The itinerant visionary made his way to the maritime provinces in southern Spain. He came with no introductions and no standing and no prospects. He was a foreign widower, penniless, and dragging behind him his five-year-old son, Diego. To no observer would he look like a worthy sea captain or a royal courtier. But his instincts were true, and his luck infallible. As his ship moved up the Rio Tinto to Palos, Columbus noticed the Monastery of La Rábida on the bluff above the river, and he went there first.
The father and son must have been quite a sight. Dusty, hungry, disheveled, and exhausted from the voyage and the long walk from Palos, Columbus pounded on the door of the monastery. When it was answered, he asked first for bread and water, as if he was an ordinary beggar and his son a pathetic urchin. Consistent with their reputation, the Franciscans welcomed the pair warmly. And then Columbus blurted out his fantastic and improbable story: that he had just come from the royal court of the King of Portugal, that he offered to lead an expedition of discovery across the western ocean, and that he had been ridiculed by courtiers. He had come to Spain in hope of making the same proposition to the Spanish crown, and to Palos specifically, because Filipa’s sister and her husband lived in nearby Huelva. As his luck would have it, the monastery had a visiting brother, Antonio de Marchena, who was practiced in astrology. He was intrigued.
Importantly, the monastery’s father superior, Brother Juan Pérez, was well connected. He had served Queen Isabella as a youth, and he was friendly with the count of Medina-Sidonia. An audience with the powerful duke was promptly arranged. Columbus’s Spanish enterprise was under way. The count of Medina-Sidonia possessed the resources to support the venture, and Columbus made a good impression upon him. But the duke was still trying to mend his fences with the Spanish sovereigns. If he funded the expedition, and if new lands really were discovered, his tenuous relations with Ferdinand and Isabella would be complicated further. Moreover, he had no authority to confer titles on anyone; that could only be done by royals. While the discussions were under way, the duke was abruptly called to the royal court in Madrid on important business.
Under the guidance of his Franciscan patron, Columbus then turned to the count of Medina Celi. At his port of Puerto de Santa María, ten kilometers across the Bay of Cádiz from Cádiz itself, the estimable count owned a prospering merchant fleet. He too was captivated by his visitor. “I should like to have taken a whack at it,” he wrote later of Columbus’s proposals, “for I had three or four caravels, and he asked me for no more.” But the count too realized the complications of supporting Columbus’s voyage, especially during a time of war, without royal permission. The proper thing, he suggested, was for him to arrange an audience with the sovereigns. Columbus was not averse. Until the request could make its way through the proper channels, the count of Medina Celi took Columbus and Diego into his house and kept them as his guests for many months.
On January 20, 1486, Columbus arrived in Córdoba for his much-anticipated audience with the monarchs, only to find that weeks before, the royals had moved north to Madrid. He found himself in a city that had become a military camp. Córdoba, the site of the most beautiful mosque ever built by the Moors, the Mezquita, famous for its forest of geometric striated arches, was now the base of operations for the War Against the Moors. Everywhere, drums beat, trumpets sounded, and horses jostled in the armies of the colorful and powerful nobles. Through the good offices of the count of Medina Celi, Columbus was put in the care of the royal treasurer, Alonso de Quintanilla, who took the wayfarer in as his guest.
In the four months Columbus waited, he was not entirely idle, for he took up with a peasant girl named Beatriz Enriquez de Arana. She was soon pregnant with Columbus’s second son, Fernando, later to become his father’s biographer. When he was not carousing, he established contacts with a network of royal underlings who might help him press his case.
