Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  On the basis of such testimony, people were hauled into jail and sometimes tortured until they confessed. If they confessed wholeheartedly, they might escape death and be given limited punishment. But if they relapsed or if their heresies were viewed as persistent, church officials would “relax,” or turn them over, to government officials, who would perform the executions.

  How did a ferocious outbreak of such injustice erupt in Spain? Answers to this complex and paradoxical question go back to the origins of Christianity. Jesus, the preacher whose teachings are the foundation of Christianity, was born a Jew. He was killed by Roman officials in Judea with the acquiescence of Jewish leaders, who may have feared that his unconventional proselytizing would cause them political problems with the Roman overlords, and who may have seen it as a challenge to their own authority as well. There is only limited secular history on these events, but they are a core article of faith for Christians.

  Jews of the first century had had good reason to be concerned about the Romans and their methods for maintaining order, for within a few decades of Jesus’s death, they were forced from their homes in Judea as a result of another rebellion. Some moved to Hispania, an important part of the Roman Empire, where other Jews had already made their homes. By Isabella’s day, some Jewish families had been living on the Iberian peninsula for more than fifteen hundred years.

  The Hebrew historian and financier Isaac Abravanel, one of Iberia’s most influential Jews at the time of the Inquisition, wrote that his family had lived in Seville during the time of the Second Temple in Israel.4 More Jews came after the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70. In the period after the “flames had reduced the beautiful Jerusalem to ashes,” writes one scholar, some Jews went to Babylon, and some to Egypt, but “the families of greatest consideration were brought to Spain, among whom were the remnants of Benjamin and Judah, descendants of the house of David.”5 In fact, the word don as an honorific may have originated in the Hebrew word adon, meaning “lord or master,” although others say the word originated from the Latin dominus.

  Displaced Jews prospered in Spain under the Roman Empire, and some became great scholars across many fields of inquiry—philosophy, medicine, literature, astronomy, and science. When the Roman Empire disintegrated, they experienced a period of oppression during the Visigothic era but were not forced from their centuries-old home. Their alliance with the Muslims allowed them to maintain comfortable lives, and they experienced a cultural zenith in sophisticated Córdoba about A.D. 1000. Many became Arabic speakers and grew comfortable with Arab customs. The close association of Jews with Arabs, however, made them suspect in Christian eyes, because there was still a cultural memory among Spanish Catholics that Jews had aided the Muslims in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula.

  During the centuries of Islamic dominance, Jews were forced to essentially buy tolerance from the Muslims by paying special taxes and by submitting to regulations directed against them. Their lives were not entirely serene because of periodic surges in Islamic fanaticism. In December 1068, for example, a Muslim mob killed some fifteen hundred Jewish families in Granada.6 They also suffered periodic persecutions at the hands of Christians, who were gradually recovering the peninsula from the Muslims. Jews frequently found themselves caught between warring bands from these two faiths and survived by adapting themselves as best they could.

  During these centuries, the Spanish royal family generally saw itself as holding a legal and moral obligation to act as protectors of the Jews. It was difficult to do this consistently in the face of ancient hatreds. In 1391, about sixty years before Isabella was born, a rising tide of Christian fanaticism directed itself against Jews. Anti-Semitic preachers roamed the kingdom, delivering fiery speeches about the death of Jesus, warning of the dangers of Judaism, and urging the rabble to attack Jews and destroy synagogues. Many people were killed, many thousands of Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, and temples were converted into churches. The epicenter of this violence was Seville; thereafter Seville became the home of many Jews who had embraced Christianity for survival. Other Jewish families, like the Abravanels, moved to Portugal to escape the oppression.7 Others migrated to Granada or North Africa. Many families splintered: some accepted baptism, while others courageously clung to their Jewish faith. Another spasm of intense proselytizing led to mass conversions of Jews to Christianity in 1411.

  These episodes of anti-Jewish fanaticism usually occurred at times when the central government was weak. The persecutions of 1391, for example, broke out the year after eleven-year-old Henry III, known as Henry the Sick or Henry the Feeble, became king. He attempted to punish people who had abused Jews, but he also bent to political pressure and permitted new restrictions to be imposed on Jews. By the time Isabella took the throne, the total number of Jews in Spain had fallen to about eighty thousand, in a population of about six million Christians.

  People who had been forced to convert to Christianity, both in 1391 and 1411, were given the right to renounce vows taken under duress, and once the danger was past, they could have reverted to Judaism without further persecution. But for a variety of reasons, some chose to retain their new affiliation with Christianity. Some had wholeheartedly converted. Others saw that converting opened up jobs and opportunities that had been closed to them as non-Christians. This latter group converted as a matter of convenience. The end result was that during Isabella’s lifetime, there were many elderly people who had practiced Judaism in their own childhoods but had changed religions. These people, and their children, were known as conversos. There were tens of thousands of them, and many lived between two worlds.

  After 1390 many conversos moved into lucrative and influential jobs in the government. Their success, both financially and professionally, stirred jealousy among longtime Christians, who faced new competition for positions that had once been granted almost as a matter of inheritance, from Christian father to Christian son.

