which we are told was meant as a warning to those at his side that he knew they were beguiling him with such pageantry whilst they were paltering with his enemies.
It was a gay though ominous feast; but Isabel could not afford much time for such trifling, and on the second day she mounted her palfrey and rode out to Tordesillas, forty miles away, to inspect the fortifications, and then to make an attempt to win back to her cause the Archbishop of Toledo. With prodigious activity the young Sovereigns separately travelled from fortress to fortress, animating followers, and providing for defence; and Isabel was in the imperial city of Toledo late in May 1475, when the news came to her that the King of Portugal had entered Spain with a large army, had formally married the Beltraneja at Palencia, and proclaimed himself King of Castile.[26] Without wasting a moment Isabel started on horseback for her faithful fief of Avila, ninety miles away. She was less than two days on the road, and, though she had a miscarriage on the way at Cabezon she dared not tarry until safe within the walls of the city, which she entered on the 28th May.
For some months thereafter the fate of Spain hung in the balance. Ferdinand strained every nerve, but the forces against him were stronger than his, and the Archbishop of Toledo with his wealth and following had reinforced the Portuguese. The invading army lay across the Douro at Toro, a frontier fortress of Leon of fabulous strength, and Ferdinand from Valladolid attempted to push them back and was beaten. All Leon, and the plain of Castile as far as Avila, looked at the mercy of the invaders. But the Portuguese was slow of action, and at this critical juncture the splendid courage of Isabel saved the situation.[27] Summoning Cortes at her city of Medina, the centre of the cloth industry and the greatest mart for bills of exchange in Europe, she appealed to their patriotism, their loyalty, and their love. Her eloquent plea was irresistible. Money was voted without stint, merchants and bankers unlocked their coffers, churches sold their plate, and monasteries disinterred their hoards. Aragonese troops marched in, Castilian levies came to the call of their Queen, and by the end of 1475 Ferdinand was at the head of an army strong enough to face the invaders. Isabel took her full share of the military operations. On the 8th January 1476, she rode out of Valladolid through terrible weather, in the coldest part of Spain, to join Ferdinand’s half-brother, Alfonso, before Burgos. For ten days the Queen travelled through the deep snowdrifts before she reached the camp, to find that the city had already surrendered; and on the evening of her arrival, in the gathering dusk, she entered the city of the Cid, to be received by kneeling, silk-clad aldermen with heads bowed for past transgressions, to be graciously pardoned by the Queen. The pardon was hearty and prompt; for these, and such as these, Isabel meant to make her instruments for bringing Spain to heel.
In the meanwhile Ferdinand had marched to meet the invading army of 3000 horse and 10,000 foot which lay across the Douro at Toro. First he set siege to Zamora, between the invading army and its base, and the King of Portugal ineffectually attempted to blockade him. Failing in this, the invaders on the 17th February raised their camp and marched towards Toro again. They stole away silently, but Ferdinand followed them as rapidly as possible, and caught up with them twelve miles from Toro, late in the afternoon, on the banks of the Douro. The charge of the Aragonese upon the disorganised army on the march was irresistible, and a complete rout of the invaders ensued, no less than 300 of the fugitives being drowned in the river in sheer panic. King Alfonso of Portugal fled, leaving his royal standard behind him, and before nightfall all was over, and the last hope of the Beltraneja had faded for ever.
A month afterwards Zamora, the almost impregnable fortress, surrendered to Ferdinand; and then the King marched to subdue other towns, whilst Isabel laid siege to Toro. The Queen scorned to avail herself of the privilege of her sex, and suffered all the hardships and dangers of a soldier’s life. Early and late she was on horseback superintending the operations, and ordered and witnessed more than one unsuccessful assault upon the town. At length, after a siege of many months, Toro itself fell, the last great fortress to hold out, and Isabel rode into the starving city in triumph. Then indeed was she Queen of Castile, with none to question her right.
The waverers hastened to join the victorious side, the nobles who had helped the Beltraneja, even the Archbishop of Toledo, came penitently, one by one, to make such terms as their mistress would accord; whilst the Beltraneja herself, unmarried again by an obedient Pope, retired to a Portuguese convent, and the King of Portugal afterwards laid aside his royal crown and assumed the tonsure and coarse gown of a Franciscan friar. Never was victory more complete; and when three years later, early in 1479, the old King of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, went to his account, Isabel and Ferdinand, for ever known as ‘the Catholic kings,’ by grace of the Pope, reigned over Spain jointly from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules, one poor tributary Moorish realm, Granada, alone remaining to sully with infidelity the reunited domains of the Cross.
