Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  As Rome was deluged with complaints from the Seville conversos, the pope reversed his decision on the royal nature of the Inquisition, claiming he had been bamboozled into signing a document he did not fully understand. ‘I have been informed that many people have been unfairly and deliberately jailed, without proper observance of the law; they have been subjected to terrifying torture, unjustly declared to be heretics and had their goods snatched away from them,’ he wrote,40 after Ferdinand had reformed the old Aragonese Inquisition along the Castilian model so that he could name his own inquisitors there. ‘The Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls, but by lust for wealth, and many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls,’ the pope went on. It had become, in other words, a form of terror. Sixtus believed that the Inquisition had run wild because he had ceded the naming of inquisitors to Isabella and Ferdinand. As a result, the royal Inquisition launched in Seville was temporarily suppressed in January 1482 while Sixtus withdrew the sovereigns’ right to name inquisitors, took away the anonymity of the accusers and allowed appeals to Rome. But Isabella and her husband were not prepared to give up such a potent tool. Ferdinand answered the pope with an angry letter insisting that ‘we are determined never to let anyone hold this office [of inquisitor] against our will’.41 And Sixtus soon backtracked. First the original inquisitors were allowed to continue in Seville, then he permitted the Inquisition’s extension across Castile with the original rules sought by Isabella and Ferdinand.42

  A papal bull sent to Isabella in February 1483 leaves little doubt about her personal backing for the tribunal. In the letter, Pope Sixtus IV tries to calm her fears that the Inquisition will be viewed by outsiders as a mere money-making operation, designed to strip conversos of their wealth and enrich the crown. ‘The doubts you seem to have about whether we think that, by taking measures to proceed so severely against those perfidious people who, under Christian disguise, blaspheme and, with Jewish insidiousness, crucify Christ … that you are motivated more by ambition and a desire for worldly goods than for defence of the faith and Catholic truth or fear of God;you should know that we have never entertained the slightest suspicion that this might be the case.’43 She had written to the pope, then, because she was worried about her image, not about the institution. By setting it up, Isabella insisted, she was merely doing the right thing by God. It was not the first time, and certainly would not be the last, that she deposited responsibility for her actions in Him.

  Isabella’s enthusiasm for the Inquisition becomes even clearer in two letters she wrote to a different pope ten years after it had been founded – when its mortal victims were well above a thousand people. By this stage senior churchmen like Juan Arias Dávila,44 the converso bishop of Segovia, found their families under attack and were fighting a rearguard action in Rome – where a different pope, Innocent VIII, was fretting about the Spanish monarchs’ power over the Inquisition. ‘You can imagine how disturbed I was at seeing the effect on your holiness’s spirit of the information provided by a bishop whose journey to that court [of Rome] obviously has not just been in order to hide the truth in the cases affecting his parents and family, but mainly to impede and create problems for the Holy Office of the Inquisition, defaming its ministers,’ Isabella wrote in one letter.45 Under the terms of the Inquisition’s foundation such cases should not be heard in Rome, she averred. When the first letter failed to provoke the desired reaction, she composed a furious, handwritten follow-up, insisting that the Inquisition’s powers did not diminish the pope’s authority. ‘It would be more damaging to your pre-eminence, honour and fame – given that this heretical crime is widely known to exist in these kingdoms – if the judicial investigation into it was in some way impeded or led off course,’ she wrote. ‘The truth about this business cannot be discovered over there [in Rome]… Your holiness should listen to those who say they are motivated only by zeal in the elevation of our Catholic faith … rather than to those who mouth and create heresy, who attempt to undo the Inquisition and are opposed to it, like the Bishop of Segovia and others.’ Isabella was clearly upset, and her handwritten letter was full of angry crossings out. She ended up by apologising if she had gone too far in her words, but said she thought it her duty, however ‘poorly reasoned and in bad handwriting’ her arguments were. The Inquisition was something she felt strongly about and the personal power she and her husband wielded over it was important because that way it could be kept on course. A significant portion of her Christian subjects were now the target of a cruel and often arbitrary persecution, but she remained convinced that she was doing God’s work.

