by Hugh Thomas
Tirant lo Blanc was among the first of many “chivalrous” works whose great sale marked the next hundred years. Reading soon became for the first time less a scholarly ritual than a habit, even though books might still be conceived as to be read aloud. Long accounts of extraordinary exploits by knightly heroes in strange lands presented an ideal in which courage, virtue, strength, and passion all played a part.34 Queen Isabel, we know, had The Ballad of Merlin and The Quest for the Holy Grail in her library. All were foretastes of Spanish adventures in the New World.
These “chivalrous” novels reflect a world in which frontiers of states were loose; and while readers were carried away by adventures in “Great Britain” or Constantinople, numerous foreigners were to be seen in the courts of both king and noblemen. From Flanders came architects: for example, Juan de Guas, who designed the church of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo, a Franciscan monastery that was the supreme artistic achievement of the time, as well as the Duke of Infantado’s palace at Guadalajara. One Spanish court painter, Michael Littow, was an Estonian. Italian writers such as Peter Martyr or Marineo Siculo gave lessons to noblemen, and soon the Florentine sculptor Domenico Fancelli would begin work on his remarkable tombs.35 Ballads and romantic stories also ignored the boundaries of states. Thus most knights in Spain thought of “the paladin Roland” and the King of France as their own heroes, though their geographical knowledge was faulty and they seem to have imagined that the French capital was on a Spanish river:
Cata Francia, cata Paris la ciudad,
Cata las aguas del Duero, do van a dar en el mar!
Look at France, look at Paris the city,
Look at the waters of the Douro which run down to the sea.
Most of the monarchs’ counselors were at Santa Fe in 1491, for the place was a court as well as a headquarters. Those present included all the experienced advisers of Isabel (for instance the Chacóns, Alonso de Quintanilla, Gutierre de Cárdenas, Andrés Cabrera, and Beatriz de Bobadilla). Fernando also had his staff with him; in addition to the skillful treasurer of Aragon, Alonso de la Caballería, there were about sixteen “fernandine” secretaries.36 Of first importance was the international secretary, Miguel Pérez de Almazán. There were, too, Juan Cabrero, the King’s steward and inseparable companion, who slept in his room and was his closest confidant, and Gabriel Sánchez, his personal treasurer, a converso like Caballería. There was Juan de Coloma, a competent private secretary who had been working for Fernando since 1469, a man of rural origin who had married a granddaughter of the chief magistrate of Aragon, Martín Díaz de Aux. There was, too, in Santa Fe, Luís Santangel, who arranged the income of the Hermandad, another converso and an astute businessman who was related to both Sánchez and Caballería.
Besides these mature statesmen of the back rooms, there were numerous younger persons, some of whom we know only by their names at the bottom of royal documents, while some were men of the future, already seeing how, with hard work and a reputation for reliability, they might ultimately climb to destinations of importance. We should imagine all these men dining together daily, developing a collegiate understanding over chickpeas, biscuits, stews, and fortified wine from, say, Cazalla de la Sierra in the Sierra Morena.
These civil servants were occasionally churchmen, sometimes bishops, sometimes monks or priors, but they were often educated men, letrados, who, ten or twenty years before, had merely been promising students of law at the University of Salamanca. A few were judges. A typical public servant was Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal, a young Extremeño who was just beginning his impressive progress upward through the committees that surrounded the monarchs. Even if crowded in small rooms, inconveniently placed, often sleeping on rough floors and in great heat, these bureaucrats must have welcomed the establishment of the court at Santa Fe, a rest from perpetual travel.
Many of these were men whose ancestors, a hundred years before, had converted rapidly, after the brutal pogroms of the late fourteenth century, from Judaism. Most of them—and that was also true of the merchants with whom they associated, by cousinly connection or friendship—were by 1490 serious Christians and had forgotten the Jewish faith of their forebears. A few, however, through family tradition or perhaps from indolence, maintained some Jewish customs, such as washing the dead before burial, eating garlic fried with oil, or turning to the wall when they died; and a still smaller number were true secret Jews, privately keeping the Sabbath, clandestinely eating meat on Fridays, and even cherishing the intoxicating hope that the Messiah would soon reveal Himself, perhaps in Seville, where the Queen, during her long stay in 1478, had noticed what she judged to be a disgraceful liturgical laxity.37 The prior of the Dominican convent, Fray Alonso de Hojeda, had told her that many conversos in Seville were returning to their Jewish faith and were threatening the survival of Christianity. His order then mounted a campaign of propaganda against the conversos.
