Blood and Faith

by Matthew Carr

  This rigorous lifestyle appealed to the fanatically religious Isabella, who in 1492 chose him to be her confessor. The fifty-six-year-old anchorite accepted this appointment as his religious duty, though his horror of the female sex was such that he refused to sleep under the same roof as women. He arrived at the Castilian court, a pallid and cadaverous figure in his monk’s habit and sandals, looking like a “desert dweller,” as Peter Martyr described him. A contemporary engraving shows the severe aquiline profile and monk’s tonsure of this intransigent cleric, who quickly proved himself to be tenacious and iron-willed in pursuit of his political objectives, insofar as these objectives reflected the interests of the Almighty.

  Cisneros soon showed his mettle when he was given the challenging task of reforming Spain’s dissolute monastic orders, many of whom had fallen so far from medieval standards of piety that they lived openly with “wives” and concubines. Personally visiting monasteries across the country on a mule, Cisneros imposed his authority on these errant monks with such force that hundreds left Spain with their female companions rather than submit to the new austerity demanded of them. Cisneros was rewarded for his efforts with promotion to the key position of archbishop of Toledo, on Isabella’s insistence. As was typical for him, he took up his new post wearing a friar’s robe and sandals, and even though he subsequently agreed to wear the customary silk and ermines at the pope’s insistence, he continued to wear the hair shirt underneath his finery.

  Such was the man whose temperament contained “more of a mania for warfare than was proper for a bishop,” in the words of his sixteenth-century hagiographer Alvar Gómez de Castro. In November, Ferdinand and Isabella returned to Seville, leaving Cisneros in the city to work alongside Talavera for reasons that remain unclear. The Toledan prelate had little enthusiasm for the evangelical methods used by his colleague to convert Granada’s Muslims and once compared his Arabic translations of the scriptures to “casting pearls before swine.” Cisneros began his own efforts by preaching to select groups of alfaquis in what Gómez de Castro calls a “soft and affable tone” and showering them with gifts of colored silk fabrics and scarlet caps in an attempt to win them over.

  He quickly lost patience with the slow rate of progress and began sending recalcitrant Muslims to prison, where they were treated with what even Gómez de Castro describes as “methods that were not correct” until they agreed to convert. One of those imprisoned was a Moorish noble named Zegrí Azaator, whom Cisneros entrusted to the care of a thuggish priest known as the Lion from his surname León. After twenty days in the harsh company of this “lion,” the humiliated and filthy nobleman was brought in chains before Cisneros and announced that Allah had commanded him in a dream to become a Christian. Cisneros immediately had Zegrí washed and dressed in a scarlet robe and whisked him off to the baptismal font, where he adopted the Christian name Gonzalo Fernandez Zegrí.

  Emboldened by this success, Cisneros intensified his efforts, boasting to Pope Alexander VI in December that three thousand Moors had been converted in a single day. The scale of conversions was so great that many Muslims were sometimes splashed with holy water instead of being led to the baptismal font. When Cisneros’s own church council in Toledo suggested that these conversions might be a breach of the Capitulation agreements, the archbishop was unapologetic, declaring that “if the infidels couldn’t be attracted to the road to salvation, they had to be dragged to it.” For Cisneros, conversion was essentially an obligation of conquest imposed on a defeated infidel enemy. In one of his letters, he told his church colleagues that Muslim religious leaders in Granada had handed him the horns they used for the call to prayer “like the keys to a city.” But not all Granada’s Muslims were willing to submit to the new dispensation, and it was not long before Cisneros’s efforts produced a very different response.

  The first signs of resistance emerged among the craftsmen, tailors, and silk weavers of the Albaicín, over the issue of the Christian converts to Islam known as elches, a transliteration of the Arabic word ilj (foreigner). To Christians and Muslims alike, anyone who abandoned his or her faith for another was an apostate, and the attitude of Christians toward these renegados was illustrated by a horrific incident following the siege of Málaga in 1487, when a group of Christian converts to Islam were tied to stakes and killed with cane spears in a cruel variant on the jousting competition known as the juego de cañas. In theory, the Granadan elches were protected from such treatment by specific clauses in the Capitulations, which stipulated that converts who had “become Moors” would not be forced to return to Christianity against their will.

  These agreements nevertheless allowed such converts to be “questioned” by Christian clerics in the presence of Muslim religious authorities. Cisneros was quick to take advantage of this loophole and began to summon elches to his office, where he hectored them to return to the Church and imprisoned those who refused. Cisneros’s efforts were often focused on Christian women who had married Muslims—an emphasis that particularly angered the Muslim population, who resented the violation of domestic space that they considered sacrosanct. On December 18, Cisneros sent an alguacil (constable) named Velasco de Barrionuevo and an assistant to the Albaicín to bring a young female elche for questioning. These officials were passing through a square when their prisoner began shouting that she was being forced to become a Christian. Within minutes, Cisneros’s officials were surrounded by a hostile crowd, and Barrionuevo was killed with a paving stone dropped from an upstairs window, while his assistant survived by hiding under the bed of a local Muslim woman who sheltered him.

  The simmering anger of the last two months now exploded in open revolt, as the residents of the Albaicín barricaded their streets and produced weapons from hidden caches. For the Christian population of the city and its small garrison, it was a precarious moment as an angry crowd descended on Cisneros’s house, where the archbishop’s staff urged him to flee for his life. Cisneros refused this option, declaring his willingness to “await the crown of martyrdom, if it is the will of heaven.” Throughout the night, he and his staff braced themselves for an assault that never came, as the crowd gradually faded away. Over the next few days, the rebellion began to take on a more organized form as the population of the Albaicín elected its own officials and leaders. Faced with a confrontation they had done so much to avoid, Tendilla and Talavera set out to defuse the crisis. Accompanied by a procession of priests and friars carrying a crucifix, Talavera attempted to enter the barricaded Albaicín, only to be greeted by a hail of stones. Showing great personal courage, Talavera picked up the cross and approached the barricades alone, to the admiration of the local Muslims, some of whom kissed the hem of his garments in a gesture of respect toward the “alfaqui of the Christians.”

  Tendilla also intervened to calm the situation, riding into the Albaicín and tossing his red cap to the crowd in a sign of peaceful intent. In a further gesture of goodwill, the captain-general moved his wife and children into a house next to the main mosque in the Albaicín. After ten days, the Muslims began handing in their weapons and even handed over the murderers of Cisneros’s constable, who were promptly executed. In the meantime, confused reports of these events had reached the Catholic Monarchs in Seville, who initially believed that they faced a general insurrection. Ferdinand was furious, telling his wife, “Your archbishop has cost us dear, whose imprudence has made us lose in a few hours what it took us years to gain.” Summoned to Seville to account for his actions, Cisneros conceded that his “excessive zeal for the interests of the faith” had contributed to the unrest, but argued that it was the Muslims who had breached the Capitulations, not him, by engaging in armed rebellion.

  Rather than impose the customary death penalty for sedition, he deviously proposed to Ferdinand and Isabella that they issue a collective pardon to the rebels, on condition that they convert to Christianity. The fact that the Catholic Monarchs promptly agreed to these proposals suggests that they themselves regarded the
Capitulations as a pragmatic arrangement rather than a permanent dispensation, and a vindicated Cisneros returned to Granada to preside over a further wave of baptisms. Within a few weeks, Granada had been transformed into a Christian city, at least on the surface, as mass baptisms and the consecration of mosques as churches was celebrated by joyous pealing of the church bells that Muslims derisively called “the king of Spain’s cowbells.”

  On January 16, 1500, Cisneros crowed to his church council that “there is now no one in the city who is not a Christian, and all the mosques are churches.”7 The same process was under way in towns and villages on the outskirts of Granada, and Cisneros predicted that within a short time “the entire kingdom will convert, in which there are more than two hundred thousand souls.” Criticisms of Cisneros’s aggressive methods now receded in the face of these successes. Even Talavera conceded that his colleague “had achieved greater triumphs than even Ferdinand and Isabella, since they had conquered only the soil, while he had gained the souls of Granada.”8 In little more than a month, Cisneros had completely unraveled the Capitulations and set in motion the chain of events that would culminate in the expulsion more than a century later. But even as the church bells celebrated the transformation of Granada into a Christian city, the flames of rebellion were spreading through the surrounding countryside.

  5

  Rebellion and Conversion

  Even in a country known for the grandeur and drama of its landscape, there are few more stirring natural spectacles in Spain than the Alpujarra Mountains. Wedged between the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the arid coastal sierras, and lying some forty miles to the south of Granada itself, the Alpujarras are usually reached from the capital by following the road that leads up from the vega to the vertiginous bridge across the Tablate Gorge. From there the road leads through the Lecrín Valley, past gullies and hillsides teeming with fig, quince, and citrus orchards and hillsides covered with olive and almond trees. The beauty of the Alpujarras lies in the variety of their terrain, in the contrasts between their barren alpine peaks, their forests and fast-moving rivers, and their astonishingly fertile valleys. Take the steep road that winds up from the town of Órgiva toward the Sierra Nevada and you enter a world of cavernous gorges and ravines and inaccessible mountain passes, dotted with classic whitewashed Andalusian villages, whose stone walls and flat tiled roofs give them an organic quality, as if they have grown out of the surrounding landscape.

  The whole area resembles the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, which may explain its appeal to the Berber colonists who dug the impossibly steep terraces and irrigation channels, or acequias, that can still be seen throughout the Alpujarras. At the end of the fifteenth century, these mountains were inhabited almost exclusively by Muslim peasants and small farmers, who bred sheep or cattle or tended the mulberry trees and silkworm sheds that provided the raw material for the weavers and tailors of the Albaicín. Resilent, independent, and strongly wedded to their religious traditions, these mountain communities had accepted Christian rule with reluctance and held Boabdil in such contempt that the Little King had been obliged to stay clear of his Alpujarran estates for his own safety before his final departure. As a natural fortress, the Alpujarra range has always attracted outcasts, bandits, and rebels fleeing central authority, and it was here that the more recalcitrant leaders of the Albaicín revolt fled in January 1500, warning that the conversions of Granada were about to be extended to the whole region.

  The rebels had no coherent military or political strategy beyond a general refusal to submit to what they regarded as a violation of the Capitulation agreements, but towns and villages across the Alpujarras now rose up in spontaneous revolt, killing Muslims who had cooperated with the Christian authorities, as well as the few Christian settlers and missionaries in the area, including two priests who were stoned to death and set on fire. The rebellion spilled over into the neighboring province of Almeria, so that some eighty thousand Christian troops were hastily mobilized to subdue the “wild beasts of the Alpujarras” in military operations that were characterized by an “absence of generosity and courtesy of sentiment” that Alonso de Santa Cruz attributed to the War of Granada.

  As in the previous war, rebels who surrendered were generally able to preserve their lives and property, but only on condition that they agreed to be baptized. Towns and villages that had to be taken by assault were treated harshly. At Guéjar, to the north of Granada, rebels opened irrigation channels in an attempt to prevent a Christian assault led by the Marquis of Tendilla and Gonzalo de Córdoba, the legendary soldier whose exploits in Italy later earned him the title of “Great Captain.” With their horses mired up to their flanks in mud and water, the Christian cavalrymen took some losses before the town was successfully stormed and the male population put to the sword, while the women and children went to the slave market.

  Similar incidents occurred elsewhere. At Belefique, the Muslim population endured a terrible three-month siege in freezing conditions before they were obliged by the ubiquitous royal secretary, de Zafra, to “surrender at the king’s mercy” when their water supply was cut off. On de Zafra’s orders, two hundred rebel leaders were thrown from the tower of a mosque and the women and children enslaved. At the town of Andarax, three thousand Muslims were massacred on the orders of the Spanish commander Luis de Beaumont, including six hundred women and children who were blown up inside a mosque where they had taken refuge. At the town of Lanjarón, the gateway to the Lecrín Valley, Ferdinand personally led his troops in an assault on three thousand rebels who were deployed around a fortified castle in the expectation of a Christian assault from the direction of Granada. Instead Ferdinand and his troops executed a daring overnight ascent of a mountain overlooking the town from the rear. The following morning, the Christian soldiers descended on the startled defenders and fought their way to the castle, where the rebels finally surrendered, with the exception of their leader, a “black Moor” who threw himself to his death from the castle walls.

  Though some Muslims preferred to “die as Moors” rather than become Christians, others bowed to what they regarded as inevitable and agreed to be baptized, in the belief that they would be left alone afterward. There were also sincere converts, such as Pedro de Mercado, a farmer from a village near Ronda who refused to join the rebellion because he “had the wish to be a Christian” and subsequently received compensation when rebels burned down his house, kidnapped his wife and one of his daughters, and killed his livestock. Other converts, according to Cisneros, were so committed to their new faith that they accepted death rather than recant and died as martyrs “calling to Jesus Christ and Our Lady.”

  Cisneros was unrepentant about the mayhem his actions had done so much to unleash, telling his church colleagues that the rebels should “be converted or enslaved, for as slaves they will be better Christians and the land will be pacified forever.” As always, Ferdinand was more flexible, calibrating his policies according to what the local situation required. In some places, Muslims were allowed to emigrate. Others were offered special privileges and financial incentives if they accepted the faith. For the rest of the year, the “second conquest” of Granada continued to unfold across the kingdom. In January 1501, Ferdinand felt sufficiently confident to order his army to stand down, but no sooner had the demobilization begun than news reached the court of further unrest from the Sierra Bermeja mountains above Ronda, to the southeast of the Alpujarras, where Muslim villagers were reported to have killed priests and sold Christian women and children as slaves in Africa. A force of two thousand infantrymen and three hundred cavalry were hastily dispatched to the Sierra Bermeja under the command of Alonso de Aguilar, one of the most distinguished noblemen in Spain and a veteran of the Granada war.

  Few Christians doubted that this powerful expedition would bring the rebels rapidly to heel. But the majority of Aguilar’s troops were members of local Andalusian militias, whose lack of discipline produced a very different outcome. On March
16, Aguilar’s men pursued a small group of armed rebels into the desolate “red mountains” of the Sierra Bermeja. Eventually they found the main rebel forces dug into strong defensive positions on the upper slopes of an elevated summit. On the plateau behind them, women, children, and old people from the surrounding villages were gathered with their possessions and valuables. Excited at the prospect of plunder, an advance detachment of Christian soldiers charged up the hill and forced the rebels back.

  As the Christians surged forward onto the open plain, they found themselves subjected to a fierce counterattack, as the rebels were joined by other Muslims from the low-lying villages. A fierce battle now ensued, which continued till dusk, when Aguilar and three hundred of his men were forced to set up a makeshift camp on the open plain. Under cover of darkness, the rebels crept up on the Christian lines and engaged the defenders in a confused hand-to-hand combat that was illuminated briefly by an exploding keg of gunpowder. By daybreak, Aguilar’s troops had been routed. Some fought and died where they stood. Others were hunted down in the surrounding mountains or tumbled into the surrounding ravines while trying to flee. Wounded by an arrow and with all his teeth knocked out, Aguilar died, sword in hand, in a battle that was subsequently celebrated in numerous Christian poems and ballads.