  The most convincing proof that the conversos were not secret Jews comes from Spain’s real Jews. Those who had held on to their faith were disgusted by those who had not and were now ‘inadvertently our enemies’.46 ‘They follow the laws of the gentiles willingly,’ observed one downcast Jew, not long after the original conversions.47 By Isabella’s days they routinely referred to them as meshumadim, or willing converts, rather than anusim, or forced converts, with Isaac Abravanel, one of the prominent Jews of Isabella’s day, calling the vast majority of them ‘sinners’ and ‘criminals’.48 In fact the eager embrace of both Christianity and anti-Jewishness by some suggests that many had the fervour of new converts.49 ‘They and their descendants after them, sought to be like complete Gentiles … imbued with the new faith,’ he wrote. But Abravanel was also aware that this would not help them in the eyes of some Christians who ‘will call them Jews, and by the name of Israel they will be known against their will and they will be considered Jews and accused of Judaising in secret and by fire they will be burned because of this’.50 Another Jewish writer saw the Inquisition as God’s way of punishing the conversos for abandoning one faith without fully embracing another, and the fact that most victims took the softer option of repenting and being killed by a garrotte while holding on to the cross rather than on the stake as proof that very few were real Jews.51

  The two communities – where they still existed as such – lived near to one another, with inevitable overlaps in business and through blood ties. The bishop of Segovia had a sister living with him who was Jewish, and a prominent Jewish family in Aragon, the de la Cavallerias, had split after several brothers converted, while two did not.

  Ironically, the Inquisition itself seems to have sparked a new, if very small, crypto-Jewish movement among those who now felt orphaned in their Christianity, though not all Jews were welcoming, with some claiming they had forfeited a right to return. These crypto-Jewish ‘returners’ eventually accounted for perhaps one in 200 conversos.52

  It was race, as much as religion, that made the conversos suspect. Perhaps the most telling description of them, at least by their enemies, was as Castile’s ‘fourth [ethnic] type’ (presumably after the Castilians, Galicians and Basques), but while the latter three were all ‘natural’ Castilians, the converso ‘nation’ was not – it remained an outsider people infiltrated into Christian ranks.53

  Further proof of the racial enmity underpinning the Inquisition and other religious measures approved of by Isabella came with the slow spread of ‘purity of blood’ rules. These banned conversos from elite institutions, monastic orders and other places, purely on the basis of their Jewish blood. Mixing converso blood (or culture) with that of old Christians, the logic went, would make later generations more prone to heresy. A college at the university in Salamanca was the first to ban them just as the Inquisition was starting its work in around 1482, followed by another in Valladolid. Torquemada banned all conversos from a Dominican monastery that he founded in Avila, and – although these rules were often policed laxly – the Jeronymite order, which owned Isabell
a’s favourite monastery at Guadalupe, also banned them in 1493. Isabella reportedly ‘heard [this news] with pleasure’, and was happy to see the Inquisition also apply an adapted version of these blood rules by punishing the offspring of its victims. Among the royal orders she passed was one banning the children and grandchildren of Seville’s reconciliados from holding public or royal offices in 1501.54

  Although they were bending to both popular prejudice and the fantasies of radical friars, Isabella and Ferdinand were the true founders of the Inquisition. It was they who had complained to the pope about the false converts in their kingdoms and asked permission to appoint inquisitors ‘to tear such a pernicious sect out by the roots’. In Castile Ferdinand was often seen as the instigator, while in Aragon the blame was often laid on Isabella. Perhaps, given the unpleasantness of an exercise that combined elements of both religious and ethnic cleansing, it was easier in each kingdom to shift blame to the sovereign’s partner. In fact they saw eye to eye on the matter, with Isabella keeping a close, protective watch over the welfare of her inquisitors, and ensuring that they received generous incomes.55

  The queen’s quest for religious purity did not end there, and the Seville Inquisition soon had a dramatic aftermath in the city. Several thousand Jews had clung on to their religion, despite the violence occasionally unleashed on them and in the face of increasing social hostility. Jews had been an important part of Seville’s society for centuries. Now Isabella decided that they should be expelled from almost the whole of Andalusia, on the grounds that they were a moral danger to the conversos and encouraged them to judaise. In an extraordinary extension of its powers to cover a religious group outside the Christian church, the Inquisition was to oversee the process. On 1 January, 1483, it issued instructions for Jews to leave the bishoprics of Seville, Córdoba and Cadiz.56 Some 5,000 people would move over the ensuing months. ‘They went mostly to Toledo and old Castile,’57 reported Isaac ibn Farradj, whose parents left for Medina del Campo. It was the first expulsion ever ordered in Castile. It would not be the last.

