A day later, under cover of darkness, the prince was secretly taken to meet his fiancée for the first time. As matchmaker, the archbishop of Toledo was the host for the assignation, and it was he who conducted Ferdinand into the presence of Isabella. She sat demurely, the picture of humility, piety, and beauty. At first glimpse, Ferdinand was so stunned by her beauty and presence that he blurted out a few disjointed and embarrassing words. But their priest-facilitator smoothed the situation calmly, and the two teenagers fell eventually into animated conversation.
“The presence of the Archbishop stifled the romantic impulses of the two whose hearts strengthened in their mutual contemplation,” wrote the effusive chronicler. “It was not long after that they experienced the legal joys of matrimony.”
There was but one sour note. At the end of their encounter, Ferdinand approached his bride-to-be and kissed her hand, an act at which she recoiled, for it made him seem like just another flatterer. Later, in commenting on this, the archbishop of Toledo waved it aside as trivial. Even if Ferdinand was somewhat below Isabella in stately power, she had given her hand to him, and for that, she owed him total obedience.
On October 18, the feast day of St. Luke, Ferdinand formally and officially entered the city with great ceremony. Crowds lined the streets as the procession of nobles and prelates rode grandly by in their exquisite, jeweled robes, their horses caparisoned with equally exquisite embroidered harnesses and stirrups. The day was filled with lively jousts and tournaments and sword-and-staff competitions with canes. The rejoicing would continue for seven days.
On October 19, in a formal ceremony, the Capitulations of Ferdinand and the Aragonese throne to Isabella and the throne of Castile were read formally before the royal assembly, as well as a papal bull waiving the prohibition against a royal marriage within the third ring of consanguinity. And then, in the palace of a local grandee named Juan de Vivero, the archbishop of Toledo, assisted by the Cardinal of Spain, Rodrigo Borgia, married the couple. The ceremony was solemn, it was said. A number of disapproving nobles were present solely to protect their interests. They sat on their hands, scowling sullenly as the archbishop blessed the couple and their union.
That night, the marriage was consummated. By longstanding tradition, courtiers were posted at the door to the royal bedchamber. When the appropriate time had elapsed, they burst into the bedchamber to strip the bed of its sheet. This trophy they brought to the eager crowd below, displaying its stains as if the relic were a triumphal battle flag. To ensure no fraud, more witnesses were sent in to double-check the bed itself.
“And then,” the chronicler wrote, “trumpets blared, kettledrums sounded, and minstrels sang.”
The long reign of Ferdinand and Isabella had begun on a most satisfactory and auspicious note.
4
As Much as
the One Is Worth
SEGOVIA
Eleven and a half months later, in Duenas, Isabella gave birth to a daughter. The unrelenting hostility of King Enrique, who remained furious about her uncertified marriage, tempered the joy of motherhood, however. A month after the birth, on November 20, 1470, the king reversed formally the agreement of Toros de Guisando. Juana, the notorious “La Beltraneja,” now nine years old, was in attendance, as her prior acknowledged illegitimacy was voided, and she was once again proclaimed to be the legitimate heir. The King of Portugal threw his weight behind this newest effort. A new papal bull now declared the previous bull null and void. In the winter of 1470–71, Enrique took the next step by disinheriting Isabella, though how a half brother disinherits a half sister is not exactly clear. A pronouncement proclaimed her to be a dissolute woman, who had acted shamefully and stubbornly against the king’s counsel, and therefore had disdained the laws of Castile.
Had it not been for the armed conflict that the latest reversals occasioned, and the intertwining of Portuguese ambitions, the situation would have been a court farce. But once again nobles and notables of all stripe chose sides and, no doubt with a sigh, strapped on their armor once again. Civil war would continue, it seemed, until El Impotente died. By 1473, towns and villages were lining up on Isabella’s side. Even the king’s favorite city of Segovia, with its lions, Flemish altarpieces, Moorish Alcazar, Roman aqueduct, and tiled patios, had deserted to Isabella’s side. It finally dawned on Enrique that reconciliation was his most sensible course.
