Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Juan’s father, Diego Arias Dávila, and his mother, Elvira, had consequently prospered: Diego became treasurer under King Enrique. But rumors circulated that the family had only pretended to convert, in order to gain financial advantage, and that they privately practiced Judaism and ridiculed Christianity. The whispering about the family grew louder when Diego and Elvira’s son Juan joined the priesthood and then became bishop of Segovia at twenty-four.

  Years after the deaths of Juan’s parents, the inquisitors came, and the questions became more pointed. The bishop of Segovia protested about the Inquisition, then took his complaints directly to the pope at the Vatican; he first took the precaution of digging up the bones of his relatives, including his parents, and transporting them with him to Rome. Some people thought he was appropriately protesting the Inquisition’s heavy-handed techniques, and others thought his actions were proof of his own family’s deceitfulness. The bishop of Segovia never came home to Spain and ended up dying in Rome in 1497.

  Back in Castile, a prolonged investigation was under way into his family’s activities. According to the historian David Martin Gitlitz, “scores of witnesses testified about the family from 1486 to 1490,” reporting that during the years when the Diego Arias Dávila family had been pretending to be Christian, they had in fact kept the Jewish Sabbath, observed major festivals, set a kosher table, supported the synagogue, and avoided going to church. Moreover, Juan’s father had “frequently disparaged the trappings of Christianity, particularly the saints.”38 This testimony, naturally enough, raised questions about the religious sincerity of his son, the bishop of Segovia.

  One particular scandal at the heart of Catholicism in Spain likely contributed to the growing sense that the church itself was being undermined by nonbelievers. The single most important pilgrimage location in Spain, after Santiago de Compostela, was the shrine of Guadalupe, the site that was also the most sacred to Queen Isabella, who visited it almost annually.

  The spiritual focus was a dark-complected statue of the Virgin Mary, which legend said had been carved by Saint Luke, and that was buried to keep it out of the hands of the Muslims after the invasion of 711. Once Christians succeeded in winning back the territory, the statue was rediscovered as a result of a vision by a local peasant, who told priests where to go to dig it up. A popular shrine sprang up at the site.

  The statue was an object of veneration to the faithful, who associated it with a number of miracles, including helping Christian slaves escape Muslim captors. Spanish Catholics from all over the peninsula made the difficult journey to Guadalupe to pray or seek penance, confess their sins, and receive absolution from a small clerical community of about 130 friars who lived there.

  Guadalupe was the holiest shrine in the holiest diocese of Spain, under the ecclesiastical control of Toledo. That was the spiritual seat of the most powerful prelate in Spain, the archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Mendoza, Isabella’s close friend and adviser.

  All these valuable associations brought wealth to the shrine, and allowed the friars living there to reside in comfortable affluence and devote themselves to scholarly works and artistic endeavors such as illuminating manuscripts. They ate well, and there was hot and cold running water at the priory.

  The town also feasted on spiritual tourism, with restaurants, hotels, and merchants prospering by selling goods and services to the hordes of pilgrims who arrived each year. About 10 percent of the local population was converso, according to scholar Gretchen Starr-LeBeau.39

  Once the Inquisition got rolling, reports began circulating that converso priests at Guadalupe were favoring converso businessmen in town, dispensing advice about how to retain Jewish customs, encouraging them to maintain the kosher dietary laws, and finding ways to trick Christians into thinking they shared their beliefs. King Ferdinand visited Guadalupe in September 1483, according to Starr-LeBeau, and soon both community residents and the shrine’s friars were under investigation.

  Some converso families fled from Guadalupe. One large, extended family moved to Muslim-controlled Málaga, which was at war with Castile, and began living openly as Jews.