  20

  Crusade

  Zahara de la Sierra, 27 December 1481

  Isabella was now used to victory, so news of a defeat on the Granada frontier must have shocked her. Two days after Christmas 1481 a group of Moors rode out of the kingdom of Granada and, in a stealthy night-time attack, scaled the walls of the fortress at Zahara de la Sierra, a small town perched high on a steep, rocky outcrop on the northern edge of the Grazalema mountains. They slew most of the garrison, took the townsfolk captive and installed their own force of well-armed and well-supplied archers and horsemen, effectively pushing the kingdom’s borders back into Christian territory.1

  Isabella could have viewed this as just another minor setback on a 600-mile frontier where skirmishing, smuggling, raiding and trading had long been the norm. The kingdom of Granada still occupied an area not much smaller than modern Belgium. A long time had gone by without any dramatic changes in the frontier and Isabella herself had been careful to keep the peace with the Moors while she dealt with Portugal and Juana la Beltraneja. A second war front would have been too debilitating. But the loss of Zahara was a reminder that, even before her reign started, she had sworn to expel the Moors from Spain. That ambition had been written down quite clearly in the first marriage contract with Ferdinand, signed at Cervera in 1469.2 She and her husband reacted to the loss of Zahara with equanimity. ‘We were angry and upset … [but] it can also be said that we were pleased by what happened because it offers us the opportunity to get speedily to work on what we were already planning … to make war on the Moors on all fronts in such a way that, God willing, we hope to recover not just the lost town but also others, in order to [better] serve Our Lord and spread his holy faith,’ they wrote in a letter to the Andalusian city of Seville.3 Those plans were still vague and their initial reaction was chaotic, but Isabella and her husband needed to keep the militarised followers who had helped her win the throne busy and away from mischief. A war against the Moors would help them do that.

  During the civil war, Isabella and Ferdinand had agreed two separate peace treaties with the Kingdom of Granada in order to keep their southern frontier quiet and, while in Seville, had begun negotiating the next treaty. The man with whom their emissaries negotiated was neither scared nor intimidated by the might of his Christian neighbours. Abū al-Hasan ’Alī ben Saad, known to Christians as Muley Hasan, was a vigorous and successful king. His kingdom was wealthy, densely populated, fertile, warlike, backed by fellow Muslims on the north coast of Africa and, crucially, proud of its religion. With generations of Muslim forebears buried in the often rich soil of a broad and occasionally mountainous strip of southern Spain, the Moors did not like to harbour feelings of inferiority to their northern neighbours, however powerful they were. Muley Hasan’s Nasrid dynasty had, despite bloodthirsty infighting, ruled from the magnificent surroundings of the hilltop Alhambra palace complex they had built in Granada for far longer than the Trastámaras had run Castile. It was true that the Nasrid kingdom was nominally a vassal state to Castile, but that was a fluctuating relationship, with the demands for monetary tribute often ignored.4

  Muley Hasan was a suitably fearsome representative of seven centuries’ worth of Muslim leaders who had both proved capable warriors and, in previous centuries, overseen an intellectual flowering that made their Christian neighbours seem like not just religious infidels but cultural heathens. An anonymous Arabic chronicler summed up the monarch’s virtues like this: ‘He enforced the rule of religious precepts, worked to better the state of the castles and greatly improved the army; which meant that the Christians feared him and signed peace treaties, covering both land and sea. Wealth multiplied, food supplies increased and prices fell, with public security spread across all the lands of Andalusia and a general state of wellbeing,’ he said.5 That, at least, is how Muley Hasan had started his reign a decade before Isabella came to throne. He had a reputation for ruthlessness, having dethroned his father (who, in turn, had grabbed power by murdering his own uncle), and for being merciless with his enemies.6

