Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Tarik, Al-Maqqari wrote, endeavored to increase the terror of the Christians by means of the following stratagem:

  [H]e directed his men to cook the flesh of the slain in the presence of the Gothic captives in his camp, and when the flesh had thus been cooked in large copper vessels he ordered it to be cut up, as if it were to be distributed to his men for their meals; he after this allowed some of the captives to escape, that they might report to their countrymen what they had seen. And thus the stratagem produced the desired effect, since the report of the fugitives contributed in no small degree to increase the panic of the infidels.30

  The Muslims spread out across the countryside, riding horses they had taken from the Christians, with the existing Roman roads making quick progress very easy. A Muslim soldier named Mugheyth Ar-rumi was ordered to attack Córdoba, a large city in the south of Spain, while other battalions went toward Málaga and Elviria. Tarik headed toward Toledo, the Visigothic capital, located near the center of the peninsula. In Córdoba, Mugheyth’s army surprised the sentries and overpowered the garrison stationed there. Some of the troops and the governor eluded capture and took refuge in a church near the city. The Muslims besieged the church for three months and finally grew tired of waiting, according to Arab historians. They ordered the refugees to convert to Islam or agree to pay tribute, and when they refused, the church was set on fire and the people within perished in the blaze.31

  “After the taking of Córdoba,” Al-Maqqari wrote, “Mugheyth assembled all the Jews in the city and left them in charge of it, trusting them in preference to the Christians, on account of their hatred and animosity toward the latter.” Mugheyth then took possession of the palace as his own home and turned over the rest of the town to be inhabited by the Muslims.32

  The same strategy was used in another town, Elviria, on the peninsula’s Mediterranean coast: “The citadel of this latter place they entrusted to the care of the Jews, and this practice became almost general in the succeeding years; for whenever the Muslims conquered a town, it was left in the custody of the Jews with only a few Muslims, the rest of the army proceeding to new conquests, and where Jews were deficient a proportionally greater body of Muslims was left in charge.”33

  Tarik took a party of Jews with him to gain control of the capital city of Toledo, Al-Maqqari wrote. There they seized many items of great value, including

  25 gold crowns, one for each of the Gothic monarchs who had reigned over Andalus, (It being the custom of that nation that each of their kings should deposit in that sacred spot a gold diadem, having his name, figure, and condition, the number of children he left, the length of his life, and that of his reign, engraven on it,) one and twenty copies of the Pentateuch, the Gospel, or the Psalms; the book of Abraham; and that of Moses, several other books containing secrets of nature and art, or treating about the manner of using plants, minerals, and living animals, beneficially for man; another which contained talismans of ancient Greek philosophers, and a collection of recipes and simples and elixirs; several gold vases filled with pearls, rubies, emeralds, topazes, and every description of precious stones; many lofty rooms filled with gold and tissue robes, and tunics of every variety of costly silk and satin, without counting gilt armor, richly set daggers and swords, bows, spears, and all sorts of offensive and defensive weapons.34

  They also found a bejeweled table made of gold and silver, and encrusted with gems, which they were told had been owned by King Solomon. This became a highly coveted trophy of war and the soldiers broke it into pieces and fought over who should get each part.

  The Christians fled northward, and those who stayed behind were permitted to remain only by paying tribute, Al-Maqqari wrote. The abandoned homes were occupied by the invaders. “The Arabs inhabited the towns deserted by the Christians; for whenever, an Arab or a Berber, received orders to settle in a spot, he . . . established himself with his family in it without reluctance, by means of which the words of Islam spread far into the country, and the idolatry of the Christians was destroyed and annihilated.” More North Africans and Arabs surged across the straits:

  When the news of the mighty conquest had spread over the countries inhabited by the Muslims, great numbers of the population of Syria and other distant regions felt a strong desire to visit Andalus and take up their abode in it. Accordingly many individuals of the best and most illustrious among the Arabian tribes left the tents of their fathers and settled in Andalus.35

