according to Al-Maqqari. “He then put to the sword such of its inhabitants as he met, and, making a few prisoners, returned safe to Africa.”22

  Now plans were made for a large-scale invasion and permanent conquest. These were put in the hands of a warrior named Tarik ibn Zeyad ibn Abdillah, who entered southern Spain with thousands of soldiers, ferrying them across the eight-mile strait in four boats that shuttled back and forth until all the men had reached Europe. During the passage, Tarik was reported to have had a dream in which Muhammad promised him military success in the invasion. This mystical experience filled Tarik with confidence, and as soon as he arrived, he swept across the land and “began to overrun and lay waste the neighboring country,” wrote Al-Maqqari.23 They had entered Europe close by a giant rock formation at the southernmost point of Spain; the spot came to be known as Jabal Tarik, “Mountain of Tarik,” and in time, Gibraltar.24

  Probably about fifteen thousand Arab and Berber soldiers participated in the invasion. The role of the Berbers, from Africa, seems to have been crucial. The Arab historian Ibn Khallikan said Tarik was a Berber and that his troops were primarily Berbers.25 Generally speaking, the Spanish men were killed and the women and children were enslaved. The interest in taking women and not killing them suggests that few of the Arabs had brought their wives and families with them. The speed of movement of the Arab armies also suggests they traveled unencumbered.26

  The Iberians were dumbstruck b
y the unexpected attacks. They attempted to respond, but their troops fell apart in chaos. Roderic was in the far distant north when the first major assault occurred. He quickly moved south and summoned troop reinforcements from all over the kingdom. Tarik similarly called for reinforcements from North Africa, and additional thousands of Muslim soldiers rallied to his side, in what seems to have been the first instance of Muslims reaching back to Africa to seek reinforcements against the Christians.

  Tarik urged his soldiers to fight bravely, in the name of Allah, according to Al-Maqqari. “Know that if you only suffer for a while, you will reap in the end an abundant harvest of pleasures and enjoyments,” Tarik told his troops. “You must know how the . . . maidens, as handsome as houris, their necks glittering with innumerable pearls and jewels, their bodies clothed with tunics of costly silks sprinkled with gold, are awaiting your arrival, reclining on soft couches in the sumptuous palaces of crowned lords and princes.”27

  The men roared their approval and rushed into battle. Roderic was killed, the Visigothic forces collapsed, and the Christians ran helter-skelter in disarray, fleeing in all directions. Roderic’s body was never found; he was believed to have drowned in a stream. “The Christians were obliged to shut themselves up in their castles and fortresses, and quitting the flat country, betake themselves to the mountains.”28

  Now Tarif led attack after attack, conquering city after city. “God filled with terror and alarm the hearts of the idolaters,” Al-Maqqari wrote, for the Christians had originally believed the Muslims would invade, steal booty, and then depart for their homes in North Africa. Now they realized they were coming to seize and occupy the kingdom.29 Some cities quickly capitulated; others fought feebly to defend themselves.