So the Spanish monarchs, in 1478, had asked Pope Sixtus IV to set up a Holy Office, or Inquisition, to root out these dangers. The procedure of such an organized inquiry had a long history in the Middle Ages. Indeed, a rather ineffective body had been established with the same purpose in the reign of Isabel’s brother, King Enrique. So Spain slid into accepting what turned out to be an iniquity without any sense of it seeming a radical innovation.
Jews had constituted an important minority in Spain since Roman days. Many had played a major part in administration in the fourteenth century. In 1391, there had been frequent popular attacks against them, above all in the large cities. At that same time thousands of Jews, perhaps two-thirds of the total, had themselves christened in order to avoid further persecution. The Crown encouraged such baptisms. Many of these conversos entered the government or went effectively into the Church as well as remaining dominant in commerce. One rabbi in Castile, the learned ha-Levi, even became Bishop of Burgos under the name of Alonso de Santa María.
The conversos prospered. They were prominent among those who sought to introduce Italian humanism into Spain, but they remained an endogamous sect within society and within the Church, and so they attracted attention, envy, and hostility—at least after 1449 when there were riots against “new Christians” in Toledo, where rivalries between old Christians and conversos were intense.38 In other places such hatreds blended with traditional enmities between two groups of families. A special case was that in Córdoba where there had even been a massacre of conversos in 1473.39 Still, conversos continued to be bishops, royal secretaries, bankers, changers of money, and priors in monasteries, and they married into the nobility.
Was the purpose of the new Inquisition to find a way of deciding who among the conversos were false Christians?40 For it seems obvious that the principal charge of secret heresy was believed absolutely by the monarchs and by the public.41 Was the aim of the Inquisition to “destroy the converso community”? Did the two rulers, traditional protectors of the Jews as well as of the conversos, come “to realize that to continue protecting them could cost them too much in terms of their relations with the majority of the people and that the presence of the Jews, despite the advantages which it offered, was more of a liability than an asset?”42 The first historian of the Inquisition, Llorente, a Marxist before Marx, thought that the motive for setting up the Inquisition was largely financial, while the great German historian von Ranke thought it a further means of securing absolute authority for the monarchs. The Spanish medievalist Menéndez Pelayo thought that the aim was the extirpation of a heresy that really did threaten Christianity, while the mercurial Américo Castro thought that the Inquisition was a typically Jewish idea actually devised by conversos to protect themselves, which was out of keeping with Spanish traditions!
Was the aim of the Crown in establishing the Holy Office on the contrary to stifle the growing popular movement against the conversos? Many old Christians thought that most, or even all, conversos and their descendants were secret Jews or, at least, were falling back into Jewish ways because of the
excessive tolerance of the Church; and certainly some Jews, in the days of popular persecution in the late fourteenth century, had converted out of fear. Rabbis thought that all Jews forcibly converted to Christendom had always to be seen as Jews, and their children, too.
Whatever the royal motives, Pope Sixtus IV announced a bull (Exigit Sincere Devotionis) establishing an Inquisition. Two Inquisitors, both Dominicans, were appointed in Seville in 1480. They were guided by medieval texts that had been in use against, for example, the Cathars. They went about their business with energy and established their headquarters and their jail in the castle of San Jorge in Triana, just across the Guadalquivir from Seville. Investigations were secret, and the accused might be held in prison for months, even years, while the case against them was prepared. The accused did have the right to defense lawyers, but these were chosen by the Inquisition itself. Those found to be secret Jews were burned (“relaxed to the secular arm” was the expression used) just outside the city after a public and ceremonial denunciation at an auto-de-fe, while those who fled in time were burned in effigy. Others were fined (reconciliado) and caused to march barefoot through the streets wearing the famous sambenito modeled on the chasuble and a long pointed hat. There were other punishments: house arrest or forced attendance at Mass on such and such a number of days.
Many conversos did flee Seville, some to Rome, where Sixtus IV helped them, even writing in 1482 to Fernando and Isabel about the excesses of the Inquisitors. He also quashed sentences against conversos who could sustain their claim to have been unfairly accused.
