Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  A Granada poet remembered the moment – and the whole war – with shame, recalling that their hopes of rescue by fellow Muslims from north Africa had been dashed.19

  The Christians attacked us from all sides in a vast torrent, company after company

  Smiting us with zeal and resolution like locusts in the multitude of their cavalry and weapons.

  Nevertheless, for a long time we withstood their armies and killed group after group of them,

  Though their horsemen increased at every moment, whereas ours were in a state of diminution and scarcity,

  Hence, when we became weak, they camped in our territory and smote us, town by town,

  Bringing many large cannons they demolished the impregnable walls of the towns,

  Attacking them energetically during the siege for many months and days; with zeal and determination.

  So when our cavalry and foot soldiers had perished and we observed that no rescue was forthcoming from our brethren,

  And when our victuals had diminished and our lot had become hard indeed, we complied, against our will, with their demands, out of fear of disgrace …

  The Moors had decided to surrender the city because ‘for lack of victuals, they ate horse and dogs and cats’, an English chronicler noted approvingly, before adding a colourful, if inaccurate, description of the exotic booty yielded up to Isabella and her husband.20 ‘In one of the halls where the king and queen of Granada lived, the walls of the hall and chamber were of marble, crystal and jasper, set with precious stones, and more over there was found great and innumerable riches.’ France sent an ambassador to watch the handover and several Italians also travelled to witness the momentous event.21 Isabella’s crusade was over – at least on Castilian soil, for her ambitions also extended to north Africa – and the marriage pledges made at Cervera, when she was just a seventeen-year-old bride-to-be and potential future ruler of Castile, had been met. Christendom’s frontiers, shrinking elsewhere, had been extended to the south. It was, by the measures of her time, an epic achievement.

  25

  Handover

  Granada, 2 January 1492

  Isabella had always liked the Arab style of dress, but the gowns, cloaks and slippers that she wore for comfort or warmth were mostly kept for the intimacy of her own rooms. On this historic day, 2 January 1492, however, she deliberately chose to dress up for public display a la morisca – in the Moorish style.1 She had picked out a silk and brocade aljuba, with its tight, buttoned-up upper top, long sleeves and knee-length skirt. Her husband, children and many of the nobles who accompanied them as they prepared to ride into Granada, were also dressed in aljubas and loose, pinafore-style marlota cloaks that tied at the back. This was a day for triumphant celebration, and an excuse to forget the dark mourning clothes that they had worn since news arrived that her daughter Isabella had been widowed when her young husband, Prince Afonso of Portugal, fell from his horse after just eight months of marriage.

  Boabdil rode out of the Alhambra on a mule, accompanied by fifty of his retainers, his head held high but his face reflecting the tragedy of defeat. When he encountered Isabella, the two monarchs performed a simple, pre-established ritual in which Boabdil would play the humble defeated king and Isabella the magnanimous victor. Boabdil doffed his hat, took one foot out of a stirrup and grabbed the pommel of his saddle as if he was about to dismount and kiss her hand. Isabella, who was riding with her son Juan, signalled that this was not necessary and he should stay in his saddle. ‘She spoke to him … and consoled him and offered her friendship and help, and he thanked her greatly and replied that there was nothing in the world that he wanted for himself, but that those he wished things for were his mother, the queen, and the princes who were his brothers,’ wrote one observer. Isabella followed the form agreed in negotiations during which Boabdil and his mother had insisted, and she had personally agreed, that he avoid the humiliation of having to kiss their hands.2

  In the meantime, Isabella awaited the appearance of the 400 captive Christians who had been held inside the Alhambra. Just as at Málaga, they appeared in their chains, following three crosses and a statue of the Virgin Mary as they intoned the psalm Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel. ‘The queen received them with great reverence and ordered that they be taken to the fortress at Santa Fe,’ said Bernardo del Roi, a Venetian who had come to witness the great moment. There were tears as, trudging past the assembled army, some prisoners were recognised by their own relatives. At the same time, the Christians handed their most important captive, the infantico Prince Ahmed – now about nine years old – back to the mother he had not seen for most of his young life.3 This formed part of the surrender deal. With Granada in their hands, Isabella and Ferdinand no longer needed him – though Isabella would try not to lose contact with the child whose education she had overseen from afar and to whom she felt such strong, almost maternal, ties.

  By now the entire Christian army was paraded in front of the city, on land across the River Genil. From there Isabella looked up at the walls of the Alhambra palace and saw a cross being raised on one of its most impressive towers, the Tower of Comares. Alongside it appeared the flag of St James – also called ‘the Moorslayer’, because of a legend that he had miraculously led a ninth-century Christian army to victory over the Muslims at Clavijo, northern Spain – and the royal flags of Isabella and Ferdinand. ‘Granada! Granada! For King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella!’ the soldiers shouted. ‘When the Queen saw the cross, the members of her chapel began to sing the Te Deum Laudamus. The joy was such that everyone wept,’ wrote one chronicler. Trumpets were blown and cannon fired as the city’s inhabitants started their new life as mudéjares, Muslim subjects of Castile’s Christian queen.4 None of Isabella’s forebears had been so powerful – though this was just the start of what would become a momentous year for Spain and Christendom.