  Many important cultural and religious sites were destroyed in the process; holy relics were discarded. The famous mosque of Córdoba was “lighted with bronze lamps made out of Christian bells,” Al-Maqqari wrote, “and [a] great addition . . . was built entirely with the materials of demolished churches brought to Córdoba on the heads of Christian captives.”36

  This series of events was seared into the memories of many residents of Iberia. The history of Spain commissioned by Isabella contained many details of the conquest from the perspective of the defeated Iberians. “The land was depopulated and filled with tears and blood,” wrote the chronicler Diego de Valera. The women were “forced” and “children were killed,” and in some cities, “the major portion” of civilian residents were slaughtered.37

  The Muslim advance into western Europe was finally halted at the Pyrenees Mountains, the rocky border between France and Spain, after the Frankish king Charles Martel defeated the Arab forces at Tours in 732.

  Ultimately only a small remnant of an opposing Christian force remained active in Spain, in the far northern enclave of Asturias. “A despicable barbarian, whose name was Pelayo, rose in the land of Galicia, and having reproached his countrymen for their ignominious dependence and their cowardly flight, began to stir them up to revenge the past injuries, and to expel the Muslims from the land of their fathers,” Al-Maqqari wrote.

  From that moment the Christians of Andalus began to resist the attacks of the Muslims on such districts as had remained in their possession, and to defend their wives and daughters; for until then they had not shown the least inclination to do either. The commencement of the rebellion started thus: there remained no city, town or village in Galicia but what was in the hands of the Muslims with the exception of a steep mountain on which this Pelayo took refuge with a handful of men; there his followers went on dying through hunger until he saw their numbers reduced to about thirty men and ten women, having no other food for support than the honey they gathered in crevices of the rocks which they themselves inhabited like so many bees. However, Pelayo and his men fortified themselves by degrees in the passes of the mountain until the Muslims were made acquainted with their preparations; but perceiving how few they were, they heeded not the advice conveyed to them, and allowed them to gather strength, saying, “What are 30 barbarians, perched upon a rock? They must inevitably die.”38

  These remnants of the Visigoths survived, however, and eked out a living in the rainy, chilly provinces of Galicia and Asturias, far from the comfortable prosperity they had enjoyed as masters of the peninsula. Al-Maqqari’s account depicts them struggling for existence. In fact, Pelayo’s brother Favila was killed by a bear while hunting, which suggests they were reduced to hardscrabble survival. The heirs of the Visigoths spent the next twenty-four generations recovering the peninsula, inch by inch, mile by mile, mostly in fits and starts, until by Isabella’s birth the remaining Muslim stronghold in Spain was in the South, in the Kingdom of Granada. The Christian survival and advance were based on an intense collaboration between church and state that allowed them to remain a community through the long fight back to recover what they had lost. On the Iberian peninsula, church and state thus grew “closely united.”39

  The story of Pelayo became central to Isabella’s frame of reference. She believed herself to be a direct lineal descendant of that stalwart Visigoth and the inheritor of his mantle. In the palace where she spent much of her childhood, the Alcázar of Segovia, statues of her ancestors stood in niches all around the walls, and Pelayo w
as presented as the first of her line. A statue of him stood in the throne room, making him a mute participant in every event that took place in the administration of the government.

  In much of the rest of Spain, however, for the Christian and Jewish people who agreed to accept domination under the Muslims—also known in Spain as the Moors because of their arrival from Morocco—conditions were generally not particularly harsh. Many lived their lives with comfort. They were allowed to follow their own religion, as long as they paid extra taxes for the privilege. In the years following the conquest, many Spaniards converted to Islam. Some of the converts, known as muladíes, were sincere. But others only pretended to convert in order to curry favor with the ruling class. Similarly, some of the invading Berbers had themselves been reluctant or conflicted converts. The same was true of some Jews who converted.

  The defeat of the Visigoths could not have been so complete or quick without the assistance of this mistreated minority, the Jews, some of whom welcomed the new arrivals and assisted them in governing their new possessions. For the Jews, life under the Muslims brought a marked improvement over the abuse they had suffered under the Visigoths. In time it allowed them to develop a golden era of literature, science, medicine, and poetry.

