Another writer, Bermudez de Pedraza, commented directly upon the Albayzín:
[The houses] were delightful, embellished with damascened work, with courtyards and orchards, beautified with pools and fountain basins with running water …
The Albayzín had reached some apotheosis it would never enjoy again. The mosque offered a courtyard full of lemon trees, and flowering trees found their way into the names of things. There was a “Mosque of the Walnut Tree,” a “Street of the Fountain of the Cherry Tree,” a “Promontory of the Almond Trees.” Up on the hill, in the area of the original settlements of los Iberos and the Romans, were public squares, a hospital, markets, hotels, warehouses, and the ateliers of silk spinners. In the lower part of the Albayzín was the legendary Maristan, a sumptuous building dedicated exclusively to the care of the mentally ill. The barrio as a whole was a hive, with labyrinthine streets so narrow you could reach across to a window on the other side. The minuscule branching lanes seemed infinite to travelers. Arches of stone stood over tiny streets, and tunnels linked some houses to one another. Balconies, sheds, rooftop gardens, and latticed windows set above cul-de-sacs all complicated further the layout of the barrio. Some quarters had their own gates, for closing off the neighborhood at night. The overall complexity of the place was such that Munzer thought it looked like a hillside covered entirely with swallow’s nests; though he found the houses clean, almost all with their own cisterns and plumbing.
The last competent Nasrid king, Muhammad V, died in 1391. He completed, following on the work of his father, Yusuf I, the construction of the Alhambra. The two hundred eighty-eight years from the arrival of the Zirids, in 1013, to the last of the Nasrids in 1391, offered a beauty of complex power. That beauty would suffer the torments history brings often to such a comely target. Yet the life force in the work done could not be extinguished. And we can learn from the story of the fall of Granada, its aftermath and dark detail.
INTO THE SLOW INFERNO
Late in the fifteenth century, in 1469, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile made their famous marriage. It was not a century in which Granada had enjoyed prescient leadership. In fact, the most powerful families in Granada marked the century with treachery, the extermination of rivals, the revolt of sons against fathers, and other episodes of imbecility. All this destructive governance culminated in the sultanate of the ludicrous Boabdil, a onetime captive of Ferdinand who was freed to return to Granada. Ferdinand knew his man. For it was Boabdil who would bear down on Granada with the full weight of his fear and vulgarity and hasten the end of the city by his useless quarreling and confusion.
In 1491, Ferdinand and Isabel’s armies besieged the city and denied it the bounty of the vega’s agricultural lands. Granada was starved into submission. With famine increasing, a surrender was negotiated, on terms set down in what is known as the Articles of Capitulation, signed by the king and queen. They make splendid reading today for the express goodwill that shines there. Let us treat ourselves to four brief passages, from a document that is dead center in the history of Spain and of Europe:
3. Isabel, Ferdinand, and Prince Juan [their son] would after the surrender accept all Granadans … “great and small, men and women,” as their vassals and natural subjects. [They are] guaranteed to remain in their “houses, estates, and hereditaments, now and for all time and for ever … nor would they have their estates and property taken from them … rather they would be honored and respected.”
4. Their highnesses and their successors will ever afterwards allow the King, [civilian] and military leaders, and good men and all the common people, great or small, to live in their own religion, and not permit that their mosques be taken from them, not their minarets nor their muezzins … nor will they disturb the uses and customs which they observe.
21. Law suits which arise between Moors will be judged by their law … as they customarily have … but if the suit should arise between a Christian and a Moor, then it will be judged by a Christian judge and Moorish qadi, in order that neither side may have any grounds for complaint.
