In 1449, in an event that doomed Juan’s reign and had immense implications for Spanish history, the crown demanded of Toledo the sum of 1 million maravedis to support the army. De Luna became the king’s hammer, and the consort put this unpleasant responsibility of collecting the surtax in the hands of his most accomplished associates, the group known famously as the conversos or “the converted.”
The conversos were persons of Jewish heritage who either themselves or through their forbears had converted from Judaism to Christianity. In the dreadful year 1391, a wide-scale massacre of Jews swept across Spain. Four thousand were killed in Seville alone, and the killings spread to most of the major towns of the country through the summer of that year. The demand was made that Jews either convert or die. Nearly a third of Spanish Jews acquiesced to the rite of Christian baptism. Such persecution continued into the early years of Juan II’s reign.
As baptized Christians, the former Jews were entitled, technically, to the rights and privileges of all Christians. They intermarried freely with Christians of “pure blood” and began to integrate socially, politically, and culturally into the wider society. After a time, it was hard to find a prominent family that did not have a converso as a relative. That included the forbears of tiny Isabella of Castile, whose paternal grandmother was the daughter of a conversa. The conversos continued in their role as the king’s tax collectors and became the backbone of the professional and commercial gentry. As such, resentment, jealousy, and even hatred toward them was rife.
In January 1449, as Alvaro de Luna arrived in Toledo to oversee the collection of the surtax, a rebellion broke out, its ire focused on de Luna and the conversos. The insurgents took over the city and for nine months the rebellion raged. From it came three documents which were to alter the course of Spanish history. In May, as Juan II approached the city with his army, the rebels presented their king with a petition later called the Toledan Petition. It placed the blame for the rebellion on the excesses of Alvaro de Luna and his converso tools. De Luna had “granted the offices of the Castilian government to infidels and heretics, enemies of our sacred faith, our king, our persons and our estates.” The conversos were enemies per se of the Spanish people. Worse, they were all secret Jews, whose conversion was fraudulent and insincere, and who clandestinely still followed Jewish rites and beliefs. Jews, ancient or modern, were a race, the petition argued, and it was their race rather than their overt or covert beliefs that made them evil servants of the Devil and cohorts of the Antichrist. The conversos were, therefore, traitors and heretics to country and to faith.
To prove the point, Castile’s first inquisitional tribunal was convened. The good Christians of Toledo were invited to offer secret evidence of heresy against their neighbors. This was the seed of a process that was to grow with the unification of the Iberian peninsula under one rule and with the final demise of the Islamic south. It was a process that would take on a distinctly Spanish character until the Spanish Inquisition became synonymous with the extreme of Christian intolerance and violence.
Three weeks later Toledo’s rebels issued a second pronouncement called the Sentencia-Estatuto, or Judgment and Statute. Jews, it proclaimed, were the central evil of Castilian society. Conversion to Christianity could not mask their perfidy. The conspiracy of the conversos aimed to kill “all the Old Christians in the city and transfer the city into the hands of its enemies.” Among other inflammatory provisions, all conversos were henceforth barred from public office and denied the right to give testimony in court. The prohibitions applied not just to the living but to their future offspring. To underscore their seriousness, the rebels hanged the bodies of several conversos in the public square, including the town’s leading converso.
With the situation wildly out of control, the Vatican finally entered the fray. In September 1449 a papal bull against the rebels was issued, and their leader was excommunicated. In the light of future history, the champion of the Vatican’s forceful anti-rebel position was ironic indeed. He was the cardinal of San Sisto, Juan de Torquemada. Cardinal Torquemada was himself a converso, and thus Jewish blood ran in his veins, and thence on to his nephew, the future Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomás de Torquemada. In 1449, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, the Vatican’s preeminent theologian, was the voice of reason and enlightenment. He compared the persecution of Toledo to “a scorching wind which damages the flowers in the garden.” He was astonished “that Christians could inflict such pain on other Christians,” branding the rebels as racists and cowards who spewed their hate from dark corners. To this elder Torquemada, a Christian, once baptized, was a Christian without qualification, for baptism was a gift of God. It was permanent, and it could not be withdrawn. He identified with the pain of the conversos, because he was one himself. But as one who held such titles in Rome as Master of the Palace and Defender of the Faith, he was also a great advocate for papal power.
“If ever it was incumbent on Catholic doctors, as soldiers of Christ, to protect the Church with powerful weapons, lest man, led astray by simplicity or error or craft or deception, should forsake her fold, that duty devolves upon them now. For in these troubled times, some pestilent men, puffed up with ambition, have arisen. With diabolical craft and deceit they have striven to disseminate false doctrines regarding spiritual as well as temporal power. They have assaulted the whole church, inflicting grievous wounds upon her, and proceeding to rend her unity, to tarnish the splendor of her glory. Shamefully to obscure her beauty, they have undertaken to crush the primacy of the Apostolic See…”
The last word was left, however, to a fire-eating priest named Marcos García de Mora. He was to supply the passion and the vitriol to the rebellion. In November 1449 he put forward his Memorial, the third important document of this period. Addressed not only to the pope and the king but to all good kings and queens in Christendom, it was as powerful and influential a piece of religious demagoguery as Church history has ever seen. He cast Alvaro de Luna as a tyrant, but merely a tool of a wider conspiracy. It was the conversos as a group and a race who exploited de Luna, who held Toledo in their sinister grip, and for that matter, all of Castile. The baptism of this “collection of beasts” was insincere and fraudulent by definition, for Jews were not capable of sincere conversion. They could not be altered or improved by Christian ritual.