As Columbus languished in Córdoba, the forces of Spanish history ground forward. Just before the previous Christmas, on December 15, 1485, the royal court was in Alcalá de Henares, fifteen miles east of Madrid. This town had become the home of Don Isaac Abravanel, where the court rabbi busied himself as chief tax collector for the Cardinal of Spain, Pedro González de Mendoza. During these days in Alcalá, Queen Isabella gave birth to a daughter named Catherine, known better in later life as Catherine of Aragon, the unhappy first wife of Henry VIII of England. “The birth of a son would have caused the King and Queen greater happiness,” the royal chronicler wrote at the time, “for a succession depending on an only son inspires no small fear, and the fecundity of their daughters presaged difficulties for future relationships.” *3
While Isabella attended to her newborn, Ferdinand concentrated on the Inquisition in Aragon. In a pious proclamation, he tried to shift the blame for confiscations to Pope Innocent VIII. The king was merely executing the pope’s order “by virtue of his obedience to the Holy Mother Church.” Such expressions of piety surrounding royal theft would certainly have pleased Machiavelli. Actually, the pope had only provided a vague authority for the confiscations; it was Ferdinand who decided the specifics of what land and property should be seized. Early in 1486, the king learned that the assassins of the inquisitor in Aragon, Pedro Arbués, were hiding in Tudela, a border town just inside Navarre. Ferdinand threatened war unless the culprits were handed over, which they promptly were.
Resistance still thrived in southern Aragon, in the lands around Teruel. Blaming the defiance on Jews, Ferdinand resorted to a measure that should have resounded through the land. He expelled all Jews from this area. Thinking he was onto a good thing, he followed by expelling Jews from Saragossa and a half dozen other cities. The royal order of banishment bore the fingerprints of Torquemada. “It appears from experience that the damaging inroads of heresy among Christians have resulted from communication between Jews and New Christians,” it read. “The only effective remedy is to remove these Jews from among the New Christians, as we have already done in Seville, Córdoba, and Jaén. A formal order for said expulsion will accordingly be prepared by the devout Father [Torquemada], prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz.”
The reach of Torquemada now stretched across the peninsula. In February 1484, Pope Innocent VIII, under pressure from Ferdinand, fired the local inquisitors in Barcelona, and replaced them with Torquemada. The Grand Inquisitor, meanwhile, was staging ever greater spectacles. On February 12, 1486, in Toledo, 750 lapsed Christians were paraded through the streets from the Church of San Pedro Mártir to the cathedral, where they were to be reconciled to the Christian faith. In the freezing cold, the men walked barefoot and hatless, but the women had it worse. They were absolutely naked, adding leering lasciviousness to the other roiling emotions that an auto-da-fe induced. All carried candles, as the feverish crowd taunted them along the way.
The royal entourage moved on to the holy town of Guadalupe, where Isabella satisfied her piety by building an oratorio for her prayers, commissioning the building of a royal hostelry to be funded by the inquisition, and speaking with Church officials about the three friars who had recently been burned in the town square. In late April, the sovereigns arrived back in Córdoba.
Under the guidance of his benefactor, the royal treasurer, Columbus shed his shabby clothes for the velvet and brocade that suited a royal supplicant, and early in May 1486, he was brought into the royal presence. The audience had been offered as a courtesy to the count of Medina Celi, for the minds of the king and queen were focused elsewhere, the king’s on the upcoming spring offensive against several Moorish strongholds, the queen’s torn between her duties as a mother and as the quartermaster for the army. Moreover, they were disturbed by stirrings of rebellion far to the north in Galicia; this would soon have to be addressed. A fantastic plan for discovery across the foreboding dark sea was scarcely on the fringes. Queen Isabella had signaled as much to the count of Medina Celi.
“She did not hold this business likely to come off,” the count wrote later.
/> Still, this brash, handsome, eloquent Italian commanded attention. In the royal court, his was a fascinating presence. Most of all, he was earnest in his representations and in his certainties, and he had thought out carefully how he might be most persuasive. His presentation blended science and evangelism, wealth, geopolitics, and mystery. The science might bore them, he imagined, but it would lend weight and gravitas to his pitch. A noble quest to bring Christianity to the horde of benighted infidels in Marco Polo’s Orient would appeal to Queen Isabella, just as would his more soaring flights of fantasy, while dreams of conquest in the golden-roofed reaches of Cipangu would appeal especially to Ferdinand. The king too would surely see how such a brilliant stroke of discovery could catapult Spain beyond its arch rival Portugal in its global reach. If Spain could find a shortcut to the Orient, the discovery would trump all the plodding Portuguese expansions down the coast of dark Africa.