  A formal handing over of the keys to the city followed, with these passing through the hands of Prince Juan as the future king eventually destined to rule over the city.5 With that, Boabdil went on his way, heading to the lands in the Alpujarra – the steep, south-facing foothills of the Sierra Nevada – that had been given to him as recompense for surrendering his kingdom. Legend has it that he stopped to weep and view the city that his forebears had ruled for two and a half centuries for one last time from a spot that became known as the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh. By the time Washington Irving, the nineteenth-century American writer who romanticised the fall of Granada, arrived here the hill leading up to the pass was referred to as ‘La Cuesta de las Lágrimas’, the Slope of Tears. Irving recorded a tale in which Boabdil’s mother Fatima ticked him off. ‘You do well to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man,’ she said.

  Isabella did not yet dare enter the city itself. In fact, the surrender agreement explicitly banned the Christian army from entering Granada to begin with, though its walls, gates and turrets would have to be occupied, thereby ensuring military control of the city. Boabdil’s negotiators had begged that the Christian takeover should be done gradually, starting with the Alcazaba and the rest of the Alhambra – which could be entered through its eastern gates without passing through the city itself. ‘You should by no means enter or leave the city by any other route,’ one of Boabdil’s negotiators told them.6

  The original agreement with Boabdil had foreseen the entry of Christian troops into Granada on 6 January. But five days before that he had sent word that he was about to lose control of the city. Some 500 Muslim hostages from its best families, who had agreed to be held at Santa Fe until the handover was completed, had left on 1 January, but the sight of them going aroused the ire of those opposed to surrender. ‘So the Moorish king sent a message to our king and queen and agreed that the very same night they would secretly send someone to take it [the Alhambra] over, because just as soon as the Moors saw that the Christians had taken it, they would lower their heads, but that if they were seen coming to the city to take it over during the day that woul
d provoke trouble and danger,’ an eyewitness named Cifuentes wrote.7

  Within an hour, Gutierre de Cárdenas – the same, loyal official who had carried the sword of royal justice before Isabella on the day she proclaimed herself queen – was ordered to prepare his men to move out at night towards the Alhambra. ‘He left at midnight, with a number of officials, people who were standing guard and footsoldiers, espingardero gunmen, lancers and bowmen,’ explained Cifuentes, who joined the expedition.8 They were then taken secretly, on a route avoiding the best-known roads and paths, to the open countryside by the Alixares part of the Alhambra, out of sight inthe eastern angle of the Alhambra mount. A gate was opened, and they were able to enter the palace complex without the city’s populace noticing. ‘We entered just as day was breaking,’9 said Cifuentes. Most were stunned by what they saw. ‘Granada is the most wonderful and amazing thing in the world in its grandeur, strength and beauty, with the [Royal Alcázar] palace in Seville seeming like little more than a thatched cottage beside the Alhambra,’ the letter-writer Cifuentes said.10 ‘This palace is so huge that the biggest section of it is larger than the entire palace in Seville,’ agreed the Venetian del Roi, who had accompanied the expedition.

  Boabdil had waited for them in his rooms at the Comares Tower. The senior Castilian nobles, having kissed his hands, were handed the keys to the Alhambra’s gates and asked to sign a document showing that this had been done. Boabdil and his men then left through one of the gates into the city, while Christian soldiers took up positions along the walls and in the towers. An altar was erected and, amid tears, the soldiers and some of the Christian captives who had been held in the Alhambra celebrated mass in the elaborate surroundings of the palaces built so lovingly by generations of Nasrid kings. By the end of the day the Count of Tendilla had installed himself in the Alhambra with a force of 6,000 men, while Boabdil rode out of the city to meet Isabella and Ferdinand and leave for ever.11

  Isabella and Ferdinand then returned to Santa Fe, staying faithful to their promise not to march boastfully through the city and making sure their troops entered the Alhambra via its back gates.12 It is difficult to believe, however, that in the following days they did not also surreptitiously visit the Alhambra to view their long-desired prize. The palace complex that they discovered now, or on their return visits, was both bigger and far more colourfully decorated than it would eventually become after centuries of Christian neglect and vandalism added to the ravages of time and nature. ‘I don’t think there is anything to equal it in the whole of Europe,’ wrote Münzer. ‘Everything is so superb, magnificent and exquisitely built that one might think oneself in paradise.’ Previous Muslim rulers had failed to maintain some of the numerous palaces and gardens of the enormous hilltop complex, but the impression was still of overwhelming splendour. The marble, mosaics and silver lamps of the Royal Great Mosque, for example, had won the praise of Muslim poets and the palaces that have since disappeared included that of the Abencerrajes and the one, adorned with silk furnishings, that was soon occupied by the man who would stay to run the city, the Count of Tendilla.13