  Conversos also entered the religious hierarchy of the church, becoming priests and bishops. It was understandably an issue of concern if people who did not hold sincere Christian beliefs were placed in positions of providing pastoral care to Christians. In Castile during Isabella’s lifetime, at least four bishops were conversos, and according to the Inquisition historian Henry Kamen, so was Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, who represented Spaniards at the Vatican.8

  Certainly anti-Semitism was at work among some proponents of the Inquisition. However, the situation in Spain was more subtle and complicated than the blatant bigotry found in northern and eastern Europe. Relations between Christians and Jews had usually been better in Castile than elsewhere on the continent. Jews had been expelled from England in 1296 and from France in 1394, but this had not happened in Iberia, and many of the refugees from those countries had settled there. Jews and Christians in Iberia had been tied together with bonds of affin-ity and proximity for centuries.

  There does not appear to be any evidence that Isabella was anti-Semitic. She had close and friendly relationships with a number of practicing Jews. One was Castile’s most prominent rabbi, Abraham Senior, from Segovia, a longtime supporter of the queen. In addition, Isaac Abravanel, whose family had been in Iberia for more than one thousand years, served as financial adviser to the queen and to her Portuguese cousins. Their families had worked together for years. Abravanel had been forced to flee Portugal when King João began persecuting Isabella’s relatives there after the war over the Castilian succession, so Abravanel relocated back to Castile with trusted references. For the same reasons, Isabella’s own cousins fled to Castile at the same time. By 1491, Abravanel was the queen’s personal financial representative.9

  The queen also relied personally on a number of people of Jewish descent. She surrounded herself with conversos. Her confessor, Hernán de Talavera, was a converso. The man she hired to write the history of her reign, the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, was a converso. And she immortalized Andrés de Cabrera, the treasurer of Segovi
a, with a stone carving celebrating his help in securing her kingdom.

  And there was likely Jewish blood closer to home as well. Spanish Jews believed that Isabella’s husband, Ferdinand, was a converso through his mother. According to Rabbi Eliyahu Capsali, who spoke to a number of Sephardic Jews who fled Spain, they believed that Ferdinand’s Castilian great-grandfather, Fadrique Enríquez, had fallen in love with a beautiful young Jewish matron named Paloma, with whom he had an affair and who became pregnant. The son they produced together was so admirable that he was taken into Enríquez’s home from his boyhood and raised among the other Enríquez children. This boy became the admiral of Castile, one of the highest-ranking nobles, and the father of Juana Enríquez, who married King Juan of Aragon.10

  But by the time Isabella became queen, conversos had become unpopular, and simmering animosities were erupting between them and longtime Christians. There had been pressure for decades for some sort of ecclesiastical investigation into whether some conversos were actually Christians or were practicing a subterfuge that allowed them to hold lucrative positions historically restricted to Christians. Isabella’s brother Enrique at one point had requested permission from the pope for his own Inquisition but did not pursue the matter. Later, as Isabella was doing all she could to mobilize a united front against Granada, the issue reached the boiling point.

  The man who most scholars believe instigated the Inquisition was a priest known as Alonso de Hojeda, the prior of the Dominicans in Seville and a man with a public reputation for holiness. He had come to believe that many people who had converted had done so dishonestly. When Isabella settled in Seville in 1477–78, Alonso de Hojeda pressed her hard with reports of insincere conversions in the local community. She was not from Seville, so she might have been inclined to listen to him as someone who knew the local community better than she did.

  Not everyone agreed with the need for the Inquisition. In fact, Isabella’s confessor and closest religious adviser, Hernán de Talavera, was “opposed to the founding of the Inquisition.”11 Her converso chronicler, Pulgar, also objected to it, saying it would unfairly penalize people in Andalusia whose only error was that they had not been properly schooled in Christian theology. “I believe my lord,” Pulgar wrote in 1481 in an open letter of protest to Cardinal Mendoza,

  that there are some there who sin because they are bad, but the others, who are the majority, sin because they follow the example of those who are bad, whereas they would follow the example of the good Christians if there were any of them there. But since the Old Christians there are such bad Christians, so the New Christians are such good Jews. I am certain, my lord, that there are ten thousand young girls between ten and twenty years of age in Andalusia, who from the time they were born have never left their homes or heard of or learned any [religious] doctrines save that which they have observed of their parents indoors. To burn all these people would be a very cruel thing.12

  But soon anonymous reports began questioning Pulgar’s own religious sentiments and loyalty to the crown, causing him to retreat from public discussions of the issue. He believed, however, that Isabella’s intentions had been understandable when she established the Inquisition—or at least that was what he said at the time.13

  Without question, Isabella was feverently religious herself and spent many hours in prayer at her private altar seeking to divine God’s purpose for her life, obsessively attending mass, even living inside a suite of rooms positioned above the choir at the Cathedral in Toledo when she was visiting Castile’s spiritual center. When she wasn’t at worship, another favorite pastime was embroidering altarcloths to be used in churches in her kingdom and in Jerusalem. When she sought a break from the rigors of court life, she retreated to the monastery at Guadalupe, which she called her “paradise.”