  For the Christians, however, the role of the Jews in the defeat of the Visigoths, combined with old grievances over the treatment of the early Christian martyrs in the Holy Land, became dark and painful memories. Over the next seven hundred years, even as the three faiths coexisted and celebrated each other’s artistic, literary, and culinary achievements, angry hurt was a corrosive burr just under the surface.

  “The time during which the Muslims and Christians, along with Jews, lived in proximity in the Iberian peninsula has often been cited as a kind of ideal era of interfaith harmony,” writes the historian Jane I. Smith.

  To some extent that claim may be justified, but if so the era was fairly short and was soon supplanted by the tensions, prejudices, and treatment of minorities by both Muslims and Christians that more often has characterized relationships between the communities. By the tenth century the chaos of earlier invasions had settled, and the Iberian peninsula was pretty well split between the Christian Kingdom of Leon in the north and the considerably larger Muslim al-Andalus (known as Andalusia) in the south, with a thin frontier zone between. During the rule of Abd al-Rahman III in Córdoba (912–961), the Spanish Islamic state reached the height of power and fame. It was a time of great opulence and achievement, in which intellectual circles of Muslims, Jews and Christians under Abd al-Rahman’s patronage contributed to a flourishing of the arts, literature, astronomy, medicine, and other cultural and scientific disciplines. Muslim tolerance of the so-called People of the Book was high, and social intercourse was easy and constant. It was also a period during which a significant number of Christians chose to convert to Islam, although Christians continued to outnumber Muslims in Andalusia until the second half of the tenth century.40

  Many Christians and Jews adopted Arab customs and styles of dress during these years.

  Tolerance faded in the late tenth century during the rule of Abu Amir Al-Mansur, “who began a series of ruthless campaigns against Christians, including the plundering of churches and other Christian sites.”41 Social interactions grew strained, Smith writes:

  Pious Muslims refrained from speaking to the infidels except at a distance. If a Muslim and a Christian met on a public road, the Christian always had to give way to the Muslim. Houses of Christians had to be lower than those of Muslims. An “infidel” Christian could never employ a Muslim in service.… Christians were buried in their own cemeteries, far from Muslims.… A Muslim who converted to Christianity was immediately sentenced to death.… Thus the era of harmonious interaction between Muslims and Christians in Spain came to an end, replaced by intolerance, prejudice and mutual suspicion.42

  The accounts of a religious nirvana in Spain are “historically unfounded, a myth,”43 writes scholar Dario Fernández-Morera, because, in fact, many Christians and Jews were killed and brutalized by the Muslims in Spain. The Muslim ruler Al-Mansur, for example, inspired fear in people of other faiths and sacked the cities of Zaragoza, Osma, Zamora, León, Astorga, Coimbra, and Santiago de Compostela. In 985 he burned down Barcelona and enslaved the survivors he did not kill. In 1066 Muslims rioted and destroyed the entire Jewish community in Granada, killing thousands—more, in fact, than the numbers killed by Christians in the Rhineland at the beginning of the first Crusade. In the twelfth century, the Muslims expelled the entire population of Christians living in the cities of Málaga and Granada and sent them to Morocco.44

  The Christians found a rallying cry when they discovered what they believed to be the burial place of Saint James (in Spanish, Santiago), the apostle who had reportedly set off for Spain, in the kingdom’s far northwest. They built a church, a humble structure with mud walls, to house the body. Soon the site, known as Santiago de Compostela, became the great pilgrimage destination for Christians throughout western Europe, and a more ornate structure was built there. In 997, the Muslims attacked and seized the town of Santiago. They preserved the tomb of Saint James but destroyed all the public buildings and razed many churches.45 Actions such as these had the effect of turning the Christian effort to recover land and territory into a crusade.

  Even when Muslim rulers were tolerant, they viewed non-Muslims with contempt. “A Muslim must not act as a masseur to a Jew or Christian; he must not clear their rubbish nor clean their latrines,” wrote the Muslim jurist Ibn Abdun.

