All this destruction was caused by one man, Mehmed, “who introduced all the gloom and devastation; he wrecked and ruined everything—he was a true plague,” wrote Marin Barleti, an eyewitness at the siege of Scutari. “Who knows how many regions, cities, states, kingdoms and empires he subdued! The whole world trembled because of him.”24
The Frenchman Pierre d’Aubusson, the grand master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, compared Mehmed to Satan, to Lucifer. He called him
the unspeakable tyrant who has destroyed the souls of so many children whom he compelled to abjure their faith, and thus blinded they have descended into hell. [He] caused virgins and maidens to be defiled, slaughtered young men and old, profaned sacred relics, polluted churches and monasteries, destroyed, oppressed and seized kingdoms, principalities and cities, including Constantinople, which he took for himself and made the scene of unbelievable crimes.25
By 1480, when Isabella was twenty-nine and the mother of three children, two of them daughters, another great assault by Mehmed was looming. He was preparing the long-awaited attack on Italy. A fleet—including some 140 vessels and a seaborne expeditionary army of 18,000—landed on the heel of the Italian peninsula.26 The original plan was to attack Brindisi, but the force shifted to Otranto. The town was small and only weakly defended and fell quickly to the Turks. Of its 22,000 inhabitants, only 10,000 survived. As in Constantinople, the residents flocked to the local cathedral, which only made them easier to slaughter. About eight hundred people were led to a nearby hill and told they could live only if they converted to Islam on the spot. They refused and were beheaded; their abandoned corpses were devoured by animals. Some eight thousand people were loaded onto ships and carted off to Albania as slaves.27
Isabella was specifically aware of this development and watching the situation anxiously. She wrote to the Neapolitans that help was on its way from Castile—and indeed, reinforcements and armaments were soon delivered.28
Meanwhile, Mehmed was preparing for his final invasion of western Europe. Many people thought the fate of the Christian nations was sealed. In 1481, for example, the classical scholar Peter Schott, canon of Strasbourg, traveled from Bologna to Rome to take a final look at the city. He went there, he wrote, to see it one last time, “before the Eternal City was taken by the Turks.”29
By early 1481 Mehmed, now forty-nine, had mobilized. He set out with a great fleet, heading west. No one knew what his destination might be. It could be Ferdinand’s Kingdom of Sicily. Ominously for Isabella, he was also rumored to be heading for an attack on the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt. That course would fill the hearts of Spaniards with deep terror—for it had been with an invasion from North Africa that Spain had been taken in 711, in another period of aggressive Muslim expansion. “Every day news came to the King and Queen that the Turks had a great armada on the sea, and that they were sending it to conquer the kingdom of Sicily,” wrote Isabella’s court chronicler Hernando del Pulgar. “And everywhere they went on the land, they were taking Christians and cruelly murdering them.”30
Isabella and Ferdinand began preparing for the assault they expected to come any day. They ordered every church in the land to organize daily prayer sessions to explain to the people what was happening and to encourage them to prepare for the attack. They reached an agreement with the king of Naples, Ferdinand’s cousin, that they would help defend Naples if he would help defend Sicily. They sent a trusted official, Alonso de Quintanilla, to crisscross their kingdoms and make an inventory of their weapons, ships, and fortresses. They sent other officials to inspect the ports to determine how vulnerable they might be to a naval assault. They looked to the English and Portuguese for guidance on strategies for repulsing attacks by sea.
Isabella was making it her mission to shore up her forces against the impending onslaught, using religious faith to mobilize troops for her kingdom’s self-defense. Everyone was told of the “great plans being made by the Turks for the spilling of blood, and what they were doing each day to the Christians, and the great necessity that all Christianity would resist that enemy,” Pulgar wrote. “And like good Christians they should give thanks to God that something had appeared that was so great that they would be reminded of the great zeal they should show for the honor of King and homeland, and to sing the praises of the Christian religion.”31
In the end Isabella’s efforts would be successful. But the methods she used would blacken her name forever.
