Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  By the following spring it had become clear that Isabella was the motor behind this crusade. The royal family had spent Christmas 1483 in the north, making plans for the following year. But Aragon had its problems – notably its traditional rivalry with the French over Roussillon. Ferdinand decided that this was his priority. Isabella, however, travelled south to Córdoba to prepare for that year’s campaign in Granada. If her husband could not organise it, then she would do so herself. She was an admirer of Joan of Arc, whose chronicle sat on her bookshelf with an anonymous dedication urging her to fight the ‘damned sect’ of Muslims35 and reminding her that the Frenchwoman had also restored the crown to greatness, though Isabella had no intention of leading troops into battle herself. She had plenty of willing field commanders for that. But generals need a commander-in-chief to set their objectives and raise their troops. And Isabella was more than happy to fill that role if her husband thought he had better things to do.

  21

  They Smote Us Town by Town

  Córdoba, May 1484

  Isabella bade goodbye to her husband at Tarazona, a town in the north-west corner of Aragon, at the end of March 1484. She had been implacable about resuming the Granada War and Ferdinand agreed to join her again once he had settled affairs in Aragon.1 Her trip south took her past Las Navas de Tolosa, the spot where a great victory over the Moors had been won in 1212 when the combined armies of Castile, Aragon and Navarre engaged the Moors in an open battle that saw more than 30,000 men in the field. Among those with her was Cardinal Mendoza, an old-style aristocratic clergyman-warrior who was ready to lead her troops if Ferdinand did not appear on time. The long train of horses and mules had first wound their way along the canyon of the Despeñaperros River with its bare quartzite walls – where a shepherd had famously led the Christian armies to the surprise attack at Las Navas de Tolosa. From there they crossed over the top of the Sierra Morena and then ambled gently down its southern slopes. Isabella moved on to Córdoba, which was dominated by a vast old mosque with 365 horseshoe arches resting on hundreds of columns of jasper, marble and granite. It had been consecrated as a Christian place of worship 250 years earlier, but the cathedral still occupied only a fraction of the space inside.

  Córdoba, like Seville, was a place where Isabella could appreciate the sophistication of those she now came to conquer. Her home here was in the alcázar, close to the former mosque and overlooking the broad River Guadalquivir and a long, sixteen-span bridge with its thick buttresses – a reminder that, before the Muslims or Visigoths had held the city, Spain had been part of the Roman empire. Noisy mills churned up the river water. The splashing and creaking of the mill wheels spoiled the queen’s sleep and, reputedly, she soon ordered them to be halted at night. This had been one of the most troublesome cities during the days of weak royal power, with conversos and old Christians clashing regularly and a handful of local nobles scrapping for control. Much of the former were falling victim to the Inquisition, with its voluminous archives housed in one of the alcázar towers; but, with the business of crusade at hand, the city’s attention now turned to legitimate war-making.

  Isabella had written to Seville, demanding it raise troops for the upcoming campaign. She did not just want horsemen, archers and footsoldiers, calculating that technicians, engineers and labourers were as important as fighting men for the task ahead. Her soldiers were as likely to need to build roads and bridges for her artillery to cross – or chop down fruit trees and wreck crops – as they were to shoot an arrow, hurl a lance or handle a sword. So it was that more than half of the 8,400 men she wanted from Seville were to come equipped not just with arms but with tools. Isabella gave detailed orders: ‘2,500 must bring, apart from their arms, a sickle each. And 500 should bring an axe for cutting wood, and 2,000 a large saw.’ A further 100 were to be stonemasons, also with their tools.2 All this needed paying for and a fresh source of financing came from the Crusade Bulls that would now be signed every three years or so by the Pope. These allowed the widespread sale of indulgences by the church – a means of buying escape from punishment for some sins – to help fund the war.