But the elements of aristocratic anarchy still existed, especially in Galicia and Andalucia, where certain noble families assumed the position of almost independent sovereigns, and at any time might again imperil the very existence of the State. With the great ambitions of Ferdinand and the exalted fervour of Isabel to spread Christianity, it must have been clear to both sovereigns that they must make themselves absolutely supreme in their own country before they could attempt to carry out their views abroad. The realms of Aragon offered no great difficulty, since good order prevailed, although the strict parliamentary constitutions sorely limited the regal power, and gave to the estates the command of the purse. In Castile, however, the nobles, eternally at feud with each other, were quite out of hand, and Isabel’s first measures were directed towards shearing them of their power for mischief. All the previous kings of her line—that of Trastamara—had been simply puppets in the hands of the nobility; she was determined, as a preliminary of greater things, to be sole mistress in her realm. Her task was a tremendous one, and needed supreme diplomacy in dividing opponents, as well as firmness in suppressing them. Isabel was a host in herself; and to her, much more than to her husband, must be given the honour of converting utter anarchy into order and security in a prodigiously short time.
The only semblance of settled life and respect for law in Castile was to be found in the walled towns. The municipal government had always been the unit of civilisation in Spain, and the nobility being untaxed, the Castilian Cortes consisted entirely of the representatives of the burgesses. With true statesmanship Isabel therefore turned to this element to reinforce the crown as against lawless nobles. The proposal to revive in a new form the old institution of the ‘Sacred Brotherhood’ of towns was made to her at the meeting of the Cortes at Madrigal in April 1476, and was at once accepted. A meeting of deputies was called at Dueñas in July, and within a few months the urban alliance was complete. An armed force of 2000 horsemen and many foot-soldiers was formed and paid by an urban house tax.[28] They were more than a mere constabulary, although they ranged the country far and wide, and compelled men to keep the peace, for the organisation provided a judicial criminal system that effectually completed the task of punishment. Magistrates were appointed in every village of thirty families for summary jurisdiction, and constables of the Brotherhood were in every hamlet, whilst a supreme council composed of deputies from every province in Castile judged without appeal the causes referred to it by local magistrates. The punishments for the slightest transgression were terrible in their severity, and struck the turbulent classes with dismay. In 1480 a league of nobles and prelates met at Cabeña, under the Duke of Infantado, to protest against the Queen’s new force of burgesses. In answer to their remonstrance she showed her strength by haughtily telling them to look to themselves and obey the law, and at once established the Brotherhood on a firmer footing than before, to be a veritable terror to evildoers, gentle as well as simple.
Isabel was no mild saint, as she is so often represented. She was far too great a woman and Queen to be that; and though for the first two or three years of her reign diplomacy was her principal weapon, no sooner had she divided her opponents and firmly established the Holy Brotherhood, than the iron flail fell upon those who had offended. In Galicia the nobles had practically appropriated to themselves the royal revenues, and the Queen’s writ had no power. That might suit weak Henry, but Isabel was made of sterner stuff than her brother had been, and in 1481 she sent two doughty officers to summon the representatives of the Galician towns to Santiago, and to demand of them money and men to bring the nobles to their senses. The burgesses despaired, and said that nothing less than an act of God would cure the many evils from which they suffered. The act of God they yearned for came, but Isabel was the instrument. Forty-seven fortresses, which were so many brigand strongholds, were levelled to the ground in the province; and some of the highest heads were struck from noble shoulders. The stake and the gibbet were kept busy, the dungeons and torture chambers full; and those of evil life in sheer terror mended their ways, or fled to places were justice was less strict.
But it is in the suppression of the anarchy at Seville that Isabel’s personal action is most clearly seen. For years the city had been a prey to the sanguinary rivalry between two great families who lorded it over the greater part of Andalucia, the Guzmans and the Ponces de Leon; and at the time of Isabel’s accession the feud had assumed the form of predatory civil war, from which no citizen was safe. The cities of the south were less settled in Christian organisation than those of the north, and their municipal governments not so easy to combine; and Isabel, in 1477, determined by her personal presence in Seville to enforce the hard lessons she had taught the rest of her realms. The armed escort that accompanied her was sufficient, added to the awe already awakened by her name, to cow the turbulent spirits of Seville. Reviving the ancient practice of the Castilian kings, Isabel, alone or with her husband by her side, sat every Friday in the great hall of the Moorish Alcazar at Seville, to deal out justice without appeal to all comers. Woe betided the offender who was haled before her. The barbaric splendour, which Isabel knew how to use with effect, surrounding her, gave to this famous royal tribunal a prestige that captured the imagination of the semi-oriental population of Seville, whilst the terrible severity of its judgments and the lightning rapidity of its executions reduced the population to trembling obedience whilst Isabel stayed in the city. No less than four thousand malefactors fled—mostly across the frontier—to escape from the Queen’s wrath, whilst all those who in the past had transgressed, either by plundering or maltreating others, and could be caught, were made to feel to the full what suffering was. So great was Isabel’s severity that at last the Bishop of Cadiz, accompanied by the clergy and notables of Andalucia, and backed by hosts of weeping women, came and humbly prayed the Queen to have mercy in her justice. Isabel had no objection. She did not scourge and slay because she loved to do it, but to compel obedience. Once that was obtained she was content to stay her hand; and before she left the city, a general amnesty was given for past offences except for serious crimes. But she left behind her an organised police and criminal tribunals, active and vigilant enough to trample at once upon any attempt at reviving the former state of things.
A more difficult task for Isabel was that of reforming the moral tone of her court and society at large. The Alcazar of Henry IV. had been a sink of iniquity, and the lawlessness throughout the country had made the practice of virtue almost impossible; whilst the clergy, and especially the regular ecclesiastics, were shamefully corrupt. Isabel herself was not only severely discreet in her conduct, but determined that no countenance should be given to those who were lax in any of the proprieties of life; and it was soon understood by ecclesiastics and courtiers that the only certain passport to advancement in Castile was strict decorum. It is probable that much of the sudden reform thus effected was merely hypocrisy; but it lasted long enough to become a fixed tradition, and permanently raised the standard of public and private life in Spain.
In all directions Isabel carried forward her work of reform. The great nobles found to their dismay, when the Queen was strong enough to do it, that she, fortified by the Cortes of Toledo, had cancelled all the unmerited grants so lavishly squandered by previous kings upon them. Some of those who had been most active in the late troubles, such as the Dukes of Alburquerque and Alba and the Admiral of Castile, Ferdinand’s maternal uncle, were stripped almost to the skin. Isabel’s revenue on her accession had only amounted to 40,000 ducats, barely sufficient for necessary sustenance; but in a very few years (1482) it had multiplied by more than twelvefold, and thirty millions of maravedis a year had been added to the royal income from resumed national grants. To all remonstrances from those who suffered, Isabel was firm and dignified, though conciliatory in manner. Her voice was sweet and her bearing womanly; she always ascribed her measures, however oppressive they might seem, to her love for the country and her determination to make it great. Upon this ground she was unassailable; and enlisted upon her side even those who felt the pinch by appealing to their national pride.
There was no one measure that added more to Isabel’s material power than her policy towards the religious orders of knighthood. These three great orders, Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara, had grown out of the long crusade against the Moors; devout celibate soldiers receiving in community vast grants of territory which they wrested from the infidel. By the time of Isabel they had grown to be a scandal, for the grandmasters disposed of revenues and forces as large as those of the crown, and were practically independent of it. Isabel’s treatment of them was diplomatic and wise as usual. As each mastership fell vacant she granted it to her husband; and thus the three most dangerous rivals to the royal authority were made thenceforward appanages of the crown, to which the territories were afterwards appropriated.[29]
The Queen’s activity and strength of body and mind must have been marvellous. We hear of her travelling vast distances, almost incessantly in the saddle, visiting remote parts of her husband’s and her own dominions for State business, to settle disputed points, to inspect fortifications, to animate ecclesiastical or municipal bodies, and to suppress threatened disorder. No difficulty seemed to dismay her, no opposition to deflect her from the exalted purpose she had in view. For it must not be supposed that this strenuous activity was sporadic and without a central object which inspired it all. In this supreme object the key to Isabel’s life must be sought. Isabel’s mother was mad: after the death of her husband she had sunk into the gloomy devotional lunacy which afflicted in after years so many of her descendants; and in the impressionable years of Isabel’s youth, passed in the isolated castle of Arevalo, the whole atmosphere of her life had been one of mystic religious exaltation.