  In 1485, seventy-one of the townsfolk of Guadalupe were found guilty of Judaizing and burned at the stake in autos-de-fé, and another forty-five were found guilty posthumously or in absentia, writes Starr-LeBeau. Other conversos were exiled from the town.40

  A super-secret council of the Inquisition then met to probe claims that the priests at Guadalupe were also heretics, Starr-LeBeau reports, and soon credible evidence emerged that the allegations were true. One converso, Friar Diego de Marchena, for example, a confessor, was reported by several witnesses to have given specific guidance on how to avoid Christian rituals, such as eliminating meat from the diet during Lent. He told his fellow friars that they could avoid detection by eating boiled rather than roasted chicken on Good Friday, so that no one would know. He also publicly questioned whether the Virgin Mary was in fact a virgin, something that was an article of faith to Spain’s pious Catholics, and told people he had never been baptized.

  Witnesses said another converso cleric, Prior Gonzalo de Madrid, pretended to be vomiting on his deathbed so he did not have to take a communion wafer when he received extreme unction at his death. Friar Luis de Madrid, a converso, had talked openly in the priory saying that he knew of two converso friars who were refusing to consecrate the host during holy communion, but he refused to say who they were. Three friars were found to be circumcised. Several more were reported to have feigned illness to avoid attending mass or singing in the choir.

  Ultimately, 21 friars of 130 employed at the holiest site in the center of Spain were censured for their purported Jewish activities. One was jailed for life, and Diego de Marchena was burned at the stake, according to Starr-LeBeau.41

  The Catholic Church in Spain attempted to keep the scandal under wraps by concealing the documentation they had gathered about the activities of the converso friars inside the monastery. But some of the documents were never destroyed and were analyzed at length by Starr-LeBeau for her 2003 book, In the Shadow of the Virgin.

  What had happened was widely known in Spain, however, and fueled speculation about which other religious orders might be similar magnets for nonbelievers.

  Queen Isabella, meanwhile, was most assuredly aware of the situation in Guadalupe, for she ordered that 1 million maravedis in moneys seized from conversos in that town should be used to build a hospital for pilgrims. She then contributed the same amount herself to pay the remainder of the costs of construction.

  Even those Spanish conversos who were devout Christians sometimes aggravated the tensions within the community by holding themselves apart or viewing themselves as superior. The concept of lineage loomed large in their minds, as it did in the minds of the longtime Christians. In Barcelona and Valencia, they worshiped as a group within former synagogues that had been converted to churches. Some claimed direct lineage from Jesus’s family. Alonso de Cartagena, the bishop of Burgos and son of Rabbi Selomah ha Levi, who became Paul of Burgos after he converted, was said to have recited the Hail Mary in this manner: “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood-relative, pray for us.” In Aragon, they called themselves “Christians of Israel.”42

  “These converso attitudes were probably created by self-defensiveness rather than arrogance,” writes Henry Kamen, a noted historian of the Inquisition. “But they contributed to the wall of distrust between Old and New Christians. In particular, the idea of a converso nation, which rooted itself irrevocably in the mind of Jewish Christians, made them appear as a separate, alien and enemy entity. This had fateful consequences.”43

  In the end the conversos found themselves without sincere friends in either the Jewish or the Christian community, at a time when Castile and Aragon were plunging into war. By now, suspicion had been aroused almost everywhere. In the 1440s, writes Netanyahu, only “a minority” of conversos had been viewed as possibly heretical, but in the next few decades public opinion
among Old Christians shifted to the point where they viewed their suspicions as “certainties about the overwhelming majority.”44

  Whatever the underlying reality, the conduct of the Spanish Inquisition was extraordinarily un-Christian, fierce, and hateful. It was at odds with another strong principle in Spanish thought, once articulated by Isabella’s older brother Enrique, that forgiveness was an essential hallmark of Christianity. Once pressed to punish a nobleman who had repeatedly betrayed him, Enrique had the man brought into his presence and released him, saying that forgiveness was a key tenet of his faith. “I pardon you,” Enrique said, “so that God may pardon my soul when my time comes to part with this life.”45

