“Besides this, in order to be able to undertake greater enterprises, always making use of religion, he devoted himself to the pious cruelty of driving the [conversos] out of his kingdom and despoiling them—this example could not be more rare. These actions sprang one out of another in such a way that between the two he never gave his enemies space to work in tranquility against him.” Ferdinand, Machiavelli concluded, “never preaches anything but peace and loyalty and is the greatest enemy of both.”
In Isabella, the metaphor was different but no less grandiose or ironic. As she acquiesced in the Inquisition, she was lionized and deified by the very conversos she was complicit in sending to the funeral pyre. Old and new Christians alike saw her as their strong and generous saviour. Converso poets saw her as the Virgin Mary incarnate, whom God had placed on earth and on the throne to protect them from the howling dogs around them. “You Queen are the figure/who rids us of our evil,” wrote a converso friar. “Your gentle beauty is painted/in colors more divine than mortal./If, enlightened queen/God made you/so unique and so great/you must be in everything/as to be the chosen one.” And another poet, Antón de Montoro, went further: “Great sovereign queen/from you the son of God/received human form/ How beautiful, saintly, and discreet/that perfect Virgin/accepted by divinity/and that is why through you/we win glory.”
To this magical court, puffed up with its own righteousness and sense of messianic mission, Abravanel was being summoned for a decidedly secular task. His skill in extracting vast taxes from the reluctant hands of the powerful and the wealthy was legendary. From his success at raising the support for the Portuguese crown in the War of Succession, his reputation for building a war chest preceded him. The Spanish monarchs were now feeling the pinch of military expenditures. After the defeat in the Axarquia west of Málaga a year before, Ferdinand knew full well that his War Against the Moors would be harsh and protracted. It required the mobilization of all the resources of northern Spain. Don Isaac’s talents, therefore, were useful.
It is not surprising that Abravanel overlooked the quiet and sinister process that was well under way against Spanish Jews. To the extent that he took account of it, he ascribed the Jewish suffering to the Jews themselves for their own heresy. The anti-Jewish policy was not instituted all at once, but rather piecemeal over a period of years. In the royal court itself, Jews were still prominent as physicians, treasurers, tax collectors, and lawyers. Had not the Queen Isabella said only a few years before: “All Jews in my realm are mine and under my care and my protection, and it belongs to me to defend and aid them and keep justice”?
The chief rabbi of the court remained the venerable Don Abraham Senior. His special relationship with Ferdinand and Isabella was secure and of long standing, for he had been a matchmaker in their nuptials and an early supporter of Isabella in her conflict with her half brother, Enrique IV. Through Abraham Senior’s auspices the fortress of Segovia, his hometown, had been turned over to Isabella’s supporters, after the rabbi had persuaded its commander that Enrique was unfit to rule. He became the chief tax collector of Castile, and through that strategic post, the wealthiest man in Spain. As the country’s largest landlord, he owned houses, estates, lands, orchards and vineyards throughout the realm, from which he gained income in leases and grants and sharecrops. In Segovia alone, besides his own commodious mansion in the heart of the Jewish quarter, he owned fifteen other houses, including one fine one that he bought after its converso owner was burned at the stake. In Ávila he had four houses on the main square, and elsewhere in the kingdom the crown ceded properties to him to manage.
Beyond his religious post, Abraham Senior was also the supreme judge of Castilian Jews under the Talmudic law, which was recognized by the state. In this capacity he presided over many legal disputes among his people. Though he was more skeptic than true believer, he conducted a house of prayer in his Segovia mansion, at whose services conversos and even some Old Christians were quietly in attendance. Through the 1480s he was a staunch and effective advocate for his people. He did not shrink from confronting the intimidating Torquemada. In 1486, he complained bitterly to the king’s supreme court about the preaching of a friar in Torquemada’s Monastery of Santa Cruz. The friar, named Antonio de la Peña, had threatened “to set up his pulpit in the Jewish quarter and cause such a commotion that the whole city would not be able to remedy the matter.” In another sermon, Peña said, “If the Christians of this city do not light a fire on the hill, the wolves would not be frightened off.” After Abraham Senior complained about this scurrilous and incendiary ranting, the ferment quieted down some. A year later, the rabbi did his best, without success, to prevent the expulsion of Jews from Andalusia.
His loyalty to the queen was total, and she, in turn, granted her chief rabbi a lifetime pension of 100,000 maravedis. In 1480, the Cortes of Toledo (as it was handing down stringent measures against the Jews generally) added to this annuity by rewarding him another 50,000 maravedis for his stellar service. He was exempt from the restrictions placed on other Jews for dress and travel. When the aging rabbi traveled, he was accompanied on the road with a retinue of thirty servants and guards on mules, and he wore an immense gold pendant around his neck. Yet, if Senior enjoyed the great favor of the court, he was distrusted by many in his own Jewish community, who protested that the rabbi had not been elected as their leader, but appointed by anti-Semitic rulers. Some Jews questioned the sincerity of his Jewish beliefs, to the point that he was called the “Hater of Light.”
