1492: The Year Our World Began (6 page)

Cisneros might have been expected to take a sympathetic line. He was an admirer and probably a practitioner of mysticism. He was a great patron of humanist scholarship. His reputation for learning, piety, reasonableness, and diplomatic skill was unexcelled. However, whereas Talavera and the governor of Granada, the Conde de Tendilla, tried to attract former Christians back to the fold, Cisneros sought to bribe or pressure them into conversion. He suspended teaching in Arabic. He also took advantage of a loophole in the terms of Granada’s surrender that allowed Christians to interrogate Muslims’ formerly Christian wives and their children to see whether they wanted to return to their former faith. He did not, he declared, want to force them: that was against canon law. Their response to pressure was in their own hands. But the line between coercion and force was blurred, and Cisneros’s methods seemed to the Muslims generally to be forcible in effect and therefore in breach of the terms of the surrender of Granada. A report drawn up for the monarchs explained what happened. “Since this was a case in which the Inquisition could take an interest,” Cisneros, the report said,

The first riot broke out when a woman, seized by interrogators, called for help. The rioters desisted, in obedience to Archbishop Talavera, but Cisneros imposed a new condition: they had to submit to baptism or leave the city. This was man-on-the-spotism: an extemporized decision that forced policy makers’ hands. Fifty or sixty thousand people, if we can believe the claims of Cisneros’s propagandists, were received into the Church.

Following on the erosion of their culture by the large-scale emigration and conversions that followed the conquest, the new turn of events scared some of the Muslims into rebellion. Berber raiding parties took part. Outside the city of Granada the scale of the uprising was enormous. Chroniclers estimated at up to ninety-five thousand the number of troops needed to quell it. The king himself took command. Atrocities multiplied. When rebel villages refused to submit to terms that now always included the demand to accept Christianity, they were bombarded into submission and the defenders were enslaved. At Andarax the Christians put three thousand rebel prisoners to death and blew up a mosque to which hundreds of women and children had fled for refuge. The rebels dealt harshly, in their turn, with anyone in their communities who would not join them. One petitioner who survived complained to the monarchs of how the rebels burned his home and granary and carried off his wife, daughter, and livestock.

The monarchs, still fearful of collusion with the Turks, grew alarmed when the rebels appealed to the Ottomans to help them. In 1502, after a series of measures restricted Muslims’ freedom of movement, those who refused baptism were expelled from Castile, including Granada. In acknowledgment of the fact that the economy in Valencia depended on Muslim labor, they were allowed to remain in the Crown of Aragon. The rebels’ terms of surrender show what conversion meant in real terms. Though the monarchs promised that former Muslims would have clergy to instruct them in Christianity, doctrine hardly featured: rather, the victors demanded a modified form of cultural conversion in
which the vanquished submitted to what nowadays would be called “integration.” Their former crimes were pardoned. They could keep their traditional dress “until it wore out.” They could have their own butchers, but meat had to be slaughtered in the Castilian fashion. They could record legal transactions in Arabic, but only the law of Castile would apply in the courts. They could keep their baths. They would pay only Christian taxes, but at a special—effectively punitive—rate three times higher than that of “old Christians.” Their charitable endowments were to continue, though no longer for maintaining mosques and Islamic schools: highway repairs, poor relief, and the ransoming of captives would be the only permitted objectives. The past would be confined to oblivion, and to call someone “Moor” or “renegade” became an offense.
¹³

The conquest of Granada and its aftermath changed the profile of Europe for a half a millennium. Outside the range of Ottoman conquests, no Muslim-ruled state ever reemerged in Europe. Until the creation of sovereign Albania in 1925, there was no state with a Muslim majority. It became possible—though perhaps not convincing—to claim that the culture of Europe, if such a thing exists, is Christian. The habit of identifying Europe with Christendom went almost unchallenged until the late twentieth century. Only then, with large-scale Muslim migrations and the emergence, in Bosnia, of another European state with a Muslim majority, did Europeans have to recraft their self-image to take the Muslim contribution to the making of Europe into account.

The events of 1492 did not, however, contribute much to the making of modern political institutions. Spain did not become a modern state in any of the ways usually alleged: not unified, not centralized, not subject to absolute rule, certainly not bureaucratic or “bourgeois.” Only in one respect did Ferdinand and Isabella practice a new technique of government: they used printing to distribute their commands faster and more efficiently around their realms. In other respects, they ruled a
typically chaotic, heterogeneous medieval state, in which the monarchs shared power with the “estates” of Church, nobility, and towns.

Monarchs were “natural lords” over their people. Their leadership was as the head’s over the limbs of the human body—and everyone knew that the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Nature was a hierarchy: even the most cursory examination of different creatures and natural phenomena made that obvious. Church windows depicted the ranks of creation, from the heavens to the plants and creatures beneath Adam’s feet, with a place for everything and everything in its place. Sacred writings and the traditions of mystical theology portrayed a similar establishment among God and the various orders of angels. The same state naturally characterized human affairs.

Although Aragon and Castile remained separate states, the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella derived a new and exalted dignity from the union of the monarchs. “You shall hold the monarchy of all the Spains,” Diego de Valera assured the king, “and shall renew the imperial seat of the Goths, from whence you come.”
¹⁴
The Goths whom Valera had in mind were the last rulers of a state that covered the whole—or almost the whole—of the Iberian Peninsula back in the sixth and seventh centuries. But Ferdinand and Isabella could not re-create a peninsula-wide state and probably never even thought of trying to do so. Even their personal union was an emergency measure—a political solution improvised to meet temporary problems.

