Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Ferdinand and Isabella spent that winter in Seville, planning their next steps. The following summer they struck and took the towns of Coín and Cártama, and then turned to one of Granada’s most difficult targets, Ronda, which sits on a mesa surrounded by sheer cliffs on all sides. Here a clever trick led to victory. Ferdinand made a feint toward the port city of Málaga, which caused the Granadans to rush their available soldiers in that direction to protect that vital link to the outside world. Meanwhile, however, the Marquess of Cádiz doubled back to Ronda and put the town under siege before the garrison could be reinforced. The Castilians besieged and bombarded Ronda and cut off its water supply.

  The battle of attrition lasted two weeks. Ronda “was defended by many of the most valiant Muslims in the kingdom, and all the Moors were brave warriors,” wrote Zurita. The fighting went on night and day, but finally “moved by the begging and crying of the women and the little children who wanted to surrender,” the Muslims asked for peace terms.30 The Castilians took the town on May 22, 1485.

  This victory was particularly significant to Isabella, because capturing Ronda freed some four hundred Christian slaves who were being held there. Among them were some of the people who had been seized at Zahara. They were weak and starving and needed to be nursed back to health. Queen Isabella ordered the heavy chains they had worn to be placed in carts and hauled to Toledo, to hang on the exterior walls of her Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, as a reminder to worshipers of the hardships Christians had suffered.

  The residents of Ronda were allowed to remain in their homes. Municipal leaders were required to take an oath of loyalty to Castile, to pay the same taxes they had paid to the Nasrid dynasty, and to fight on behalf of Castile if asked to do so. King Ferdinand promised not to interfere with their practice of Islam and allowed them to settle disagreements under sharia law.

  From there the Castilians marched to the port city of Marbella, which promptly surrendered. In fact, the city’s top officials contacted King Ferdinand before he arrived, asking to be given the choice of becoming vassals of the Spanish sovereigns or departing to “any place they wish,” on ships to be provided by Ferdinand.31 Alemán’s woodcarving of the surrender of Marbella shows a Muslim soldier who has changed sides and is providing assistance and advice to the Castilians as they approach the city gates.

  With Ronda and Marbella both secured, the sovereigns decided they could at last head home for a while. Isabella and Ferdinand spent the winter in Castile, in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid. Princess Catherine, the future Catherine of Aragon, was born there on January 16, 1486. Queen Isabella remained off the campaign trail for a while, suffering from a postpartum infection, but Ferdinand set out on an expedition to Granada on his own on May 13, leaving at dawn. He apparently had no particular plan of attack, instead advancing as quickly as possible and intending to look for promising targets of opportunity. Isabella wasn’t sure where he was at times, once writing to him “at the siege wherever you have gone.”32

  Ferdinand marched down toward Andalusia. He crossed the Las Yeguas River near Córdoba, where he paused to receive the supplies that were being shipped to him from all over the peninsula. The Marquess of Cádiz arrived as well, bringing additional reinforcements. Here Ferdinand was informed that Boabdil had reconciled with El Zagal, despite his pledge of loyalty and fealty to Isabella and Ferdinand, and was now planning how best to make war on the Christians. El Zagal and Boabdil had resolved their differences by dividing up the cities of Granada between themselves.

  At night Ferdinand gathered his nobles to consult about where to direct their effort. On the advice of the Marquess of Cádiz, they decided to make another attempt against Loja, the town they had failed to capture four years earlier and that now was being defended by Boabdil himself. In preparation, the Spaniards besieged and took the nearby towns of Íllora, Moclín, Montefrío, and Colomera. The Spanish nobility participated in this effort in force, as well as some newcomers from England and France. A man they called Lord Scales made a particularly jaunty appearance on his arrival with a contingent of English troops.

  While Ferdinand was away from her, Queen Isabella wrote to him with painstaking care for his pride, with exaggerated courtesy and respect. She suggested at one point that Boabdil could have possession of the citadels of Baza and Guadix, properties that were held by El Zagal, in exchange for his surrender of Loja, but then ostentatiously appeared to catch and excuse herself: “Pardon me, your wife, because I speak about things I do not know.”33

  The artillery attack on Loja began on Sunday, May 28. Ferdinand was ferocious in his assault, wrote Peter Martyr, who was there. The bombardment was fierce but did not last long. The chronicler Hernando del Pulgar said the bombardment lasted one day and two nights before Boabdil surrendered the fortress.