At the Cortes of Tarazona, Don Isaac Abravanel was persuaded to enter the royal service as a tax collector, under the supervision of Don Abraham Senior, who was then seventy-two years old; Abravanel was twenty-five years younger. From 1483 onward, they were to become intimate friends and colleagues. Ironically, these two pillars of the Jewish community would be responsible for collecting a heavy tax on their own people known as the Alfarda, or Stranger’s Tax, to support the war against Granada.
Don Isaac Abravanel and Don Abraham Senior relied on the illusion that they were indispensable to the crown and therefore protected. And in turn, the Jews of Spain labored under the illusion that by virtue of their leaders’ privileged position with the monarchs, they too would be protected. As long as they enjoyed the favor of monarchs, Abravanel and Senior would be as a “shield and a wall for their race,” wrote Abravanel’s son later, “and would deliver the sufferers from their oppressors, heal differences and keep fierce lions at bay.”
Not exactly. When the apocalypse finally came for Spanish Jews in 1492, these two leading rabbis, statesmen, and ministers of finance chose radically different paths.
QUEEN ISABELLA I
(Museo del Prado, Spain)
KING FERDINAND II
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
ENRIQUE IVOF CASTILE
(Biblioteca Nacional, Spain)
TORQUEMADA
(Biblioteca Nacional, Spain)
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
(Biblioteca de las Indias, Seville)
BOABDIL, THE LAST MOORISH KING OF GRANADA
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
JOÃO II, king of Portugal
(Museo lisboeta de la Marina)
ISAAC ABRAVANEL
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
POPE ALEXANDER VI (RODRIGO BORGIA)
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
SEVILLE
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
MÁLAGA
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
GUADALUPE
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
ST. DOMINIC
(Museo del Prado, Spain)
PEDRO ARBUÉS, INQUISITOR OF ARAGON
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
TALAVERA, ISABELLA‘S CONFESSOR
(Curia Eclesiástica de Grenada)
AUTO-DA-FE
(Museo del Prado, Spain)
ST. DOMINIC PRESIDING OVER THE B
URNING OF QUR‘ANS
(Museo del Prado, Spain)
BOABDIL‘S SWORD
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
13
The Valiant, the Powerful,
and the Unlucky
RONDA
In the two years that followed the major defeat of the Christians west of Málaga in March 1483, and the major defeat of the Moors a month later at Lucena where the sultan Boabdil was captured, the holy war between the two sides had devolved into a struggle over organization for the long haul. On the Christian side, Ferdinand gradually mobilized the complete chivalry of his empire, summoning it with the clarion call of crusade. In April 1484, 11,000 light cavalry and 25,000 foot soldiers gathered in Córdoba for the summer campaign. As they did so, Ferdinand said of the war to his queen, “It is so just and holy an enterprise that among all the Christian princes nothing is more honored, nor can it be. Truly, this war has the help of God and the love of the people.”
Perhaps. But two years of conflict had cost his kingdom dearly in men, material, and money. Much ravaging of the countryside had been enjoyed by both sides, but no major bastion had changed hands. Little had been gained.
An unexpected shift in leadership had shored up the weakness of the Moors. The pathetic figure of Boabdil had been marginalized. He languished in splendid isolation in Almería, sunk in self-pity, his treason well understood by the people and his inadequacies deplored even by his tart-tongued mother. “It is a feeble mind that waits for the turn of fortune’s wheel,” Ayxa de Hora hissed at her son. “The brave mind seizes upon the moment and turns it to advantage. Take the field, son, and you may drive danger before you. Remain cowering at home, and fortune besieges you in your own house. By bold enterprise you may regain your splendid throne in Granada. By passive forbearance, you will forfeit even this pathetic throne in Almería.”
Of course, this was the same acerbic advice she had given in prodding her son into action the year before, the action that resulted in catastrophe and capture. How was he to accomplish such a thing, anyhow? He had few followers and no soldiers. “Evil indeed was the day of my birth,” he moaned, “and truly am I named El Zogoybi, the unlucky.”
At the Alhambra in Granada, his father, Muley Aben Hassan, was old and infirm and incompetent. Nearly blind, surrounded by satraps and sycophants, railing at his fate, he was often bedridden with various ailments, and incapable of action. His fiery, impetuous nature had become a flicker.
And yet between the feeble, treasonous Boabdil in Almería and sick old Muley in Granada, an alternative had arisen in Málaga. He was El Zagal the Valiant, the brother of Muley and the hero of the Moors’ great victory west of Málaga. On the streets of the capital, as seemed to happen often in times of grave crisis, the old hermit, Alfaqui, emerged from his cave in Sacromonte to berate the crowd.
“You have been choosing and changing between one man worn out by age and infirmities, unable to sally forth against the foe, and another who is an apostate, a traitor, a deserter from his throne, a fugitive among the enemies of his nation, a man fated to misfortune,” he cried. “In a time of war like this, only he who can wield a sword is fit to hold the scepter of power. You need not look far. Allah has sent such a man. You know who I mean. He is your general, the invincible El Zagal whose name stands for the courage of the faithful and who can strike terror in the hearts of the unbelievers.”