All the same, the Inquisition was soon to be found in almost all the big cities of Castile. The establishment of the Holy Office in the kingdom of Aragon was more difficult, since it was necessary to bring to an end some existing institutions that had the same purpose. There was special hostility, too, to the idea that Castilian Inquisitors should play a part. There were protests from traditionalists as well as “new Christians,” and it seems reasonably certain that the murder of the Inquisitor Pedro Arbués in 1485 in the cathedral of Saragossa, which caused a scandal in Christian Aragon, was the responsibility of the latter.
Those who died because of the denunciations of the Inquisition, followed by the secret trials and imprisonments, and then the “relaxation” of the “guilty” to the civil power, may have exceeded two thousand in number by the year of the siege of Granada.43 In addition, most of those accused who managed to establish innocence never recovered the property confiscated at the beginning of their investigation. The Inquisition was acting against conversos, not Jews, but, of course, there was a connection, as events were to show.
A number of important Jews as well as conversos were present in Santa Fe; for example, Abraham Señor, a financier with many official roles. There was Isaac Abravanel, a famous tax collector who had fled from Portugal after an alleged plot in 1485.44 There was also the Queen’s doctor, Lorenzo Badoz, and the King’s, David Abenacaya of Ytarrega.45
The Church in Spain then boasted forty-eight bishops,46 of whom many were often at court, as they were at Santa Fe. Many managed, ex officio, vast properties, especially the Archbishop of Toledo, and all were free of taxes. Ten Castilian cathedrals, including the primatial see of Toledo, had, between them, control over thirty towns and over 2,300 vassals.47 The bishops were headed by Mendoza, both Cardinal and Archbishop, but others were nearly as warlike, and almost as active, if not as rich. In the past, the rule had been: if a bishop died in Rome, his see would be filled by the Pope; in all other cases, the cathedral chapter (cabildo) would propose a name, though they had to consider any suggestion made by the monarch; the latter’s wishes now gradually became decisive.
There were also, outside the walls of Granada, members of the contemplative orders, the Benedictines and the Jeronymites, as well as the active brotherhoods, such as Dominicans and Franciscans, the latter including the sect known as the Observants, who were reforming members in search of a more spiritual life. Among these, the Jeronymites, only a century old, with their marvelous headquarters at Guadalupe, had a special place in the heart of the Queen.48
In Santa Fe, there were, too, younger members of the royal family, especially Don Juan, the thirteen-year-old heir of the monarchs, their pride and their expectation. With him was his household—an unusual mixture of mature advisers, playmates, and fellow students of writing, arithmetic, geometry, and Latin. The Infante Juan’s court at Almazán on the border of Aragon and Castile would later be composed of a brilliant combination of people, some of whom (Nicolás de Ovando, Cristóbal de Cuéllar, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo) would later be seen in posts of significance throughout what became the Spanish Empire.49
Also in the ranks of Castile before the siege of Granada were the aristocrats of the realm, mostly rich dukes and counts, noblemen of a few generations at the most, for, as in England, civil wars had destroyed nearly all the families that had dominated the high Middle Ages.50 The powerful chief minister of Juan II, Álvaro de Luna, who really ruled Spain from 1420 till 1453, had created a new hierarchy of noblemen, beginning in 1438 with the Count of Alba de Tormes, the ancestor of the Albas. These new titles were hereditary and were now given to men who were not members of the royal family. The grant of a hereditary title—“to you and your descendants forevermore”—also gave to the nobleman concerned permanent rights to the estate from which he took his name. Thus the grant of the first hereditary marquisate (of Santillana, in 1445) assured the Mendozas the city and lands of Santillana, in Cantabria. At Santa Fe, the noblemen would be easily recognized, for they would customarily wear spurs of silver or gold and shining breastplates.
A modern historian has written that the Spanish nobility at the end of the fifteenth century constituted one large family headed by the King.51 It would have been better to say that that large family, with about twenty branches, was headed by the Mendozas, of which the Duke of Infantado was the senior member. But even his title was less than twenty years old, while the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s title dated from 1444, Alba (as a duke) from only 1472, and Nájera from 1482. The Duke of Medinaceli was of royal blood, but his dukedom dated only from 1479.
These personages were present outside Granada because, being who they were, they were obliged by ancient custom to attend the monarch in crisis. Kings throughout the Middle Ages had given land to nobles in return for provision of men in war or, to lesser nobles, in return for their own services. In 1491, great nobles were still expected to contribute to the King’s wars—men, money, or their own valor. They anticipated, too, benefits from their service, especially in the form of land. Noble families had their lands guaranteed them by a royal grant of an entailment (mayorazgo), by which an estate was guaranteed not to diminish but by which the head of the family was obliged to concern himself with his younger brothers and their descendants, as well as to find dowries for his sisters. These families were often attended by private courts that might include poets and scholars, as well as librarians and musicians.
