By Granada’s terms of surrender, the Moors, as subjects and vassals of the monarchs, not only could remain to keep the economy going, but also incurred obligations of military service. Ferdinand and Isabella even attempted to organize them to provide coastal watches against invasion, but that part of their policy was outrageously overoptimistic. If Maghrebis or Turks invaded, most Christians were in no doubt of whose side the defeated Moors would favor. As Cardinal Cisneros wrote during his stay in Granada, “Since there are Moors on the coast, which is so near to Africa, and because they are so numerous, they could be a great source of harm were times to change.”
At first, the conquerors seemed anxious to act in good faith. Ferdinand, despite his reluctance to have more Muslim subjects, acted as if he realized that the ambition of an all-Christian Spain, “constituted to the service of God,” was impractical. The governor and archbishop of Granada shared power with Muslim “companions,” and for a while their collaboration kept the peace. The companions ranged from respected imams, such as Ali Sarmiento, who was reputedly a hundred years old and immensely rich, to shady capitalists, such as al-Fisteli, the money lender who served the new regime as a tax collector. In 1497, Spain offered refuge to Moors expelled from Portugal. So expulsion was not yet imminent.
Yet if the monarchs had kept to the terms of the bargain they made when the city fell, it would have been honorable, but it would also have been incredible. Ferdinand, as we have seen, declared in correspondence with the pope their intention of expelling the Muslims. In 1481 he wrote in similar terms to the monarchs’ representative in the northwest of Spain: “[W]ith great earnestness we now intend to put ourselves in readiness to toil with all our strength for the time when we shall conquer that kingdom of Granada and expel from all Spain the enemies of the Catholic faith and dedicate Spain to the service of God.” 11 Most of the conquered population did not trust the monarchs. Many took immediate advantage of a clause in the terms of surrender that guaranteed emigrants right of passage and provided free shipping. Granada leeched refugees. Boabdil, whose continued presence in Spain the monarchs clearly resented, left with a retinue of 1,130 in October 1493.
Indeed, the policy of conciliating the conquered Moors, while it lasted, was secondary to the monarchs’ main aim of encouraging them to migrate. This had the complementary advantages of reducing their potentially hostile concentration of numbers and of freeing land for resettlement by Christians. The populations of fortified towns were not protected by the terms negotiated for the city of Granada. They had to leave. Their lands were confiscated. Many fled to Africa.
Eventually, Ferdinand and Isabella abandoned the policy of emigration in favor of expulsion. In 1498, the city authorities divided the city into two zones, one Christian, one Muslim—a sure sign of rising tensions. Between 1499 and 1501, the monarchs’ minds changed as turbulence and rebellion mounted among the Moors and most of them evinced unmistakable indifference to the chance to convert to Christianity. The fate of former Christians provoked violence when the Inquisition claimed the right to judge them. There were only three hundred of them, but they were disproportionately important: “renegades” to the Christians, symbols of religious freedom to the Moors. Muslim converts to Christianity were exempt from the Inquisition’s ministrations for forty years. The new archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, procured that concession for them, partly because he disliked and mistrusted the Inquisition, and partly because he realized that converts needed time to adjust to their new faith. Apostates, however, were in a special category. It was hard to fend the Inquisition off. In 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella sent the primate of Spain, Cardinal Cisneros, to sort the problem out.
Cisneros might have been expected to take a sympathetic line. He was an admirer and probably a practitioner of mysticism. He was a great patron of humanist scholarship. His reputation for learning, piety, reasonableness, and diplomatic skill was unexcelled. However, whereas Talavera and the governor of Granada, the Conde de Tendilla, tried to attract former Christians back to the fold, Cisneros sought to bribe or pressure them into conversion. He suspended teaching in Arabic. He also took advantage of a loophole in the terms of Granada’s surrender that allowed Christians to interrogate Muslims’ formerly Christian wives and their children to see whether they wanted to return to their former faith. He did not, he declared, want to force them: that was against canon law. Their response to pressure was in their own hands. But the line between coercion and force was blurred, and Cisneros’s methods seemed to the Muslims generally to be forcible in effect and therefore in breach of the terms of the surrender of Granada. A report drawn up for the monarchs explained what happened. “Since this was a case in which the Inquisition could take an interest,” Cisneros, the report said,
thought he could find some way to get them to admit their fault and bring them back to our faith, so that perhaps some of the Moors would be converted…and our Lord was pleased to grant that, thanks to the archbishop’s preaching, and his gifts, some of the Moors did convert…. Because slight pressure was being applied to the renegades to make them admit their errors and convert to our faith, as is legally permissible, and also because the archbishop’s men were converting the renegades’ sons and daughters at a tender age, as is legally permissible, the Moors…, concluding that the same thing would happen to them all, rioted and killed an officer of justice who went to arrest one of them, so they rose up, barricaded the streets, brought out their hidden arms, made new ones for themselves, and set up a resistance.12
The first riot broke out when a woman, seized by interrogators, called for help. The rioters desisted, in obedience to Archbishop Talavera, but Cisneros imposed a new condition: they had to submit to baptism or leave the city. This was man-on-the-spotism: an extemporized decision that forced policy makers’ hands. Fifty or sixty thousand people, if we can believe the claims of Cisneros’s propagandists, were received into the Church.