  Isabella studied the latest developments in artillery, hiring French and German experts who gave her instructions on which guns and munitions to buy. While the civil war army that had fought against Portugal had just four lombarderos, or master-gunners, the new crusading force would eventually boast ninety-one.3 She had also ordered that a fleet patrol the Mediterranean to prevent reinforcements and supplies reaching the Granada coast from Africa. It was only now, late in May, that Ferdinand, having settled his affairs in Aragon, appeared. He led the troops against the town of Álora, set up on a rocky crag. The town was well fortified, and the defenders had not thought it necessary to evacuate their women and children. Pulgar accused them of having turned soft. ‘The Moors live under the thumbs of their women,’ he said. ‘Tender love of their children turns them into cowards and, since they seek so boastfully to have offspring, their houses were stuffed full of helpless beings.’ The army had been preceded by Isabella’s carefully recruited labourers and road-builders, who created paths for the artillery that slowly pounded away at the towers and battlements of Álora’s castle. The Moors fired back with long hand-held espingarda guns and hurled poisoned javelins at the attackers, but watched impotently as their defences crumbled away under the bombardment. Isabella had also realised that front-line medicine could save lives and boost morale, and sent with the army what came to be known as ‘the queen’s hospital’ – large tents and a team of primitive surgeons. It would become a custom. ‘The queen would always send six large tents along with the bedding needed for the sick and wounded; and she sent surgeons and doctors and medicines and people to serve them and said that the costs did not matter, because she would pay,’ explained Pulgar.4

  It took just a week before the battered defenders came out to parley, agreeing to abandon the fortified town in exchange for their lives and the price of the cereals stored there. As always, one of the conquerors’ first actions was to consecrate the town’s mosque as a church. A satisfied Ferdinand ordered the walls repaired and the town garrisoned, then prepared to return to Isabella with his troops. But she would have none of it. She had prepared for a longer campaign. Mule trains had been readied and vast quantities of barley and flour bought. Some 800 mules were delivering weekly supplies and were expected to do so for a full seven weeks.5 As Palencia recounted, ‘The queen, who worked daily sending money and people, and pack animals and supplies, and equipment for that war, having heard that the king was thinking of leaving the war and returning with his host from the Moorish lands, sent to tell the King that – if he wished – he should continue laying waste to the Vega or should besiege some other town, since there was still enough of the summer left to be able to do so.’ Ferdinand did exactly that, his troops rampaging through the fertile Vega of Granada, destroying the orchards, storehouses and well-watered fields that had helped fill Muslim stomachs for centuries. As Ferdinand’s army returned, Isabella wrote daily letters to ensure that supplies reached a similar expedition led by the Duke of Medina Sidonia.6

  The monarchs wintered in Seville, a city now at the heart of the war effort but devastated by the expulsion of its Jews, the persecution of its conversos and occasional outbreaks of the plague. They were back in one of Isabella’s favourite spots – the Royal Alcázar – which brought back happy memories of the procreation and birth of little Juan. But members of her household soon began to die from the plague and Isabella fled with her family to healthier climes. The outbreak was so severe that, when she sent Ferdinand off to war again early the next year, she banned sevillanos from joining him.7 ‘I order that nobody from the city of Seville or from those places around it and in its archbishopric where there is plague be so bold as to go to the king’s camp,’ she wrote.8 They were now settling into a pattern of warfare. Winters were for rest, planning and even for giving birth – with her fourth daughter, and final child, Catherine o
f Aragon born in the break after the 1485 campaign. Fighting could start again in the spring, with fresh troops and supplies. On each expedition the weight of artillery and the importance of road-makers, bridge-builders and labourers increased as the heavy cannon were dragged through the alternately arid and rain-drenched landscapes of Andalusia so that ferocious bombardments could be unleashed on Moorish towns and castles. That spring, as he set off towards spectacular Ronda – a strategic town that straddled a deep canyon north of Málaga – Ferdinand was followed by an artillery force drawn by 1,500 carts.9

  Double-dealing, the use of Moorish allies and plain good luck all came to their aid. But the keys to success were the ever more refined siege techniques and supply trains that Isabella ensured arrived regularly at the camps where more than 10,000 hungry soldiers were gathered. Isabella herself watched from a prudent distance, worrying constantly about whether her resupply programme would perform properly. A pivotal victory came when, after a short two-week siege and bombardment, a secret deal was done with some of the senior families in Ronda. All those who had battled for control of Spain’s southern Mediterranean coastline, from the native Iberians to the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and Muslims, had established themselves here. A whole swathe of towns fell with it, as the Moors decided it was better to accept the status of mudéjares – Muslims in Christian Spain – than fight to the death or be captured and enslaved.10

