Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Boabdil told them to discuss the problem among themselves and to suggest what should be done. The city elders decided to send an emissary to the Spanish sovereigns to ask for a negotiated settlement, and Boabdil agreed. Many scholars now believe that Boabdil had already reached a secret agreement with the Castilians but feared he would be killed if his subjects knew. By pushing the problem onto others’ shoulders, they shared responsibility for the opening of peace talks.

  By this time, too, Boabdil appears to have been primarily looking out for his own interests. In his negotiations with the Castilians, who were represented by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, a fluent speaker of Arabic, Boabdil asked for personal reassurances: “Tell me what certainty can [I] have that the king and the queen will let my lord the king have the Alpujarras, which is the first clause in our negotiations, and that they will treat him as a relative as promised?”47

  “The obligation, and the [grant of] lands will last, Mr. Governor, sir, for so long as His Excellency remains in the services of their highnesses,” Gonzalo was said to have answered.48 In other words, Boabdil was required to accept a permanent state of vassalage to Isabella and Ferdinand.

  The final settlement, according to Harvey, was really dependent “on a private and secret understanding” between Boabdil and the Spanish sovereigns. And so the surrender of Granada was secured.

  The public agreement, which was widely circulated, gave the Muslims of Andalusia the right to stay in their homes, keep their possessions, operate under their own sharia system of law, and leave for North Africa at the expense of Castile, as long as they left within three years. Muslims were to be allowed to keep their own faith without being compelled to convert to Christianity. The Muslims had to free their Christian slaves at the time of surrender. Christians were forbidden to enter mosques.

  Two specific provisions applied to the Jews living in the Nasrid empire. They were not permitted to collect any taxes or hold any power over Muslims. And the rights that had been granted to the Muslims would apply to Jews residing in Granada for the next three years only, after which, if they did not become Christian, they would have to move to North Africa.

  Under the agreement, the Alhambra was to be handed over on January 6, the Christian holiday known as Epiphany, to commemorate the day the Magi arrived bearing gifts for the infant Christ. But Boabdil suggested they speed up the transfer because the residents of Granada were becoming agitated about losing their homeland. They advanced the date, and Boabdil got a “suitable written receipt,” in Harvey’s words, confirming the deal had been concluded.49

  And so, at the beginning of 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand at long last took the capital of Granada. On January 2, Boabdil ceremonially handed over the keys to the city, and the two sovereigns, accompanied by fourteen-year-old Prince Juan, passed through the gates. Zurita recalled it as a day of “incredible fiesta and happiness.”50 They entered with surprising serenity, considering the circumstances. Boabdil had sent his son to them as a hostage to ensure a peaceful transfer of the city into Castilian hands. When the city was secured, the boy was returned to his family.51 Crosses and Castilian flags were planted at the highest points of the fortresses, while priests sang hymns and celebrated mass.

  Boabdil, who had just traded away his birthright, departed over a bridge that came to be known as the Bridge of Sighs, with his once-proud mother at his heels, reportedly carping at him for his failure to hold it for his descendants. El Zagal had already left for North Africa; Boabdil followed soon thereafter. The Spanish sovereigns clearly wanted him to leave, regardless of the assurances they had given him at the time of the surrender, and he was unhappy living under Spanish domination. He is believed to have died in Fez. What happened to these men’s harems is unknown.

  Taking possession of the city was a momentous experience for Ferdinand and Isabella and their children. The beautiful Alhambra of Granada, the Moorish-built palace of the Nasrid dynasty, struck the sovereigns as lovely, and they wandered its byways and gardens with awe and appreciation, wondering about the flowing designs of Arabic script. Its walls were inscribed with Arabic poetry and holy writ. One inscription, which Isabella noted, was repeated over and over: ONLY GOD IS THE VICTOR, or ONLY GOD IS ALL POWERFUL.52

  Inside the palace, whose immense size awed the visitors, were visible signs of the Muslim domination of the peninsula. At the entrance, an eyewitness said, they discovered seventeen Castilian standards, each representing a specific victory against Christian forces, including one that was more than 150 years old.53 And this fairytale palace, they learned, had been built with Christian slave labor.

  Another discovery also jarred the sensibilities of the Castilians. A group of nearby caves had been used as prisons, and many of the captives had been allowed to starve to death during the siege. The German traveler Jerónimo (Hieronymus) Münzer, who went there a few years later, said he was told that only 1,500 of the 7,000 Christian slaves were found alive when Isabella and Ferdinand arrived. They emerged, emaciated and filthy.

  About 750 of these captives were at death’s door. As they left the dungeons, they sang songs about Jesus as their savior, and they threw themselves on the ground before the feet of Isabella and Ferdinand, crying and shouting prayers of thanksgiving. It took two large carts to haul away the chains with which they had been bound.

  Most had managed to retain their Christian faith despite the difficult circumstances. Isabella asked one wizened captive who had been held for forty-four years whether his faith had sustained him: “What would you have thought in the first year of your captivity if you had been told that Jesus Christ had not been born to be your redeemer?” The man answered, “I would have died of the pain.”54

  Nine Christian captives—two Lombards and seven Castilians—had turned away from Christianity and become Muslim. That was heresy and apostasy and could not be permitted, so the king ordered them killed. They were beaten and then burned at the stake, the common penalty for heresy.