The monarchs listened to this fascinating personage attentively. Columbus and Isabella were the same age, and an instant bond seemed to spring up between them, a bond that may even have possessed the blush of sexual attraction. At this infatuation, Ferdinand was characteristically and understandably standoffish and inscrutable, shielding his first favorable impression behind a stony countenance. When the time came for them to respond, the monarchs did what all decision makers do when a tangential matter takes up their valuable time. They dispatched the proposition into lesser hands. The man was interesting. His theories had merit. The matter should be pursued. A commission of experts should be gathered. Perhaps Columbus should meet the Grand Cardinal, Pedro González de Mendoza, the “third king of Spain.” Since a decision would rest on the technical and scientific merits of the case, he should also meet Archbishop Hernando de Talavera, the reigning intellectual of the court.
Columbus went away from this first meeting with real hope. The sovereigns had not said no. They were opening more doors. A commission was to be established, and hopefully, it would have on it no bishop who would mock him.
Within days the monarchs stood before the battlements of Loja, Boabdil’s lair, on the northern frontier. The meeting with Columbus had been quickly forgotten. It was not even mentioned by the court chronicler. The defeat of the Moors was their first and all-consuming preoccupation.
With the warning of the old hermit to be a sovereign rather than a slave still ringing in his ear, Boabdil took charge of his northern garrison of Loja and promptly attempted to be both sovereign and slave. He sent an obsequious message to Ferdinand, informing the Castilian king of his arrangement with El Zagal, and reconfirming his status as a vassal. As such, Ferdinand was not to attack Loja. In return, beyond the annual duty and the return of captives, Boabdil promised safe passage through his lands for the Castilian armies as they moved against the strongholds of his uncle in the south.
So absurd was this shameful offer that Boabdil himself could scarcely have expected it to be taken seriously. It was hard to say who had more contempt for Boabdil now, Ferdinand or El Zagal. The only questions were how brief would be this partition of the Moorish kingdom, and who would take over the north first.
Ferdinand’s reply dripped with scorn. By his union with his uncle, Boabdil was no longer a vassal but an enemy combatant, the king scrawled furiously. By this alliance Boabdil had forfeited his rights of protection and forbearance. Granada would be Spanish. Boabdil should prepare to be attacked. Within days, Ferdinand’s armies were moving on Loja. As usual, the marquis of Cádiz, the formidable Rodrigo Ponce de León, was the field general, now with five thousand cavalry, twelve thousand foot soldiers, and most important, a battery of bombards. Ferdinand’s determination was great. The memory of his humiliation at this place three years earlier fueled his passion further.
Three years had made a big difference. Within Loja’s walls was no fierce old defender like Ali Atar, but a wimpering, muddleheaded weakling. Still, Boabdil had reinforced his garrison in anticipation of the coming fight by deepening the trenches and raising the berms higher around the outside walls. Loja would be no easy prize. In short order, the marquis of Cádiz took over the hill of the Albohacen overlooking the fortress and brought his catapults and bombards forward. To his credit, Boabdil did not cower, but sallied out flamboyantly on a magnificent steed across the bridge over the Genil River. He fought capably until he was twice wounded by the thrust of a spear and had to be carried from the battlefield. The terrible bombardment then began, and the Battle of Loja was over in two days. It ended yet another humiliation for El Chico. The wounded Boabdil was brought out of the battered town on a stretcher. Before Ferdinand, he stooped to grovel, finally falling on his knees to kiss Ferdinand’s feet, before he was sent off south to cause more trouble.
These sieges began to take on a certain sameness. Loja was handed over to Ferdinand; again bedraggled Christian prisoners of war crawled out of their dungeons. The defenders were permitted to leave for Castile or Granada or exile abroad, and new settlers were brought in to populate the town. And then Isabella’s religious police moved in to transform the mosques into Christian churches.