Facilitating this reconciliation was a surprising figure. Abraham Senior, the court rabbi, was a fifty-seven-year-old Jew who was something of a financial genius and who had been a quiet influence behind the scenes in arranging the marriage between Ferdinand and Isabella. Born in Segovia, he worked in the one area that remained officially open to Jews, tax collection. By enriching the coffers of the crown’s treasury through skillful administration, he had gained enormous influence in the royal court, capturing the admiration of the aristocracy, as well as the affection of Isabella. With this clout, he had become the de facto leader of the 120,000 Spanish Jews, as well as the queen’s chief adviser for secular matters. His intelligence, wit, and bearing had made him a favorite if unconventional presence in the court. In gratitude for his services, Isabella was to grant him a lifetime pension of 100,000 maravedis. As a bonus, he was able to escape some of the harsh restrictions that were required of his brethren.
In December 1473, half brother and half sister finally met in Segovia. Arm-in-arm, they danced and sang and paraded before their subjects joyously, as if nothing awkward or untoward had passed between them for the previous five years. They were joined by Ferdinand, who had been away in Aragon most of the year fighting the French. A whole new set of proclamations and bulls were drafted, as Isabella was reinstated as princess and heir. Amid all this apparent amity, it was incumbent upon the heirs to the crown of Castile to guard their backs, for scoundrels and assassins lurked in the shadows.
In the years 1469–73, if the relentless strife between petty nobles seemed like business as usual in the Spanish heartland, there were several events on the ecclesiastical front worth noting, portents of more worrisome events to come. In 1471, a new pope acceded to the throne of the Holy See. He was Sixtus IV, an Italian Franciscan priest of humble origins, and a confirmed nepotist, who was addicted to great luxury and who loved art and architecture. (The building of the Sistine Chapel and the establishment of the Vatican Library were among his lasting achievements.) Sixtus had propagated two sons, whom he immediately installed in important ecclesiastical posts, just as his nephew was made a cardinal. The new pope became quickly embroiled in Italian politics, forcing Rome and the Church into a desperate struggle with Florence and Lorenzo de Medici. As a consequence, this pope was both pliant and distracted from Spanish affairs during this critical period.
Sixtus owed his election partly to a rising star in the Roman Curia, a Spanish cardinal named Rodrigo Borgia to whom the pope delegated the responsibility for Spanish affairs. For his efforts, Borgia had become the vice chancellor of the Vatican. In the summer of 1472, Cardinal Borgia was dispatched to his homeland, ostensibly to mediate for peace in the civil war, to restrain Alfonso of Portugal in his ambitions for Spain, to advocate for a crusade against the infidels in the south, and to deliver the papal blessing for the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella.
For this diplomatic and military mission, Borgia’s extensive party arrived, with great ceremony, at Tarragona. The papal legate promptly alienated both his countrymen and the Portuguese with his arrogance and extravagance and “other unbraked passions.” He entertained at lavish banquets and insisted on grand processions, complete with several hundred soldiers and musicians, for his arrivals. Cardinal Borgia would stay for a year, spending months in Ferdinand and Isabella’s court, while he devoted most of his energies to enriching the House of Borgia with wealthy bishoprics. In Portugal, he carried on scandalously with the ladies of the court. The cardinal of Pavia remarked that Borgia’s sole purpose seemed to be to dazzle his countrymen with wealth and spectacle.
Wit
h the pliant Sixtus as her pope and the dissolute Rodrigo Borgia as her cardinal, Isabella had as her confessor quite a different character. His name was Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican prior of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Segovia. Torquemada had grown up in Valladolid and was the nephew of the great Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, who had been such a noble defender of the conversos during the troubles of 1449. Tomás de Torquemada was tall and pale, with thick eyebrows. His flattened boxer’s nose was the most prominent feature of his face, and its lumpy folds seemed all the more prominent because of the ring of hair and bald top that distinguished the tonsure of a Dominican friar. Known for his privations, he walked barefoot, slept on planks, and wore the hair shirt beneath the wool of the white and black cowl of his order. For his efficient administrative skills he had risen rapidly in the ranks of the Dominicans.
