THE SEISMIC MONARCHS
That outlook took its cue, its form, its detail, and its future from Ferdinand and Isabel, and for their politics the moment of truth is 1492. One can imagine their grandeur and their hope as they took possession of the Alhambra, and from that phenomenal venue envisioned a world of piety, justice, virtue, and prophetic majesty.
There is some fundamental way that in 1492, in the palace we look upon from the Albayzín, history hung in the balance. The war and politics of the monarchs had come to their climax. It is as if the pressure of their worldview had been pressing against the world of Al-Andalus in a kind of plate tectonics of history. In Granada, the pressure reached an unendurable limit, and history let go, and the energy released remade the world of the sixteenth century with changes so violent we still feel the effects in our own time. As we studied the period, we came to see that it is impossible to understand the Albayzín, Granada, and Spain itself unless we see the politics, learning, and faith of the monarchs in direct relation to Al-Andalus. Too often, Ferdinand and Isabel have been seen independently of the eight hundred years of history that created the country they governed. This has been so because of the glamor of the discoveries of Columbus, the convenient way the fall of Granada marks the end of an epoch, and the rarity of vivid and comprehensive historical studies of Al-Andalus. And, it must be said, it was so because of the lustrous, if not mythic, success of the propaganda of Ferdinand and Isabel, their successors, and their church. But it is time to bring together those monarchs and the world whence they came. Columbus is no longer so glamorous, nor can we dismiss Al-Andalus so conveniently, since historians in the last decades have brought clarity, energy, and reality to Al-Andalus, really for the first time. All this being so, we can work anew in hope to understand more clearly who Ferdinand and Isabel were, what they did, and how we might learn from them. As I tried to do so, I gained a sense of how benighted I had been in my facile acceptance of the taking of Granada in 1492 as a moment in which the energies of unity were released in Spain to the benefit of all. To be sure, there was a release: of the energies of despotic leadership exercised with finely tuned political savagery. It was a dark and humbling study.
Part of what it meant was that we needed to look again at the very terms that have been applied to the history of this pivotal period. Take, for just one example, the term “reconquest.” If you read of the history of Spain and of Europe, you will come incessantly upon this term. It is used ad nauseam and ex cathedra, a bolted-down part of the story of European history. But it seems increasingly plain that “reconquest” is a kind of one-word propaganda stunt, a linguistic bunco game, and, most of all, a code word used to glorify destruction and expulsion. Take the gently phrased declaration of the superb historian Thomas Glick: “indeed, the notion of reconquest involves from a historiographical perspective a number of anachronisms and anomalies.” Such are the delights of reading history! Or take the magisterial work of the world-class scholar L.P. Harvey, who points out the incoherence of the whole notion:
The European Conquest of the Americas is in some areas separated from our present day by a mere one-third of the chronological gap that stretched between the Spain of the Expulsion and the Arab conquest. Yet the Americas as we know them are felt as a firm fait accompli of history, an omelet that no one ever expects to be unscrambled. Nobody imagines that America’s white and black inhabitants will one day be eliminated in favor of the peoples of the First Nations.
In other words: If eight hundred years from the Declaration of Independence—over a half a millennium from now—in 2576 AD, the Mohawks and Algonquians once again settle throughout New York state, will this be a “reconquest”? And what about the Kickapoo in the Upper Great Plains, who might ride into St. Louis and take up residence under the golden arch? The Shasta and the Klamath Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who might find Portland and Seattle, with their fine bookstores, very much to their liking? And the Ohlone of San Francisco, who will find the bridges useful, no doubt? Would they, in the name of “reconquest,” feel justified in the expulsion, after eight hundred years, of those who followed a non-Indian faith, followed by the forcible erasure of eight centuries of American culture?
Eight hundred years cannot be erased by a word. In any case, there was no “Spain” (the word did not even exist) before 711 that rose again, like some Gothic monster, to take up the sword. In fact, Christians ruled peaceably and effectively with Muslim and Jewish officials, allies, and subjects. Muslim regimes in Al-Andalus sometimes fought one another with Christian help (for example, El Cid himself). Christian regimes sometimes fought one another with Muslim allies. So there was no prior, pure, monolithic Christian culture that could have “reconquered” a Muslim and Jewish country. It is, like so much, a cumulative invention of the chroniclers and political operatives of late Christian Al-Andalus and their colleagues since, who did not write history so much as gin up a rich mix of outright fabrication and military fantasy, laced with a hearty dose of religious bombast.
We have in this account lived alongside the scientists and traders, the rulers and inventors of Al-Andalus. It is worth repeating as often as possible, since it is a fact so often swept into a dark hole, that Al-Andalus was governed by Christian kings as well as Islamic caliphs and emirs, often with the assistance of powerful Jewish aides and counselors. So there was rich precedent for Christian rule of a society of mixed faith. If we bring together that society with the politics of Ferdinand and Isabel and their successors, then we are more likely to be able to assess clearly their influence, their institutions, and their reign as a whole.