The fact that Isabella was a woman created some of the problems. Until the mid–sixteenth century, when Falloppio sliced women’s bodies open and saw how they really work, medical science classed women as defective men—nature’s botched jobs. Isabella needed Ferdinand at her side in a calculated display of essential equipment. Earlier queens in Castilian history, moreover, had been condemned as disastrous. The image of Eve—seducible, fickle, willful, and selectively subrational—dogged women and made them seem unfit for rule. Works intended for
young Isabella’s edification included Juan de Mena’s
Laberinto de Fortuna,
first printed in 1481, which stressed the importance of female self-discipline for a well-ordered household and kingdom, and Martín de Córdoba’s
Jardín de nobles doncellas,
which paraded exemplars of feminine virtues. As well as of sexual coquetterie, Isabella was the target of misogynistic pornography. A work from probably a few years after her death, the
Carajicomedia,
frankly aligns her with whores and sluts.
¹⁵

The monarchs’ conflicting pretensions made matters worse. The rivalry is apparent between the lines of the address Isabella delivered at the conference in 1475 that settled their differences over how they would share power: “My lord,…where there exists that conformity that by God’s grace ought to exist between you and me, there can be no dispute.” By implication, the conformity was lacking and the dispute obvious. In exchange for parity of power with Isabella in her lifetime, Ferdinand had to renounce his own claim to the throne in favor of his offspring by his wife. Isabella made him her “proctor” in Castile, with power to act on her behalf. He made her “co-regent, governor, and general administrator in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon…in our presence and absence alike.”
¹⁶

The image of unity papered over the cracks in the monarchs’ alliance. Almost all the documents of the reign were issued in the monarchs’ joint names, even when only one of them was present. They were said to be “each other’s favorite,” “two bodies ruled by one spirit,” “sharing a single mind.” Theirs was the equality of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To mask their differences, their propaganda made a display of mutual love. Love knots and yoke-and-arrows were their most favored decorative motifs. The conjugal yoke bound the weapons of Cupid. Pictures of the monarchs exchanging rather formal kisses illuminated presentation copies of royal decrees.
¹⁷

Were the king and queen in love? Their biographers seem unable to abjure this silly question. The coquetterie in which she encouraged court poets was part of Isabella’s armory. Ferdinand’s dislike of her fa
vorites is well attested, and Isabella responded by gutting her husband’s mistresses out of the court. “She loved after such a fashion,” said one of the court humanists, “so solicitous and vigilant in jealousy, that if she felt that he looked on any lady of the court with a look that evinced desire, she would very discreetly find ways and means to dismiss that person from the household.”
¹⁸
Her object in persecuting her husband’s floozies was, however, according to the same source, her own “honor and advantage” rather than amorous satisfaction. A document often cited as evidence of her affection for her husband is the letter she wrote to her confessor describing Ferdinand’s escape from an assassination attempt in Barcelona in December 1492, but the incident reveals feelings deeper, in Isabella, than love. A knife-wielding maniac, “long crazy and out of his mind,” as an eyewitness observed, took advantage of one of the regular Friday audiences, at which petitioners were allowed to confront the monarch in person. On the face of it, the sentiments the queen declared at the time seemed admirably, lovingly selfless. “The wound was so big,” she bleated,

Yet for all her expressions of tenderness for her spouse, it was evidently for herself that Isabella most grieved and feared. She made her sorrow seem worse than her husband’s affliction. A professional court flatterer, Alonso Ortiz, told her that her suffering “seemed greater than the king’s.” She congratulated herself on persuading the would-be assassin to confess, thereby saving his soul. And she took up most of her letter to her confessor with reflections on her own unpreparedness for
death. Ferdinand’s plight convinced her “that monarchs may die from any sudden disaster, the same as other men, and it is reason enough to be ready always to die well.” She went on to ask her confessor to prepare a handy list of all her sins, including especially the vows she had broken in the pursuit of power.
¹⁹

The monarchs’ affection for each other may have become a fact, but it began as an affectation. The language of love the king and queen exchanged in public had little to do with real sentiments and much to do with the courtly ethos that made the monarchs’ style of government seem far removed from modernity: the cult of chivalry, which was probably the nearest they got to an ideology. Isabella’s mental image of heaven is suggestive. She saw it as a sort of royal court, staffed by paragons of knightly virtue. Chivalry could not, perhaps, make men good, as it was supposed to do. It could, however, win wars. Granada fell, said the Venetian ambassador, in “a beautiful war…. There was not a lord present who was not enamored of some lady,” who “often handed warriors their weapons…with a request that they show their love by their deeds.” The queen of Castile died uttering prayers to the archangel Michael as “prince of the chivalry of angels.”
²⁰

To see how important chivalry was, the best measure is the frequency and intensity of jousting. (The joust was chivalry’s great rite—a sport of unsurpassed nobility, which afforded many opportunities for political jobbery.) In April 1475, in the midst of war with Portugal, the monarchs held a tourney at Valladolid that the local chronicle acclaimed as “the most magnificent that had ever been seen, men said, for fifty years and more.” The host and master of the joust, the Duke of Alba, exhibited the value of valor. He “fell from his horse on his way to risk himself at the tilt and was rendered dumb, unable to speak, and he hurt his head, and they bled him. Yet he still came out armed and jousted twice.” The king displayed a tribute on his shield that read, “I suffer without making sound / For as long as I am bound.” The king’s secretary, however, confided the underlying purpose of assembling the monarchs’ most powerful supporters: they had to know who was with them
and who against them. The magnates had their own agenda, according to Alonso de Palencia: they intended to exploit the occasion to distract Ferdinand from matters of state and lure him into expenditure and concessions.