Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella and Ferdinand might have expected an easy handover of Málaga, where a wealthy and spoiled merchant class lived off the sea-trade between Granada and north Africa. But it was also the most important point of connection with the kingdom’s supporters on the southern side of the Mediterranean. ‘The city was a magnificent emporium for the profits of all vessels that docked there and the main point of support for the people of Granada,’ said Palencia.8 Arab, Egyptian, Tunisian, Numidian (Berber) and Sitifensian (Kabyle) vessels weighed anchor there, supplying the kingdom of Granada with men, horses and money that had been gathered from across north Africa. Málaga also had a large force of Gomeres – a tribe of warlike Berbers who, motivated by religion, money or both, provided fighters determined to save the kingdom of Granada from the Christian onslaught. With the backing of Zagal, these helped an experienced commander called Hamete Zegri take control. Among the keenest to hold out were the small population of converts from Christianity – afraid of their future fate as apostates – and the wild monfíes bandits from the countryside who had vowed to fight to the death. That made the siege which started in May 1487 a far more complex affair than anything Isabella and Ferdinand had embarked on before.9

  Isabella’s supply task was eased by the fact that goods, especially artillery, could now be delivered by boat, but the fierce spring rainstorms made the tracks muddy and the sea choppy. This time the monarchs had drawn their forces from further afield as foreign volunteers sought the mystique of successful crusaders and Aragonese nobles joined their ranks, bringing their own men. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian sent two ships’ worth of artillery, though he almost certainly charged them for the assistance.10

  Isabella and Ferdinand’s men, most of whom had never seen Málaga before, were awed by its size and defences. Pulgar was one of those who realised that this was like no other city they had come across before. ‘It is situated on a flat piece of land at the foot of a long slope, and is surrounded by a round wall, fortified with many thick towers, at a close distance from one another; and it has a thick outer barrier, where there are also many turrets. And on one side of the city, where the slope begins to rise, is the alcázar – known as the alcazaba – surrounded by two walls in which we were able to count up to 32 thick towers of wondrous height and cleverly built. And along the walls there are up to 80 other medium-sized and small turrets close to one another,’ he wrote. From there two more walls protected a road that led straight up the steep slope to the top of the hill, where the Gibralfaro castle sat, overlooking the areas where any attack might come from. Some of Isabella and Ferdinand’s advisers thought a siege would be too risky – that Málaga could be slowly strangled from afar now that all the neighbouring towns and castles were occupied. Others hot-headedly urged a direct assault. But even taking strategic positions around the city was difficult, as hilltops were fought over at close quarters and the Moors proved themselves to be highly motivated fighters. Ferdinand’s own tent, poorly placed on a hilltop, had to be moved back out of sight after the Moors picked it out and began to target it with cannonfire.11

  In the end it was Isabella who, according to Pulgar, took the final decision to carry on with a classic siege of attrition and avoid a frontal attack. A massive ditch was dug around the city, with palisades erected as a further obstacle to anyone trying to ride out and fight. The idea was to starve the defenders out, while bombarding them with the growing mass of artillery. Walls and fences were built to give the attackers cover. Tunnels were dug to get close to the city walls. Siege machinery, much of it built on site, began to populate the plain around Málaga. Huge towers, designed to be rolled towards the walls so that troops could scale them, were built, along with elaborate fireproof mobile protective shelters. Attacks launched against breaches in the walls caused by bombardment, however, were always beaten back. And Zagri’s men often rode out, bypassing the palisades and eager to do battle with their besiegers. Groups of Moors dug away outside the walls to create their own defensive barriers or to find the tunnels being dug by the Christians. All those who stepped within firing range could expect to be harassed by archers or gunners. The siege dragged on and, unlike others, it brought a high cost in human lives. The besiegers were losing thirty men a day, while the Moorish defenders suffered even more heavily – with around fifty a day dying. Those inside the city lived in equal terror of the Christian army and of the ruthless Gomeres, and anyone who dared to suggest negotiating risked execution for treasonable cowardice. As the numbers of injured and wounded grew, so did the size of Isabella’s hospital. By the end of the siege it had expanded from the original six tents to two large pavilion tents and a further fifteen smaller ones. Isabella found her army was running out of gunpowder and sent ships to Valencia and Sicily to seek supplies, while a begging letter also went to the king of Portugal. But the sea was her best support. It meant that Isabella could ship in food and gunpowder relatively easily, landing it at a dock set up within sight of the city walls – presumably exasperating the defenders as they themselves began to run short.12