  In fact, the Jew and the Christian are more suited for such work.… It is forbidden to sell a coat that has once belonged to a leper, a Jew or a Christian, unless the buyer is informed of its origin; likewise if this garment once belonged to a debauched person.… No Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual.… A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them so they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace. . . . It is forbidden to sell to Jews and Christians scientific books.46

  Issues that affected women were always of particular interest to Isabella, and gender relations also colored the perceptions of people living in Spain. All three great faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—honored women in certain ways but were also patriarchal and made women second-class citizens in other significant ways. And while conditions for women in Christian Castile were far from ideal, conditions were arguably worse in the Muslim-occupied lands. Women’s activities there were legally restricted: They were not allowed to take boat trips with men; they were forbidden to wash clothes outside; they were banned from sitting on the river shore in the summer, when men were there. Moreover, they were required to wear voluminous clothing, such as the hijab, despite the sweltering heat of southern Spain; they were separated physically from men; they were generally confined to the household.47 These conditions of confinement would have been unimaginably awful for Isabella, who grew to be a strong, energetic, and physically active woman who traveled for miles on horseback, sometimes with only a handful of companions.

  Another disturbing element for an independent-minded woman like Isabella was that tens of thousands of women were held in sexual servitude under the Moors. These lives are seldom depicted in art or literature, and male historians seldom mentioned them except in passing, so it is difficult to gauge what the lives of these women might have been like. One rare set of pictures of concubines appears in a set of illustrated manuscripts at El Escorial, capturing the mournful faces of women wearing diaphanous, see-through gowns while they serve food and drink to men playing chess and other board games.48

  Polygamy was another divisive issue. It had been practiced in the early phases of all three religions, but it never faded away in the Islamic culture as it had in the other two. Muslim culture permitted men to have up to four wives but did not permit women to have multiple husbands. Muhammad had eleven recognized wives of various ages. Wealthy Muslim
men could emulate the prophet by similarly maintaining stables of women, stocked in harems, with war providing a steady stream of females for this purpose. Men aspired to such a lifestyle. The Muslim ruler Abd Al-Rahman, the one often mentioned as the guiding light of the golden era of Granada, left two hundred children, 150 of them male and the rest female.49 He was reported to have 6,300 women in his harem.

  It must have been disturbing to Isabella to imagine all the dejected first wives throughout the empire, lying in bed at night and overhearing their husbands making love with younger women, new wives who had been introduced to the family home.

  It was difficult for Muslim rulers to obtain enough women on this scale by wooing them, so a brisk business developed in the trafficking of kidnapped Christian and Jewish women. They would be renamed once they were enslaved, and renamed again when impregnated, often with the prefix Umm, which means “mother of.” Thus, Egilona, wife of the unfortunate Visigoth king Roderic, wed to one of the Muslim soldiers, became known as Umm-Asim, or “The Mother of Asim.”

  Many women did not find harem life appealing, so they had to be guarded. A vast caste of castrated slaves served as their captors. White slaves from eastern Europe, or “Slavs,” had their testicles removed but the customary practice for black slaves from Africa was to remove both their testicles and their penises. That way the captors and the captives could not engage in sexual relations with each other.

  A major historical event occurred in Isabella’s childhood that made the Moorish invasion of 711 seem just a moment away in time. In 1453, when she was two years old, and about the time her father died, Constantinople fell to Muslim Turks. Its conquest had been foreseen for decades, but still, when it finally happened, it was as though the tectonic plates of the earth had shifted. For a thousand years this exotic city, far to the east, had been the great metropolis of Christendom. Hagia Sophia had been the largest cathedral in the world when Justinian completed its construction, and it was still the largest in the world more than nine hundred years later. Through all these years the city was a living relic of the classical world. The residents there still called themselves “Romans”; they regularly read the Greek classics, including Homer; they saw themselves as the continuation of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. For most of those thousand years, Constantinople had also been the military bastion of Europe. It guarded the crucial crossing of the Bosporus and kept the nomadic armies of Asia out of Europe. The city had withstood a multiyear siege by Arab armies in 674–78, and a second, still more determined siege in 717–18, aided by its massive defensive walls and the technological wizardry of “Greek fire,” a substance like napalm, whose formula was a closely guarded secret.