  Isabella’s public role during the battle at Loja had been ostentatiously religious. She had spent her days and nights in prayer and fasting, asking God for victory and fretting about the fate of her husband and the other soldiers. She rejoined the army soon after the Castilians gained control of the city.

  Boabdil was back in their hands once again. Again he asked to be freed, and again Isabella and Ferdinand agreed, even though he had earlier pledged vassalage to them and then reneged. By this point it was clear that Boabdil was more valuable to the sovereigns when he was in Granada fomenting trouble than when he was in their custody. And now, in exchange for his freedom, Boabdil reached a secret agreement with Queen Isabella, very similar to the one she had proposed to King Ferdinand. She promised to support him in a plan for a coup against his uncle.

  The shifts in fortune so evident in Loja put Isabella in a reflective mood, and she wrote to Ferdinand on May 30: “May it please the Lord to continue the victory that Our Lady has given” in delivering that town to them, she wrote, calling it “a marvelous thing.” Nevertheless, the loss of life disturbed her. “The Moors died defending [Loja], and our people also did so,” she wrote. “… The deaths weigh heavily on me.”34

  But there could be no hesitation. The sovereigns pushed ahead toward Íllora, Moclín, and Montefrío, which all surrendered. The queen herself entered Moclín with six-year-old Princess Juana to accept its surrender, according to Alemán’s choir stall woodcarving. Isabella and her daughter are shown, accompanied by Cardinal Mendoza and what appear to be several young pages. The woman and child, riding on horseback, enter a chaotic and frightening scene. The carving shows the tower ablaze as a result of mortar fire that caused an explosion. The mortar fire had ignited the Muslims’ gunpowder depot, according to the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar.35

  Returning to Córdoba, the queen prepared a grand victory reception for King Ferdinand, who arrived four days later. With this event, the campaign of 1486 ended.

  Isabella and Ferdinand spent that winter in Salamanca and then, when winter ended and the new campaign season began, went back to their military headquarters in Córdoba. With the spring came Boabdil’s promised coup. On April 7, 1487, Ferdinand left to besiege Vélez-Málaga, a town near the crucial port of Málaga. After a pitched battle there, the Muslims surrendered on April 27. El Zagal had set out with troops from Granada to defend the town, but soon after he left, Boabdil took control of the capital. This was a huge blow to El Zagal, and, seeing no point either in trying to defend Vélez-Málaga or in returning to Granada, he and his followers headed instead for the town of Guadix. Now Granada’s troops were permanently divided into two separate contingents that would no longer be working together.

  Boabdil had been able to oust his uncle because of the secret pact with Queen Isabella. He had written to her explaining that he had an opportunity to unseat El Zagal, but needed troops, arms, and provisions to do it. Isabella had sent her childhood friend, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, to render that support. Together they locked El Zagal out of Granada, and Boabdil was declared king. On April 29, Boabdil wrote to Queen Isabella announcing his triumph against his uncle and reaffirming the obedience he had
sworn to her in Loja. He had also reached an agreement with her, as she had suggested, that “he would turn over Granada, when he could, in exchange for places in the eastern part of the kingdom, which was then loyal to El Zagal.”36 At this point, according to the historian L. P. Harvey, he was almost certainly a “secret ally” of Isabella and Ferdinand. 37

  Ferdinand and Isabella next proceeded to a rich target, the seaport city and fortress of Málaga. They understood that it would be the most important battle of the war, because the seaport was the vital link between the Muslims of Granada and Muslims elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It was also probably the most difficult single target, as it consisted of three separate fortresses. If they were to win it, then victory over the inland city of Granada would be a virtual certainty. Ferdinand had arrived on May 6, while Isabella got there two weeks later. Her arrival, coming as it did among reports of a plague epidemic, demonstrated her personal resolve to take the port city. The sovereigns established a tent encampment outside its gates.