  In that case, King Enrique showed forgiveness to someone who had actually done wrong. But now Isabella unleashed cruelty on people who had done little or no harm. She must have been conflicted about it herself, for she permitted people close to her to raise far-reaching questions about the justice and morality of the Inquisition, though she expressed no doubts herself. She permitted her chronicler Pulgar to write, in a court-financed publication, that the “ecclesiastical Inquisitors and the secular executors behaved cruelly and showed great enmity, not only toward those they punished and tormented, but also toward all [New Christians].”46

  It is unlikely that the unprincipled Ferdinand would have found in any of this much of a moral dilemma. In fact, the historian Benzion Netanyahu believed that Ferdinand was “the real architect of the Inquisition.”47 Ferdinand, he wrote,

  sought to appear ethical and religious; for he accurately assessed the crucial part played by ethics and religion in human affairs. Instead of openly defying morality, he sought to employ it for his own ends. He knew how to evaluate mass feelings as a factor in social life, and used the force of popular passions… as steam to move his ship of state. Thus he harnessed the hatred of the conversos and the laws of the Church concerning heresy to advance his political interests, all the while trying to appear as Holy Mother Church’s true son, whose eagerness to guard religious law even exceeded his desire to guard the civil one.… Accordingly he refrained from formally inquiring into the Inquisition’s judicial proceedings, so as to avoid responsibility for its verdicts and prevent anyone from disputing his claim that he had full confidence in the Inquisitors’ judgments. But he often intervened in the gathering and division of the Inquisition’s spoils.48

  What then about Queen Isabella, who in many other aspects of her life was described as humane and a student of the life and teachings of Christ? How could she justify this cruelty, these murders?

  The short answer is that Isabella was a complex personality, in which diverging elements were all present. While she was beneficent in many ways, she also seems to have had an unforgiving streak that made her harsh, punitive, and unbending in punishing people she saw as evildoers and in seeking to accomplish her goals. Perhaps she rationalized that the Inquisition was a means to a worthy and justifying end, that she needed wholehearted support from the Old Christians of Andalusia, particularly those of Seville and Córdoba, to win the war with Granada, and that these people were deeply antagonistic to the conversos. Perhaps she believed that her whole way of life was at risk and that only the most ruthless tactics would permit survival for Christian Spain against the Turks. Or she might have been motivated by a sincere, if misguided, concern for the spiritual well-being of her subjects. For the zealous of each faith, only their own specific practice holds the keys to the universe. In any case, Isabella was entirely able to rationalize establishing and supporting the Inquisition. Successful rulers are usually willing to sacrifice others in pursuit of something they see as a greater good. For Isabella, wrote Netanyahu, “safe control of Andalusia obviously depended on finding a way to reduce the unrest.”49

  After the war against Granada was over, however, her attitude did not change. If anything, the targets of her rigor expanded. In March 1492, after secret deliberations, she and Ferdinand ordered the Jews—who had previously been spared the brunt of the Inquisition—to convert to Christianity immediately or be expelled. They had decided that the presence of Jews in Spain was tempting conversos to abandon their Christian faith, thereby risking their salvation. When Jews came to her to plead their case, she told them that the decision had come to Ferdinand in a dream and was God’s will. “Do you believe that this comes upon you from us?” she told the Jewish representatives begging her to change her mind. “The Lord hath put this thing into the heart of the King.” Pressed further, she refused to make a protest to her husband. “The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, as the rivers of water,” she told them. “He turns it whithersoever He will.”50 And from this point, Isabella’s Jewish subjects knew that the matter was set in stone.

  This new, hardened position had been foreshadowed by a provision in the surrender treaty between Castile and the Muslims. It said that Jews in the conquered lands who did not convert to Christianity within three years would have to move to North Africa. But amid the excitement of ending the long war, this provision had gone unnoticed.