The Christian Spaniard of Castile had through seven centuries gradually regained for Christ his lost kingdom by a constant crusade against the infidel. The secular struggle had made him a convinced believer in his divine mission to re-establish the reign of the cross on earth. To this end saints had led him into battle in shining armour, blazing crosses in the sky had heralded victory to God’s own militia, and holy relics, miraculously revealed, had served as talismans which ensured success. Mysticism and the yearning for martyrdom was in the air in Isabel’s youth, and she, a saintly neurotic, who happened also to be a genius and a queen, shared to the full the Castilian national obsession. The man who fostered the growth of this feeling in the young princess at Arevalo might have been useful in spurring a sluggish mind to devotion; but to further inflame the zeal of a girl of Isabel’s innate tendency was unnecessary, and of this alone was he capable. He was a fiery, uncompromising, Dominican monk, called Tomas de Torquemada. The Dominicans, centuries before, had been entrusted by the Pope with the special duty to maintain the purity of the faith, and as its guardians, spiritual pride and arrogance had always been the characteristic of the order. Torquemada, as Isabel’s confessor and spiritual tutor, had abundant opportunities of influencing her, and never ceased to keep before her the sacred duty imposed upon rulers of extirpating heresy, root and branch, at any cost. Her own brother Henry had been surrounded by the hated infidel, the enemy of Christ and Spain. Failure as a king, ruin as a man, and a miserable death, had been his portion. And so the lesson was ceaselessly dinned into Isabel’s ear, that no ruler could be happy or successful who did not smite heretics, infidels and doubters, hip and thigh, for the glory of God. The Moor, she was told, still defiled in Granada the sacred soil of Spain, suffered by an unworthy Christian king to linger for the sake of the paltry tribute paid.
To establish the rule of Christ on earth, which she was taught was her sacred duty, Isabel knew that a strong weapon was needed. Only a united and centralised Spain could give her that, and Spain must be unified first of all. Her marriage with Ferdinand was a great step in advance; her suppression of the nobles and the masterships of the orders another, the submission of the country to her will and law a third, the increase of her revenues a fourth; but a greater than all was the reawakening in the breasts of all Spaniards the mystic exaltation and spiritual pride that gave strength to their arms against the Moor in the heroic days of old. The character of the Spanish people, and the state of the public mind at the time, made it easy to stir up the religious rancour of the majority against a minority already despised and distrusted. Throughout Spain there were numerous families of the conquered race nominally Christians, but yet living apart in separate quarters, and unmixed in blood with their neighbours. They were, as a rule, industrious and well-to-do handicraftsmen and agriculturists, whose artistic traditions and skill gave them the monopoly in many profitable and thriving avocations. The Christian Spaniard had not, as a rule, developed similar qualities, and were naturally jealous of the so-called new Christians who lived with them, but were not of them.
There was, however, at first but little open enmity between these two races of Spaniards, though distrust and dislike existed. It was otherwise in the case of the Jews. They, during the centuries of Moorish rule, had grown rich and numerous, and had in subsequent periods almost monopolised banking and financial business throughout Spain, marrying in many cases into the highest Christian families. As farmers of taxes and royal treasurers they had become extremely unpopular, especially in Aragon; and although, for the most part, professed Christians, they were eyed with extreme jealousy by the people at large, and on many occasions had been the victims of attack and massacre in various places.[30] Nevertheless, so far as can be seen, the first steps towards religious persecution by Isabel and her husband do not appear to have been prompted, although they may have been strengthened, by this feeling. There had for centuries existed in Aragon and Sicily an Inquisition for the investigation of cases of heresy. It was a purely papal institution, and its operations were very mild, though extremely unpopular. In Castile, the papal Inquisition had never been favoured by rulers, who were always jealous of the interference of Rome, and at the time of Isabel’s accession it had practically ceased to exist.
