Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  The fires of the Tablada were meant to be a glimpse into the mouth of Hell.

  A week hence, the second auto-da-fe took place at the Tablada. This featured Diego de Susan, the leader of the brief Seville resistance, who had been personally tried and tortured into a confession by Alfonso de Ojeda. But de Susan was tough, and he maintained both his defiance and even his good humor to the end. With the noose dangling from his neck and dressed in his yellow gown, he turned to one of his executioners on the scaffold and suggested that they exchange togas as an act of friendship, as if this was some sort of sporting event. The reports of his demise varied. One said, “it seems that he died as a Christian,” while another announced wistfully, “he was a great rabbi.”

  At de Susan’s Act of Faith, there was one notable absence: Friar Alfonso de Ojeda. To many in the crowd, this must have appeared strange, for de Susan’s fate was the personal triumph of the Dominican. He had dealt with the converso personally in the interrogation chamber, in the dungeon of Triana, and in the torture chamber.

  But after his rousing sermon on February 6, Ojeda had fallen ill. It is not clear whether his affliction was pneumonic or bubonic, whether he had become infected by the ubiquitous rat flea or by some airborne bacteria. It is not recorded whether his symptoms were spitting blood through the mouth and nose, accompanied by horrible fevers, or whether he had developed bubos, the size of apples, in the groin or armpit. If his plague was pneumonic, he died within seventy-two hours. If it was bubonic, he might have lasted a day or two longer. In either case, his death was gruesome.

  For one so attentive to the wrath of God, he would surely have lashed out at some wicked force. For so rabid an anti-Semite, he could well have blamed the Jews, as so many other Christians had done in the previous 150 years, since the first medieval plague had leapt across the Straits of Gilbraltar and entered Iberia from the Moorish lands of North Africa in 1348. Perhaps he embraced the popular supposition that the pestilence was cosmic, a diabolical conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, or the theory that with a terrestrial earthquake, a fissure had been opened in the ground, from which the gas of pestilence gushed. Perhaps he saw the epidemic as yet another sign of the coming apocalypse. It is not likely that he blamed his own sinfulness for his disease, for Ojeda admitted of no moral faults. Perhaps in his last hours of life, he tried some of the remedies of the time: lancing the boils or drinking strong spirits or holding a bouquet of various aromatic spices to his nose or applying a plaster of pigeon dung or pig fat. Whatever he did, whatever the form of his pathogen, his Black Death was horrible.

  Ojeda was not alone. Rather, he was a forerunner. In Seville’s dreadful visitation, the first cases of the plague had appeared in the city the previous fall. During the cold months of 1481, the incidence was small. But as the weather grew warmer that year, the number of victims soared, for warmth and humidity nurtured the contagion. Decaying animals and human bodies piled up in the streets, emitting a terrible stench. Few volunteered to bury them.

  Civil order broke down. Once again, old Italian rumors were revived about the source of the pestilence: an invasion of eight-legged worms that killed you by their stink or black smoke that melted mountains. In the panic, citizens raced to quack measures for prevention: smelling aromatic wood and spice like juniper and rosemary, washing hands and feet with vinegar and rosewater, ingesting figs and nuts before breakfast, pepper and saffron later in the day, along with plenty of onions and garlic, but not too much to make the humors of the body hot, so that the pores of the skin might open. Sinful desserts were a bad idea, as were meat and fish that might spoil.

  One recipe for plague medicine went as follows:

  Take five cups of rue (woody herb with bitter leaves) and if it be a woman, leave out the rue, for rue is restorative to a man and wasting to a woman; and then take thereto five crops of tansey (bouquet of composite herbs) and five little blades of columbine, and a great quantity of marigold flowers full of small chives from the crops that are like saffron chives… Then take a quantity of good treacle, and bray all these herbs therein with good ale, but do not strain them. And then make the sick drink it for three evenings and three mornings. If they hold it, they shall have life.

  Holding it was the problem.

  In the end, since the root cause of the pestilence was the wrath of God, prayer was the best medicine of all. Families disintegrated, as wives fled from husbands, sisters fled from brothers. The pestilence spread, as Boccaccio described it a century earlier, like “a fire racing through dry or oily substances.”

  What Boccaccio had written about Florence in 1348 was true of Seville in 1481. “How many gallant gentlemen, fair ladies, and sprightly youths, who would have been judged hale and hearty by Galen and Hippocrates, having breakfasted in the morning with their kinsfolk, acquaintances and friends, supped that same evening with their ancestors in the next world!”

  Before the plague spent itself a year later, fifteen thousand would die in Seville, more than a third of the population of that port city.

  Like a two-headed dragon, Plague and Inquisition were joined in what seemed like a wider diabolical plan. The important signs of the End Times were manifest: wars and rumors of war, pestilence, chaos, hate, poverty, famine, sacrilege, and heresy. Blame was heaped on familiar culprits: the pestilence had come from the south, from the flea-ridden, rat-infested ships that came from the heathen lands of the east to the last Moorish state… or from the Jews, fouling the water supplies. The vials of God’s wrath were full. The Temple was filled with the smoke from the glory of God. Who shall not fear Thee, O God? Seville was the Lord’s threshing floor, where in His harvest the wheat was separated from the chaff. Pestilence and Inquisition were His instruments. It was as if vultures perched on the gargoyles of the cathedral of the stricken city.

  There seemed to be no discrimination. The just as well as the iniquitous were slain. Even the pure of heart and the pure of blood were not spared.

  8

  Woe Is Me, Alhama

  GRANADA

  In the fall of 1479 Ferdinand rejoined his queen, arriving in Toledo like Hannibal, riding an elephant that had been the gift from an ambassador from Cyprus. Days before, Isabella had given birth to a daughter, Juana.

  Ferdinand was now rightly an emperor. Earlier that year, his father, Juan II of Aragon, had died in Barcelona at the ripe age of eighty-three. With that death, the principal domains of Spain, Castile and Aragon were united at last for the first time in four hundred years, and the foundation of the Spanish Empire from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, from Sicily to the Balearic Islands to Valencia to the Portuguese frontier, was formally laid. The horizons south to Al Andalus, east to the Holy Land, and eventually west across the unknown beckoned, and the possibilities seemed endless.

  With this historic realization, the notion of divine guidance grew in the popular imagination. The first providential step had arrived with the unification of the peninsula under one crown. Next was the purification of the populace from heresy and unbelief and rebelliousness; and after that, the completion of the Christian Reconquest by eliminating Gog and Magog, the last vestige of Islam in the Spanish land. That would be the fulfillment of a 500-year-long process. Lastly, toward the end of the century and the advent of the Jubilee year of 1500, the Antichrist, with his army of Jews and Muslims, would be confronted and defeated. The triumphal crusade would end with the reconquest of Jerusalem for Christianity, and in the apocalypse, the offering of a pure Christian paradise to God.

  God’s plan was clear. The instruments for this divine glory were this fertile and pious queen and her diligent, cunning, and brave husband. Through them the prophecy of St. John the Evangelist, her patron saint, and of the book of Revelation would be realized. Spain, as beacon to the world, was entering the countdown to the last days. Isabella would reign as history’s counter to the submissive, sinful, weak-minded Eve, as the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, and as the Apocalyptic Woman of the Bible. She stood, clothed in the sun, st
anding upon the half moon, adorned with a crown of twelve stars, holding her boy-child and heir, Juan, as the Apocalyptic Woman held Jesus. With her feet she would trample the evil serpent, and with her double-edged sword, slay this Devil-Beast with its seven heads and ten horns.

  This perfect queen, together with her husband, the Hidden One, would bring about the New Spain, the New World, the New Jerusalem.

  Early in the new decade of the 1480s, the war over succession was complete. Portugal had ceased to be a threat. The royal police had been established. The crown had pacified the upstart nobles. The Inquisition was getting under way, and the fiscal system was overhauled. And so the internal controls were in place. Ferdinand and Isabella could at last begin to think about their grander vision for the Jubilee and perhaps for the apocalypse: their oft-postponed crusade against the Moors and the final demise of the infidel kingdom on the Spanish peninsula.

  Before the accession of the fiery Muley Aben Hassan to the throne of Granada in 1462, the price of peace between the Christian domain in the north and the Islamic province of Granada in the south was 1,000 pistoles of gold, and sixteen hundred Christian captives. If there were no captives to hand over, Granada was required to deliver to Córdoba an equal number of Moors as slaves. With Muley Aben Hassan, the payment ceased.

  Ferdinand was now ready to press the issue. He sent his ambassadors to Granada to demand a resumption of the tribute as the condition of peace. The result was a rude rebuff. King Ferdinand was to be told that the mint that once was used to produce coins for Christians was now producing scimitars and axes for Moors. Ferdinand could not have been displeased, for the insult was the pretext for the next step in God’s plan. “I will pick out the seeds of this pomegranate one by one,” he had said ominously. (Granada is the Spanish word for “pomegranate,” and the pomegranate was the symbol for the Moorish Caliphate.)

  “Christian Spain does not thirst for rapine and revenge,” a scribe wrote, “but for that pure and holy indignation which every Spanish knight entertains at beholding this beautiful dominion of his ancestors defiled by the footsteps of Infidel usurpers. It is impossible to contemplate this delicious country, and not long to see it restored to the dominion of the true faith, and the sway of the Christian monarchs.” Only the timing for the final war against the Moors was in doubt.

  Muley Aben Hassan proceeded to make the decision for war even easier for the Castilian monarchs. The Moor was greedy, bellicose, and impetuous. His Christian enemies, he knew, would invade his land sooner or later. Why not then a preemptive strike? And so he cast his eye on the various Christian fortresses near his border, and focused on the castle of Zahara, northwest of Ronda and just a few miles into Christian Andalusia.

  Zahara was an imposing fortress, built on a rock outcropping on a mountain peak between Ronda and Medina-Sidonia. The dwellings within its walls were hewn out of rock, and it had but one fiercely guarded entrance. So impregnable was this gate thought to be that ladies of unapproachable virtue across Spain were given a variation of its name, Zahareña. Muley’s spies were telling him that after years of peace, Zahara’s defenses were soft and sloppy. He determined to test them.

  A few days after Christmas in 1481, the sultan marched out of the Alhambra leading his forces to the western frontier under the cover of a ferocious storm. In howling winds and driving rain, his scaling ladders were quietly placed against the castle’s walls, and the Moors surprised the sleeping garrison. The battle was brief and decisive. With the defenders either dead or in chains, the sultan left the place in the care of his men-at-arms and returned home.

  Days later, he buoyantly prepared a lavish celebration for his victory over the Christians, as the bedraggled survivors were marched into Granada. But instead of rejoicing, the common people of Granada were seized with anxiety over the consequences of the reckless attack, for it broke the truce that had given the Moorish state a measure of tranquility. Their anguish increased with the sudden appearance in the Alhambra of a grotesque anchorite named Alfaqui. This ancient hermit, with flaming eyes and piercing voice, lived in a cave in the Sacromonte on a slope north of the Alhambra and rarely ventured out in public. Now, waving a bony finger at the crowd, he shouted,

  “Woe unto Granada. Its hour of desolation approaches. The ruins of Zahara will recoil upon our heads. The end of the empire is at hand.”

  In the Courtyard of the Myrtles in the Alhambra, these warnings were dismissed as the ravings of a crackpot. He was “one of those fanatic infidels possessed by the devil,” wrote one chronicler, “who are sometimes permitted to predict the truth to their followers, but with the proviso that their predictions shall be of no avail.” But outside the palace, his warnings were taken more seriously as people recoiled in horror. The prophet was not finished. With a throng building behind him, he wandered down the hill into the city to continue his diatribe.

  “The peace is broken! The war of extermination has begun. Woe! Woe! to Granada. Its fall is at hand! Desolation shall dwell in its palaces; its strong men shall fall beneath the sword. Its children and maidens shall be led into captivity.”

  When the news of Zahara reached Ferdinand, he feigned shock and indignation and injury. This was the spark he needed to mobilize his Andalusian subjects. The time had come at last to launch his righteous crusade. He knew it and welcomed it. His first order was to put all the Christian fortresses along the border with the Moorish kingdom on high alert.

  The man most affected by these events was Rodrigo Ponce de León, the marquis of Cádiz, for his holdings in Andalusia were vast and included the borderlands with the Moorish kingdom. Zahara had been one of his prize fortresses. Importantly, he was eager to reaffirm and demonstrate his loyalty to the crown, after the embarrassment of having been ordered to return the converso refugees from the Inquisition, and in the hope that the crown would cease its efforts to undermine his independent base.

  In his service the marquis had a considerable corps of spies. Many of them were Moors who had converted to Christianity and who could easily mingle with their Islamic brothers. In January 1482, he dispatched them into the borderlands to watch for further enemy expeditions, but also to gauge the readiness of the Moorish strongholds. Within days, he received an interesting report from one of his most reliable agents that the city of Alhama was ripe for the picking.

  Alhama was deep within the Moors’ kingdom, no more than twenty miles southwest of the city of Granada itself. Significantly, it lay astride the vital strategic road between Granada and Málaga. If that road were cut, it would isolate Granada from its major port and source for reinforcements in North Africa. The town itself was large and prosperous, known since Roman times for its salubrious hot springs and for its commanding fortress, which hovered over the town from a high perch on a rock ledge overlooking a deep gorge. Behind that palisade rose a high sierra. The Alhama River nearly encircled the town.

  Without seeking Ferdinand’s approval, the marquis of Cádiz assembled an impressive force of Andalusians at Marchena, some three thousand light cavalry, four thousand foot soldiers, and a company of engineers. Without informing his soldiers of their exact mission, the marquis led them east through Antequera, the first of the Andalusian towns to fall to the Christian forces seventy years earlier, and then into the slopes around Alhama. On the night of February 5, they reached the environs of the town and moved silently to the rock ledge beneath the walls. As the town slept, a single sentinel patrolled the battlements.

  A squadron of three hundred handpicked commandos now crept silently to the walls, carrying scaling ladders. Soon enough they were over the parapets and into the town. If the town slept initially, it awoke quickly to the alarm, and hand-to-hand combat raged in the streets. It was said that the Moors, sensualists as they were, were weakened by the pleasures of their hot baths, and by their sense of false security. But they outnumbered the Christians, and they fought valiantly for their homes. While the fighting raged, engineers went to work on breaching the walls of the fortres
s. When the breach was accomplished, the battle was drawn; by dusk, Ponce de León held the town. From the dungeons of the fortress, a number of prisoners from Zahara were liberated.

  It was later written that the chivalrous Rodrigo Ponce de León had suffered the pleas of his commanders to evacuate the place, so deep was it within enemy territory, because it could not be defended.

  “God has given the citadel into Christian hands,” he had replied stoutly. “He will no doubt strengthen them to maintain it. We have gained the place with difficulty and bloodshed. It would be a stain upon our honor to abandon it for imagined dangers.”

  Alhama was entrusted to the care of Iñigo López de Mendoza, the second count of Tendilla, a distinguished and highly cultured member of the Mendoza family—a brave, frugal, and pious warrior, and the brother of the Grand Cardinal of Spain. The count was the very model of medieval chivalry and learning, and he sought to instill in his defenders the highest principles of honor, duty, and piety. “A just war is often rendered wicked and disastrous by the manner in which it is conducted,” he is said to have told his soldiers. “The righteousness of our cause is not sufficient to justify corrupt means. A lack of order and obedience among troops may bring ruin and disgrace upon the best-laid plans.”