  So the majority of Jews were shocked, even dumbfounded, when the order was announced. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had not signaled in any way that they were angry at Jews. They had shown them respect and friendship. Ferdinand was believed to be of Jewish descent himself. Isaac Abravanel, a trusted counselor and financial adviser to Isabella and her family for much of his adult life, later said he could hardly believe his ears. “I was at court when the royal decree was announced,” he recalled. “I wearied myself to distraction in imploring compassion. Thrice on my knees I besought the king: ‘Regard us, O king, use not thy subjects so cruelly. Why do thus to thy servants? Rather exact from us our gold and silver, even all the house of Israel possess, if he may remain in his country.’ ”

  The offer of a large bribe, not surprisingly, intrigued Ferdinand and he visibly hesitated, pondering it. But his confessor, Tomás de Torquemada, physically recoiled and, gesticulating angrily, he accused Ferdinand of being tempted into betrayal of his faith for thirty pieces of silver, the reward Judas was believed to have received for delivering his friend Jesus into the hands of the Romans for execution. Ferdinand decided not to relent. Abravanel then begged his friends to intervene to block the edict,

  but as the adder closes its ears with dust against the voice of the charmer, so the king hardened his heart against the entreaties of his suppliants, and declared he would not revoke the edict for all the wealth of the Jews. The queen at his right hand opposed it, and urged him to continue what he had begun. We exhausted all our power for the repeal of the king’s sentence; but there was neither wisdom nor help remaining. Wherever the evil decree was proclaimed, or the report of it had spread, our nation bewailed their condition with great lamentations; for there had never been such a banishment since Judah had been driven from his land.51

  Some, like Isabella’s childhood ally Rabbi Abraham Senior, reluctantly decided to convert. He was baptized at the monastery of Guadalupe with the queen beaming at his elbow. “Thousands and tens of thousands” also regretfully accepted baptism.52

  Others departed, knowing that the risks of the road were so great that some of their family members would not survive. Don Isaac Abravanel exhorted and encouraged people to keep firm to Jewish law, even at the risk of life and property. His faith was paramount to him. He and his family fled to Naples and later to Venice. Others went to Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, or elsewhere in Europe.

  Chroniclers said the Jewish exodus from Spain was a pitiable sight. “Within the term fixed by the edict the Jews sold and disposed of their property for a mere nothing; they went about begging Christians to buy, but found no purchasers; fine houses and estates were sold for trifles; a house was exchanged for an ass; and a vineyard given for a little cloth or linen,” the Castilian chronicler Andrés Bernáldez wrote.

  Although prohibited carrying away gold and silver, they secretly took large quantities in their saddles, and in the halt
ers and harness of their loaded beasts. Some swallowed as many as thirty ducats to avoid the rigorous search made at the frontier towns and seaports, by the officers appointed for the purpose. The rich Jews defrayed the expenses of the departure of the poor, practicing toward each other the greatest charity, so that except very few of the most necessitous, they would not become converts. In the first week of July they took the route for quitting their native land, great and small, old and young; on foot, on horses, asses, and in carts; each continuing his journey to his destined port. They experienced great trouble and suffered indescribable misfortunes on the roads and country they traveled; some falling, others rising; some dying, others coming into the world; some fainting, others being attacked with illness; that there was not a Christian but what felt for them and persuaded them to be baptized. Some from misery were converted; but they were very few. The rabbis encouraged them, and made the young people and women sing, and play on pipes and tabors to enliven them, and keep up their spirits.53

  The Jews of Segovia spent their last three days in the cemetery “watering with their tears the ashes of their fathers; their lamentations excited the pity of all who heard them.”54 Many left carrying little more than precious Hebrew manuscripts they removed from the synagogues before departing.

  The first to leave were a large group of Jewish families who had been living in Granada, and others followed soon after. They made their way to ports, where Ferdinand had arranged for ships to transport them. Some drowned at sea or narrowly survived shipwrecks. Some died of exposure to cold. Many fell ill. They were attacked by robbers, who stole their possessions, even their clothing, and sold them into slavery. Some were dumped on distant shores. One group traveled to Fez, which was suffering a drought, and they were turned away. They were forced to pitch camp in an arid plain and soon began starving to death themselves. Reports that they had swallowed gold to smuggle it out of Spain circulated widely; Muslims in Africa “murdered a number, and then ripped them open to search for it.”55