  First they tried to negotiate for Málaga’s surrender, something that they had managed to achieve with a number of other Moorish towns. They warned that if the Muslims did not submit, they would be enslaved. Given that El Zagal had moved away from the front, Ferdinand and Isabella were able to argue that the garrison was unlikely to get much support from other Muslims in Granada. But the defenders adamantly rejected the offer of a negotiated settlement. So Ferdinand and Isabella began a tight blockade and siege to starve the inhabitants into submission.

  The bombardment began; the city was besieged for three long months. Food ran low, and the residents began to starve. Morale also flagged among the Castilian troops, and some deserted. Málaga’s Muslim commander threatened to kill the six hundred Christian prisoners inside the city if the Castilians did not withdraw. Ferdinand responded that he “would kill every Muslim in Spain” if the Christian slaves were injured.38 At last the city surrendered, but the ferocity of the battle had hardened the sovereigns’ hearts, and they were punitive toward the inhabitants.

  All the surviving residents of Málaga became the property of the king and queen. Women slaves were given to Christian noblewomen. The pope was given one hundred slaves; Cardinal Mendoza received seventy. The Jews of Málaga were allowed to keep their property but were forcibly relocated until their ransom, some 10,000 gold castellanos, could be paid. Chief judge and rabbi Abraham Senior, Isabella’s childhood friend from Segovia, raised the money for the ransom of the Jews and paid it. No one stepped forward to pay the ransoms of the Muslims. Of about 5,000 people captured, about 4,400 ended up sold into slavery.39 The mosques were turned into churches. The six hundred Christian captives, as sick and wizened in appearance as the slaves in Ronda, were freed, fed, and nursed back to health.

  With the collapse of Málaga, western Granada now belonged entirely to the Castilians, and only a handful of major Granadan towns remained under Nasrid control. Guadix, Baza, and the capital, Granada, were important towns and cities in the interior of the kingdom; Almería was Granada’s last major seaport.

  In 1488, after spending some time in Ferdinand’s realms, Isabella and Ferdinand captured the towns of Vera, Vélez-Blanco, and Vélez-Rubio. That year the urgency of their cause increased, because word came that the Turks were on the move once again, this time with a land army of some 100,000 soldiers and a fleet of 505 galleys.

  Baza was the next major siege. The Castilian troops arrived in June 1489. It became a long, hard slog. They made little progress and considered departing. King Ferdinand sent messengers to the queen, who was in Jaén, asking her advice, and she insisted that the Castilians stand their ground, saying that she would find a way to provide whatever was needed to win the victory. She urged her troops to take courage from the Castilians’ growing record of success, and to have confidence that they were doing God’s bidding. “It is the same enemies and now they are weaker,” she told her husband and his troops. She promised, moreover, to keep God on their side by offering perpetual prayers for their support. This message cheered and roused the troops. “Therefore we fix our foot,” Peter Martyr concluded, meaning that they would not back down and would not withdraw from the siege.40

  By 1489 the Castilian troops encamped around Baza had become a cohesive fighting force, and the comity and high morale among them were evident to everyone. The soldiers came from all different parts of Spain—from Asturias, from Galicia, from the Basque country, and from Extremadura—and joined with the Castilians and Aragonese. All spoke different dialects but nevertheless got along surprisingly well, united in a sense of combined public purpose. They were becoming a nation, organized under a religious banner. “It is incredible to believe that among so many idioms of various nations, different manners, various disciplines of eighty thousand foot and fifteen thousand horse there should be the greatest concord” in the camp, Martyr told Milanese Cardinal Giovanni Arcimboldo. “So great is the reverence of the Royal Majesty that to this day, no tumult has arisen to disturb anything; there are no thefts, no highwaymen on the roads; no private quarrels. But if by chance any arise, the rest are deterred by severe reprimands to the authors.”41

  The military discipline reminded the humanist scholar of the ancient Greeks. “Yet all anonymous, shut up in one camp, so practice warfare, so obey the orders of the chiefs and prefects, that you would suppose them all brought up in one house with one language and the same discipline,” he wrote. “You would believe our camp to be a city founded on Plato’s Republic.”42