  The victory over Granada won acclaim for Isabella and Ferdinand throughout Europe, because it was the first significant triumph against Islam in hundreds of years, and to many Europeans, it was partial payback for the loss of Constantinople. “Perpetual peace resulted from the conquest of Granada,” wrote Zurita. “It was famed and celebrated through all the realms of Christendom, and it extended to the farthest and most remote lands of the Turk and Sultan.… It was an end to a war so continuous and cruel, that had lasted for centuries, with a nation so barbaric and fierce, such an enemy and an infidel.”55

  Ferdinand moved quickly to make sure he was given full credit for the achievement. “We desire you to know that it has pleased our Lord to give complete victory to the King and destruction to the Kingdom of Granada and to the foes of Our Catholic faith and after many labours, costs, deaths and much shedding of our subjects’ blood, on second January of this year of Grace 1492,” he wrote exultantly that very day in a letter to the rulers of Venice. “… Henceforth you have here a Catholic land.”56

  In addition to Alemán’s fifty-four choir stall carvings commemorating the war, another set of artworks memorialized it as well. They are part of the altarpiece of the Royal Chapel of Granada. They consisted of painted wood carvings of the surrender, fashioned within living memory of that early day in January 1492. One carving shows Isabella and Ferdinand entering Granada on horseback; her clothes cover her entire body, with only her face uncovered. She made it a custom to dress in the local style of her citizens, and here she appears to have dressed in a garment similar to a burka, though wearing a broad-brimmed hat. She even wore drapes under the hat to cover her neck.

  In a second carving, Boabdil approaches the king and queen to hand them the keys of Granada. A long line of Christian captives straggle out of the fortress behind him. A third panel shows Muslim men submitting to baptism in a fountain. A fourth shows heavily draped Muslim women being baptized, their mournful eyes visible under the heavy veils.

  Clearly, assimilation of th
is new province into Spain was not going to be painless. But a new institution of religious supervision and control had already been established by the Spanish sovereigns, and it was ready to be deployed against the Muslims as well.

  FOURTEEN

  ARCHITECTS OF THE INQUISITION

  During these years when religious hatreds were on the forefront of everyone’s mind, when Muslims and Christians were at war in Spain and in eastern Europe, and when both sides in both places justified their actions by calling it devotion to God, Queen Isabella authorized the creation of a joint church and state initiative called the Inquisition.

  The Inquisition applied only to people who had formally identified themselves as Christians but whose behavior caused others to doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. In Isabella’s lifetime, the Inquisition focused primarily on conversos, people of Jewish descent who had publicly converted to Christianity and were calling themselves Christians. It did not initially apply to Muslims or Jews. Its goal was to ferret out insincere Christians and, if they were found guilty, to correct them, and if they were deemed unrepentant, to kill them by burning them at the stake, the traditional penalty for heresy. But when Isabella and Ferdinand decided that the presence of practicing Jews in the kingdom was leading conversos astray, they decided to try to force all the Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity. Those who did not accept baptism were compelled to leave. Later the same thing happened to the Muslims, despite the specific promise made to them at the surrender of Granada that they could keep their faith. Both policies increased the number of reluctant Christians who would become subject to the Inquisition.

  The queen is known to have begun pondering the idea of an inquisitorial panel when she was in Seville for the first time in 1477. She formally launched it in 1480, the year the Turks seized Otranto and as the war with Granada was on the verge of breaking out. She did it, though reluctantly, as a result of intense lobbying by clerics in Seville and elsewhere who told her that heresy among conversos in Andalusia was epidemic, was jeopardizing souls, and was undermining security. The Spanish Inquisition therefore owed its origins in part to the strains of wartime, when suspect loyalties were less tolerated than usual and suspicions were running high. But it turned out to be such an effective tool for government repression and control that it survived as an institution for three hundred years, giving successive rulers a convenient way to suppress enemies and punish various kinds of social nonconformity that the majority of the population found irritating.

  Its first victims were Christians of Jewish descent who had continued to follow some Jewish customs, a practice called “Judaizing,” which made it difficult to tell if they had sincerely converted to Christianity. But as time wore on, homosexuals, people of Muslim descent, Protestants, and divorced people all came under the same type of scrutiny. So did political enemies of the government, or people accused of various kinds of unconventional thinking.

  Nonetheless the Spanish Inquisition, also known as the Holy Office, was a popular institution with the wider population, because they believed it was needed. After years of civil unrest, many people welcomed evidence that a strong authoritarian central government was eliminating social discord. The Spaniards had come to value religious orthodoxy. Bigots, or even the ordinary narrow-minded and pedantic, were the Inquisition’s most enthusiastic proponents; its victims or prospective victims hated and feared it. It became, in the historian Henry Kamen’s words, “a standard feature of the Spanish landscape.”1

  Nobody knows for sure what Isabella had in mind when she started the Inquisition. And nobody knows for sure how many people it affected. The scholars who have studied it have often brought their own personal biases to their work. It has been depicted so frequently in fiction that truth and perception have become confused and intermingled. Propagandists from England cited the existence of the Inquisition as evidence of their kingdom’s moral superiority to Spain, even while English authorities were cruelly oppressing their own religious minorities at home. Sultan Bayezid II is said to have roundly criticized the Inquisition shortly before the Ottoman Empire killed tens of thousands of its own heretics—those following a mystical Sufi variant of Shia Islam, instead of the government-authorized Sunni teachings. In other words, religious oppression is nothing new and is not uniquely Spanish.

