Now the Jews realized they had fallen into a trap, because King João also imposed heavy exit taxes, making it very expensive for the people who had arrived in Portugal to legally depart. Moreover, those who wished to leave by ship were forced to travel on vessels owned by the king, which allowed him to profit once again on the plight of the hapless Jews. Ship captains who offered alternative transport were executed.13
King João, eager as he was to profit from the plight of the Jews, also wanted to force them to convert to Christianity. In an edict of October 19, 1492, he ordered that any Jew who accepted baptism would be exempted from paying the entry and exit taxes. As the deadline for departure arrived, he announced that anyone who did not have the money to depart Portugal would become a slave. Some number—between one thousand and fifteen thousand people—became captive servants of the king under this provision.
Then the king announced that he would seize Jewish children for nonpayment of taxes. Hundreds and possibly up to two thousand children were transported to the barren island of São Tomé, off the coast of West Africa, where they died of hunger and exposure. There is little or no record of this event in Castilian chronicles of the time. Perhaps it was considered too disturbing to mention. This failure to address the abandonment of the children was, writes François Soyer, “a lapse [that] defies explanation.”14
However, the timing of these events suggests what may have motivated King João to do something so cruel. The Aragonese historian Jerónimo Zurita, who had access to original archival documents, wrote that Princess Isabel, João’s daughter-in-law, was so distraught when her husband Afonso died that she became convinced that the sins of Portugal had caused the young man’s death. She was particularly concerned about Portugal’s willingness to accept Jews and conversos who were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, heretics who had angered God, according to Zurita. She had become obsessed with the issue. “And the disaster that had befallen Prince Don Afonso, her first husband, she attributed to the fact that they had favored heretics and apostates who had fled Castile,” Zurita wrote. “And she formed a great scruple about it, and it created such a fear of having offended God that she believed it had caused his death.”15
This dark soul-searching after the young Afonso’s death had surely became a topic of much discussion among the Portuguese royal family, who had lost their son and legitimate heir. So it seems possible that King João’s vindictiveness toward the Jewish children may have been a twisted kind of revenge on God and the Jewish people for taking his own son.
There is no record of how Isabella reacted when she heard, as she almost certainly did, about João maliciously putting children out to die. But around that time, she issued safe-conducts to Jews who had gone to Portugal and who wanted to come home—but only, again, subject to their pledge to convert to Christianity. Many now drifted back to Castile, reluctantly accepting baptism and conversion.
When King João II finally died in 1495, it was no doubt a relief to the surviving but dwindling number of Jews of Portugal. But their moment of reprieve was short. When King Manuel took the throne in 1495, he initially showed compassion for the captive Jews and ordered them to be released. But within a year, he decided to expel them from Portugal, unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. Princess Isabel—the young widow whom the king sought to marry—had made him promise to compel Jews to accept baptism as a condition of her agreeing to marry him; he was to deport anyone who had been convicted of heresy in Spain. At first King Manuel feared that this was one more pretext for Isabel to avoid marrying him. So, Zurita said, Princess Isabel wrote him a letter in her own hand promising to take an oath “to assent to the marriage, and to go to live with him in his country,” if he would ensure that all the people condemned for heresy were made to leave.16
According to the Portuguese historian Antonio Enrique de Oliveira Marques, however, this pledge to Isabel simply provided Manuel with a “pretext” to do what he had wanted to do anyway.17 In expelling the Jews, he was doing the same thing that other rulers in Europe had done, an action that was seen as reducing internal tensions and interreligious conflicts.
But King Manuel, who was devoutly religious himself, came up with a draconian new method of enforcing conversion: he ordered the Jews to leave if they wanted to, but they would be required to leave behind their children under age fourteen, to be parceled out to Portuguese Christian families to raise. This idea was chillingly close to the Turkish devsirme concept. To save and keep their children, several thousand Jews in Portugal at last gave in and converted. The familiar pattern repeated itself: some converted to Christianity sincerely, while others only pretended to convert.
