Granada

by Steven Nightingale

  Scholars have noted the perfection, if that is the word, of this calculated governmental form. It has been demonically influential. One historian, Joseph Perez, has noted an obvious modern sequel, Stalin’s technique of arrest and show trials in the Soviet Union. The similarity of key elements is there for all to see: the secret accusation, the sudden arrest and imprisonment, the use of torture, the insistence on public confession, the ruination of the family of the condemned. It is an accursed heritage. But it is only part of the story, since Ferdinand and Isabel had a comprehensive plan for power. The Inquisition should be seen not as the single tool, but one of many, the sum of which achieved for the monarchs the religious and political unity they sought. In 1481, the Inquisition had begun its persecution and burnings. In 1492, the monarchs took control of Granada, expelled the Jews from their kingdom, and flattened the Jewish quarter of the city, and then, as we have seen, they set in motion a series of laws and proclamations which taken together amounted to ethnic cleansing of the remaining Muslims. The prosperous Muslim and Jewish families who did convert to Christianity—and they were numerous—still remained in mortal peril, since they could be denounced to the Inquisition at any moment. In this way, national power and control was sustained and enforced by Christian fundamentalism.

  All this accumulation of control and wealth had, of course, its costs, since Ferdinand and Isabel had to win allies among the nobility and to recruit, supply, and maintain a large standing army.

  To pay these costs, the monarchs went into debt—often, in dark irony, to Jewish or converso families—with Isabel hocking her royal jewelry now and again. To pay off Christians for their political and financial support or for military exploits, and to reward the church for its partnership, they distributed land and booty from their conquests. And in all this, their actions, as they conceived them, meant something well beyond the material and political domination of Spain. They were resplendent with a meaning that lifted them onto another plane altogether, the plane of the fantastical storyline that accompanied the workings of their power. They had a prophetic mandate to dominate Spain, conquer Jerusalem, and restore the world to the True Faith. It was by such blessing that Ferdinand, as we have seen, styled himself “King of Jerusalem.” He and his queen saw resonant, singular, divine meaning in their history: they were the principal players in the last act of history. By means of their nobility, in accordance with prophecy, with the energy of destiny, they had brought salvation to Spain and would see the Kingdom of Heaven come to earth.

  What were the consequences of this grandeur? It is the ideal occasion for what-if history, since at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spain looked to be at the beginning of one of most influential empires in history, with one of the most remarkable chances at knowledge and power ever presented to a country.

  THE CATHOLIC MONARCHS RE-CREATE SPAIN IN THEIR OWN IMAGE

  It was a pivotal moment in history. Ferdinand and Isabel knew it to be one. They unified Spain, and they looked to the future. Of course they wanted, by the alliances they made with the marriage of their children, to provide for the continued ascendency of their country. Their one son, Prince John, died as a youth. They had had one surviving child, Juana (the unfortunate woman known to history as Juana la Loca—Juana the Mad). Juana married Philip the Handsome, an Austrian Hapsburg, the only son of Emperor Maxmilian the First, Holy Roman Emperor. Philip engaged in a seething fight with Ferdinand, his father-in-law, for power in Spain. He chose the wrong adversary. One day, at age 28, some hours after quaffing a glass of ice water, he sickened and died. Rumors of poison circulated immediately. We shall never know for certain, but we do know that Ferdinand had shown for decades a refined genius for murder from a safe distance. As to Juana la Loca, she showed a profound if not perverse interest in the corpse of her husband, part of the reason she was locked up in a castle for the rest of her life. But after the deaths of Isabel (in 1504) and Ferdinand (in 1516), the first son of Juana la Loca, Charles I, became king of Spain. Three years later, he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. So did Spain come to be in legal and royal possession of many of the countries and territories of Europe, including Sicily, the Kingdom of Naples, Sardinia, large portions of France (including Provence and Burgundy), Austria, Bohemia, the Low Countries, and Luxembourg. And to all this, of course, they added their incomparable territories in South and Central America and the Caribbean. It is difficult to overstate the magnificence and promise of such a position. And Spain, among all the countries of Europe, had an extraordinary advantage: it was the only country that could bring to the management of these vast domains the most advanced technical, scientific, mathematical, and commercial culture in the whole of the Mediterranean: the culture of Al-Andalus.

  It was not to be. Spain chose another course: descent into centuries of war, economic stagnation, rampant corruption, bankruptcy, and scorching misery. So unprecedented was the opportunity, and so elevated its position, that the full collapse required generations to play out. But the road down through the decades and centuries was a precipitous one, and economic and cultural historians have given us a map of the way: the plain facts of what Spain did with what they had.