Torquemada burned with a vivid hatred of heresy and of any Christian of whatever background who might conceivably be guilty of it. His grandmother had been a Jew, and this dirty little secret seemed to drive his passion against Jews and Christians of Jewish heritage into a determined and permanent rage. He longed for the “pure blood” of an old Castilian Christian, and believed that Jewish blood was darker in hue as it contaminated the body. In the absence of any prosecution of heretics at all in Castile, the “Old” Inquisition was not good enough for this bloodless fanatic. As he received Isabella’s confessions during this period, he sought to extract a promise from her:
“If you ever come to the throne, you must devote yourself to the liquidation of heresy, for the glory of God and the exaltation of the Catholic Church.”
The last of Isabella’s quartet of holy men was Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain. In 1473 at the Council of Aranda, Carrillo made an effort to upgrade the standards of Spanish priesthood, for the ignorance and corruption of country friars had become an embarrassment and led to violent clashes with Jews and conversos. Henceforth, examinations for the priesthood would be required, and priests were obligated to read and write Latin, which was the lingua franca of the Church and the foundation of all religious instruction. Holy men were forbidden to wear silk or colorful decoration, which undermined and distracted their focus from their spiritual calling. They must abstain from gambling, and they were required to celebrate mass at least four times a year.
Laudable as these measures were, they did little to restrain radicals who in the name and the garb of holy orders continued to agitate against the House of David. In 1473, another wave of pogroms swept Spain, starting in the reconquered towns of Andalusia and spreading north to such cities as Valladolid and Segovia. During Lent that year when a group called the Cofradia del Caridad, the Brotherhood of Charity, were marching through the streets of Córdoba, a young conversa girl emptied water on the parade from an upper story. As drops fell on the statue of the Virgin Mary they were carrying, pandemonium erupted, and the brothers of charity chanted: “Death to the conversos,” with terrible consequences.
Isabella’s reconciliation with the king coincided with her break with her archbishop. For the archbishop of Toledo himself was not incorruptible. He had come under the sway of an itinerant huckster named Fernando de Alarcon, who by all accounts had married many times in many places and, so one chronicler wrote, had corrupted clerics from Cyprus to Sicily and brought them to “incests and all sorts of obscenities.” Alarcon professed knowledge in the magical properties of herbs and minerals; among his talents, he told the primate of Spain, was his ability to change stone into gold. His secret lay in phosphorous, which contained the light of the sun, he claimed, and which had miraculous powers. Since the archbishop’s interest in gold was extravagant, the alchemist was brought into the archbishop’s court and given a laboratory to ply his wondrous techniques. Only the archbishop was blind to this fraud, apparently. Strife and dissension reigned in the court as a result of this bizarre friendship.
Eventually, when the charlatan ran short of money, Isabella was asked to contribute to his support. Caught between her gratitude to her archbishop and her certain knowledge of Alarcon’s schemes, she played along for a time. But she was instinctively contemptuous of superstition and sorcery, and eventually had the faker ejected from the palace and beheaded. The archbishop, in a pique, switched his loyalty to Enrique the Impotent and to the aspirations of the nine-year-old Portuguese pretender called La Beltraneja.
In 1465, four years before Isabella married Ferdinand, the last Moorish Caliphate of Spain endured as a mere shadow of past glory. At its height, the realm of Al Andalus covered most of Spain. It had eighty cities, including Córdoba with a population of over a million, and twelve thousand villages on the banks of the Guadalquivir River alone. Since the mid-thirteenth century its expanse had shrunk to the mountainous province of Granada, nestled amid the stately peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the Alpujarras foothills, and extending south to its ports of Málaga and Almería on the Costa del Sol. Isolated from its spiritual roots in the east, and attacked continuously from the north, Granada was a fading jewel, an enclave of learning and culture, and a model of religious tolerance. So long as all citizens recognized the caliph as their ruler, Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans lived peaceably together as “people of the Book.” The city of Granada itself comprised some 70,000 houses and had a population of 400,000. Distinctive walled gardens bloomed with pomegranates, date trees, and jasmine. The air was perfumed with orange blossoms. The vistas to the snowy peaks in the distance were magnificent. The Moors imagined that the paradise of the Prophet was situated in that part of heaven above Granada.