Conversion to Christianity did not eliminate the hostility of longtime Christians. In 1506 a Christian mob rampaged in Lisbon and massacred two thousand former Jews. King Manuel executed the mob’s leaders, but it had become clear that even conversion did not bring safety.
Soon Jews were flowing not just out of Spain but out of Portugal, too, heading for Amsterdam, North Africa, or, most successfully, the Ottoman Empire. Contrary to a widely reported myth, Bayezid II did not specifically welcome them to Ottoman lands.18 But he did allow them to enter, subject to obeying the sharia rules that defined the culture: they had to accept second-class status, pay special taxes, and show deference in various ways to Islamic beliefs.
After the ordeals they had experienced, many Jews found the Ottoman lands a safe haven. They could accept the restrictions there. Soon many of them recovered, mentally and emotionally, and began to prosper.
But they didn’t forget. The family of Rabbi Elijah Capsali, for example, living on the island of Crete, considered every Ottoman victory a new triumph for God over the evil Christians. Many Jews became secret supporters of the Turks. Some Sephardic Jews became slave traders in Istanbul, peddling Christian captives to harems and as galley slaves. Capsali said the Jews of Spain brought valuable technical information on “the development of firearms,” which helped the Turks win more battles against the Christians.19
Some came to see the defeats of the Christians by the Turks as ordained by God for their sins. Joseph Ha-Kohen, a contemporaneous Jewish historian in Genoa, saw “the rise of the Ottomans [as] part of a divine plan to punish Christianity for its ongoing oppression of the Jews,” writes Martin Jacobs. Ha-Kohen described the sack of the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia as removing Christian “images” and “idols” and called it a “fulfillment of God’s prophecy,” as spoken through the prophet Jeremiah.20
For the next five hundred years, Jews from Spain, known as the Se-phardim, and Muslims would harbor painful and bittersweet memories of life in Spain, which in time they came to view as an idyllic paradise lost. “The vanished land of Sepharad provides one of the great themes of Jewish history, somewhat analogous to the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian Exile,” writes the historian Jane Gerber.21 No Arab or Muslim “has ever visited al-Andalus and viewed its great Islamic monuments without experiencing a mixture of pride and regret,” writes another historian, Salma Khadra Jayyusi.22
Isabella had succeeded in making Spain almost monolithically Catholic, but she had lost the industry and artistry of the Jews and Muslims who had lived there for hundreds, even thousands, of years. She made many enemies for the kingdom in doing so. The Inquisition, and the religious intolerance it represented, forms an indelible blot, a dark mark against her legacy that has haunted Spain for generations.
TWENTY-ONE
THREE DAUGHTERS
The pace never relented for Isabella, who reached her early fifties in the years following the half millennium of 1500. As she continued to deal with wars overseas and domestic unrest, there were two remaining children to launch in life, her daughters María and Catherine, and she was in the process of recalling Juana, now the heiress to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, back to Spain so she could be sworn as the next queen. Juana had to be prepared to govern. All three relationships had their own particular problems, and as a mother, Isab
ella still had much to do.
But the queen was not well. Normally undaunted in her willpower, drive, and energy, she began to suffer periods of debilitating fatigue. She had chills and fevers. She deferred, delayed, or stopped doing the kinds of things that had made her so successful in the past.
When Juana came home in 1502, riding into Toledo with her husband to be recognized as the heir to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, Isabella was unable to ride out to greet her and instead waited at the palace for her daughter’s arrival. King Ferdinand and Archduke Philip rode ahead of Juana, taking precedence over her as they entered the city, something that should not have happened to the future queen of Spain. The misstep showed that Isabella, who had so carefully crafted her own succession to the throne, was slipping. She had always used her indomitable will to shape events and how they were perceived, but she no longer had the strength to control things as she once had.