  On days when, because of the stormy weather at sea and the waterlogged, slippery tracks, supplies did not reach the camp, the rumour mill churned and there was loose talk of retreat. With her soldiers suffering, Isabella decided to join them on the front line. Her visits to recently conquered towns had, in the past, boosted morale quickly and, despite the obvious dangers of a place where dozens of her men were dying in the daily skirmishing, she moved to Málaga in May. She set up her camp at a safe distance on a hill overlooking the city. She came accompanied by her own court, including Cardinal Mendoza and her eldest daughter Isabella, along with singers, musicians and her own artists, whose task was to immortalise the siege in paint. ‘She was welcomed with great joy, as her coming brought lightness to their toil and they put greater effort into their work,’ said Pulgar.13

  Isabella wanted to see, in person, how the siege was going, whether her provisions were sufficient and to quash rumours that fear of the plague might provoke an order to lift the siege. Ferdinand evidently needed Isabella to stiffen spines, and hoped that her presence would weaken them among the defenders so that ‘the Moors could see for themselves that it was both his will and hers that the siege should continue and that it would not be lifted until the city was taken’. There was some grumbling that war was men’s work and that, even though she had been at Íllora the previous year, the queen should not be there, but overall Isabella’s impact on the besieging forces was electrifying. ‘Most were happy, because the queen was loved and feared by everyone,’ reported the Marquess of Cadiz’s chronicler. Soldierly pride meant many were itching to show her what they could do. ‘Everyone in the camp thought that, with the coming of the queen, they should strike at the Moors,’ said Bernáldez. But while her presence may have emboldened her own men it did nothing to weaken the resolve of the defenders. ‘As people from Spain … they came out valiantly to fight,’ he said admiringly, while also recognising the common ‘Spanishness’ of Moors and Christians.14 ‘And they never once mentioned negotiations, but fought to defend their city, causing as much damage as they could while themselves receiving much harm and many deaths.’

  Within the city walls zealous holy men preached the creed of resistance to the death, while the Gomeres enforced discipline and sent out raiding parties. One of the most ardent Gomeres was Abrahen Algerbí, a fiery preacher who had travelled from the island of Djerba in modern-day Tunisia. He soon found a gang of followers who were seduced by his warlike tone, invocations of the Prophet and conviction that victory could be obtained. Algerbí led a daring mission to reinforce Málaga with 400 of his followers, catching the besiegers unaware at night, jumping the wooden palisade they had erected and wading through the sea towards the city. Some 200 of his men made it into the city but Algerbí himself remained outside, ostentatiously sinking to his knees and praying. The astonished besiegers detained him and took him to see the Marquess of Cadiz. Algerbí claimed to be a holy man with a s
ecret message for Isabella and Ferdinand explaining to them how to take the city. He was sent to the royal enclosure but Isabella ordered that he be kept waiting outside their tents until Ferdinand woke up. When Algerbí saw two people approaching who looked, to him, like the king and queen he produced a small sword that he had been hiding inside his cloak and slashed at them. He had attacked the wrong people. Isabella’s lady-in-waiting Beatriz de Bobadilla and Álvaro de Portugal, whom he had mistaken for the sovereigns, were reportedly saved by the fact that Algerbí tripped over a tent rope.15 The man’s end was, according to Palencia, gruesome. He was stabbed to death by the guards and then his body was taken to a catapult and hurled over the city walls into Málaga, presumably splattering on to a rooftop or into a city street.