The heart of the caliphate was the magnificent Alhambra. The jewel and the symbol of the 800-year rule of Islam in Spain, this red palace had awed and inspired the common man and the composer and the poet alike for centuries. “Give him alms, woman, for nothing in life is worse than being blind in Granada,” a modern poet would write. And a fourteenth-century poet, Ibn Zamrak, the vizier to Muhammad V (1362–91), wrote of the Alhambra:
The Sabika hill sits like a garland on Granada’s brow
In which the stars would be entwined
And the Alhambra (Allah preserve it)
Is the ruby set above that garland.
It was as much a royal village as it was a palace, as much a set of luxuriant gardens as fortress. Within the walls of the complex, it was said that forty thousand soldiers could be garrisoned. From its lofty terrace the colossus towered above the city and looked out to the vega, or plain, which stretched some thirty miles to distant hills.
As the last bastion of Islam in the West, the caliphate had survived partly through its deference to the warrior kings of Castile. For centuries the Christian kings had taken their oaths of office with the pledge to destroy the infidel kingdom of the south. In urging on Isabella’s weak father to greater glory, a poet of the time wrote to him pointedly: “You were made king of the earth by He of the Heavens,/ So that you and those you command/Turn His Wrath against the Moors.” It was the king’s duty to his God and his faith and his subjects. For decades there had been periodic thrusts on both sides of the frontier, but for much of the fifteenth century a truce had been in effect. In these intermittent periods of truce, the price of peace was a tribute to be paid in the city of Córdoba every year by the Moorish kings to the emissaries of the Christian kings.
But in 1465, a fiery and resentful prince, Muley Aben Hassan, succeeded his father, Ishmael, as the emir of Al Andalus and abruptly terminated the tribute. Witnessing his father kowtowing to the Christian envoys over the years, he had developed a passionate distaste for the groveling. The mere mention of the practice sent him into a fit of rage.
In his youth, Muley Aben Hassan had married a strong, energetic, and determined woman. Her name was Ayxa, and for her fortitude and rectitude she was known as “the Chaste.” By her the caliph was presented with a son, Abu Abdullah Muhammad, who would become better known as Boabdil. Legend has it that upon his birth the court astrologers had been summoned to fo
retell his future. But when they marked the positions of the planets on his birthday and regarded the signs of zodiac in his horoscope, they recoiled in fear and horror: Although it was written in the book of fate, they whispered, that the boy would one day sit on the throne, it was also written that during his reign the great caliphate of Al Andalus would fall to conquest and collapse. This curse of astrology turned the father against his son and his wife. Both were rejected and ostracized. In the court of the Alcazar, the son became known as “Boabdil the Unfortunate.”
After Ayxa the Chaste, the sultan took a very different wife. She was a Christian slave, whose father had been captured in combat, and who had been brought to Granada as an infant where she was raised as a Muslim. She was given the name first of Fatima and then, due to her stunning beauty, the name of Zoraya or Morning Star. As assertive as she was beautiful, she was taken into the sultan’s harem and quickly became his favorite. Bearing the sultan two sons, she pressed them forward as an alternative to Boabdil as heirs to the throne.
Within the furtive court a faction formed behind Zoraya’s ambitions, and the harem became a hotbed of intrigue and dissension. Totally captivated by his sultana, and yet driven to distraction by the machinations of his court, the sultan took the extreme measure of putting several of his sons to death in the Alhambra’s Courtyard of the Lions. At Zoraya’s urging, he also imprisoned his son Boabdil in the Tower of the Comares, with the intention of executing him as well and thus expunging the curse of Boabdil’s horoscope. Shaking his fist at the stars, Muley Hassan reportedly declared: “The sword of the executioner shall prove the fallacy of those lying horoscopes, and shall silence the ambition of Boabdil.”
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