  Isabella and Ferdinand were changing the parameters of warfare. As the artillery guns they used became heavier and more numerous – along with the increasing number of road-builders available to flatten valleys, carve roadways out of hillsides or build bridges across river beds – so the great defensive bastions of medieval military strategy, the castle and the city wall, slowly crumbled before them. It was no longer necessary to concentrate on blocking routes in and out of towns while waiting for the besieged to starve. This new sort of army, in which artillery and infantry replaced knights and their mounted followers as the most important elements, saw fear of Isabella and Ferdinand’s troops spread as – according to one Muslim poet – they ‘smote us, town by town, / Bringing many large cannons they demolished the impregnable walls of the towns.’11 The royal arsenal would soon have some 180 big and medium guns and several foundries to supply them. ‘Towns and fortresses … which once could have held out for at least a year and fallen only by starvation, now fell in a month,’ remarked Bernáldez.12 Thousands of cannon balls made of iron or stone were hurled at walls that had previously been thought impenetrable. The largest were carved out of 150-pound lumps of rock. Some of the worst damage was done, however, by fireballs made of hemp, pitch, sulphur and gunpowder, which spewed flames as they fell, raining fire across a wide area.13 Defenders who tried to patch up the damage would then find themselves subjected to intense fire from smaller cannon, from bowmen or from the long-barrelled, hand-held espingarda guns, which gradually became more numerous in the army’s ranks.

  A typical assault, described by Pulgar, saw the town of Setenil taken in just three days. ‘Setting up his big lombarda guns, the king ordered them fired at the two great towers at the entrance gates. These fired as directed until, in three days, they had reduced the walls to great heaps of rubble. The cerbatanas and pasabolantes and ribadoquines [all smaller artillery pieces] hit the town’s houses, killing men, women and children and destroying homes. Such was the terror the firearms inspired and the carnage and ruin inflicted on the Moors that they could not endure it.’14 Breached walls then allowed the artillery to start targeting and flattening the houses inside or shooting fireballs at them. Little surprise, then, that many towns did not even wait for the bombardment to start – and instead sued for peace while the guns were being set up before them. The traditional rag-bag Castilian ‘host’ of conscripts, regional Hermandad militias, feudal lords’ armies, mercenaries, technicians and well-organised groups from the military orders were gradually marshalled intodisciplined units of around 800 men. At the core of it was what would eventually become Europe’s largest standing army.15

  Granada’s own civil war spluttered on, weakening the enemy further. Muley Hasan was ousted by his brother Zagal before dying in 1485, and Boabdil remained rebellious and unreliable. Isabellaand Ferdinand aided him in his civil war and at one stage he appeared in Murcia, being fêted by his Christian allies. By 1486 the Albaicíndistrict, on a hill opposite the Alhambra palace complex, had rebelled in his favour and was being bombarded with cannon and catapults from the other side of the Darro Valley. But then he allied with his uncle Zagal and took charge of the defence of Loja, the scene of Ferdinand’s embarrassing first attempt at besieging a walled town. ‘Now you are going to suffer a defeat similar to the one you have already suffered here,’ his mudéjar interpreter, Abrahim de Robledo, threatened. But the hapless Boabdil lost the town almost immediately as the walls collapsed under intense cannon-fire and fireballs set houses ablaze. He was captured once more, becoming Isabella and Ferdinand’s vassal again – and his uncle’s enemy.16

  By this stage news of Isabella’s crusade had spread across Europe. Volunteers appeared from far and wide, including the English aristocrat known as Lord Scales, believed to be Edward IV’s brother-in-law, Edward Woodville, with more than a hundred English archers and footsoldiers armed with axes and lances. They were deemed to have turned the final battle over Loja, though Scales himself lost two teeth after being hit by a rock and worried that his looks had been spoiled. Ferdinand told him to be proud of a crusader’s injury that made him ‘more beautiful than deformed’, and Isabella showered him with 2,000 doblas’ worth of gifts, including ‘a very rich bed, and two tents, and six big, beautiful mules and four horses’. Scales amused Isabella when she arrived at the freshly conquered town of Íllora by greeting her dressed in white, with a plumed hat, his chestnut horse wearing a long blue silk skirt, accompanied by a similarly attired retinue. Scales made his horse perform vigorous dressage jumps for the onlookers, who obviously approved of this eccentric display of aristocratic pomp.17