THIRTEEN
THE QUEEN’S WAR
As soon as she put the problems with Portugal behind her, Queen Isabella directed her attention to southern Spain. This region was a priority for two reasons. In the short term, she had to deal with a new aggressiveness from the neighboring Muslim Emirate of Granada, at a time when border defenses were weak, splintered, and unreliable. And in the longer term, she needed a strong position on the Mediterranean Coast in order to protect Castile and Aragon against the growing threat from the Ottoman Turks.
The first step was to secure Castile’s border with the Islamic world. Queen Isabella had to find ways to make peace among the squabbling nobles living in the Christian-controlled portion of Andalusia, which had been wracked for years with civil unrest because of King Enrique’s lax administration of lands that were distant from his home in Segovia. It was particularly important to quell domestic disturbances in Seville, the biggest city and most important river port in the south, because new hostilities were breaking out on the frontier.
Just across the border was the last surviving Muslim realm in Iberia, the Kingdom of Granada, now controlled by the warlike Nasrid dynasty. This heavily armed emirate stretched about 250 miles along the Mediterranean coast, reaching about 93 miles inland; formidable castles defended its perimeter. The kingdom’s biggest city and crown jewel was Granada, located in the mountainous heartland, but the Nasrids also controlled the important Mediterranean seaports of Málaga, Marbella, and Almería, which gave them ready access to reinforcements from overseas and a continuing source of supplies.
From these secure bases, the Granadans were able to send lightning-strike raids out into the Castilian lands to capture Christians to enslave them, to sell them for ransom, or to use them as laborers or in sex trafficking. “Taking advantage of the disturbance and revolts sweeping through Castile at this time, [they] sent yearly expeditions there during the reign of Enrique IV, until his death in 1474,” wrote the historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad Al-Maqqari.1
In 1474, the year King Enrique died, a new leader came to power in Granada. Abu al-Hasan Ali was more belligerent than his recent predecessors. He built up the Muslim army and its capacity for offensive action, with the help and support of his equally strong-willed primary wife, Fatima, who was also his cousin. The sultan’s militancy worried even his own countrymen. One Arab chronicler called Abu al-Hasan “magnanimous and valiant, a lover of wars, and the dangers and horrors of them.”2 It was a time of glorious Islamic expansion, and no doubt he wanted to emulate the successes being achieved by the Ottoman Turks in the east, confident that God was on his side as well as theirs.
Abu al-Hasan grew steadily bolder and more determined. “He put great dread into the Christians, who had never been so harried by the Muslims,” according to Arab historians. He did not seize land but instead concentrated on raids that brought “rich spoils of booty and captives.”3 In April 1478 he staged a huge military parade to put his troops and armaments on display. This new aggressiveness, coming as it did at a time when the Ottoman Empire was expanding in the Balkans, was worrisome to the Castilians, who feared that the Nasrids would ally themselves with the Turks and allow them to use their Mediterranean ports for an invasion of Spain. It could be a repeat of 711, of 1086, and of 1195, when Muslim rulers in Andalusia had gained reinforcements from other Muslim lands.
The Christians, however, were not just innocent victims. They, too, led raiding parties into Muslim areas and had engaged, in fits and starts, in aggressive advances that had allowed them to conquer
vast tracts of land that had been home to Muslim families for hundreds of years. The Christians saw each victory as reclaiming what had been theirs; the Muslims saw each defeat as theft of their own homeland. Isabella was as convinced as Abu al-Hasan that her viewpoint was correct and that the entire south of Spain belonged by right to her, allowing her to rationalize and justify the need for a military response to any provocation.
Abu al-Hasan now saw Isabella’s rise to power as a welcome sign of Castilian vulnerability. Soon after the princess became queen and just around the time the Portuguese invaders surged into Castile, he made his ominous vow that he would no longer make the vassalage payments that Granada had been giving Castile to maintain their uneasy truce. Arab sources reported that he delivered this message in specifically threatening words. He said the days of Granadan tribute to Castile were over: “The sovereigns who paid tribute to the Christians are dead, and in Granada the only thing we are minting is… iron and lances to use against our enemies.”4 The Italian scholar Peter Martyr, who lived at Isabella’s court, said he was told that Abu al-Hasan made that threat while menacingly fingering the point of a sharp metal lance.