Conversos were an “abhorred, damned, and detested group, species and class of baptised Jews and those who came from their lineage.” The Memorial revived the concept of “Judaizing,” in which the conversos as secret Jews were forever conspiring to undermine true believers and true Christianity. Conversos were “adulterous sons of infidels, fathers of all greed, sowers of all discord, rich in every malice and perversity, always ungrateful to God, opposed to his orders, and deviating from his ways.” If Jews were constitutionally evil, one had to look no further than the Bible to know it. He invoked or misinvoked Psalm 95:10–11.
“It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known My ways/Unto whom I swore in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.”
García’s Memorial was a wild, scurrilous harangue. Not long after it was issued, its author was taken out and hanged as a traitor. But its arguments were broadcast widely, and they succeeded in altering the terms of the debate over race and religion in Spain. For a popular audience which resented the power and influence of the conversos, the Memorial found favor.
Throughout these disastrous events, Juan II’s wife, Isabel of Portugal, inveighed against Alvaro de Luna to her husband. In 1451 during her pregnancy with Isabella, and more pointedly afterward, it was de Luna who managed her medicines. Suspicions arose that de Luna was poisoning his detractor, which was probably true. In 1453, despite her infirmities, the queen finally won out. De Luna was seized, charged with high treason, and beheaded. A year later, Juan II died, and his foppish son by his first marriage succeeded to the throne as Enrique IV.
If Enrique was more clever than his father, he was
also, if anything, a greater abomination. It was said that he was an enemy of Christians and worshiped in a heathen manner. In his court he promoted criminals and country bumpkins. And he soon found himself in open warfare with his prominent caballeros, especially after they accused him of ordering a priest, in the aftermath of a violent storm in Seville, to preach that the devastation was “divine punishment for public depravity” and, as such, “the pure effect of natural laws.”
That the king should appeal to natural laws struck his nobles as ironic. It was written that he found pleasant odors repulsive “and prefers the stink of severed horse hoofs and burnt leather.” This shocker suggested witchcraft, for horn and hoof were associated with the Devil, and burnt horn or leather was used by witches in their spells (although the nauseating smoke of burnt hoof was also the remedy of the day for epileptics).
That the king was also a practicing homosexual was widely known. “The king is so effeminate,” wrote the court scribe, “that he even goes in the middle of the night to the house of his new favorite, in order to entertain him when he is ill, by singing and playing the sitar.” His queen of twelve years was the long-suffering Blanche of Navarre. No children issued from this marriage, for it was never consummated. For a congenital weakness, Enrique was dubbed “El Impotente.”
“The impotence of the king to procreate was notorious,” wrote a scribe. But it was left to a visiting German doctor to say why. Enrique’s “member” was, in size and length, debile e parvum, “crippled and small,” and he could not achieve an erection. His doctors gathered to scratch their heads and finally decided upon the remedy: a medieval version of artificial insemination. In the Latin of their medical diagnosis, his member was mulgere, milked. A golden tube was inserted in the queen’s womb, into which the king’s manhood was poured; but alas the infusion did not work. The king’s semen was aquosum et sterile, “watery and sterile.”
As the medieval world turned, the blame was placed not on Enrique but upon his queen. Ritualistically, the Spanish crown appealed to the pope to annul the marriage of twelve years. The rationale given to the Holy Father was unusual. Compliant, and no doubt well-paid, prostitutes were brought forward to give evidence to the Vatican that Enrique, suddenly “El Potente,” had copulated with them. The examiners at the Vatican must have heard this testimony with muffled snickering, but they pronounced the marriage ended due to a demonic spell cast over it. Blanche of Navarre was banished. In May 1455, Enrique took a new queen, Juana of Portugal, the sister of the Portuguese king. She was a lusty wench, and she promptly presented the crown with a different problem.
In 1462, when Enrique’s half sister Isabella was eleven years old, Juana gave birth to a daughter. It was clear to all that Enrique’s majordomo, Beltrán de la Cueva, was the father. So clear was it that the child, named Juana after her mother, was dubbed “La Beltraneja.”
In 1464, matters took a serious turn when Isabella and her younger brother, Alfonso, were called to the court in Segovia. By this time the court of their half brother had become a swamp of corruption and intrigue. The person most affected was Alfonso, who, though only eleven years old, was the sole male in the immediate line of succession, and whose role in life, it seemed, was to be a pawn. Enrique IV made him a virtual prisoner. “Alfonso, wrenched from his mother’s arms, existed as though buried, exposed to perversity, and in danger of cruel death,” wrote a chronicler. Upon their arrival, Enrique announced that he was passing over Isabella and Alfonso as his heirs, and making his “own” daughter the next in line to succeed him. An oath of allegiance to La Beltraneja was drawn up. To strengthen the case, the nose of the baby was broken to make her look more like the horse-faced king.