The policies and politics of Ferdinand and Isabel brought dramatic change, change that uprooted centuries of economic and cultural institutions and drove deep and lasting roots for new ones. Reading about their reign, one thinks of how rare it is to learn of two rulers whose actions marked their country, and our history, so profoundly and indelibly. It is all the more reason we need to know the long-term result in detail. We have seen already, less than one hundred years after the fall of Granada, the way Spain defaulted on its domestic and international debt. From there, despite a brief industrial resurgence in the early 1600s based on New World gold and silver, the decline accelerated. We have a clear portrayal from two scholars who have made the most exhaustive study of the period, Stanley and Barbara Stein. They are writing about the end of the 1600s, just two centuries after the fall of Granada:
… the shadow of Spain had contracted virtually to the country’s borders. The metropole lacked a developed artisan industry, its agricultural and pastoral sectors were marked by low productivity, and principal exports—aside from the reexport of silver—were raw materials and some processed food. Internal communications were rudimentary, domestic demand was limited, and the Spanish merchant marine and Navy were insignificant.
We see, in the material life of Spain during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, how swiftly a dynamic and prosperous economy can come to static ruin. It was a ruin that glittered with precious metals and the glory of empire, but it was ruin nonetheless. Ferdinand and Isabel ruled with such abundant success that they have long, and rightfully, been recognized for their decisive effect on the history of Spain. But because of the work of two recent generations of scholars, we understand now much more fully the culture and economy they destroyed. Even more startling is how obvious that destruction of the Spanish economy was to Spanish political economists from the 1500s forward; startling because, for all their acuity and analysis, they could do nothing to alter the almost-surreal obsession of Spain with its past: Its past, that is, as if it began in 1492. Once again, let us quote the magisterial Steins, reviewing the work of the Spanish political economists of the time, the so-called arbitristas:
Spain’s decline had multiple facets: economic and political as well as religious, social, and cultural … When an early arbitrista concluded that Spain was poor because it was rich, he touched on the peculiar contradictions that give rise to the notion o
f a nation “bewitched,” living outside reality … Although the term decline (decadencia) rarely appears in the literature of the time, late-seventeenth-century arbitristas generally agreed that Spain, once prosperous and powerful, had slipped into stagnation and poverty, political impotence, and even institutional decay.
What had been inherited and developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly under Isabel, Ferdinand, and their grandson Charles V, remained enshrined, almost sacralized. Change toward something new, an innovation, was in principle unacceptable.
I do not think it can be said that Ferdinand, Isabel, and Charles V destroyed the economy and culture of Al-Andalus. But they did give that culture and the practice of convivencia, already in deep peril, the final political bludgeoning from which it could never recover.
It is a most useful and instructive history to study. In sum, Spain became a country of seigneurial privilege, with inviolate state and ecclesiastical bureaucracies of entrenched power. A landed religious and secular aristocracy came to control vast areas of the country but provided only subsistence labor. Herds of sheep with up to three million animals were the economic centerpiece of the Iberian countryside. There was no dynamic and sustained creation of a middle class devoted to commerce and production in the country, citizens who could use the technical advances of Al-Andalus and of contemporary Europe to initiate new enterprises and seed national industries. Instead, the country produced raw materials for other countries of Europe that had developed their economies with sophisticated banking and credit facilities, laws governing and enforcing contracts, trading networks, supply chains, market intelligence, effective partnerships with governments, and joint-stock companies, all riding upon a heady current of technical and scientific progress. Spain’s silver and gold, for the most part, passed through its hands to enrich the rest of Europe. And in a most bitter irony, the growing material needs of Spain’s own colonies were supplied largely by the very countries whose economies had used Spanish wealth to build their own commercial expertise. In an equally telling irony, the Spanish state came partly to rely for financing on Sephardic families it had expelled from Spain, whose descendants had become major financial powers in Holland. It is as if Spain traded in its whole economy for a patrimonial and military culture that enriched a narrow class, guarded its power jealously, held stiffly to its religious traditions, conjured a history that began in 1492, and blundered over decades and centuries into a bizarre failure that enriched all of Europe at the expense of Spain’s own citizens. Such was the political prowess of Spain that it managed to miss, in whole or in part, the Enlightenment and both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. It is as if it sold off for pennies the winning trifecta ticket of modern European history. These three revolutions in understanding and accomplishment were built largely upon the achievements in the sciences and humanities of Al-Andalus. It is one of the strangest episodes in continental economic history, this metamorphosis from Al-Andalus to a country of colonies and precious metals, of military aggression and economic failure. It is, to use a term from the mystics, a teaching story.
