Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella had offered increasingly generous terms to most of the towns captured as the Granada campaign progressed. In the early stages those who fought against her armies would not only be forced to live outside the walls of their town or fortress but would also lose their land and properties. Where there was no resistance, they were allowed to hold on to them. Those who fought hardest, especially in Málaga, received the worst possible punishment of either captivity or, if they could not buy their way out of that, slavery. From 1488 onwards, however, even those who had fought were allowed to keep their lands – a formula that made it easier to persuade them to surrender. They were even offered money in exchange for their Christian captives and allowed to keep their horses and bladed weapons (but not firearms). If they later rebelled, as some did, confiscation was automatic. And confiscation was, eventually, followed by repopulation with Christians brought in from elsewhere in the kingdom.21

  Granada and the Alpujarra received the best settlement of all. Isabella had negotiated several of the previous surrenders, but she and Ferdinand obviously realised that they were facing exceptional circumstances. Granada had been overcrowded, short of supplies and without support. But this was not the moment to humiliate a defeated people whom she would have to govern. Up to 100,000 people, including many refugees from previously conquered areas, were packed into the city or living in the valleys of the Alpujarra. It would have been impossible to keep them all captive, and ruinous to expel them. A more prolonged war would have cost more lives, many of them Christian. Just policing Granada, a large, dense city of steep, narrow roads and alleys, was a daunting task. More than seven centuries of history, Muslim pride and the sense of humiliation that came with being governed by a supposedly inferior faith could not be wished away. The best Isabella could hope for, to begin with, was to occupy the Alhambra and other strongpoints in the city that she now saw as the jewel in her crown, trusting that the inhabitants would police themselves using their own long-standing local institutions. Much the same had been done with Almería and with the town of Purchena in 1489.22

  And so she and Ferdinand accepted the terms of Granada’s negotiators, almost to the letter.23 The latter wanted to keep their properties, their laws and their religion. They wanted to be able to call worshippers to prayer from the city’s minarets and be judged by the same officials and the same laws that they were used to.24 And they would be excepted from Castile’s rules about wearing distinguishing marks on their clothes to show that they were mudéjares. Revenge and compensation, for war damages or Christian slaves sold in Africa, were out of the question. Christians could not enter their houses without permission and, if one did, he could be killed without punishment. Even those former Christians who had converted to Islam, the so-called elches, had to be left in peace. The kingdom’s Jews were to be given the same conditions and the Christian converts to Judaism, probably including former conversos who had fled to Granada, were to be allowed to leave the country peacefully without being pursued by the Inquisition. The Moors themselves could sell their goods and properties at market prices and move to the Muslim lands of north Africa while conserving the right to return for a few years. And they were to be allowed to trade freely with both Africa and the rest of Castile.

  Isabella’s negotiators cut short the handover time, bringing it forward from March to January. And the period in which Moors could freely leave for north Africa was reduced from five years to three. Only a handful of demands were deemed unacceptable. The right to kill Christians who entered their homes without permission was turned into a royal pledge to pursue any Christians who did so. And legal issues between Christians and Moors were not to be tried only by the Moorish judges, as they had wanted, but by tribunals that included Christian judges as well. They could keep their swords, knives and bows but, as had happened elsewhere, firearms were banned. A few clauses were made deliberately vague, such as the one permitting the call to prayer, which took out any reference to this being done ‘with voices’. But the negotiations also saw some demands fulfilled in terms that were even more generous than might have been expected. Isabella and Ferdinand, for example, pledged to leave the income and endowments of the mosques and their religions ‘now and for ever’.25 And the rules against Christians seeking revenge were extended to war booty and the mistreatment of slaves and captives.

  Some of the clauses added to the agreement reflect Isabella and Ferdinand’s awareness that, at least numerically, their soldiers would be vastly outnumbered in the city, while others sought to prevent Christians from inadvertently sparking rebellion. The 500 hostages from the city’s best families remained in their power as surety while the Christians installed themselves in the Alhambra and the Alcazaba fortress, repairing damage to walls and defences. Other clauses protected Muslims against forced conversion or extra taxes. ‘No Moor or Mooress will be forced to become Christian,’ the final document pledged.26 That promise was extended to the elche converts to Islam from Christianity and to the children of the romías, women like Boabdil’s stepmother Zoraya who had been born Christian. Minor alterations also foresaw the potential problems of Moors and Christians living together in the city. Granada’s sophisticated water-distribution system, which brought fresh water into the heart of the city, was to be respected. Neither Christians nor Moors could cut it off, or wash their clothes in it.

  Isabella was remaining true to the history of Castile and the traditions of the three cultures. A kingdom whose biggest non-Christian group had long been the Jews now had a large population of mudéjar Muslims – up from 25,000 before the war to perhaps some 200,000 people, though some 100,000 had either left or were about to. Adding in the numerous mudéjar communities from Ferdinand’s Aragonese lands, the Muslim population they jointly ruled over was now almost 300,000 people – or one in twenty Spaniards.27

  Some saw this, however, as merely a way of keeping Granada’s Moors quiet and peaceful while other measures were subtly applied to persuade them to abandon the country. ‘The agreement is very beneficial to the Moors, but when things have reached such an honourable and beneficial end it is right to finish them off by whatever means,’ said the letter-writer Cifuentes. ‘Now that the monarchs have Granada, which is what they wanted, they can apply cunning to the remaining task and, the Moors being as they are, make them leave the city without breaking the agreements.’28

  These new Castilian Muslims may, however, have felt they had little to fear after signing such a generous surrender. There was no reason to believe that Isabella might change Spain’s ancient rules respecting the rights of religious minorities. But then they did not know what was about to happen to Castile’s Jews.

  26

  Expulsion of the Jews

  Santa Fe, 1492

  The queen listened to the well-heeled supplicants, men whom she knew well from their years at court as loyal officials and royal collaborators. First among them was don Isaac Abravanel, his throat sore from begging and reasoning with all those who would hear him out. His exact words to Isabella are not recorded, but perhaps they matched those he used with Ferdinand. ‘Why do you act in this way against your subjects? Impose strong taxes on us – a man from the house of Israel will make presents of gold and silver and of all that he has for the land of his birth.’1 But Isabella would not bend to money. The Jews of Spain, whose roots stretched back beyond the arrival of Christianity, must convert or leave the land they had inhabited for at least ten centuries.

  Isabella remained firm, claiming that this was God’s work. ‘Do you believe this comes from me? It is the Lord who has put this idea into the king’s heart,’ she told the group of eminent Jews before her, including some who had been among her most important supporters during her bid for the throne.2 ‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, like the waters of a river. He directs them wherever he wants.’ Isabella, according to this version of events, was placing the blame on the shoulders of others. One of those was her husband who, as a mortal, could be challenged. But the o
ther was God, whose word was absolute. What she did not say was how God’s message had arrived in their court and changed centuries of royal policy in Castile. It was, however, an effective way of telling Abravanel and the country’s senior Jews to give up any attempt to stave off expulsion. We do not know whether the idea was more Isabella’s or Ferdinand’s. One of the advantages of a dual monarchy was that, whenever it was politically useful, responsibility or blame could be transferred to one’s partner. But Isabella was there again when the Jewish leaders tried, once more, to dissuade Ferdinand from carrying out the measure. ‘We worked hard, but without success,’ said Abravanel. ‘It was the queen who stood behind him and hardened his resolve to carry out the [expulsion] decree.’3

  A sixteenth-century Spanish historian added a twist to this story by bringing in one of the most feared men in Spain, the inquisitor general Tomás de Torquemada. The seventy-two-year-old inquisitor reacted angrily to the sight of Isabella, whom he had known since she was a teenage girl, and her husband wavering beforethis group of senior Jews, some whom the couple knew well. He appeared bearing a crucifix and said: ‘Judas once sold the son of God for 30 pieces of silver: your majesties are thinking of selling him a second time for 30,000: well, señores, here he is, sell him!’4 They did not dare. The story is probably false, but it reflects well the intimate connection between two infamous inventions overseen by Isabella – the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews. The victims of this purge were only too aware of Torquemada’s menacing presence, and his influence on Isabella. ‘In Spain there was a priest who had tremendous hatred for the Jews and the rule is that whoever afflicts the Jews becomes a leader by doing so,’ observed Solomon ibn Verga, who sought exile in Portugal.5 ‘He was the confessor to the queen, and he instigated the queen to force the Jews to convert. If they would not, they were to be put to the sword.’

  Spain’s Jews sometimes claimed to be descended from the original tribe of Judah which was expelled from Jerusalem and its lands by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar six centuries before Christ. In fact, they probably first arrived in appreciable numbers in the first century after Christ, following the sacking of Jerusalem and when Hispania was still part of the Roman empire. Several centuries of intermarriage made them ethnically indistinguishable from other hispano-romans, and they went on to live through centuries of religious change. The Visigoth kings who took over when the Roman empire crumbled converted to Christianity in the sixth and seventh centuries and seemed set on persecuting them. Then the Muslims swept across the Iberian peninsula early in the eighth century, initially tolerating the presence of religious minorities and sometimes using Jews to garrison forts and town castles. Over the centuries the Jews, like the Christian minority, became thoroughly arabised, in both their language and many of their habits. Many probably converted to Islam – as did an estimated 80 per cent of the Christian population. Some rose to positions of importance, and strong communities flourished in numerous cities. One city, Lucena, was essentially Jewish. Great philosophers and scientists like Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed tried to resolve the conflicts between faith and reason, emerged from their ranks. When religious fanaticism swept through the Muslim kingdoms with the arrival of the Berber almohades and their fundamentalist caliphate in the twelfth century, many were either forced to convert or fled to the Christian north. Maimonides himself, who wrote his first version of the Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic, feigned conversion before leaving for the more relaxed environment of Cairo and becoming doctor to the sultan. Spain’s Muslim kingdoms were far more culturally advanced than the Christian north, and the Jews brought this cultural wealth across the frontier with them. They were crucial to the so-called School of Translators – a broad movement based around flourishing Toledo that began to translate into Latin and Spanish many of the Arabic texts found in the libraries of the recently conquered city. These included translations or adaptations of lost Greek works as well as scientific tracts that drew on Persian and Indian sources, which helped Europe recover knowledge lost during the intellectually drab days of what some would later call the Dark Ages. A Jewish golden age saw the city of Toledo – a cultural and economic powerhouse – become their principal city. A handful put their wealth to the service of the Reconquista, as the slow Christian march southwards was called, with the great victory at Las Navas de Tolosa part-financed by a loan from Joseph ibn Salomon ibn Shoshan.6 Numbers are hard to assess accurately but, as the end of the fourteenth century approached and the population hit a peak, Spain had boasted the world’s largest Jewish community.7 In Castile it may have accounted for up to 250,000 people, or as many as one in fifteen Castilians.

  The coexistence of Christianity, Judaism and Islam made Spain almost unique. One of Isabella’s predecessors, Fernando III ‘the Saint’, had termed himself ‘king of the three religions’ in the first half of the thirteenth century and the writing on his tomb in Seville – which Isabella must have visited – was in the four languages of Spanish, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew.8 The latter declares him conqueror of Sepharad, the name the Jews had given to the Iberian peninsula. But tolerance had its ups and downs. In reality, this coexistence included sporadic outbursts of inter-religious and social violence, alongside great cultural enrichment.

  Yet Spain was an anachronism. While Jews were contributing to a cultural renaissance that would help Europe awaken from a period of relative intellectual slumber, they were being persecuted across the rest of the continent. England expelled them in 1290, while France had had five separate expulsions by 1394. In parts of the German-speaking world there had been terrible pogroms earlier in the fifteenth century. And in just the half-dozen years leading up to 1492Jews had been forced out of the Swiss city of Geneva, Italian territories like Perugia, Parma and Milan and German areas like Würzburg and Heilbronn (with Pomerania and Mecklenburg following suit in 1492).9 Only eight years earlier the German traveller Nicholas von Popplau had been amazed and appalled by the presence of Muslims and Jews across both Castile and Aragon. ‘Some condemn the King of Poland because he allows various religions to live in his lands, while the lands of Spain are inhabited by baptised and converted Jews and also by infidel Moors,’ he said.10 He could see only one possible explanation for the presence of Jews. ‘The queen is the protector of the Jews, and is herself the daughter of a Jewess,’ he declared. He was right on the former claim, for Jews were under royal protection, though not on the latter.

  Vital to the survival of the Jews in Christian Spain was the protection offered by monarchs in both Castile and Aragon. These allowed them to live by their own laws, with their own courts that could even order death sentences on the so-called malsin – Jews who denigrated or libelled their own community. One Castilian monarch, Alfonso X, had said they should ‘live in captivity for ever as a reminder to all men of those from their line who crucified our Lord Jesus Christ’.11 They paid special taxes directly to their royal patrons. This was both tribute and protection money. The latter was needed to keep them safe from the violence of mobs who chose to believe the standard lies and legends about the Jews – that they ritually murdered Christian children, or had plotted with the Muslims to enable the eighth-century conquest of Toledo. Their professions were as mixed and varied as those of Christians,12 but their elites sometimes worked directly for the monarch, including as tax collectors and doctors. ‘The Jews were beloved in Spain by monarchs, intellectuals and other social classes – with the exception of the common people and the monks,’ observed Solomon ibn Verga.13 That made them vulnerable, and badly in need of a monarch’s protection.

  Slowly, however, intolerance – both official and unofficial – had spread. In the thirteenth century the Jews lost the right to own farming land, pushing them into the cities. Among other urban professions they found there was that of money-lenders, with the monarchy setting interest rates at 33 per cent in Castile and 20 per cent in Aragon. The vast majority, however, worked at other things – as artisans, say, or traders.14 Ta
x collectors and financiers are easy to hate. So, too, are religious minorities. At times of political or economic crisis, the Jews found themselves the victims of popular rage, though anyone who attacked them risked the wrath of the monarch – or, occasionally, of the Grandees and other nobles – under whose protection they lived. Isabella herself was quite clear about that status. ‘All the Jews in my kingdoms are mine and are under my protection and safe-keeping and it falls to me to defend, protect and provide them with justice,’15 she proclaimed in 1477. She repeated the instructions in Seville that same year. ‘I take under my safekeeping, protection and royal defence the said Jews in the said aljamas [their city-based local communities, or ghettos] and each one of them, their persons and goods are assured by me against each and every person, whatever their position … and I order that they shall not be wounded or enchained, nor that [anyone] allow them to be injured, killed or wounded.’16

  The Jews were at their most vulnerable during economic or other crises and when royal protection weakened. A political vacuum caused by the death of King Juan I in 1390 had allowed the masses, their anger and prejudice whipped up by populist preachers, to unleash the onslaught that led to the mass forced conversions of the following year. Juan had been succeeded by the eleven-year-old Enrique III. ‘There was a lack of fear of the king, because of his young age,’ observed the then chancellor, López de Ayala. ‘It was all robbery and greed, it seemed, more than [religious] devotion.’17 By the time a second round of conversions, under less duress, occurred in 1414, their numbers were vastly reduced – with perhaps only 50,000 or so left. On that occasion a supposedly saintly friar, Vicente Ferrer, had toured Spain. Ferrer may have preached non-violence, but he was often accompanied by an intimidating mob and he felt free to force himself on the Jews, preaching in their synagogues. It was he who turned Toledo’s Ibn Shoshan synagogue into a church, which still stands today, called Santa María la Blanca.18 The white-walled synagogue was itself already a monument to Spain’s complex cultural intermixing, with its horseshoe arches, white walls, brick columns and ornate capitals.19