  Her religiosity had a dark side. She feared unknown and dangerous things in the spiritual realm. It’s no coincidence that she commissioned the large family portrait that showed her sheltering under the arms of the Virgin Mary while menacing demons danced above their heads.

  At the time the converso question erupted, the queen was especially vulnerable to the arguments of churchmen. Her daughter Isabel was seven years old, and Queen Isabella had been unable to produce another child. She was under intense social and political pressure to conceive and give birth to a male heir who could inherit the thrones of both Castile and Aragon and permanently unite the two realms. She had become concerned that her infertility might be a sign of God’s disfavor, and she was open to suggestions on what she might do to restore herself in the eyes of heaven.

  In addition, news accounts of invasions by the Ottoman Turks frequently contained credible and factual reports that the Turks had been assisted by insincere converts to Christianity who gave them material assistance—maps, advice, and inside information—that allowed them to conquer Christian communities. Certainly a number of such incidents occurred during the reconquest of Granada. Moreover, some Jews in Christian Europe were secretly cheering the successes of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a messianic belief that the fall of Christendom “was preliminary to the deliverance of the Jews” and was spurring the “advent of the messiah.”14 Rabbi Capsali, in Crete, clearly articulated such a belief in his Seder Eliyahu Zuta, which portrayed Mehmed the Conquerer as a hero who was cruel only to the wicked.15

  An obsessive concern with religious treachery was developing across Europe.

  The controversy over conversos came to a head in the late 1470s, just as Isabella was engaged in an aggressive law-and-order campaign. She was headed toward Seville, arguably the kingdom’s most important city and a hub of international commerce, for her first visit. It was in disarray and disunited, and she was trying to prove that central government authority could reduce anarchy. On her way south, in the medieval town of Cáceres, for example, she paused long enough to make a personal effort to reestablish justice and peace, punishing criminals and setting things right. The rule of law was reestablished and everyone in the town was left “very content,” Pulgar wrote. She did this while she simultaneously engaged in an inspection tour of the kingdom’s frontier defenses, making a side trip to Badajoz on the Portuguese border.

  When Isabella got to Seville, she found it in a state of chaos, with “scandals and dissensions and wars,” in Pulgar’s words, that had left many dead or injured.16 She immediately initiated a replay of the pattern that had won her the support and adoration of her people elsewhere—she set out to restore justice.

  Each Friday she held a public audience in the Alcázar for people to bring their grievances and complaints about events that had occurred. She sat in a great room in a high chair covered with cloth of gold, her courtiers and legal advisers surrounding her and helping her ascertain the facts in each case. Then she would issue a judgment. Criminals were sentenced, many receiving the death penalty; victims received prompt recompense. Within two months she had accomplished much; street crimes and robberies had largely disappeared. Seeing her seriousness of purpose, many criminals and those accused of wrongdoing fled Seville. “And because of the justice she had brought forth,” Pulgar wrote, “she was very loved by the good people, and feared by the bad.”17

  But her methods, while effective and perhaps necessary, were also harsh and arbitrary. Eventually the residents of Seville began to feel terrorized. Don Alonso de Solís, bishop of Cádiz, pleaded with her to show more mercy to miscreants, urging that God valued those with “humility of heart” who showed mercy.18

  The queen relented. “Seeing the multitudes of those men and women tribulated by the fear of justice, moved to compassion by their tears and moans,” she decided she would issue a general pardon for ordinary crimes.19 The word spread, and soon more than four thousand people came home to the Seville area. Isabella’s fierce justice had been roundly applauded.

  It wasn’t a great step to expand this kind of inquiry to the religious realm. Soon Hojeda had more supporters for his quest to start an Inquisition. One enthusiast wa
s Friar Filippo de’ Barberi, the Sicilian inquisitor, who had recently arrived in Castile. He was seeking to confirm an ancient decree, from 1223, that permitted an Inquisition in Sicily to drive out heresy; it also permitted one-third of the possessions of any heretics to become property of the Inquisition. The papal legate Niccolò Franco, bishop of Treviso, shared these views, and soon all three were importuning Isabella for action.20

  Then they found another ready ear in King Ferdinand. An Inquisition, once established, promised to be a useful mechanism for rooting out all kinds of dissent and also for collecting money from people accused of heresy—money that could be diverted for other purposes. The king soon joined the chorus. He already had picked out just the right man for the job of running the Inquisition—his longtime confessor, the rigid and ascetic Tomás de Torquemada, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada’s nephew.

  “To Ferdinand it is probable that the suggestion was not without allurement,” writes the historian Rafael Sabatini,

  since it must have offered him a way at once to gratify the piety that was his, and—out of the confiscations that must ensue from the prosecution of so very wealthy a section of the community—to replenish the almost exhausted coffers of the treasury. When the way of conscience is also the way of profit, there is little difficulty in following it. But after all, though joint sovereign of Spain and paramount in Aragon, Ferdinand had not in Castile the power of Isabella. It was her kingdom when all was said, and although his position there was by no means that of a simple prince-consort, yet he was bound by law and by policy to remain submissive to her will. In view of her attitude, he could do little more than add his own to the persuasions of the three priestly advocates, and amongst them they so pressed Isabella that she gave way to the extent of a compromise.21