  Just as the Inquisition supplied the world with a template of hatred, so the governance of Spain, beginning with Ferdinand and Isabel, provides a distinct template for national failure. That template has a fixed set of elements. Prominent among them are the union of the state with fundamentalist religion; a preference for debt-financed military solutions to political problems; the destruction of the country’s manufacturing base, in favor of the production of raw materials and precious metals; a marked decline in the quality of education; and the abandonment of small-scale diversified agriculture in favor of large estates. There are shelves of books with the details, so I will touch on a few instances of each element. But it is staggering how many of them were set vigorously in place by Ferdinand and Isabel: it is a testimony to their power to shape the destiny of Spain in their time and for centuries afterward.

  As to the unity of church and state: the Inquisition, of course, being so politically useful, bonded the Catholic church closely to the crown. Part of the spoils of war were given directly to the church, especially the large estates owned by “Catholic military orders, monasteries and convents, brotherhoods and cathedral churches.” And the church associated itself directly with merchants and commercial undertakings—even initiation into guilds was sewn with religious ritual. Given the church’s influence at court and the ability of the Inquisition to seize the wealth of whole families, it became politically wise, if not essential, for an ambitious family to build their stature and connections in the church through gifts and legacies. By such means, the church was able to gain more real estate, and as the revenues from such land enriched the church, the institution gained yet more power at court. At the same time, a material part of the seizure of assets from those accused by the Inquisition went directly to the Crown, who used the wealth to reward noble families for political or military help, though the Inquisition often claimed the confiscated wealth for itself, to fund its expensive operations. It meant that the Crown did not enrich itself unduly, but engorged its power further by such financial coordination, which extended even to Ferdinand and Isabel’s taking a portion of the ecclesiastical tithe. And the messianic vision of the two monarchs dovetailed perfectly with the flammable rhetoric of a militant church working for the salvation of all humankind in the triumph of the True Faith at the end of time.

  From 1492 forward, it is hard to pry apart church and Crown. They found their embrace mutually enriching, and they wielded power in rough synchrony. An excellent example is Ximenez de Cisneros, the friar whom we have met in Granada, as he was burning the university library and the books of the Albayzín. In 1492, Isabel had chosen him as her confessor. He proved to be a man with an extraordinary talent for administration, though he was said to be of “warlike and even disquiet condition.” And so he was: he wore a hair shirt, scourged himself with
gusto, got lost in ecstatic trances, conversed with celestial visitants, and recoiled at the idea of staying in a building where women had resided. In 1495, Isabel took the next step and made him archbishop of Toledo, the most powerful ecclesiastical position in Spain, the so-called “Third King.” In 1507, Ferdinand made him Inquisitor General and a cardinal. Such was his power that he took control of all Spain twice, as regent for Ferdinand in 1506 and for Charles I in 1516. All this vigorous unity of church and state was stamped onto history early on, when in 1494 Pope Alexander (the Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia) gave Ferdinand and Isabel the title of los Reyes Católicos—the Catholic Monarchs. The pope meant to celebrate the fall of Granada, the working of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, the discoveries of Columbus, and the religious orthodoxy of the king and queen, and all this for all Christendom. It was a designation that they would pass on to their descendants. And the unity of church and state would prove of the most startling durability in Spain, a kind of fatal embrace not undone until the death of Francisco Franco and his government of “National Catholicism.” The emblem of the Falange, the fascist political party that supported Franco, was the yoke and a bundle (fasces) of arrows. They are none other than the personal emblems created by Ferdinand and Isabel as the standard of their fundamentalist reign, half a millennium earlier. More than once during our life in Granada, coming upon public demonstrations of the far-right wing in contemporary Spanish politics, we saw the same emblem, on a flag, waved with incendiary pride and excitement from a balcony.

  As to Spain’s debt-financed military efforts for political ends, and the devotion of public funds to those ends: it is a classic story of how imperial leaders can redirect the economy of a whole nation. Learning from Ferdinand and Isabel, and from his grandfather Maximilian, Charles I had the right pedigree for empire: he was archduke of Austria, king of Spain, and Holy Roman Emperor. He followed los Reyes Católicos in seeking a worldwide Catholic empire with Europe as its center and Spain as its epicenter. Just as the Inquisition worked to arrest and punish nonbelievers, heretics, infidels, and Protestants, so did Charles determine to bring the cleansing power and religious purity of Spain to all the people of his continent. He would go to war with Holland, France, England, Italy, and anyone who asserted a political and religious life independent of Spain. Now, to pursue a continent and a world with such dynastic and universalist ambition means paying the bills. And so Charles and his successor Philip II had to find a centerpiece for their financial policy, and they did: gold and silver. From the New World, beginning in the early 1500s, precious metals began to arrive in magnificent quantities. Spain could, of course, have invested such wealth in education, manufacturing, and development of agriculture, national transport, scientific work, and commercial ventures meant to enrich the country over the long term; that is, the country could have transformed its windfall into an impregnable economic foundation for prosperity. Yet, with its colonies producing such a bounty of precious metals, it seems that the court considered Spain already rich. And so the metals, principally the silver, were put to another use: as security for loans the country sought to pay for its operations, above all for its extravagant military adventures in service of empire. Within its own country, Spain sold short-and long-term government bonds to its own people, to aristocrats, cathedrals, merchants, rich peasants, men of business, monasteries, and anyone else in the country with capital who wanted a dependable source of income. Outside of its boundaries, Spain sold its bonds to German industrial groups, to Italian and Flemish bankers, and to Dutch financiers. When the borrowing needs outstripped the silver available for security, Spain borrowed more money, this time secured by tax receipts in Castile and custom receipts from its trade with its own colonies. The bonds were called juros and carried interest of 5 to 7 percent.