  In more recent decades, hundreds of scholars have pored over the surviving fragments of documentary evidence of what the Inquisition was and did. Historians once believed that immense numbers of people were burned at the stake, but more recent scholarship has cast doubt on those assertions, and the estimates of actual deaths have been substantially reduced. Claims that hundreds of thousands of people were killed have been proved to be erroneous.

  But there is no question that during Isabella’s reign, hundreds of people were put to the flame, probably at least 1,000 and perhaps as many as 2,000. In the religious capital, Toledo, for example, the inquisitors killed 168 people during Isabella’s lifetime.2 About 85 in that same district were tried and found innocent. Another 120 were tried in absentia, having fled elsewhere or having already died. One reason the numbers are hard to determine is that inquisitors often tried people who were already dead, using the inquisitorial mechanism of documents as testimony, then burning their bones. People who ran away were tried in absentia and burned in effigy, much as a puppetlike figure of King Enrique had been constructed and then symbolically dethroned in Ávila when Isabella’s brothers were fighting over the throne. In those days, wax, wood, or cloth representations of people were viewed as having ritual significance.

  The Spanish Inquisition was not a new idea conceived by Ferdinand and Isabella. Through most of recorded history, and before the concept of a separation of church and state was invented, government and religion were inextricably linked. In most cultures, opposing religious doctrine has been tantamount to defying political authority. Therefore the Inquisition was an institution with very old roots and a prescribed set of rules, although the Spaniards introduced many new twists.

  The governing principle of an Inquisition is that failing to conform to religious and political norms is treason. In Isabella’s age, church and state were one—religious authority and secular power were intermingled. Threats to religious orthodoxy were seen as threats to the political establishment. Kings and queens assumed their thrones, they believed, by the will of God, and questioning God was tantamount to questioning royals’ political legitimacy. Moreover, kings and queens were viewed as spiritually responsible for the guardianship of their subjects’ lives and souls. A failure to root out heresy put the souls of the king and queen at risk as well.

  The word Inquisition comes from the Latin noun inquisitio, or “investigation,” and the Spanish Inquisition followed specific Roman codes of law. The Romans had authorized the use of torture to gain confessions, for example, believing that most wrongdoers would not voluntarily share information that would place them at risk of punishment. But they knew that confessions obtained under torture were often unreliable, and they required officials to obtain statements afterward from the suspect confirming what he or she had said under intense duress. The Roman emperors found torture effective in achieving the desired goals. In later centuries, writes the historian Lu Ann Homza, “the use of torture for the purpose of interrogation also became more widespread… especially in cases of treason.”3 Torture became a customary tool of law enforcement in Spain, too: victims were forced to experience the sensation of drowning by having water poured into their mouths, or were dangled from overhead beams to dislocate their shoulders.

  Over the years, a number of kings and popes had called for Inquisitions against various kinds of heresies, and burning heretics at the stake was the traditional punishment. Joan of Arc, for example, had been convicted of breaking church rules by wearing men’s clothing and was burned at the stake. The nine former Christians found in Granada at the Reconquest who had converted to Islam were deemed apostates and were sentenced to death.

  The big
gest single previous Inquisition had involved the Cathars, a Christian religious splinter group that spread in western Europe between the 1100s and 1300s. They deviated from church orthodoxy by permitting women to be religious leaders, criticizing the moral corruption of the Vatican and clerical hierarchy, and following a special diet that made them very thin. They said their beliefs made them special; they called themselves “Perfects.” In 1234 Pope Innocent III authorized an Inquisition to suppress them and kill those who would not renounce their beliefs. On a single day in March 1244, about two hundred Cathars were burned on a funeral pyre in France. Those who were not willing to die for their unorthodox beliefs pretended to have seen the errors of their ways and went underground.

  In those days, there was no presumption of innocence for people accused of crimes; they were simply assumed to be guilty. Under the Inquisition, people who were accused of practicing unorthodox customs but who admitted their sins and confessed were forgiven but were still punished in some way: they were made to wear a pointed hat or a special shirt, or were forced to walk barefoot or naked, or were made to do some other kind of penance. Those who returned to their previous errors received the death penalty.

  Under the inquisitorial system, informants were encouraged to come forward and anonymously identify people whose seemingly innocent habits might reflect an insincere commitment to Christianity—things such as avoiding pork, wearing clean clothes on the Jewish Sabbath, or lighting candles on Jewish holidays. Large numbers of people, it turned out, were willing to anonymously finger their friends, employers, and associates. The ability to denounce people without incurring personal risk brought out the worst in the human character.