Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Yet Cisneros’s bull-headed approach worked. Amid fears that those who were baptised would be separated from the others, almost the entire edifice of Muslim Granada crumbled. To begin with the conversions were of individuals, but by the end entire parishes were created by first consecrating a mosque to turn it into a church and then through the baptism – one by one – of most of those who belonged to it. In Granada that meant up to 300 individual baptisms per priest per day. Many of the baptismal records survive today, with 9,100 of them in just three months up to February 1500. Thus those called Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali and Ibrahim found themselves renamed as, for example, Juan, Francisco, Alonso or Fernando. Women with names like Axa, Fatima, Omalfata or Marien were baptised, in turn, as María, Isabella, Catalina or Juana. The registers for the new parish of San Gregorio – previously the mosque of Gumalhara – reflect the full mix of Granadan Muslims, who included immigrant mudéjares from elsewhere in Castile and Aragon (including a Muzehed from Hornachos, who became Pedro), a list of twenty-six black Africans and a dozen people who were baptised in jail. Over a single weekend in January 1500, three priests baptised 806 people in the former mosque.4 A relief in the choir stalls of Granada’s cathedral shows Muslim women queueing up, their faces covered as if in shame, to be baptised.5

  Some 35,000 people in and around the city were baptised in the space of a few months, giving rise to a new category of converts called moriscos. ‘This conversion business is going very well and there are now none in this city who are not Christians and all the mosques are now churches,’ wrote Cisneros in mid-January 1500. ‘And exactly the same is happening in the towns and villages near by.’6 This was clearly forced conversion. ‘They embraced the faith and took baptism, but without their heart or only in a ceremonial fashion,’ commented Bernáldez.7 As such, it was also in contravention of numerous papal edicts and the advice of theologians.

  Cisneros was anything but apologetic. His view was simple: where Talavera’s mealy-mouthed attempts at conversion had achieved little in eight years, he had sorted the entire problem out in a matter of months. Force was the best form of persuasion, and conversion preferable to the exile inflicted on the Jews. It was ‘better not to allow them to go into exile. We would rather they were converts or captives, like these ones. Because as captives they can become better Christians, and the land will be safe for ever, and as they are so near the sea, and so close to over there [north Africa], and as there are so many of them, they could do a lot of harm if times changed,’8 he said, pointing up the practical benefits of forced conversion as much as the religious ones.

  Isabella and Ferdinand were confused about how to react. They went from rage with Cisneros for stirring up trouble to joy at the number of converts he was creating. An exhausted and depressed Talavera, meanwhile, wrote to Isabella asking her to come to Granada as soon as possible.9 It was too late. Isabella and her husband rapidly became enthusiasts for the Cisneros method. ‘My vote, and that of the queen, is that these Moors be baptised and if they are not real Christians, their children will be, and so will their grandchildren,’ Ferdinand allegedly said.10 Isabella knew that Talavera and Cisneros did not get on,11 but she clearly now backed the latter. She returned from Seville in July 1500 and immediately set about increasing the number of clergymen in her new kingdom, which now had tens of thousands of fresh converts.12

  Blame for this change of heart might also be attributed to the Scottish friar Duns Scotus, who had made his way from Dumfries via Northampton to Oxford in the thirteenth century. Scotus was a Franciscan philosopher theologian, whose ideas had been widely promulgated by one of the Spanish royal family’s favourite thinkers, the same Francesc Eiximenis whose advice on the raising of young princesses – using both God and the rod – had so influenced Isabella’s world.13 ‘I think that it would be religiously correct to oblige parents through threats and terror to receive baptism,’ Scotus wrote.14 ‘Their descendants, if properly educated, will be true believers in the third or fourth generation.’ The end, he meant, justified the means.15 That other great authority, Thomas Aquinas, would have disagreed. ‘By no means should people be forced to accept the Christian faith, because belief is voluntary,’ he had said.16 There was room, in other words, for choice, and Isabella had now chosen the harsher of the two options.