  In the fall of 1489, Queen Isabella moved from Jaén to the nearby town of Ubeda, close enough to keep an eye on events in Baza. In November, she decided to go to Baza itself, as she had in Málaga, to boost morale. Her presence caused the Moors’ resistance to crumble. She arrived in a stately procession, accompanied by her eldest child, nineteen-year-old Princess Isabel. With Queen Isabella present, the town leaders and residents felt confident that the terms of surrender would be merciful and would be observed. Soon they reached an agreement with her that allowed the elite to take their possessions and depart, while the townspeople were left to live according to their customs.

  The agreement they reached gave the Muslim soldiers of Baza money in exchange for helping the Castilians attack El Zagal’s remaining strongholds. Sidi Yahya, the principal leader in Baza, left for Guadix, where El Zagal was living, and convinced him that resistance was futile. By December 22, El Zagal had surrendered the port city of Almería, and he gave up Guadix on December 30. He sold all his personal property in Andalusia for 20,000 castellanos and departed to a new home in North Africa. Arab sources said he did it to spite his nephew Boabdil. According to Nubdhat Al-Asr:

  Many people assert that [El Zagal] and his commanders sold these villages and districts ruled by them to the ruler of Castile, and that they received a price for them. All this was with a view to taking revenge on the son of his brother… and on his commanders who stayed in Granada, with just the city under their government and with benefit of a truce from the enemy. By his action, he wanted to cut Granada off, so as to destroy it in the way that the rest of the country had been destroyed.43

  The surrender of Almería had great strategic importance: it meant that the entire southern coastline was closed off from Granada and that the Nasrid dynasty had lost its last outlet to the sea and the possibility of reinforcement. King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, and Princess Isabel all participated in the official surrender of the city. Alemán’s woodcarving shows a bearded man with a turban, probably El Zagal, approaching King Ferdinand, almost on his knees, to kiss the king’s feet. Meanwhile, over the door, a Muslim raises his hands in either greeting or lamentation.44

  This series of episodes in 1489, and specifically the siege at Baza and Isabella’s role in its surrender, left a lasting mark, among other things, on the games we play today. Chess was enormously popular in Spain at the time, and soon after this battle the Queen became the single most powerful piece on the chessboard, able to move great distanc
es in all directions; her mission is to protect and defend the key piece on the board, the King. Some versions of chess had had a Queen figure before Isabella’s birth, but it was at this time that the game, originally invented in India, underwent a complete metamorphosis and the Queen became a dominant figure. The changes in the game were chronicled in a popular book on the new rules of chess, published in Salamanca about 1496, written by Ramírez de Lucena. He described the game now as “queen’s chess,” and her new powers allowed her to “advance as far as she liked, as long as her path was clear.”45 Queen Isabella had memorialized herself as a powerful player in the game of war.

  Isabella and Ferdinand’s most recent victories had been crucial to completing the Reconquest. By 1490 the Nasrid dynasty was finished, but the war was not yet over. In 1490 and 1491 the sovereigns began their siege of Granada’s capital. The Muslims hoped that when winter came, the Spaniards would depart to escape the harsh cold, but these hopes were dashed when the Granadans saw them building a permanent garrison town outside Granada, which they named Santa Fe, or Holy Faith. But the Granadans hung on, hoping against hope. Starvation set in, and conditions inside the city became desperate.

  The final year of the campaign, 1491, was a year of perpetual skirmishes as the Muslims found ways to strike at their attackers. The exact role played by Boabdil, now the emir of Granada, is unclear. He had promised to give Granada to Isabella and Ferdinand, but now that the end was near, he seemed immobilized. A group of leading Granadan noblemen, clerics, and dignitaries met with him and pointed out the emirate’s dismal situation, its food shortages, and the deaths of its strongest warriors, leaving no one else to fight. And there was no help on the horizon. “Our brethren the Muslims who live across the sea in the Magrib have already been approached, and none of them has come to help or risen to our assistance,” this delegation said.46