  Isabella’s morale-boosting visit to Íllora was designed, in part, to thank the volunteers who had arrived from across Europe. The surrendering Moors had just left the city and Isabella – accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting and eldest daughter Isabella, now aged fifteen – was greeted by a loud band of trumpets, sackbuts, shawms and drums. The army of Castile awaited her, dipping its flags as she rode past on a mule dressed in rich scarlet and gold cloth. She herself wore a Moorish-style dress with a black brockade hat – an unsubtle homage to the land her armies and her husband were conquering. Ferdinand, who also carried a curved Moorish scimitar-style sword, greeted them by kissing his wife on her cheek and his daughter on the mouth.18

  Isabella now followed just a few steps behind the conquering army. At Moclín, which was taken in 1486, eighteen heavy lombarda guns kept up a permanent barrage ‘so fast, day and night, that there was never a moment when the reverberation of one gun or another was not heard’.19 Eventually a fireball landed on the town’s stock of gunpowder, producing a rapid victory that saved Isabella’s army from being peppered by gunshots from the town walls. While Ferdinand then went off to lay waste to the farmland of the Vega of Granada in the summer of 1486, Isabella moved to the conquered town and soon found herself also negotiating the surrender of nearby Montefrío. As in other places, the inhabitants gave up without a fight, leaving with their possessions for the city of Granada itself.20

  22

  God Save King Boabdil!

  Málaga, 1487

  The Granada War had already dominated the affairs of Castile, and Isabella’s time and energy, for several years, but the biggest tests lay ahead. In 1487 she and Ferdinand decided to besiege Granada’s second biggest city, Málaga. It was a huge, well-fortified port, needing a greater amount of military muscle than Isabella had ever put together before. A great army of 53,000 men, including 13,000 on horseback, was assembled and marched first on the town of Vélez-Málaga in early April. Zagal
also raised an army and set out for Vélez-Málaga, with Isabella suddenly panicking that she had not recruited enough men. It was now, however, that her strategy of dividing the Nasrid royal family by turning Boabdil into a vassal paid off.1 She and Ferdinand had even sent Christian troops to reinforce Boabdil after he had reappeared beside the Alhambra, taking control of the Albaicín district the previous autumn. ‘The enemy helped the master of the Albaicín [Boabdil] with all sorts of supplies: men, guns, powder, animal feed, cereals, animals, gold and silver,’ wrote the anonymous Muslim chronicler after fighting had erupted across the narrow Darro Valley.2 ‘With that the enemy achieved what it sought, that infighting would break out.’3

  A nervous Zagal had made the people of Granada swear not to rise against him while he led his troops towards Vélez-Málaga, but no sooner had he gone than an elderly Moor locked himself inside one of the city’s towers and climbed the stairs to the top. He removed his headpiece, tied it to a lance and started to shout: ‘God save King Boabdil!’4 The latter was soon in control of the city. News reached Zagal at two o’clock in the morning as he camped near Vélez-Málaga and, with his way back to Granada now blocked, he set off east towards his strongholds of Baza and Guadix. The inhabitants of Vélez-Málaga, presented with the sight of their king riding away from them while Ferdinand lined up his mighty guns, took just ten days to surrender. Boabdil, meanwhile, thanked Isabella for her help by sending her a Christian captive from Úbeda along with a gold chalice and various exotic scents. He also wrote to explain that he had slit the throats of some of his father’s most important supporters in the city, and asked Isabella to remind Ferdinand to send him more reinforcements.5 ‘You should know that we have killed four of the enemy captains,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps God will make sure this happens to all the enemies who are left.’6 Ferdinand sent him 3,000 Christian troops and orders were issued to Christian frontier commanders to help Boabdil make war on his uncle wherever possible. Boabdil later returned the favour by attacking a Muslim force sent by his uncle to reinforce Málaga.7