  As conditions inside the city worsened, Málaga’s military commanders requisitioned most food, leaving many of the Jews trapped inside the city to die of starvation. Soon donkeys, horses and rats were being eaten. Yet even as starvation set in, the fighters rallied to the cause of their holy war. In a last great display of foolhardy bravery, they broke out of the city and launched a suicidal attack that saw several of their best commanders killed or wounded. The commander of the surviving Gomeres then took his troops into the Alcazaba and suggested to the city’s inhabitants that it was time for them to negotiate. As the inhabitants of Málaga starved, Isabella and Ferdinand met representatives of the fourteen main groups in the city. The representatives demanded that – as in the towns that had given way with less of a fight – they be allowed to go free, even if they had to abandon all their possessions. The demand came with a threat if it was turned down. ‘They would hang from the city’s battlements the 500 Christian men and women whom they were holding captive and, after placing the elderly, women and children in the [safety of] the alcazaba, would set fire to the city and would come out ready to die and kill Christians, so that the king and queen’s victory was bloody,’ reported Pulgar.16 ‘That way the events at Málaga would be known to all living people and would perdure throughout all the ages of mankind.’ But Isabella and her husband were no longer interested in negotiating. That option was available only to those who declined to fight. And if they killed the Christian captives, they could expect each and every inhabitant of the city to have their throat cut. ‘They can go to the devil,’ replied Ferdinand.17

  When the final surrender came, the thousands of surviving Moors were pushed into the same corral where the 500 Christian captives had been held while their future was decided. They, or their relatives, could buy their freedom at thirty gold doblas, or some 13,000 maravedís*, per head – though they would then have to leave immediately for north Africa. Those who could not pay ransoms became slaves. Several of the most fanatical defenders, including some converts from Christianity, were excepted from the agreement. And those conversos who had installed themselves in the city after fleeing from the Inquisition in Seville and elsewhere now found themselves back in its grasp. Many were burned. A dozen Christian traitors found in the city were given the most painful death, tied to posts and stabbed with sharpened canes until they bled to death.18

  Málaga was a city in ruins, its streets impregnated with the stench of rotting corpses. From behind its battered walls there now emerged a train of 500 wretched-looking people, their legs still shackled to metal chains. A cross was paraded before them. Isabella had ordered that a large tent be set up with an altar inside it, so that these Christian captives – many of whom had been there since the disastrous Axarquía raid – could be ceremonially released from their shackles, clothed and blessed. Isabella and Ferdinand refused to enter the city until it had been cleansed of corpses and the stink had subsided. Then they processed to the main mosque, already consecrated as a church, to give thanks and complete the ritual expulsion of Islam from a city that had been Muslim for more than seven centuries.19

  The haul of 11,000 prisoners from Málaga was so huge that Isabella had to issue letters ordering the people of Seville to take them into their houses. Payment for their upkeep came from the sale of slaves and from ransoms. ‘I order you to use the money received for the Moors who were sold in this city to pay those people who have had those same Moors [in their houses] for the days that they had them there,’ she told the city authorities. The prisoners were divided into three groups.20 One was given to the caballeros, captains and hidalgos who had taken part in the campaign, while another was used for swaps with Christians held in north Africa. The final, and largest, group went to Isabella and her husband, and were sold off to boost an exchequer exhausted by war costs.