Following on the erosion of their culture by the large-scale emigration and conversions that followed the conquest, the new turn of events scared some of the Muslims into rebellion. Berber raiding parties took part. Outside the city of Granada the scale of the uprising was enormous. Chroniclers estimated at up to ninety-five thousand the number of troops needed to quell it. The king himself took command. Atrocities multiplied. When rebel villages refused to submit to terms that now always included the demand to accept Christianity, they were bombarded into submission and the defenders were enslaved. At Andarax the Christians put three thousand rebel prisoners to death and blew up a mosque to which hundreds of women and children had fled for refuge. The rebels dealt harshly, in their turn, with anyone in their communities who would not join them. One petitioner who survived complained to the monarchs of how the rebels burned his home and granary and carried off his wife, daughter, and livestock.
The monarchs, still fearful of collusion with the Turks, grew alarmed when the rebels appealed to the Ottomans to help them. In 1502, after a series of measures restricted Muslims’ freedom of movement, those who refused baptism were expelled from Castile, including Granada. In acknowledgment of the fact that the economy in Valencia depended on Muslim labor, they were allowed to remain in the Crown of Aragon. The rebels’ terms of surrender show what conversion meant in real terms. Though the monarchs promised that former Muslims would have clergy to instruct them in Christianity, doctrine hardly featured: rather, the victors demanded a modified form of cultural conversion in which the vanquished submitted to what nowadays would be called “integration.” Their former crimes were pardoned. They could keep their traditional dress “until it wore out.” They could have their own butchers, but meat had to be slaughtered in the Castilian fashion. They could record legal transactions in Arabic, but only the law of Castile would apply in the courts. They could keep their baths. They would pay only Christian taxes, but at a special—effectively punitive—rate three times higher than that of “old Christians.” Their charitable endowments were to continue, t
hough no longer for maintaining mosques and Islamic schools: highway repairs, poor relief, and the ransoming of captives would be the only permitted objectives. The past would be confined to oblivion, and to call someone “Moor” or “renegade” became an offense.13
The conquest of Granada and its aftermath changed the profile of Europe for a half a millennium. Outside the range of Ottoman conquests, no Muslim-ruled state ever reemerged in Europe. Until the creation of sovereign Albania in 1925, there was no state with a Muslim majority. It became possible—though perhaps not convincing—to claim that the culture of Europe, if such a thing exists, is Christian. The habit of identifying Europe with Christendom went almost unchallenged until the late twentieth century. Only then, with large-scale Muslim migrations and the emergence, in Bosnia, of another European state with a Muslim majority, did Europeans have to recraft their self-image to take the Muslim contribution to the making of Europe into account.
The events of 1492 did not, however, contribute much to the making of modern political institutions. Spain did not become a modern state in any of the ways usually alleged: not unified, not centralized, not subject to absolute rule, certainly not bureaucratic or “bourgeois.” Only in one respect did Ferdinand and Isabella practice a new technique of government: they used printing to distribute their commands faster and more efficiently around their realms. In other respects, they ruled a typically chaotic, heterogeneous medieval state, in which the monarchs shared power with the “estates” of Church, nobility, and towns.
Monarchs were “natural lords” over their people. Their leadership was as the head’s over the limbs of the human body—and everyone knew that the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Nature was a hierarchy: even the most cursory examination of different creatures and natural phenomena made that obvious. Church windows depicted the ranks of creation, from the heavens to the plants and creatures beneath Adam’s feet, with a place for everything and everything in its place. Sacred writings and the traditions of mystical theology portrayed a similar establishment among God and the various orders of angels. The same state naturally characterized human affairs.
Although Aragon and Castile remained separate states, the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella derived a new and exalted dignity from the union of the monarchs. “You shall hold the monarchy of all the Spains,” Diego de Valera assured the king, “and shall renew the imperial seat of the Goths, from whence you come.” 14 The Goths whom Valera had in mind were the last rulers of a state that covered the whole—or almost the whole—of the Iberian Peninsula back in the sixth and seventh centuries. But Ferdinand and Isabella could not re-create a peninsula-wide state and probably never even thought of trying to do so. Even their personal union was an emergency measure—a political solution improvised to meet temporary problems.