  Isabella considered the conversion of 35,000 people a spectacular success. But it still represented only a quarter of the Muslims in the kingdom of Granada. Isabella and Ferdinand were clearly fearful that they might face widespread rebellion and they wrote to those in the hill country around Ronda, who had been given a similar deal to Granada, assuring them that they were by no means affected. ‘We have been told that some of you are saying that our will is to force you to become Christians, but since our will is that no Moors become Christian through force … we promise on our faith and royal word that we will not consent or allow any Moor to be forcibly converted, that our main desire is for those Moors who are our vassals to live in security and justice,’ they wrote, just as crowds of moriscos were being processed through the new churches in the city of Granada. In the mountainous Alpujarras, where Boabdil had originally gone, and in other Granada towns like Guájar, the Muslims saw the writing on the wall. They rebelled, provoking a three-month Alpujarra campaign in which they were slowly subdued. Their rebellion served Isabella’s aims well, for once they were defeated she and Ferdinand were able to accuse them of breaking the terms of the capitulaciones and impose fresh, harsher conditions on them. Property was confiscated and Isabella ordered some of those captured during a rebellion at Nijar to be sent to her as slaves. Most importantly, they were now forced to convert.17 Another important block of Moors, and a geographical area of the new kingdom, was thus artificially and violently ‘normalised’.

  Other rebellions eventually broke out elsewhere, requiring further campaigns – but producing similar results in terms of mass conversions. Lynch mobs in Castile prepared to attack smaller, older mudéjar communities, with Isabella explicitly defending the aljama in Arévalo in a letter that promised to punish any who attacked them. By May 1501 the flames of rebellion had been dowsed. Entire towns in the kingdom of Granada now decided it was more sensible to seek baptism than risk the consequences of a visit by Cisneros’s officials.18 Two months later, in July 1501, Isabella and Ferdinand banned the entry of any more Muslims into a kingdom of Granada that was now mostly populated by so-called moriscos, Muslim converts to Christianity who maintained many of their cultural habits, their dress and traditions. The order assumed that ‘there are no infidels at all’ left, but the monarchs added a clause giving any who might remain just three days to leave ‘on pain of death and loss of all their possessions to our exchequer’.19

  In September 1501, in an instruction which was both self-contradictory and breathtaking in its cynicism, Isabella demanded that no further conversions be carried out through force or bribery, while explicitly threatening those who did not ‘voluntarily’ receive baptism. ‘They should be treated well,’ she wrote. ‘But if in the end they do not want to convert to our will, you can tell them that they must leave our kingdoms, because there is no reason why there should be any infidels in them.’20 It was, in effect, an expulsion order similar to that issued against the Jews and it now helped push the last of Granada’s population into forced baptism.

  As if the message was not clear enough, Isabella signed a further order to help eradicate Islam. All copies of the Koran and other Islamic texts were to be burned. The instructions, issued jointly with Ferdinand, left no room for doubt. ‘As you know, by the Grace of our Lord the Moors who lived in this kingdom have converted to our holy Catholic faith. And because in the time that this kingdom was populated by Moors they had many books of lies from their false sect, these must now be burned in a fire, so that no memory remains of them,’ they wrote. In squares, markets and wherever else people gathered in the city and across the kingdom of Granada, criers announced that ‘within thirty days from the day of the announceme
nt they must take to you, our officers of the law, all books that are within your jurisdiction so that no single Koran or any other book from the Mohammedan sect remains’. These were to be burned in public ‘and we order any person who possesses such books or who knows of their existence to give them to you within this time limit so that none are left, on pain of death and loss of all their goods for anyone who keeps a book and hides it’.21 Some 5,000 books and scrolls – including delicate pieces of art with beautiful illuminations, perfumed pages and decorations of pearls or gold – were burned. Much of the rich literary and poetic tradition of the Nasrids was lost.22 Only medical texts, some philosophy – both of which the Arabs were admired for – and a number of historical chronicles were excepted.23