  What were the facts on the ground, as they come into view during this macroeconomic escapade? It is not just that Spain used its precious metals principally to secure debt, rather than seeking productive investment within its own borders. The real effect was much more broad: in borrowing money from its own citizens, Spain diverted capital away from the investment needed to build a vigorous economy at home. These citizens did not, in general, gather talent, assess the needs of their neighbors and their city, adapt the rich technological heritage of Al-Andalus to the needs of their time, draw upon the accumulated operational skills and market and manufacturing intelligence of Al-Andalus, and then embark upon new enterprises. They felt no pressing need to make any such efforts. The vigor and prestige of the market was in remarkable disrepute. For those with social prestige and capital assets, a life of commerce, of working, making, inventing, buying, and selling, risked a perilous decline in personal dignity and social status. Why take such risks when an investor could easily earn a generous income by loaning money to his own government? What is more, the principal and interest paid to international financial centers in Europe was very unlikely to be reinvested in Spain; rather, the funds flowed outside the country to bankers and families who were perfecting the strategic, technical, and market expertise needed to profit from Spain’s urgent need for cash and the demand of the Spanish colonies for manufactured goods. It is the most terrible irony that the precious metals of the New World, finally, drove the commercial enrichment of Europe and ignited its technological advances, since it helped to finance the very scientific and market development that Spain chose not to undertake for itself.

  The money spent on perpetual war could never be recovered. And with every decade, Spain dug itself in deeper, since a country with a failing economy could not attract investment even from those among its own citizens who might have the talent and interest to make such investments. As if all this were not calamitous enough, through the late 1500s and 1600s, Spain increasingly had to import even the most basic materials—paper, textiles, hardware, and the like—and, as a result, the country ran a current account deficit with all its adversaries. It is painful to read about, this story of a country that worked a lengthy national confidence trick and swindled itself out of its own silver. The end of such financial connivance is the obvious one: the loss of technical and intellectual ability, a momentous decline in the productive capacity of the nation, and the dismal, inexorable impoverishment of its citizens.

  The years rolled on. When Charles I got into desperate financial trouble, he simply went forth to the great port of Seville and seized for himself private shipments of silver. He offered compensation, of course: more juros. In their indispensable economic history of the period, Stanley and Barbara Stein say it best: “In 1557, for example, 70 percent of military operations against France were financed by American silver. The next year, 85 percent of total state borrowing was guaranteed by the same source.” By 1559, the “accumulated pubic debt reached a figure of 25 million ducados”: a figure, they note, which was a breathtaking sixteen times annual revenues. Perhaps Charles I was exhausted by his forty years of military aggression in which he even managed to sack Rome itself, or weary of the demands of the country’s creditors. In 1556, he retired to pray in a monastery in Ayuste, where he passed the time trying in vain to synchronize the clocks in the building. Alas, in the country he left behind, the interest clocks were ticking on the money he had borrowed. He left his country so crushed with debt that his son, the pious Philip II, would run out of money and default on his own people three times, in 1557, 1575, and 1596. Not being content with repudiating his own countrymen, in the same years, he defaulted on Spain’s foreign creditors as well. His successor, Philip III, would default three more times, in 1607, 1627, and 1647, on debt owed to foreigners. I cite all these dates because they are a portrait in time of the decline of the Spanish economy: the richest and most accomplished nation of the European Middle Ages, the centermost of scientific advancement and commercial vigor, became, within a century and a half after the fall of Granada, the deadbeat of the continent.

  To make sense of this decline, we should recall the wealth of Al-Andalus, based on commerce
of inventiveness and energy, with a wide variety of manufactured goods and a diversified and progressive agriculture. It is worth looking into the material energy of the culture, constructed over centuries, that Ferdinand and Isabel inherited. The eminent historian Daniel Levering Lewis, writing of Al-Andalus in the tenth and eleventh centuries, gives us the heart of the matter: