Isabella of Castile
Page 30
The Jews were now easy targets for everything from fraudulent business deals to robbery and murder. Isabella acted to protect them where individual cases reached her, but the expulsion order brought mass abuse. Hatred was freely expressed. ‘The Jews were bad and disbelievers,’ said Bernáldez. They had mistreated Jesus Christ, and now were receiving their just reward. ‘With malice they persecuted and killed him; and, having made that mistake, they never repented,’ he added.16
Isabella’s promises of protection must now have seemed, at best, half-hearted to those who, out of greed or hatred, fell on the weak and desperate Jews of Spain. Property was sold, where it could be, at knock-down prices. Even Bernáldez, who approved of the expulsion, admired the courage with which the Jews set out – and reported on how Isabella’s Christian subjects mistreated them. ‘Young and old showed great strength and hope in a prosperous end,’ he said. ‘But all suffered terrible things; the Christians here acquired a great quantity of their goods, fine houses and estates for very little money, and even though they begged, they could not find people prepared to buy them, exchanging a house for an ass or some vines for a small amount of cloth, since they could not take gold or silver.’17 A vineyard in Santa Olalla worth 10,000 maravedís was swapped for a donkey worth just 300, while a house in the same town was sold for a tenth of its real worth.18
The roads towards Portugal, via Zamora, Badajoz, Benavente, Alcántara or Ciudad Rodrigo, were soon busy with refugees. Checkpoints were set up to make sure they weren’t carrying gold or silver. Swallowing the precious metals was the only way of smuggling them. ‘In the places where they were searched, and in the ports and frontiers, the women especially swallowed more, with people swallowing up to 30 ducats at a time,’ said Bernáldez. Weddings were hurriedly celebrated to ensure that girls did not travel as single women.19
Processions of Jews crossed the frontiers of Portugal and Navarre, or travelled north to the Atlantic port of Laredo or south to embark in Málaga or Cadiz. Aragonese Jews – for, like the Inquisition, this was one of the first measures to truly cover the joint kingdoms of Isabella and Ferdinand – mostly headed for Mediterranean ports.20 Robbery and death, at sea or on the land, were not uncommon ‘at the hands of Christians as much as Moors’, Bernáldez observed.21 Some lost their willpower at the last minute. ‘Tens of thousands of Jews converted, and this even included some who were leaving or who had left the country, as they saw what a terrible fate awaited them in their travels,’ reported Capsali.22
The initial expulsion was by no means the end of their trials. The lucky ones travelled straight to the Ottoman empire or to the few Jewish refuges in Provence and the papal lands at Avignon.23 Some did not survive the journey. ‘Those who left by sea found that there was not enough food, and a great number attacked them each day. In some cases, the sailors on the ships tricked them and sold them as slaves,’ reported one exile.24 ‘A number were thrown into the sea with the excuse that they were sick [with the plague].’ One shipload was dumped on shore, miles from the nearest settlement, after an epidemic broke out in their boat. On land they were also treated as plague-carriers or kept at a distance because they had appeared in such huge numbers that local people feared for their own food supplies.25
Those who reached north Africa and the kingdom of Fez (covering much of the northern part of modern-day Morocco) found themselves in a shanty town that soon burned down, or were attacked by mobs.26 The founder of the Wattasid dynasty in Fez, King Abu Abd Allah al-Sheikh Mohammed ibn Yahya, however, proved generous, at least in spirit. He ‘accepted the Spanish Jews in all his kingdom and received them with great favour’, and, after some difficult years, a flourishing community grew up in the city of Fez, in Tlemcen (in modern Algeria) and in Ksar el-Kebir ‘and we built spacious and artistically decorated houses with attics, and … beautifully built synagogues’, according to a literary rabbi from Zamora, Abraham Saba.27
Navarre also came under pressure and expelled its Jews in 1498 – so that within six years of the expulsion many either found themselves on the move again or heading home in despair, ready to convert. The worst stories came from Fez, perhaps reflecting the prejudices of Christian writers. ‘The Moors appeared and stripped them naked to their bare skin,’ said Bernáldez, who dealt with many of those who fled back to Spain.28 ‘They threw themselves upon the women with force, and killed the men, and slit them open up the middle, looking for gold in their abdomens, because they knew that they swallowed it.’ Mouths were forced open and hands thrust down trousers or up orifices amid tales of abuse of women and young men.
In Portugal, King João II at first thought of closing his frontiers to the Castilian Jews, but seems to have decided he was better off extorting money from them. His counsellors warned against allowing Spain’s Jews into the country, pointing to France and England, where Jews had been expelled many years before and ‘where the [Christian] faith is now flourishing and perfect’.29 In the end, he declared that 600 wealthy ‘households’ would be allowed to settle, but the rest would have to leave after eight months or be enslaved. The refugees had to pay an entry tax of around 2,900 maravedís a head – roughly equivalent to the annual salary of, for example, the municipal doctor in an important town like Medina del Campo. Charges on goods taken across the frontier were as high as 30 per cent. With more than 25,000 refugees (and possibly a lot more) flooding in, this was good business. Officials watched closely on both sides of the border, either preventing money from leaving Castile or taking it off those who arrived in Portugal. Refugee camps of hastily built shacks sprang up on the Portuguese side, as many towns refused to let the Jews in.30 King João had to write to Évora, on the road to Lisbon, reminding it that he had not banned Castilian Jews from entering the town. ‘We have not ordered you to act in this manner, but have only ordered those places on the borders not to receive Jews from parts of Castile where they are dying [of the plague]. We order you to let into the town those Jews that are not from such areas,’ he wrote.31 Epidemics, meanwhile, spread through the crowded, unsanitary camps and many died.
The wealthy 600 households were spread across the country and continued to be taxed separately. Saba moved to modest Guimarães – twenty-five miles from the border – with his wife and two married sons, taking at least part of his library of several hundred books with him. Portugal’s population of almost 1 million was suddenly boosted by around 3 per cent – and its Jewish population doubled. In towns like Santarém, south of Lisbon, the Castilians suddenly accounted for almost a quarter of the whole population.32
Within eight months, the vast majority of these Jews – excepting the 600 families – were put on boats heading for the Portuguese-held ports of Tangiers and Arzilla, on their way to the kingdom of Fez. Even Portugal’s royal historian, Damião de Góis, admitted there was widespread abuse on the ships. ‘In addition to treating them badly, they deliberately strayed off course in order to vex them and sell them meat, water and wine at whatever price they saw fit. They humiliated the Jews and dishonoured their wives and daughters,’ he reported.33 In one of the cruellest moves, João ordered the kidnapping of some 2,000 children whose parents had stayed, apparently without paying the appropriate tax. These were sent to populate the island of São Tomé – off the west coast of Africa – where many would die and which Saba would call ‘the Snakes Islands’. They included one of Aravanel’s grandsons, who had been smuggled into the country with a wet nurse after his father heard rumours that there were plans to kidnap him in Castile in order to pressure his wealthy family to convert.34 Solomon ibn Verga, himself a refugee, told the story of a woman who had six children snatched from her and pleaded with the king as he left mass one day, throwing herself in front of his horse. ‘Let her be, for she is like a bitch whose pups have been taken away!’ he allegedly responded.35
Judah ben Jacob Hayyat, a teacher of law who was then in his forties, embarked from Lisbon after being expelled, only to find himself captured by a Basque boat and sailed back to Málag
a, where Spanish priests came on board to preach to them daily. ‘When they realised the devotion and the tenacity with which we clung to our God, the bishop placed an interdict upon them that they give us no bread, and no water, and no provisions whatsoever … Thereupon close to one hundred souls apostatised in one day … Then my dear innocent wife, peace be unto her, expired of hunger and thirst; also maidens and young men, the old and the young, altogether fifty souls.’36
Others returned home to Spain, preferring baptism to the suffering they found elsewhere. Hunger, sickness, despair and the decimation of their families drove them back, willing to accept any conditions. Priests like Bernáldez in the frontier and port towns through which they returned found themselves continually baptising returnees. ‘Here in Los Palacios they provided one hundred new souls [to Christ], whom I baptised, including some rabbis,’ he wrote. ‘There was no end to the people crossing the frontier in Castile to turn Christian.’37 Those returning from Fez came barefoot, hungry, lice-ridden and full of stories about the calamities they had experienced. ‘It was painful to see them,’ he admitted. Bernáldez personally baptised ten rabbis on their return.38 In November 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand signed a document allowing returnees to buy back property they had sold, at the same price.39 ‘Many … converted more out of necessity than out of faith, and returned to Castile poor and dishonoured,’ reported one Portuguese writer.40 At least one Castilian town, Torrelaguna, saw half its Jews return as converts. Among those to move backwas Isabella’s former tax collector Samuel Abulafia, who had been converted in Portugal, and much of his family. He returned in 1499 and – despite a fourteen-month period in the Inquisition’s dungeons ten years later and a second arrest in 1534 – had a successful second career under the name of Diego Gómez. Isabella and Ferdinand tried to protect the returnees. But they were going back to a world of intolerance and some ran the same gauntlet of muggings, murder and robberies that they had experienced abroad, this time at the hands of their old neighbours in the home towns to which they returned.41
The question of exactly how many Jews left, how many returned and how many converted remains unresolved. ‘Of the rabbis of Spain and their leaders, very few were willing to sanctify God’s name by dying for Him, or were willing to endure any other punishment,’ wrote Abraham ben Solomon.42 He especially blamed Seneor and his family, because ‘the masses looked towards them, and because of them the masses sinned’.43
The hatred felt towards Isabella, the woman who had not so long before declared that ‘all the Jews in my kingdoms are mine’,44 was resounding. She ‘deserved to be known as Jezebel because of the way she did evil in the eyes of God’, declared Capsali. ‘Isabella had always hated the Jews,’ he added. ‘In this, she was spurred on by the priests, who had persuaded her to hate the Jews passionately.’45 In this version a bullying Isabella was blamed for the expulsion, with her husband little more than someone she pushed around. ‘Queen Isabella was thus clearly superior to him, and whatever she wished was done,’ wrote Capsali.
But there was also fatalism among the people she had exiled. If they had been expelled it was, ultimately, because God wanted to punish them. ‘God decided that the time had come for the Jews to leave Spain,’ wrote Capsali. ‘And once such a decision was reached, nothing could prevent it, for all is written in the book.’46 Solomon ibn Verga spelt out a long list of sins for which they were being punished – including eating and drinking with Christians, coveting their women and money and the conceit that had made them feel superior and want ‘to be lords over non-Jews’.47
If Isabella’s aim had been to push the last Jews into peaceful conversion, she mostly failed. In fact, the expulsion appears to have ended up being almost as terrible as the pogroms unleashed by uncontrolled mobs a century earlier. It was further proof that the modern, power-hungry monarchy that she was busy building could be at least as cruel as the unwieldy medieval order that was being gradually overturned. In Isabella’s mind, expelling the Jews was just another step in the process of constructing a religiously pure, homogeneous and ordered society – and one that would be a shining example, rather than an exception, to Europe and Christendom. The price, in terms of human suffering and lives lost, did not trouble her greatly.48
28
The Race to Asia
Santa Fe, 17 April 1492
Isabella must have smiled once more at the sight of the eccentric, entertaining Italian sailor who had come to sell her his dreams. Christopher Columbus was difficult to miss. Tall, flamboyantly dressed and full of the kind of bubbling, voluble self-confidence that hides deeper insecurities, he had been in and out of her court over seven years, hawking his extravagant plans for a journey into the unknown – heading west across an Atlantic Ocean that was still known simply as the ‘Ocean Sea’. On the occasions that they met, he addressed the queen in an accent that reportedly owed much to the lisp of southern Andalusia, but presumably with the sometimes awkward phrasing of a man for whom Castilian Spanish was merely his third or fourth language. Conversations with him were difficult to forget. He had first sat before her as the rain poured down during those damp, muddy January days of 1486 at Alcalá de Henares in the weeks after her youngest daughter Catherine of Aragon was born. On that occasion in the archbishop of Toledo’s palace he had started his painfully long and drawn-out campaign of persuasion and seduction. This involved showing her maps of the known world, telling stories of secret, westerly routes to the spice-, gold-, silver- and pearl-producing lands of Asia and explaining how his venture would help Isabella and her husband to send a final crusade to recover Jerusalem and the holy lands. Like many people he believed in the millenarian fantasies like that of the Last World Emperor, who was meant to retake these lands and convert the world to Christianity before engaging in a final battle with the Antichrist. Isabella and Ferdinand, Columbus was suggesting, could do at least part of that task. He was amusing, but difficult to take seriously.1
‘He explained his ideas, to which they did not give much credit, and reasoned with them, saying that what he told them was true and he showed them a mapa mundi,’ recounted Bernáldez.2 The idea was, if not mad, then impossible. That was what a committee of experts in the Castilian court, led by Isabella’s trusty friar Hernando de Talavera, eventually decided after Columbus had pestered the itinerant court for much of the next two years.3 The wise men, salty sailors and careerist lawyers who were asked to study his plans now or in later years almost all shook their heads in suspicious wonder at his extravagant ambition to sail into the unknown. What Columbus was saying ‘could not possibly be true’, they said. And they had good reasons for thinking so.
The Genoese-born sailor had later insinuated himself into Isabella’s small, colourful party as she rode grandiosely into the siege camp at Baza in 1489 before seemingly frightening the besieged Moors into submission. At some stage in their meetings over these years he talked about the Great Khan – the king of kings from the mysterious east, made famous by Marco Polo – and the legend of how he had begged for Christian preachers to be sent to enlighten his people. It was a request that had been ignored, he pointed out, but that Isabella and Ferdinand could make good by sending him on his own daring route towards Asia via the west. Isabella had not read Marco Polo – or certainly did not own a copy of his work at the end of her life – but she was familiar with the writings of that fraudulent armchair traveller Sir John Mandeville. She owned two copies of the latter’s so-called Travels and may have been familiar with a popular treatise on oriental history that served as one of Mandeville’s sources, The Flower of Histories of the East by the Armenian monk and noble Hayton of Corycus.4
But Columbus – a man with influential friends in Seville – was relentless, even boorish and mono-thematic. He had planted a seed in Isabella’s mind and refused to accept that it would not eventually sprout and grow. Now Columbus was back at her court in the camp at Santa Fe, as Isabella reflected on the enormity of Castile’s victory over the kingdom of Granada and the da
unting task of administering her newly conquered lands and their Muslim population. TheGenoese-born adventurer with a strong mystical streak and a mysterious seafaring past in Portugal and elsewhere argued that his bold project suited the greatness of crusading monarchs who had ‘thrownthe Jews out of all your lands and kingdoms’,5 were proven ‘enemies of the sect of Mohammed’ and, thanks to the Inquisition, were relentless pursuers of heresy. If they sent him to find a new route to the lands of India then he could discover how their people might be ‘converted to our holy faith’ while also claiming them, and the wealth they contained, for Castile. These were, indeed, remarkable times. Less than four months had passed since the fall of Granada and the expulsion order was barely two weeks old. If ever Isabella and her husband were going to fall for his ambitious and courageous project, he must have thought, this was the moment.
It is not clear exactly where Columbus, already an experienced sailor whose previous travels had taken in almost all of the western edge of the known world from Iceland to Africa’s Gold Coast, first came across the notion that Asia could be found by sailing west. It was generally agreed that the earth was a sphere, so the idea was not ridiculous, but there was disagreement over the size of the earth’s circumference (some more recent guesses by people Columbus trusted made it far too small). And information about what lay on the other side of the Atlantic was based on legend, fantasy, rumour, conjecture and what little evidence overland travellers and the ocean currents – as they conveyed flotsam and jetsam – could provide.