  Moors also made good gifts. One hundred of the warlike Gomeres were sent to the pope. The queen of Naples received fifty Moorish girls from Isabella, and the queen of Portugal a further thirty. ‘And the queen also made a gift of a large quantity of Moorish women to some of the [great] ladies of her kingdom, while others remained in her own palace,’ commented Pulgar. The fate of the 450 Jewish inhabitants of Málaga was resolved by the Jewish community in Castile, which paid 22,000 doblas, or around 8 million maravedís, for their freedom.21

  Isabella and Ferdinand retained strict control over the Málaga booty. ‘Nothing was lost that was worth money, all of which went to the king and queen,’ remarked the author of a chronicle about the Marquess of Cadiz. Isabella distributed 3,000 captives among the nobles and troop commanders, allowing her to write off the debts she had run up with many of them.22 ‘This seemed fine to everyone, especially to the marquess, because it enabled them to avoid the shame of not being able to pay what they owed,’ explained the marquess’s chronicler, almost certainly glossing over the inevitable squabbling about war booty. ‘And that is why the Moors went into the monarch’s exchequer.’

  It was an historic victory. The ancient kingdom of Granada had lost its main port and second city. Some of its most determined and toughest fighters had been blasted and starved into submission. And the remaining territory in Muslim hands was divided into opposing halves – with Boabdil and Zagal sworn enemies. The upper hand in that battle now lay with Boabdil, who was also Isabella and Ferdinand’s vassal. They could now concentrate all their firepower on Zagal and his lands to the east. A fragment of a new treaty with Boabdil, which survives among the records of Isabella’s secretary Hernando de Zafra, shows that he had promised to help them. ‘The said King Boabdil, their vassal, will truly and faithfully help their royal highnesses and their people against the said Moors with all his might. And the king of Granada is obliged to hand over the city of Granada and its forces, as and when he can.’23 He, in return, would be granted many of the lands they now planned to take from Zagal, as well as the return of his son Ahmed, who was currently in the fortress at Moclín, under the watchful eye of Hernando de Baeza’s employer, Martín de Alarcón. Under the terms of this treaty, the inhabitants of El Albaicín – who had long proved the most open to a settlement with the Christians – would receive a ten-year peace deal that allowed them to maintain their mosques and way of life, or to move freely to north Africa. And the most important of them were also allowed privileges – including the right to sell their possessions to Christians. ‘If I break this agreement … the king and queen, my lords, will not be obliged to keep to any of the agreements contained here,’ Boabdil added.24 The Granada War, Isabella may have been tempted to think, was all but over.

  Boabdil was increasingly dependent on Isabella and Ferdinand but, given that the lands he was to receive in exchange for Granada were so obviously inferior in size and importance, he was also in no great hurry to see the treaty through to its logical conclusion. ‘The Queen sent this Moorish king money every month for his own upkeep and that of those who were with him,’ Pulgar explained.25 At one stage Boabdil wrote a grovelling letter of thanks in reply to one from Isabella, exhausting his list of adjectives to praise the ‘glorious, magnificent, excellent, generous, famous, illustrious, noble, virtuous, charitable and honourable’ queen of Castile. ‘We have also received your help and gifts with your sergeant,
the gentleman Guzmán, and with my servants and gentlemen. We accept them with many thanks … we are at your service; we will sacrifice our people and our lives for your honour … we do not have any other aid, apart from that of God, other than from your household and your royal majesty. To maintain ourselves in this capital, dear princes of sultans, we need many things and there is no other source of money or anything else of any use that is not the house of your royal majesty. May God prevent your royal highness from stopping to help or forgetting us.’26

  For the next two years Isabella and Ferdinand switched the focus of the war to the eastern borders of Granada, where the city of Almería – once the Muslim kingdom’s greatest port and capital of a major silk-producing zone – and bastions such as Baza and Guadix were the key to unlocking a region with easy, well-used sailing routes to and from north Africa. Zagal proved a wily foe and the men of this region were famed fighters, with Palencia claiming that the children of Baza were ‘trained from childhood in the arts of war and forcibly dedicated to it in their constant fighting with the frontier Christians’.27 In the first year they captured large stretches of territory, but failed to dislodge Zagal and his commanders from the most important towns and cities, who fought off the attackers with, among other things, cauldrons of boiling oil.28