  The smoke and smell of burning holy literature, of paper and parchment, wafted up from the squares and through the narrow streets of Granada and other towns through the autumn of 1501. This act of purification by fire, reportedly held in the Plaza Mayor of Granada24 and fuelled by the city’s madraza school libraries, was the ultimate humiliation for the now secret Muslims in Isabella’s newest kingdom. A ban on these new converts bearing arms suggested that Isabella knew that many, seeing no other option, were pretending and could resort to violence.25 It also meant that, as with the conversos, these new Christians were already being treated differently to old Christians. Talavera soon pointed out that in the city’s new churches many converts were displaying obvious disdain, as the morisco converts ‘mingle or sit down with the women, while some lean against the altars or turn their backs to them, and others wander about during the sermon’. Threats of excommunication proved meaningless, so Isabella and Ferdinand imposed fines or ten-day prison sentences.

  Four months later, in February 1502, Isabella and her husband took the next, brutally logical step. ‘We have worked so hard in the said kingdom [of Granada] where all were infidels and now none are left,’ Isabella was able to boast as they published another dramatic edict, this time ordering the ancient mudéjar communities scattered around the rest of Castile to leave. They were granted just two and a half months, until the end of April 1502, to make up their minds. ‘Given that it pleased our Lord to expel in these times our enemy from that kingdom [of Granada] … so it is right to show our gratitude … by expelling from [all] our kingdoms [of Castile] the enemies of his holy name, and no longer permit in these kingdoms of ours people who follow such reprobate laws,’ said the edict that she put her name to in the Royal Alcázar in Seville on 12 February that year, apparently unaware of the irony of signing such an edict in one of the wonders of Moorish architecture. Ferdinand’s name was also on the document, though it did not cover the Muslims in his own lands since these were far too important to the economy of kingdoms like Aragon and Valencia. The reasoning was exactly the same as that which had inspired both the expulsion of the Jews and the foundation of their royal Inquisition. ‘Given that the biggest source of the corruption of Christians that we have seen in these kingdoms was by contact and communication with Jews, so it is that contact with the said Moors of our kingdoms is a great danger to the new converts.’26

  While the expulsion rules for the Jews had been brutal, those for the Muslims were simply impossible. They were not allowed to go to Ferdinand’s Aragonese kingdoms or to Navarre. They could only go to countries that Castile was not at war with. This excluded the Ottoman empire, north Africa and much of Europe, where they were unlikely to be welcomed anyway.27 The lands of Mamluk Egypt – which included Jerusalem – were about the only possible destination. These lay at the other end of the Mediterranean, but the expulsion order said that Castile’s Muslims could leave only from ports in Vizcaya, on the Atlantic coast of northern Spain. This was the furthest possible spot from their destination. They would have to sail along the dangerous northern coastline of Galicia (later to be known as the Coast of Death) and around Spain’s own rugged and storm-lashed World’s End, Finisterre. The journey would then have to follow Portugal’s Atlantic seaboard to the fast-moving Strait of Gibraltar just to enter the western end of the Mediterranean Sea. Barbary pirates and other dangers remained along the lengthy crossing to the east of the Mediterranean.

  Unsurprisingly, the remaining mudéjares now also converted. Conversion was not even mentioned as an option in the expulsion order, but they had no real choice. And so the ancient mudéjar communities were also baptised en masse, adding another 20,000 to 25,000 people to the list of converts. In her Spanish kingdoms alone, between Jews and Muslims, Isabella had gained some 150,000 souls for Christ, even if many were faking it. She had also drawn the curtain on seven centuries of coexistence between the three ‘religions of the book’ in Castile. It had taken her just a decade. Her puritanical revolution was almost complete. Even Machiavelli was amazed at this ‘pious work of cruelty’. ‘There could not have been a more pitiful or striking enterprise,’ he said.