  Trouble came, according to the anonymous Arabic chronicler, when he began to enjoy his wealth and success excessively. ‘The king devoted himself to pleasure, giving himself up to passions and enjoying himself with female singers and dancing girls. Immersed in leisure and carefreeness, he destroyed the army, getting rid of a large number of brave knights. And at the same time he overwhelmed the countryside with public levies and the zocos [town and city markets] with taxes.’7 But his worst sin was to have fallen for Isabel de Solís, a Christian slave-girl who swept floors in the rooms of one of the daughters Muley Hasan had with his aristocratic wife Fatima. Isabel had been captured during a cross-border raid when she was no older than twelve and, converted to Islam, became known as Zoraya.8 ‘This [king] had the habit of trying to bed all the women of his household,’ wrote Hernando de Baeza, an Arabic-speaking frontiersman who would become a close friend and translator to the king’s son Mohammed ben Abū al-Hasan ’Alī, known to the Christians as Boabdil.9 A pageboy acted as secret intermediary, but one night after Zoraya left the king’s room the queen’s ladies set a trap and ‘waited for her to return, then beat her continuously and almost to death with their slippers’. Muley Hasan’s furious reply was to install her as his new queen, and turn his back on Fatima. ‘From then on he lived with her and she was considered queen and he never again spoke to or saw his wife,’ explained Baeza. The extensive Alhambra complex of palaces was easily big enough for the two royal families to coexist without meeting. Fatima and her children were moved into rooms near the Courtyard of the Lions, while Muley Hasan took Zoraya, who soon produced two sons, into his home in the imposing Comares palace, with its impressive tower and rooms looking onto the glassy sheet of water and marble floors of the Court of Myrtles. Converts to Islam provoked the same kind of suspicion as the conversos in Christian Spain – especially those, like the family of powerful alguacil may
or of Granada, Abulcacim Venegas, who rose to positions of importance. Zoraya would forever be referred to as romía, a name originally referring to people who had lived under Roman law.10

  If Isabella had not forgotten the pledges made at Cervera, some of her nobles proved themselves even keener to strike back after the loss of Zahara. Cross-border rivalries were not just between kingdoms, but between the lords who controlled either side of the frontier. The modest Moorish victory was soon answered with a daring raid into the heart of the Granada kingdom by an army raised by the Marquess of Cadiz. This secretly made its way to within thirty-five miles of the kingdom’s great capital city and surprised the sleepy garrison at the strategically important town of Alhama late in February 1483. As the town was both well fortified and perched high on a cliff above a bend in the River Alhama, its inhabitants had assumed it was unassailable and had dropped their guard. A group of the marquess’s troops scaled the walls early one morning and knocked a hole through them to let other troops in, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting as the townsfolk hastily threw up barriers in the streets. An angry Muley Hasan appeared with his own army, but found himself having to besiege a solidly fortified town of the kind that he himself so liked to build or maintain. The Christian occupiers hurled the stinking, rotten bodies of those Muslims who had died during the assault over the town’s walls, where hungry dogs tore at the corpses.11 Hasan was outraged and his best archers picked the animals off from a distance.

  Isabella and Ferdinand, who were in Medina del Campo, received the news twelve days later and immediately ordered that reinforcements be sent. ‘Knowing just how useful and advantageous holding and sustaining that town is to us for the conquest of the kingdom of Granada, which we propose to pursue with all our might, we are sending as many horsemen as possible to the frontier,’ they told the Seville city council, while instructing it to gather troops and artillery.12 Ferdinand himself would soon be on his way, they added. Christian and Moorish troops began moving towards Alhama in their tens of thousands. A few weeks later Hasan was confronted by a fresh Christian army of up to 40,000 led by Cadiz’s long-term rival, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had come to reinforce the garrison. Hasan was forced to withdraw and Ferdinand himself arrived soon afterwards, resupplying the town and leaving a fresh garrison.13 A delighted Isabella was able to relish a newphenomenon that could help bind her unruly kingdoms together and that was already apparent in the collaboration between Cadiz and Medina Sidonia. A crusade against Spain’s Muslim lands made her bothersome Grandees forget their squabbling and united her still-bruised and fractured kingdom around a single, joint cause. She immediately ordered that Alhama’s three main mosques be turned into churches, sending crosses, silver plate, ornaments and books needed for Christian worship to be carried out where, just weeks earlier, Muslims had prayed. It was her contribution to a piece of freelance daring that restarted the seven centuries’ old drive to oust the Muslims from their oldest stronghold in western Europe. Not only had the conquerors left the stinking bodies of their enemies to rot outside the city walls, but she had now planted the cross of Jesus Christ in the heart of the Muslim kingdom.