The problems were both physical and psychological. Isabella had some unspecified internal ailment, possibly cancer or perhaps something else. She had also suffered three serious personal blows: the deaths of Juan and Isabel, her two favorite children and the ones she had raised to replace her, and the death of her tiny grandson Miguel de la Paz, who would have inherited Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. Isabella’s hopes and plans for the future had been dashed, and now she was having difficulty recovering. In the months following Miguel’s death in July 1500, she was so distraught that she could hardly communicate.
Many activities had to be postponed. The humanist scholar Lucio Marineo Siculo, a Sicilian living at the Castilian court, told a friend that the court had virtually ground to a halt. “So great grief has swept over our most Christian princes and the whole court that no one has been able as yet to approach or even address the queen,” he told a correspondent, Fadrique Manel. “For the king and queen are bowed down with great distress, as is no wonder since within so brief a time they have lost three renowned princes, all legitimate heirs.”1
The problems went beyond this most recent tragedy. In public Isabella maintained her stoic demeanor, but pain and ill health ravaged her appearance. The good looks of her youth had faded. She grew overweight. She covered her head with an unflattering cap, perhaps for religious reasons or because her hair was thinning or had turned gray. Portraits capture her increasingly careworn appearance.
In private, her positive outlook had dissipated as well. A young nobleman who had lived in the court described Queen Isabella to Peter Martyr as “sorrowful,” something that he struggled to understand. The queen was admired and feared by her subjects, but political clout and status had not made her happy, he told Martyr, who agreed with him.2
Soon it became apparent to people throughout Spain that something was seriously amiss with the queen and consequently with the nation as a whole. As her vigor eroded, a great many other things started to disintegrate as well.
Alonso de Hojeda, for example, who had served in the Granada war and then traveled with Columbus, arrived back on the island of Hispaniola with some news: he told the Castilian colonists that Queen Isabella was very ill and was believed to be dying. Everyone knew that Isabella had been hard hit by the deaths in her family, but it was almost impossible to imagine such a strong, indomitable person being struck down. Columbus considered the story a malicious rumor, and his son Ferdinand later recalled it as an attempt by Hojeda to undermine Columbus’s administration and oversight of the islands.3
But as the reports circulated around the islands, a subtle change in behavior soon became apparent. Isabella had made it clear that she was a protector of the Indians, and that people who hurt them would be chastised and punished. But with her health declining, the colonists gradually became emboldened to behave more aggressively toward the native Americans than they had at first.
Would-be colonist Bartolomé de Las Casas, then a young man seeking to make his fortunes in the Americas, arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 and saw this transition firsthand. He had been among the inner circle knowledgeable about the discoveries from the beginning. He came from a converso family from Segovia that had moved to Seville,4 and his father and three uncles had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the Americas. Las Casas had decided to go there himself and later recalled how warmly he had initially been welcomed by the native Americans. Spaniards had been in the islands for a decade by then, and they were still seen as benign forces by many Indians.
But as people internalized the news that Isabella was failing, Las Casas noticed that attitudes toward Indians became much harsher. The Spaniards demanded that the Indians serve and work for them. If the Indians objected or rebelled, the Spaniards responded at times with monstrous cruelty, turning their hunting dogs upon them to disembowel them, or slicing the limbs off men, women, and infants.
Making problems worse was the fact that the class of settler heading to the New World had deteriorated. The first group had been simple seamen. Hordes of promising young men had joined Columbus’s second voyage. But so many of these first explorers had died of syphilis or other diseases or had been killed that it was no longer easy to attract explorers and colonists. The crown attracted new entrants by offering amnesty from execution or long-term imprisonment to convicted criminals if they would emigrate to the Americas. Lower-quality people were crossing the Atlantic as emissaries of the Old World to the New. Columbus called the Spaniards living in Hispaniola then “little else but vagabonds.”5
Las Casas said these cruel practices had erupted because it had become easier to conceal information from the queen. Deeply disturbed by what he had seen, he was becoming a human rights advocate, traveling back and forth between the Americas and Europe trying to get the government in Castile to put a stop to abuses in the New World.