29. No Moor will be forced to become a Christian against his or her will …
These passages illustrate the tenor of the document as a whole, which reconfirms and extends the promises of protection for religion, property, and custom. It is a document wholly in the spirit of Al-Andalus. The Muslims were to be treated with tolerance and respect, in the present and for all time—such was the commitment of the sovereigns of Spain. It was as if Ferdinand and Isabel had looked carefully into the eight hundred years of Al-Andalus, under the administration of Muslim caliphs or Christian kings, both with the active and brilliant help of the Jewish community of Spain. It was as if they had studied the achievements of the past centuries in the arts, in poetry, music, science, and technology, and wanted just such energies in their own kingdom. It was as if they wanted to honor the accomplishments of the period and the wisdom of their own Christian forebears. In reading the Capitulations, one wants to salute the genius of two intelligent rulers, who at their moment of triumph looked into the past, so as to provision their nation for the future.
Even today, one can walk around the Albayzín and imagine the hope that must have arisen in these streets. A document full of justice, noteworthy for its fairness and decency, issued directly and personally by the monarchs, now guaranteed for all time the continuance and thriving of Al-Andalus, medieval Europe’s culture of genius.
Ferdinand and Isabel lied. It was a lie of such horrific grandeur that we live today with the consequences. An important clue to the lie was in the one discordant note in the Capitulations:
48. The Jews native to Granada, Albayzín … and all other places contained in these Capitulations, will benefit from them, on condition that those who do not become Christians cross to North Africa within three years counting from December 8 of this year.
Isabel and Ferdinand formally took possession of the Alhambra on January 2, 1492. In their new palace, they set to work immediately and in secret to draft an Edict of Expulsion for the entire Jewish community of Spain. It was completed swiftly and signed on March 31, 1492. The edict was withheld for a month, then was proclaimed publicly in Granada and throughout the country. The Jewish quarter in Granada was to be demolished immediately. The Jews, all of them, had three months to leave. All of their assets that could not be carried had to be sold. Family houses were bartered for an ass; vineyards for a piece of cloth. Even in the case of a sale, the Jews were forbidden to take into exile any gold, silver, or coined money. What is more, the Edict of Expulsion went on to say that, after the three months, if any Christian “shall dare to receive, protect, defend, and hold publicly or secretly any Jew or Jewess,” then he would forfeit the entirety of his wealth, possessions, royal grants, and inheritance. These absurd conditions effectively transferred the preponderance of Jewish wealth to Christian hands. If they had wealth remaining, they were systematically robbed of it, by means of extortion rackets, embarkation fees, looting of concealed assets, or cancellation of debts owed them. At sea, pirates awaited them, and in North Africa, they were attacked and sometimes enslaved.
To avoid such confiscation, there were, of course, numerous conversions, as there had been in the decades previously. But the edict achieved its goal: Isabel and Ferdinand wiped out the oldest and most talented Jewish community in Europe, and one of the foremost in world history. And they did not rest content with such destruction. The Muslims were next, and the action was in the Albayzín.
The respect for Islam and the protection of property granted the Muslims was for “… now and for all time and forever.” All time and forever turned out to be seven years. But for the Muslims, those seven years gave them hope. Hernando Talavera, the archbishop of Granada, and the count of Tendilla, the mayor of the city, worked with tact and dedication to see the Capitulations honored. Talavera, though a vitriolic anti-Semitic propagandist, thought that the visible grace of Christian practice would lead, in the long term, to t
he voluntary conversion of Muslims. He even counseled his priests to learn Arabic. There were disquieting signs, though. Especially the policy to isolate Muslims in their own neighborhood. If they lived in other parts of Granada, they were forcibly moved to the historic Albayzín, and the Christians there moved elsewhere with royal assistance. Ominously, this separation of non-Christians into their own ghettos had been the policy, slowly enforced, of Ferdinand and Isabel for over two decades.