The fact that Isabella was a woman created some of the problems. Until the mid–sixteenth century, when Falloppio sliced women’s bodies open and saw how they really work, medical science classed women as defective men—nature’s botched jobs. Isabella needed Ferdinand at her side in a calculated display of essential equipment. Earlier queens in Castilian history, moreover, had been condemned as disastrous. The image of Eve—seducible, fickle, willful, and selectively subrational—dogged women and made them seem unfit for rule. Works intended for young Isabella’s edification included Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna, first printed in 1481, which stressed the importance of female self-discipline for a well-ordered household and kingdom, and Martín de Córdoba’s Jardín de nobles doncellas, which paraded exemplars of feminine virtues. As well as of sexual coquetterie, Isabella was the target of misogynistic pornography. A work from probably a few years after her death, the Carajicomedia, frankly aligns her with whores and sluts.15
The monarchs’ conflicting pretensions made matters worse. The rivalry is apparent between the lines of the address Isabella delivered at the conference in 1475 that settled their differences over how they would share power: “My lord,…where there exists that conformity that by God’s grace ought to exist between you and me, there can be no dispute.” By implication, the conformity was lacking and the dispute obvious. In exchange for parity of power with Isabella in her lifetime, Ferdinand had to renounce his own claim to the throne in favor of his offspring by his wife. Isabella made him her “proctor” in Castile, with power to act on her behalf. He made her “co-regent, governor, and general administrator in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon…in our presence and absence alike.” 16
The image of unity papered over the cracks in the monarchs’ alliance. Almost all the documents of the reign were issued in the monarchs’ joint names, even when only one of them was present. They were said to be “each other’s favorite,” “two bodies ruled by one spirit,” “sharing a single mind.” Theirs was the equality of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To mask their differences, their propaganda made a display of mutual love. Love knots and yoke-and-arrows were their most favored decorative motifs. The conjugal yoke bound the weapons of Cupid. Pictures of the monarchs exchanging rather formal kisses illuminated presentation copies of royal decrees.17
Were the king and queen in love? Their biographers seem unable to abjure this silly question. The coquetterie in which she encouraged court poets was part of Isabella’s armory. Ferdinand’s dislike of her favorites is well attested, and Isabella responded by gutting her husband’s mistresses out of the court. “She loved after such a fashion,” said one of the court humanists, “so solicitous and vigilant in jealousy, that if she felt that he looked on any lady of the court with a look that evinced desire, she would very discreetly find ways and means to dismiss that person from the household.” 18 Her object in persecuting her husband’s floozies was, however, according to the same source, her own “honor and advantage” rather than amorous satisfaction. A document often cited as evidence of her affection for her husband is the letter she wrote to her confessor describing Ferdinand’s escape from an assassination attempt in Barcelona in December 1492, but the incident reveals feelings deeper, in Isabella, than love. A knife-wielding maniac, “long crazy and out of his mind,” as an eyewitness observed, took advantage of one of the regular Friday audiences, at which petitioners were allowed to confront the monarch in person. On the face of it, the sentiments the queen declared at the time seemed admirably, lovingly selfless. “The wound was so big,” she bleated,
so Dr. Guadalupe says, for I hadn’t the heart to behold it—so wide and so deep that four fingers’ lengths would not equal its depth and its width was a thing of which my heart trembles to tell…. and it was one of the griefs I felt to see the king suffer what I deserved, without deserving the sacrifice he made, it seemed, for me—it quite destroyed me.
Yet for all her expressions of tenderness for her spouse, it was evidently for herself that Isabella most grieved and feared. She made her sorrow seem worse than her husband’s affliction. A professional court flatterer, Alonso Ortiz, told her that her suffering “seemed greater than the king’s.” She congratulated herself on persuading the would-be assassin to confess, thereby saving his soul. And she took up most of her letter to her confessor with reflections on her own unpreparedness for death. Ferdinand’s plight convinced her “that monarchs may die from any sudden disaster, the same as other men, and it is reason enough to be ready always to die well.” She went on to ask her confessor to prepare a handy list of all her sins, including especially the vows she had broken in the pursuit of power.19
The monarchs’ affection for each other may have become a fact, but it began as an affectation. The language of love the king and queen exchanged in public had little to do with real sentiments and much to do with the courtly ethos that made the monarchs’ style of government seem far removed from modernity: the cult of chivalry, which was probably the nearest they got to an ideology. Isabella’s mental image of heaven is suggestive. She saw it as a sort of royal court, staffed by paragons of knightly virtue. Chivalry could not, perhaps, make men good, as it was supposed to
do. It could, however, win wars. Granada fell, said the Venetian ambassador, in “a beautiful war…. There was not a lord present who was not enamored of some lady,” who “often handed warriors their weapons…with a request that they show their love by their deeds.” The queen of Castile died uttering prayers to the archangel Michael as “prince of the chivalry of angels.” 20
To see how important chivalry was, the best measure is the frequency and intensity of jousting. (The joust was chivalry’s great rite—a sport of unsurpassed nobility, which afforded many opportunities for political jobbery.) In April 1475, in the midst of war with Portugal, the monarchs held a tourney at Valladolid that the local chronicle acclaimed as “the most magnificent that had ever been seen, men said, for fifty years and more.” The host and master of the joust, the Duke of Alba, exhibited the value of valor. He “fell from his horse on his way to risk himself at the tilt and was rendered dumb, unable to speak, and he hurt his head, and they bled him. Yet he still came out armed and jousted twice.” The king displayed a tribute on his shield that read, “I suffer without making sound / For as long as I am bound.” The king’s secretary, however, confided the underlying purpose of assembling the monarchs’ most powerful supporters: they had to know who was with them and who against them. The magnates had their own agenda, according to Alonso de Palencia: they intended to exploit the occasion to distract Ferdinand from matters of state and lure him into expenditure and concessions.
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