A COUNTRY OF JASMINE AND DISASTER
To read Spanish history is to embrace a hornet’s nest. If the reader is looking for an argument, any of the economic and political history I have related will do the job. Not only can you argue with many Spaniards but with many academics, and not just about economics. There has been, over the last many decades, virulent kerfuffles among professors that are remarkable to follow for the lay reader. To recite the facts of Al-Andalus, in some company, will draw the most incendiary reaction. There will be bitter attacks on the notion that the convivencia meant anything and charges of “utopianism” and outraged recitations of the massacres of Jews and Christians and the internecine battles among Muslims that occurred in Al-Andalus. Some will tell you that the convivencia was just not authentic, that it was a coalition of the unwilling, that its reality has been so much swollen by praise that it should be considered a kind of magical thinking. Among such interlocutors, it is often heresy to celebrate any good thing happening before 1492. I have been surprised by the vehemence and bitterness of such reactions. Whatever dismissive contempt they carry, such views are increasingly in the minority, since it is no longer possible to deny that Al-Andalus was an advanced society—scientifically, economically, and culturally. Nor is it possible to deny that Spain largely squandered the knowledge, the power, and the commercial energies of Al-Andalus. The real question, for me, is why this controversy continues to awaken such hot anger. It does, I think, because the history of the period, as it has come into view, does not advance incrementally our understanding. It transforms our understanding. It asks us to look deeply at the Middle Ages in Europe and to extend our study and sympathy to a rare experiment in culture whose work and discoveries all of us can justly celebrate, and with that celebration, share in them.
Yet in the popular imagination, the old, fixed prejudices are still at work. One can, for instance, pick up popular treatments of the history of Granada and encounter references to the “perfidious Jews.” In distinguished museums, one reads how in 711, Spain “suffered” the invasion of the Arabs. At other times, I have been accused of outright deceit. Once, riding with my family in a taxi in Granada to a lecture to be delivered in the Xavier Cisneros auditorium, I joked to the driver that we did not plan on burning any books. I received an instant, snarling reply that Cisneros did not burn any books (or perhaps one or two, he said), and that any such event was the fabrication of “English historians,” whose willing pawn I was. Yet the book-burning, of at least five thousand volumes, is an incident attested to from numerous sources, including Cisneros’s own biographer. And the short summaries I have given in this book of the accomplishments of Al-Andalus could be, and in fact have been, expanded into multivolume works.
The slow, cumulative massing of facts is now undeniable. Ferdinand and Isabel, and their successors and allies, gave Al-Andalus its death blow. Though their image is still that of triumph and righteousness, the Catholic Monarchs might be seen more properly as exterminating angels: flying in their own mythic light, winged with power, and lethal. The question now is how long might it take to see a deep change in popular understanding, a metamorphosis, a correction of the common narrative—a change, that is, in our comprehensive sense of the history of Spain. Because the Spanish Civil War is so agonizing a memory for Spain, and because of the rather straight line from Ferdinand and Isabel to fascist Spain, it may take a long time for enough detachment and perspective to clear the way for the transformed history that we have now in our hands.
I remember a lunch, early in our years in Spain, on the country estate of some wealthy Spaniards. Upon learning of my interest in Spanish history, I was shown from their library a book from the period of the Spanish Civil War titled Jews, Masons, and Other Scum. Soon afterward I was entreated to consider how blessed a salvation Gen. Francisco Franco and the Falangists had brought to Spain and heard an argument that Adolf Hitler had been unfortunately misjudged. The most sincere offers of help with my work were made as I read my way through books during our sojourn in Spain.
So many years later, I have come upon a passage that addresses such a view of history and ties together the fall of Granada with the aftermath of the Civil War, about four hundred and fifty years later. The passage is in The Spanish Holocaust, by the esteemed historian Paul Preston. We should note that he is one of those English historians so unpopular among certain taxi drivers. Preston is discussing the imprisonment of women after the victory of Franco’s soldiers in the Civil War. It is a brilliant and careful book, and hard to read. He relates to us, for instance, how after the rebel military victory in the city of Zamora, pregnant women and nursing mothers were executed just for having a family member associated in any way with the Spanish Republic. Some of the women had merely cleaned houses of Republicans.
… the suffering of women in the prisons had dimensions unknown in the male population. Many of the w
omen arrested were pregnant or had very young children with them. Mothers of children older than three were not allowed to take them into the prison … Older women were forced to watch while their sons were tortured and sometimes murdered.
Rape was a frequent occurrence during interrogation in police stations. Transfer to prison and concentration camps was no guarantee of safety. At night, Falangists took young women away and raped them. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows.
The yoke and arrows: symbol of Ferdinand and Isabel. We cannot ignore this survival of the emblem of the Catholic Monarchs, burnt into the breasts of women just eighty years ago. The same emblem is found on the Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows, the highest decoration bestowed by the Franco regime. And bestowed it was, in 1938, on Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, whose Gestapo colleagues provided crucial training for Franco’s political police. In 1940, Himmler would be welcomed to Spain, where his opulent tour included rides through San Sabastian and Burgos, their streets awash with swastikas.
It is a warning to all of us: once widespread imprisonment and torture become embedded in a culture, they can survive for centuries, accompanied by their symbols. It happened in Spain, but not because of any dark strain or special weakness in the Spanish temperament. It happened in Spain because such conduct is possible in all countries, in all societies, at all times. No one has written more eloquently about this than Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz. He, who has seen the full scope of human barbarity, tells us: “We must be listened to … It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen anywhere.”
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