Whatever Isabella at age thirteen and Alfonso at age eleven may have thought about this slight, the court nobles revolted. Enrique was already in deep trouble with his aristocracy. Through his self-indulgence and love of luxury, he had squandered the rich surplus that his father’s favorite tax collector, Alvaro de Luna, had amassed in the royal treasury. Wags and poets made fun of his court as being populated by sodomites and whores. One poet had encouraged the king toward greatness: “You were made king of the earth, by He of the Heavens, so that you and those you command [could] turn His wrath against the Moors.” But the king’s appetite for the Reconquest had been feeble. Enrique was no warrior.
Further charges abounded. The king was coddling conversos and Jews, it was claimed, and one Franciscan agitator tried to shock the royal court into action by claiming that he could produce one hundred foreskins from the sons of conversos in high places. The king had also alienated the Catholic bishops by calling them ridiculous goatskins and treating their pronouncements with contempt. “Instead of pursuing a war against the Moors,” one detractor wrote, “he wars on his own vassals, on good manners, and on ancient laws.”
In September 1464, a group of rebel nobles circulated a counterpetition throughout the land, declaring Enrique to be an unfit ruler. Not only was the king a perverse homosexual, the petition charged, but he was making a mockery of the Reconquest. Not only was he was under the thumb of Beltrán de la Cueva, but the infanta was not even the king’s own child. Later, in Ávila, a ceremonial dethronement of Enrique took place in a square near the cathedral. A mannequin dressed as the king in mourning clothes was propped upon a mock throne, a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other. Solemnly, the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña, boomed out a litany of grievances, whereupon, stagily, first the scepter, the king’s symbol of justice, and then the sword, his symbol of the kingdom’s defense, was removed, and finally the royal raiments until the naked effigy was kicked to the ground. In his place, the nobles proclaimed the eleven-year-old Alfonso to be the true King of Castile.
This would later be remembered as the Farce of Ávila. In the famous contemporaneous poem known as the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, the prophecy was delivered that Enrique IV “will either be punished or God will provide another good king.”
Knights and priests chose up sides, and Castile slipped into civil war. Once again Jews and conversos were drawn into the fray, for Enrique, like his father, was regarded as soft on heresy. The rebels called for a stiff Inquisition, with a full range of harsh penalties for insincere Christians.
Again, the hotspot was Toledo. There, sixteen hundred dwellings were burned, and a sizable number of conversos massacred, including the two leaders of the conversos in the city. Their naked bodies were strung up in the central square where the crowd gawked at their lower extremities to see if they were circumcised, sure evidence of secret Jewishness.
The chaos finally came to a climax on August 20, 1467, at the Battle of Olmedo. The outcome was indecisive, but it led to a division of lands between Enrique IV and the forces of the young prince Alfonso. This accommodation lasted less than a year, for in July 1468, Alfonso fell suspiciously ill. The plague was first thought to be the cause, but as the prince declined, it became clear that he had been poisoned. King Enrique’s current court favorite, Juan Pacheco, marquis of Villena, was implicated in the foul deed, for previously he had tried, without success, to lure the prince into homosexuality the better to control the boy. But the prince had complained about these pornographic solicitations. Pacheco stood to lose the riches and estates he had amassed through his court conspiracies if Alfonso prevailed.
Alfonso lingered for three days before he died. His corpse was taken to Arevalo for burial. If in life he was surrounded by minders who tried to corrupt, to exploit, and to disorient him, in death he was beatified. He was the “holy child” whose soul was “immaculate” and whose brief and contested shadow reign had given his people great hope. Archbishops and princes and other notables briefly suspended their hostility toward one another to gather and mourn the boy king.
Isabella was genuinely grief-stricken at the death of her younger brother and withdrew to a convent in Ávila to mourn. As she prayed, the shattered rebel forces fell into a fever of plotting. Deprived of their male pawn, they we
re desperate and endangered; their hope was Isabella. In Burgos they met to craft another brickbat to the king. He was, they charged again, in the grip of “infidels,” referring partly to his beloved Moorish guards, and of “enemies of the Catholic religion.” They scoffed once more at his plans to name his infant daughter as his successor, when it was a mockery to “call her Princess which she is not.” And then they converged in haste on Ávila.
But the time was inauspicious, for Ávila was suffering with an outbreak of the plague. Its narrow streets, close quarters, and high walls were the perfect incubator for pestilence. Enrique dared not enter it, and Isabella dared not leave. There, her chief adviser was the most powerful churchman in Spain, the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña. The archbishop was a severe and intimidating presence, and he was determined to turn aside any accommodation with Enrique. The prelate fell to his knees before Isabella. She was now, he proclaimed, the true Queen of Castile. He urged her to replace Alfonso as the symbol of the rebellion against Enrique.
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