The result was satisfying to Granada. The Christians made no immediate response and appeared to be accepting peace on those terms. Inside the Castilian court, however, the signal had been received. “The King and Queen were disturbed by this message,” Peter Martyr wrote.5 But there was little Isabella could do about it, engaged as she was in wars on two of her other borders and trying to establish peace within the kingdom. But she realized that she was working against the clock, that she faced not just a newly militant Granada but also the likelihood that the emirate would be bolstered by Muslim allies from North Africa, Egypt, or Turkey. And in fact, as Isabella feared, the Muslims of Andalusia soon approached the Muslims of North Africa for assistance and reinforcement. And then they turned to the Turks as well.
In the middle of 1477, to closely evaluate the situation, Queen Isabella traveled to Seville for the first time and stayed there for more than a year. She found the city in bad shape. The royal palace, the Alcázar, was in crumbling disrepair. Street crime was rampant; it was too dangerous to venture outside at night. Two of Andalusia’s leading noble families, those of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia and the Marquess of Cádiz, were literally at swordpoint with each other. Disagreements of all kinds simmered under the surface of public discourse, ready to boil over into violence. But she did her usual things to bring justice to the region—presiding for hours on end over judicial procedures to resolve disputes, allowing people to air their grievances, and trying to bring adversaries into a semblance of harmony. Her customary brand of stern justice brought wrongdoers to heel. She even had some success in beginning a rapprochement between the families of the duke and the marquess. She spent about three more months in the second most important city of Andalusia, Córdoba, before heading back to Castile, where a number of other issues were awaiting her attention. Trying to buy time, she signed a three-year truce with Abu al-Hasan in 1478, and she did not press her demand for tribute money.6
Back in Castile in 1480, after finalizing the peace treaty with Portugal, Isabella barely had time to catch her breath before receiving what Isabella’s Spanish chronicler Palencia called the “terrifying news” of the successful Ottoman attack on Otranto. The Spaniards learned with horror that the Turks had conducted a successful surprise raid on the town, and that although the people of Otranto had not put up the “least resistance to the enemy,” many had nevertheless been slaughtered. The long-dreaded attack had given the Turks a foothold on the Italian peninsula, from which they could ravage the interior and prepare to seize Rome. The seriousness of the attack could not be underestimated. Its goal was “extinguishing the Catholic religion,” Palencia wrote.7
The speed of Otranto’s fall made it painfully obvious how easily the Turks could do the same thing on the Iberian peninsula, particularly if they used a beachhead like Málaga, Almería, or Marbella and found allies among the Muslims of Andalusia. It was becoming clear that if the Turks came in this way, it would be impossible to fend them off. And since war was inevitable, the threatening beachhead had to be eliminated before it began. From this point on, Isabella and Ferdinand seemed to be looking for an excuse to fight. Soon an opportunity presented itself, in the form of another surprise attack, this time from Granada.
During Christmas week of 1481, the Muslims of Granada invaded and attacked the mountain enclave of Zahara, located well within Castilian territory, on what Arab sources called a “stormy, rainy dark night.”8 Under the cover of these conditions, they audaciously clambered up the walls of the poorly guarded and ill-prepared fortress. “The Christians were terrorized and without any hope of rescue,” the chronicler Palencia wrote. They couldn’t resist the Muslim assault, and “a great number of them were killed by being slashed with swords, and the rest were captured and were marched to Granada.”9 Abu al-Hasan took possession of the town and left a garrison there to secure it. “He returned to Granada very satisfied and content with the good outcome of his venture,” Arab historians would write.10
But some older, wiser people in Granada, worried that the move had been rash, expressed concern about how Abu al-Hasan was governing the realm. Overtly provoking the Christians might lead to a bad outcome. Some in Granada began to see omens and portents of doom, troubling signs in nature that unsettled the superstitious.