  Isabella was used to the Royal Alcázar in Seville, but must still have been impressed by the subtle play between ornamental intricacy and architectural simplicity in the Nasrid palaces. This was meant to be a place of contemplation. ‘Enter with composure, speak thoughtfully, be short on words and leave in peace,’ read one piece of Arabic script. Glistening marble was everywhere, inside and outside, in columns and on the floors in great big fifteen-foot-long slabs. Crystalline water moved gently through manicured gardens of lemon trees and myrtles and into palace bedrooms through a system of pipes and channels the likes of which Münzer had never seen before. ‘And a bath house – oh what a marvel! – with a vaulted roof.’ The baths had rooms for hot, warm and cold water.14

  Ceilings were painted in vivid colours. ‘All the palaces and annexes have superb coffered ceilings made of gold, lapis lazuli, ivory and cypress, in such a variety of styles that one cannot begin to explain or write about them,’ said Münzer. The muqarna ceilings of interlaced stucco or cedar had honeycombed designs which seemed to float above the heads of those who walked below them.15 Even the stone creatures guarding a fountain in the Court of the Lions were brightly painted. The night sky of stars was mirrored in the glassy surfaces of courtyard pools, while the white marble slabs in the Court of the Myrtles glowed softly under the moon, radiating a soft, dreamlike light.16

  The Generalife gardens would become one of Isabella’s favourite places. Münzer recalled ‘a truly royal and famous garden, with springs, pools and charming little channels of water’, while another visitor saw it as a place to ‘enjoy a life, in repose and tranquillity’. A gushing waterfall fell ten brazas, or arm-lengths, into a tank, splashing those who came close with cooling droplets of water. Rabbits hopped among the myrtles and water was everywhere, brought in over an aqueduct and cleverly distributed by pipes and channels. These flowed off towards the Alhambra and were also cut into the steps and stone banisters that ran down an outside staircase called the Escalera de Agua. The game here was to wait for a group of people to walk down the steps, then switch the flow of water so that it flooded over their feet and hands. A similar trick could be played in a patio orchard that could be silently flooded so that, according to one Italian visitor, ‘whoever is in it, without knowing how, sees the water rise beneath his feet, so that he gets all soaked and then the water disappears without anyone coming into sight’.17

  Isabella and Ferdinand had not only captured the greatest piece of Islamic architecture in Europe, but their status across the continent was now unassailable. Christendom had, at last, struck back at Muslim encroachment and could start to hope that its fortunes were finally changing. European witnesses to the final days of the siege wrote excited accounts back to their home countries.18 Christopher Columbus, who had been pursuing Castilian support for his own projects, was among them. ‘That January by strength of arms I saw the flags of your royal majesties placed atop the towers of the Alhambra,’ he would remind them a few months later. ‘And I saw the Moorish king leave through the city’s gates.’ England’s Henry VII ordered a special Te Deum sung at St Paul’s cathedral in London and Rodrigo Borgia led the celebrations in Rome, where there were bullfights and processions.

  Isabella and Ferdinand had been generous in victory. If the surrender negotiations were not arduous it was, in large part, because they gave Boabdil virtually everything he asked for. He himself received control of much of the Alpujarra, with the right to sell that back to Isabella and Ferdinand whenever he wanted. He also received 30,000 gold castellanos and was allowed to hold on to the lands and mills that he had inherited from his father, while his wife, mother and sister were all also allowed to keep their lands. They had the right to leave, whenever they wished, taking their goods with them on two large Genoese carracks that Isabella would pay for from her exchequer and which would take them to Alexandria, Tunis or anywhere else they wished to go. They were allowed to take their weapons with them to the Alpujarra, but not those that used powder. Before leaving, Boabdil had ordered that the bones of his forebears be dug up from the Alhambra cemetery, sending them off to a new burial site in Muslim lands in the Alpujarra. But he did not last long. Within a year he and his family were busy selling their possessions and preparing to accept the free shipping to Africa. Eventually he sent envoys to Isabella and Ferdinand, offering to sell his lands. Boabdil’s wife Moraima died in August 1493, after an illness that had slowed down the departure plans. Boabdil, his mother, family members and many of his officials embarked for north Africa in October. ‘All of them, the king and his companions, boarded the vessels they had been loaned and were respectfully and honourably treated by the Christians,’ remarked the anonymous Muslim chronicler. ‘At the end of their sea journey they landed in Melilla, on the coast of north Africa, from where they continued to Fez.’ Boabdil installed himself in Fez, building his family Andalusian style alcázares to li
ve in. Within a century, some members of his once magnificent family would be reduced to begging.19

  Isabella was upset by the departure of the infantico Ahmed. ‘The king’s departure has given us much pleasure, but that of his son the infantico saddens us greatly,’ she wrote, regretting that she had not tried harder to stop the boy – whom she had wanted to convert to Christianity – from leaving with his father.20 ‘Wherever he goes we must always keep up with him, visiting with the excuse of seeing his father and sending him something.’ Baeza, the translator, would be a good person to carry the messages, she believed.