Replacing Talavera in 1499, Cardenal Ximenes de Cisneros, confessor to Queen Isabel, had other ideas. Cisneros had been a key negotiator, in 1497, for Ferdinand and Isabel in the marriage contract between their daughter and the king of Portugal, Manuel. Portugal, like the rest of the Iberian peninsula, had at the time a well-established Muslim population. It also had the only remaining Jewish population in the Iberian peninsula. But the king and queen of Spain, with Cisneros as one of their key counselors, had a plan. As a condition of the marriage, they forced Manuel to promise not only to expel the Jewish population, but—and this was unprecedented—the Muslims as well. The terms of the expulsions we may recognize. The Jews had to leave by a set date, they could depart only from Lisbon, and those who did not meet the deadline were enslaved. Yet there was a further condition: the authorities forbade the children of Jewish families to depart with their parents; the children were to be seized and taken away to be raised as Christians. As to the Muslims, they were forced, in an astonishing and diabolical turn, to move to … Spain! An exit fee was required, of course. We shall see the fate prepared for them, to which preparation Cisneros now devoted himself.
Ensconced in the Albayzín, Cisneros first distributed rich gifts to Muslim leaders, to encourage conversion. When the results did not satisfy him, he made it known that Muslims who did not convert would risk imprisonment and torture. The reaction was what we would expect: despair, disbelief, an incendiary atmosphere in the barrio.
Cisneros meant what he said. For he was not in Granada simply to help in the spiritual administration of the city. He was there as part of a powerful religious institution, invested with rampant new power by Ferdinand and Isabel: the Supreme Council of the Inquisition. Archbishop Ximenes Cisneros was Inquisitor General.
Cisneros was to go on to play a most prominent role in the government of Spain. He was a man of cunning, martial zeal, torrid Christian conviction, and dark political genius. His central tenet was simple: the Catholic church, bearing the teachings of a divine Jesus, must save the souls of Muslims and Jews by forcing their conversion and exterminating their culture. He rejected Talavera’s interest in Arabic and the printing of prayer books and hymnals in that language; “pearls before swine,” he called it.
Because the Articles of Capitulation were so clear, Cisneros needed room to maneuver; that is, he needed to work as a provocateur. He proved to have a demonic gift for such initiatives. The Capitulations, for example, provided that women with ancestors who at any time were Christian could be questioned in the presence of witnesses. The idea was to induce them to return to Christianity. Cisneros, accordingly, sent agents, including a man fatefully named Barrionuevo, into the Albayzín to seek out the daughters and wives of Muslim families, on the pretext of advancing such questions. The families of the Albayzín viewed such actions as a violation of their honor and a transparent attempt to seize women for forced conversion. In one such incursion, Barrionuevo seized a young woman in the plaza (now called the Plaza de Abad) between the mosque and the hospital. She called out for help to those around her; a crowd gathered, freed her, and then turned on Barrionuevo. He was known to be an agent of the hated Cisneros, and he was seized and killed. Cisneros, when he got wind of the uprising, hid himself in another part of the Albayzín (in a place now called the Hospital de la Tiña), within the most fortified section of the barrio. When the fierce archbishop made his escape, he had what he wanted: a pretext for ethnic cleansing.
He commenced with that centerpiece of hatred, the book-burning. Cisneros ordered the confiscation of all copies of the Koran, including private copies looted by priests and soldiers from residents of the Albayzín. To this haul he added most of the contents of the Madrasa, which served as a kind of university library in the center of Granada. Cisnero’s associates went on, in addition, to seize any religious tract, including the exquisite stories and poetry of the Sufis. Many precious manuscripts with beautiful borders and classic calligraphy, plated with gold and silver, were added to the pile in the lovely Plaza Bib-Rambla, near the central marketplace and by the side of the most famous school in the city. There, Cisneros had all the books incinerated. It amounted to more than five thousand volumes, though some estimates are astronomically higher. It was the first major book-burning after the surrender of Granada, that is, in newly Catholic Spain. But far from the last.