Alongside the great noblemen there were knights, some of whom owned lordships, which gave them status but scarcely a livelihood. An ambitious knight would therefore work at court, perhaps, to begin with, as a continuo, a courtier in attendance, one of about a hundred, and he might be paid a few thousand maravedís; or he might find himself at a lord’s court, where his income would be smaller. In war, these knights would often be grouped in companies of between 150 and 350 men, some of them being so-called armed knights (caballeros armados) or sometimes simply squires (escuderos).
Another class attached to the court were the hidalgos—poor gentlemen, that is, good at fighting, and usually as loyal to their lords as to the King; some of them were concerned with administration, too, and were often held to be creative (ingenioso) as well as brave. Hidalguismo, we are told, was, “as well as a class division, a frame of mind, but it was not enough just to be valiant, one had to show oneself as such.”52 An impertinent act of courage, such as that of Hernán de Pulgar before th
e mosque of Granada, was the action of a true hidalgo.
The pursuit of fame was not yet in Spain what it was in Italy. Few Spaniards had read Plutarch, Suetonius, or Petrarch. But for a hundred years there had been a cult of ballads written in Castilian that talked of historical heroes such as Caesar, Alexander, and Charlemagne as if they were contemporaries; and well-brought-up men were accustomed to lace their conversation with allusions to antiquity.
The war had not been continuously gentlemanly: the Muslims often tipped their arrows with poison from aconites or wolfbane, which grew wild in the Sierra Nevada. When a Muslim seer, Ibrahim al-Jarbi from Tunisia, attacked Álvaro de Portugal and his wife at the siege of Malaga, believing them to be Fernando and Isabel, he was torn to pieces, and his remains were thrown back into the city by a siege catapult. His body was sewn together again there with silk and given a fine funeral before a Christian prisoner was executed and his dead body mounted on an ass and sent to wander off into the Christian camp.53
Last but certainly not least, the war was expensive. The total cost was perhaps 800 million maravedís, raised in a multitude of ways. This had led, among other things, to a special tax on the Jewish community of Spain of no less than 50 million maravedís.54
The court of Christian Spain under Fernando and Isabel, like all courts, was also attended, wherever it was, in Santa Fe or in Santiago de Compostela, by a host of expectant plaintiffs; some of them were scholars of distinction, some near-beggars, all hopeful for a nod or even a smile of recognition from a secretary. There were those who hoped to gain enough money to afford a plate of chickpeas by singing or playing the vihuela.
Among these individuals in Santa Fe was a tall, purposeful, prematurely white-haired man—it had once been red—his eyes blue, his nose aquiline, and his high cheeks often turning scarlet, on a long face. He would tell anyone who cared to listen curious geographical things. He had been at court for about five years and was astounded that people did not listen to him more. But with the war coming to its conclusion, what, really, could he have expected? He seemed to have a sense neither of judgment nor of humor, and never joked about himself. He was pious and on Sundays did nothing except pray. Indeed, in respect of fasting, saying prayers, and condemning blasphemy, he might have been a member of a religious order. Yet he was affable and friendly. His favorite oath was “By San Fernando,” and his only rebuke, “God take you.” He spoke Spanish fluently, but with an accent that no one could place. He never explained exactly whence he came, but most people thought that he was from Genoa. He had been to Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands and so knew of the astonishing achievements of captains from Lisbon on the west coast of Africa since the days of Henry the Navigator. People also said that this individual had sold sugar in the Canaries, on behalf of Florentine merchants. He had powerful friends: the Duke of Medinaceli liked him and even the great Cardinal Mendoza interested himself in him from time to time. He was an exotic figure in a court that, for all its foreign alliances and marriages, was somewhat peninsular in its attitudes. (In 1488, Peter Martyr had written that Spain was the last attic of a vast palace in which Italy was the main salon, the emporium of the world.)55 This stranger was a well-known sight, for he had long been waiting for some royal sign of encouragement. Yet familiarity bred respect for him. He wanted support from the Crown for a journey that he wished to make to the West, across what was thought of as the “Ocean Sea.” His name was Columbus.56