This was Jihad, the fifth pillar of the faith, the moral duty of all Moors to rise in defense of their homeland and their faith. The flag of Jihad had to be raised against the banner of Crusade. God is Great—Alihu Akbar. Of unbelievers who attack you, especially in the Inviolable Place of Worship, the Koran says: “Fight in the way of Allah, against those who fight against you, but do not transgress limits. Lo! Allah does not love aggressors.” And in this fight against aggressors, “slay them wherever ye find them and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter.”
Great God He might be, but Allah had not prevented the forces of the unbeliever from penetrating deep into Moorish land the summer before. The invaders had ravaged the meadows around Antequera, burning fields, vineyards, and olive orchards, and stealing whatever livestock they could find. Before the small but significant alcazaba (fortress) of Alora, a mere fifteen kilometers northwest of Málaga, the Christians had deployed their terrible new engines of warfare. Brought to Spain by French, German, and Italian mercenaries, the new artillery included a devastating cannon called a bombard, capable of hurling 200-pound boulders and iron-cased, gunpowder-filled shells, which quickly reduced the tall, thin-walled towers of the outpost to ruin and threw the population into confusion.
With this new artillery, the age of the armored knight and the turreted castle was moving into its twilight. The arrow and spear of the chivalrous age had given way to cannon and catapult, fired at a safe remove from the fray. The battle was given over to the engineers. As this devastating weapon of mass destruction became commonplace in the War Against the Moors, a Moorish cavalier would lament:
“What good is all the prowess of knighthood against these cowardly engines that murder from afar!”
After nine days of bombardment, Alora’s walls and towers were rubble, and the fortress was in Christian hands. The nearby town of Sentinel and some forty other villages had surrendered without a fight, for their terrified populations had heard about the fearsome new artillery and preferred to preserve their towns intact. Before the Christian forces withdrew, they penetrated into the vega of Granada, coming almost to the gates of the Alhambra itself. The demonstration was effective, for old Muley Aben Hassan promptly reversed himself and offered an armistice and a resumption of payments of vassalage. It was too late. This time, Ferdinand rejected the offer out of hand. Total victory was now his goal.
Meanwhile, El Zagal was consolidating his grip on the Moors’ empire. Appearing before the walls of the Alcazar in Almería, he demanded that Boabdil be turned over.
“Where is the traitor, Boabdil?” he shouted.
“There is no traitor more treacherous than you,” shouted the feisty Ayxa in reply. “I trust that he is safe and preparing to take revenge on you for your usurpation.”
Safe Boabdil was, safe in Christian hands. He had slipped out of his own dominion and was again being toasted by Christian knights in Córdoba. They would soon turn him back with instructions to foment civil war more vigorously.
Thus stood the situation in the spring of 1485 as Christian soldiers flooded the streets once again for the seasonal campaign.
In the council of war that spring, Ferdinand, Isabella, and their generals settled on Málaga as their main objective for the initial weeks of the year’s campaign. If they could not actually take the well-defended port, they could at least isolate it and pick up some important satellite towns along the way. At first, this plan seemed sound, as the Christian force of 9,000 cavalry and 20,000 foot soldiers thundered its way through the Val de Catama, taking the towns of Coín and Catama after week-long sieges.
Even before the Christian army moved out of Córdoba on April 5, however, El Zagal the Valiant One knew from spies of his enemy’s plan. He had worked diligently to fortify Málaga, knowing that sooner or later his port would be attacked. While the city’s defenses were formidable, El Zagal viewed them as inadequate, especially with these reports of Ferdinand’s new super weapons of bombardment and Castile’s effective boycott of the southern coast.
When the report came that the Christian army was approaching his city, El Zagal gathered a thousand of his best fighters and sallied forth to engage it. The ensuing skirmish was violent and brief; many were killed on both sides. But it caused the Christian side to reconsider its war plan. In the aftermath the marquis of Cádiz, Ferdinand’s most distinguished field commander, advised a change of strategy. The Christian force was insufficient for a major siege, he argued. They should ponder their alternatives.
The key to the western defenses of the Moor
ish state was Ronda, a fortified town some thirty miles north of the coast and sixty miles due west of Málaga. This bastion enjoyed an utterly remarkable natural circumstance which in medieval terms—but for the factor of human folly—practically defined the concept of impregnability. Within a region of wild mountains, the town was set upon a high butte, the sides of which were great chimneys of limestone 200 feet in height. The north side was a yawning ravine, El Tajo, through which the Guadalevín River ran. Across this narrow gorge was a single bridge to a well-fortified gate that was later called “the Moor’s armchair.” The approach to the lower, more vulnerable southern side of the butte was protected by the massive, turreted alcazaba, or fortress. A fierce corps of veteran mountain fighters defended it, and its mayor was an important and experienced Moorish general named Hamet El Zegri.
Dogs of God Page 17