Some anguished residents of the Albayzín emigrated immediately. Some joined a revolt in a beautiful valley, the Alpujarras, high in the mountains above Granada. Ferdinand himself commanded the Christian troops, and one of his companions in arms, one Luis de Beaumont, in a battle near Andarax, in the eastern Alpujarra, took three thousand prisoners. He slaughtered them all and went on to blow up a nearby mosque with six hundred refugees, children and women, inside. These massacres soon were known throughout the Mediterranean. The revolt in the Alpujarras was put down in two bloody years.
The Muslims of the Albayzín, under constant pressure, with some of their numbers threatened, imprisoned, or tortured, began to convert in large numbers. By early 1501, there was hardly a Muslim left. The culture, eight hundred years old, of course remained, with its public baths, distinctive dress, culinary specialties, and its gift for music and love of dance. And because the conversions were forced, many Muslims were only nominal Christians. In the Albayzín, many families carried on their traditional way of life.
In the same year as these forced conversions, Ferdinand and Isabel issued another edict that required the Muslims of most of the rest of Spain, specifically in Castile and Leon, to become Christians or go into exile. The rules that applied to exiles had the usual malignant absurdity: they had a year to leave. They could take their possessions, but no gold or silver. The exiles could not go elsewhere in Spain, nor to North Africa, nor to any territories under control of the Ottomans. They could go, then, to Egypt. But they could only sail to Egypt from the Bay of Biscay, in the north of Spain. Unfortunately, almost no ships sailed to Egypt from the Bay of Biscay. Why would they?
It was a program to force a final round of conversions. The efforts of Cisneros in the Albayzín had proved to be a deliberate test run for all of Spain. Since the fall of Granada had completed the conquests of the Christian armies, Granada had tremendous symbolic resonance. Accordingly, the Albayzín, historic center of the city, with its concentrated Muslim population, had been dealt with first. Now, in the following years, Ferdinand, Isabel, and their successors issued a further series of proclamations. Let us list a range of them, with a view to seeing the progress of the royal will:
1502: Edict of Conversion: all Muslims must convert to Christianity, or go into exile; Muslims remaining in Spain are to be enslaved. Muslims are made subject to the Inquisition.
1511: Moorish converts forbidden to bear arms or carry knives. All books in Arabic are to be surrendered; those having to do with Islamic law or religion are to be burnt. Tailors were fined for making Moorish clothing; butchers who prepared meat according to Islamic practice (called halal) could have their property confiscated. Property could not be passed to children in accordance with Islamic law, nor could former Muslims sell their property.
1526: The Edict of Granada: complete prohibition of all customs of Moorish life. All Moorish baths outlawed and closed. The owning of slaves, the wearing of any Moorish clothing (even amulets), the dyeing of hands with henna, and the circumcision of infants is forbidden. In exchange for a payment to the Crown, open abuse of Moors in the street and random sacking of their houses is to stop. Principal Andalusian office of the Inquisition move
d from Jaen to Granada.
1565: The Synod of Granada: all previous royal edicts confirmed. All aspects of Moorish life forbidden: baths, Arabic books, social ceremonies linked to Islam, traditional rituals such as fasting, and Moorish music and dancing.
So the expulsion in 1492 of the Jewish community of Spain was a prelude to the extinction of the Muslim community. The goal was to tear out the culture—its religion, customs, traditions, ceremonies—by the roots. The means were royal decrees, close surveillance, harassment, humiliation, confiscation of property, imprisonment, torture, and capital punishment. We read, for instance, of people beaten and jailed for not attending church, of Moriscos (that is, Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity) being coerced to drink liquor and eat pork. And the Inquisition was fighting, all this while, for exclusive power to enforce the edicts. It was a power they would use with methodical gusto.
This attempt to eradicate a whole culture proceeded by fits and starts. The Moriscos paid bribes, maneuvered, cultivated powerful friends, and continued to make a crucial contribution to the economy of the city. These men and women, after all, were now all Christians. So they, in theory, were asking only for respect for their centuries of cultural heritage, since their religious heritage had already been abolished. The partial success of these efforts by the Moriscos explains the need, on occasion, to confirm the royal edicts.
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