  Isabella tightened the screw further later in the year. In September 1502, in a pragmática signed by her alone, she banned the new converts in the kingdoms of Castile and León from leaving them for the next two years.28 They had been given an opportunity to leave, however false, and now they were Christians. She did not want them tempted back to their old faith. They could trade in Aragon or Portugal only with an official ninety-day permit. If they tried to sell their properties, these would be impounded by the crown with no compensation for either buyer or seller.

  Isabella addressed one copy of the new law to her daughter Juana, now also her heiress, as well as to all her nobles and officials. ‘I have been informed that some of them, falling for false counsel, have begun to sell up their possessions so that they can move to other kingdoms and across the sea. And given that I, as queen and lady, am the keeper of the [proper] service of God our Lord and his holy Catholic faith I feel obliged to take measures in order to ensure that the new converts remain in our faith, away from those people who might urge them to wander,’ she said.29

  Castile’s old mudéjares, now moriscos, were also banned from the kingdom of Granada, where they could not even trade. This, she explained, was ‘for certain reasons that have to do with the new converts in the said kingdom’.30 It was as close as Isabella could come to publicly admitting that the moriscos of Granada were, in large part, still secret Muslims or, at the very least, bad Christians who had been converted by force.

  Isabella’s final exercise in purification was, for most of its victims, a farce. Islamic law, under a self-protection clause called the taqiya, allowed pretend conversion under extreme circumstances where there was no other option, and Christian contemporaries quickly realised what was happening. ‘They said they were Christians but paid greater attention to the rites and ceremonies of the Mohammedan sect than to the rules of the Catholic Church, and they closed their ears to whatever the bishops, priests and other religious men preached,’ Mármol Carvajal, who was born in Granada and spoke Arabic, wrote at the end of the sixteenth century. Soothsayers known as jofores told the unhappy converts that they would one day return to their original faith. Even a century later, Mármol reported, many – if not most – were closet Muslims. ‘They hated the Roman Catholic yoke and secretly taught one another the rites and ceremonies of the Mohammedan sect … If they went to Mass on Sundays and feast days it was out of obedience and to avoid punishment,’ he added. Muslim prayers were said in secret, especially on Friday, and artisans would continue working behind closed doors on Sundays. Confession was, for many, a farce and Mármol claimed that recently baptised children were ‘secretly washed in hot water to take away the chrism and consecrated oil’ before they were given Moorish names and the boys were circumcised. ‘Brides who had been made to wear Catholic [Christian] clothes to receive the church’s blessing were stripped when they returned home and dressed as Muslims, celebrating a Moorish wedding with Moorish instruments and food,’ he wrote.31

  Some were scandalised, seeing trouble being stored up for later. ‘You will object, however, that they will continue to live wit
h the same spirit of commitment to their Mohammed, as it is both logical and reasonable to suspect,’ Anghiera wrote to Bernardino López de Carvajal, one of Borgia’s Spanish cardinals in Rome.32 Anghiera obviously thought this himself, but also believed that their children would be good Christians. But acting against Castile’s Muslims brought another set of problems, for powerful countries on the southern and eastern side of the Mediterranean were soon rumoured to be preparing to take tit-for-tat measures against Christians in their lands. That explains why Anghiera found himself being sent as an envoy to Egypt, where the sultan was receiving angry complaints from those being forcibly converted in Spain.

  44

  The Sultan of Egypt

  Venice, 2 October 1501

  Isabella’s growing status and Spain’s position as Europe’s emerging political power meant that the shockwaves from her boldest and most controversial actions now reached distant peoples and lands. So it was that she felt obliged to turn her attention to the man whom she thought of as ‘the sultan of Babylonia, Egypt and Syria and Lord of the whole of Palestine’, meaning the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, Qansuh al-Ghuri. In October 1501 she and Ferdinand sent Peter Martyr d’Anghiera to see the sultan with strict instructions that he should deny the forced conversions: ‘If he asks you anything with respect to the conversions of the Moors in this kingdom saying that this was forced or some grievance was committed to make them convert to our holy Catholic faith, tell him that the truth is that no [conversion] was done by force and never will be, because our holy faith desires this not be done to anyone.’1