But in these years, trying to conserve her health, Isabella focused primarily on securing Castile. The succession issues were pressing, and the death of Princess Isabel had left the kingdom’s left flank, its border with Portugal, vulnerable once again.
With Isabel’s death, King Manuel of Portugal, now thirty-one, was a bachelor again. Queen Isabella had tried hard to convince him to accept María instead of Isabel because the older sister had not wanted to remarry, but Manuel had been adamant in insisting on Isabel and rejecting María. Now Queen Isabella had to once again offer him María, who was fifteen years old, and hope that this time he would accept. And he did, in fact, eventually marry her.
This was an immensely awkward situation for María, of course. But as the fourth child, as a twin who had lost her sibling in utero, and as the third sister in the family, she was accustomed to taking what was left over after everyone else got their first choice. There are fewer records of purchases of clothing and finery for María than for her older siblings. Cloth was expensive, and María likely got hand-me-downs tailored to fit her rather than the same number of new garments made to order for her brother and sisters.
So she might be able to accept a hand-me-down husband as well. It must have been excruciating for her, because Manuel turned down the offer several more times. Finally, he reluctantly consented, and in April 1500 the Portuguese and Spanish royal families signed an agreement for the marriage. Her parents made the match a profitable one for Manuel. He would receive a dowry of 200,000 gold doblas, payable in three installments, and María would be comfortably self-supporting thanks to an annual income of 4.5 million maravedis, based on rents from Seville.6 And María would be well attended, adding to the grandeur of the king’s entourage. In May it was decided that María would have a household of forty-seven, including six ladies-in-waiting, a chief of staff, a majordomo, scribes, accountants, footmen, and four pages. In addition, she would be accompanied by “two or three white slaves.”7 They were most likely to have been Russian or Greek slaves captured in war from Muslims but retained as slaves by the Spaniards.
There was one small problem. Manuel would be marrying the sister of his deceased wife, which would be skirting the prohibition in the book of Leviticus again
st marrying the brother or sister of a previous spouse. Manuel was, of course, a widower, and the ban was probably inapplicable to the situation, but just to be on the safe side, they decided to obtain a papal dispensation—an official religious forgiveness—granting specific approval for the union. Pope Alexander VI wasn’t as cooperative as he had been in the past. He was starting to feel that his contributions to Spain’s success were underappreciated, which had led to some testy scenes in the Vatican, and this time he required that Ferdinand make his nephew, Luis Borja, archbishop of Valencia in return. This had been Cesare’s former clerical post, but he had by now left the church. Rodrigo had come to feel that that seat, which had been his before he became pope, belonged to his family as a sort of hereditary right. The pope signed the dispensation on August 24.8
The wedding festivities for Manuel and María occurred in October 1500; the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar said that the king and the nobles of Portugal received the princess “with a great reception.”9 Queen Isabella’s Portuguese aunt and cousins showered María with attention and helped her make an easy adjustment to life in Portugal.
From the beginning, the reports on the union were favorable. “The Lady Queen dresses very well at all times, and she is plump and very gentle, thanks be to God, and the King shows her much love and is much attached to her, and all the gentlemen and ladies of the court do the same,” a courtier in Portugal wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand on November 24, 1500.10
Placid and easygoing, willing to let bygones be bygones, María re-ceived a warm welcome from her new husband. She was pregnant by the following summer and gave birth to a son, the future King João III, on June 6, 1502. She followed up the next year with a lovely daughter whom they named Isabel. And then she had another baby almost every year for a decade. Eight in all survived to adulthood, leaving the Portuguese succession nicely secured. “Great was the fruit that God gave them,” wrote the chronicler Fray Prudencio de Sandoval.11
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 47