After the fall of Loja, the bastion of Illora to the north—known as the right eye of Granada—fell. The Christians then stood before the more important fortress of Moclín, only thirty miles north of Granada. A year before, the count of Cabra had been ordered to take this bastion with a hundred knights and three thousand soldiers, but El Zagal had been ready with an even greater force of cavalry and foot soldiers, and the Christians had been turned back. But in July 1486 Ferdinand, with a greater force, was determined to push the conflict forward to its final resolution.
Outside of the Alhambra itself, Moclín was perhaps the most awe-inspiring of all the Moorish fortresses. It perched on a spire of rock atop a mountain 5,000 feet high. The expanse of Granada’s plain stretched out dramatically to the magnificent, snow-covered peaks of the Sierra Nevada, which scored their sharp lines along the southern horizon. Moclín commanded the road to Córdoba and overlooked one of the few deep passages through the mountains. Its walls circled the mountaintop in coils, and its square towers were among the most imposing in the Islamic kingdom.
As if they were anticipating a last stand, the Moors had emptied the fortress of its women, children, and elderly, for it was now appreciated that the terror of these groups at the falling bombs had contributed to the confusion and chaos in Ronda. Once again, the new age artillery carried the battle. Here, the gunners timed their shots so that eight or ten balls would land at once. One memorable projectile from a bombard went spiraling through the air, giving off sparks, and landed on a tower that housed a magazine of Moorish gunpowder. The resulting explosion was so spectacular and awe-inspiring that, when the smoke cleared, only a pile of rocks remained. It was later asserted that the Christian God had guided the projectile toward its direct hit. When the Battle of Moclín was over in a day, the strains of the Te Deum filled the air, followed by Christian soldiers falling to their knees and mouthing the words Benedictum qui venit in nomine Domini—Blessed are those who come in the name of the Lord.
After the sad evacuation of the town, and when it was safe for ceremony, the queen arrived in glory. Isabella rode on a mule, seated upon a saddle of silver. In her hands were reins of silk, embroidered in gold. She wore a luminous velour dress and a black hat. A gossamer veil hid her face. Behind her rode her daughter Isabel, similarly dressed, also upon a mule whose tack was silver and whose reins were embroidered in gold. Behind the princess came ten ladies-in-waiting. Victorious soldiers lined the sides of the road. As their gracious queen passed, they lowered their colorful battle flags in reverence and affection.
From the opposite direction came the king, dressed in a suit of yellow silk and also wearing a hat. Behind him rode various knights, including a number of foreign nobles who had been drawn to this noble cause of Crusade. Notable among them were masters of artillery from Lombardy, France, and Switzerland, and an Englishman, Count Scales of Lancaster, who was dressed entirel
y in white, a French hat festooned with gaudy feathers cocked rakishly on his head, while his chestnut horse was draped in blue silk to the ground. When the monarchs met before the assemblage, Ferdinand dismounted and Isabella removed her gossamer veil. He kissed her lightly on the cheek, and then turned to his daughter Isabel, kissing her hard on the mouth.
When they were finally in the royal tents, they spread the map of Al Andalus before them and rejoiced at their successes. The forces of Christ the King now held all the towns and castles west of Málaga.
15
The Learned Men
of Salamanca
SALAMANCA
In the fall of 1486, the Spanish monarchs were well satisfied with their military accomplishments. Releasing their army for a winter of rest, they packed up and moved north to Salamanca, where they put their minds to other pressing business. An obstreperous renegade-knight was acting up in Galicia in the northwest corner of the peninsula and needed to be silenced. There was a succession rivalry in the vassal state of Navarre that needed to be straightened out. A knight had unjustly sentenced one of his subjects to death, and when the queen sent her adjudicator, his interference was resisted. Not to be trifled with, the queen ordered the houses of the rebel destroyed. And tensions with France remained high along the northeastern frontier with Catalonia.
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