Isabella and Ferdinand were in Medina del Campo when they heard about the fall of Zahara. They received this news with special dismay. Not only did the attack represent another in a long line of border skirmishes—it was also a blow to Spanish pride. Zahara had been conquered from Granada after a grief-filled siege by Ferdinand’s grandfather, Ferdinand of Antequera, in 1410. Now, in addition to these most recent deaths, some 150 people of Zahara had been marched into captivity and were being held in the impregnable town of Ronda. And, troublingly for Isabella and Ferdinand, Zahara was now permanently occupied.
From this new base, the Muslims made further incursions in the direction of Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, and Murcia, and nobody could stop them. Ferdinand and Isabella were too far away to intervene. Now the region was, in the words of the Countess of Yebes, “practically at the mercy of the infidel.”11 Nobody was safe.
A problem that had existed as a dull ache in the Spanish psyche had suddenly become a ringing migraine. Isabella and Ferdinand had launched their marriage with the vague intention of someday reclaiming Granada as part of Christendom, but now the situation had taken on an intense immediacy.
But what should they do? Achieving victory over the Muslim forces of Granada would require a herculean commitment by all the Spanish kingdoms, because Granada was formidably protected by hilltop fortresses everywhere, each almost impossible to successfully besiege. The Nasrids’ close proximity to their coreligionists in North Africa, meanwhile, made it likely that they would receive, in short order, succor and assistance. Reinforcements and relief were “so apparent, so certain and so close,” wrote the Aragonese chronicler Jerónimo Zurita, that the monarchs realized it would take “all the power and the force and the pushing” they could muster to “free that part of Spain and of the world of the subjugation and servitude from such enemies.”12
Not yet prepared to mount such an all-out effort, the Spanish sovereigns at first relied on defensive tactics to protect themselves while they organized for what they saw would be a battle to the death. Isabella and Ferdinand ordered the Castilian fortress cities ringing the Granadan kingdom to strengthen their own defenses and prepare for war. They also initiated a naval blockade that began to interfere with the shipment of goods and soldiers between North Africa and Granada’s port cities.
But before the sovereigns could complete their preparations for war, the Sevillian nobleman Rodrigo Ponce de León, the red-haired and hotheaded Marquess of Cádiz, the man who had been feuding with the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, decided to take matters into his own hands. An informant, a former s
lave who had been held in the dungeon there, told Ponce de León that the heavily walled town of Alhama, located in the rich agricultural heartland of the Kingdom of Granada, was poorly defended and might be a good target for a counterattack. On his own initiative, the Marquess of Cádiz decided to capture the town. He and his allies chose the date of February 27, 1482, and launched their attack at night, as the Muslims had done in Zahara. They rushed the town and took it, killing eight hundred Muslims and capturing three thousand, and planting a cross on the battlements of a high tower. And so the long-expected war began in a chaotic and unplanned fashion.
Now it was the Muslims who reacted with shock and horror, for they viewed Alhama as a critical link in the wall of defense ringing Granada. The city had been known as the “eyes” of Granada, because its watchtowers had alerted the citizens to Castilian forays into their lands. From their perspective, this too was a surprise attack. Moreover, the methods employed by the Castilians, who had been looking for revenge, inspired rage in the Muslims. “[The city’s] walls, streets and temples were left filled with corpses and bathed in blood,” Arab historians wrote.13 The Castilians threw the bodies of the dead over the town walls.
This was the first big victory in Isabella’s chapter of the Reconquest. Almost immediately she recognized its significance. But its methods had been brutal, and they paved the way for all-out war.
The Muslims quickly assembled an army to recover the town, and upon their arrival outside its walls, they were enraged and repulsed to discover wild dogs gnawing the decaying corpses of their countrymen. This was a double affront to Muslim sensibilities because they believe dogs to be unclean animals. The soldiers from Granada, determined to eject the Castilians from the fortress, besieged it for weeks. The Castilians were trapped inside, with limited water supplies, and began slowly dying of thirst. They managed to send out messengers first announcing their victory, then revealing their plight.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 23