When the sovereigns were holding Court at Seville in 1477, a Sicilian Dominican came to beg for the confirmation of an old privilege, giving to the Order in Sicily one-third of the property of all the heretics condemned there by the Inquisition. This Ferdinand and Isabel consented to, and the Dominican, whose name was Dei Barberi, suggested to Ferdinand that as religious observance had grown so lax under the late King Henry, it might be advisable to introduce a similar tribunal into Castile. Ferdinand’s ambitions were great. He wanted to win for Barcelona the mastership of the Mediterranean and the reversion of the Christian Empire of the East, and, as a preliminary, to clear Spain itself of the taint of dominant Islam at Granada. He understood that times had changed, and that the nerve of war was no longer feudal aids, but the concentration in the hands of the King of the ready money of his subjects. The people who had most of the ready money in Spain were the very people whose orthodoxy was open to attack, and he welcomed a proposal that might make him rich beyond dreams.
Isabel was not greedy for money as her husband was: she was too much of a religious mystic for that; but to spread the kingdom of Christ on earth, to crush His enemies and raise His cross supreme in the eyes of men, seemed to promise her the only glory for which she yearned. By her side was her confessor Torquemada, the Dominican Ojeda, and the Papal Nuncio, all pressing upon her that to strike at heresy in her realms was her duty. So Isabel took the step they counselled, and begged the Pope for a bull establishing the Inquisition in Castile. The bull was granted in September 1478, but no active steps were taken for nearly two years.
In 1480, Isabel and her husband were again in Seville, and the Dominicans were ceaseless in their exhortations to them to suppress the growing scandal of obstinate Judaism. The complaints of the clergy against the Jews were such as they knew would be supported by the populace. Amongst other things, they said that the Jews bought up and ate all the meat in the market for their Sabbath, and there was none left for Christians on Sunday;[31] that they were hoarding coin to such an extent that there was a lack of currency; that they donned rich finery and ornaments only fit for their betters, and so on.[32]
The various modern apologists of Isabel have striven to minimise her share in the establishment of the dread tribunal that sprang out of these and similar complaints. There seems to me no reason for doing so: she herself probably considered it a most praiseworthy act, and her only hesitation in the matter was caused by her dislike of strengthening the papal power over the church of Castile.[33] There could have been no repugnance in her mind to punishing, however severely, those whom she looked upon as God’s enemies, and consequently unworthy of the privileges of humanity. Ferdinand added his persuasion to the clamours of the churchmen; and from Medina del Campo, Isabel, in September 1480, commissioned two Dominicans to act as Inquisitors, and to establish their tribunal at Seville.
The Jews of Seville took alarm at once, and large numbers of them fled from the city to the shelter of some of the neighbouring great nobles, who looked with dislike at this new development of priestly power. A decree of the sovereign’s at once forbade all loyal subjects to withhold suspected heretics from their accusers, and those fugitive Jews who could escape sought the safety of Moorish Granada. In the first days of 1481, the Inquisition got to work, striking at the highest first, and before the end of the year 2000 poor wretches were burnt in Andalusia alone.[34] All Spain protested against it. Deputations from the chief towns came and demanded the abolition of a foreign tribunal over Spaniards. The Aragonese, rough and independent as usual, resorted to violence, and hunted the Inquisitors, whilst in Old Castile the tribunal could only sit, in many places, surrounded by the Queen’s soldiers. But Isabel’s heart was aflame with zeal, and Ferdinand, with gaping coffers, was rejoicing at the showers of Jewish gold that flowed to him; and all remonstrance was in vain. The Pope himself soon took fright at the severity exercised, and threatened to withdraw the bull, but Ferdinand silenced him with a hint that he would make the Inquisition an independent tribunal altogether, as later it practically became, and thenceforward the horrible business went on unchecked until Spain was seared from end to end, and independent judgment was stifled for centuries in blood and sacrificial smoke.
The heartless bigot Torquemada, Isabel’s confessor, was appointed Inquisitor-General in 1483, and he, the most insolent, because the humblest, man in Spain, became the greatest power in the land, master of Isabel’s conscience and feeder of Ferdinand’s purse. Isabel’s Spanish biographers continue to assert that she was tireless in her endeavours to soften the rigour of her own tribunal, and to intercede for her ‘dear Castilians.’ There is not a scrap of real evidence known to prove that she did so, and certainly her contemporaries did not believe it.[35] Her administration, however, had already been extremely successful. Peace and order reigned, the pride of Spaniards, which she so sedulously fostered, had been worked up to a high pitch, the Queen herself was personally popular, in consequence of her dignity, her activity, and her patriotism; and the urban populations, who had so greatly aided her, and were now so powerful, dreaded to cause disturbance that might have thrown the country again into the clutches of the nobles. Terrible, therefore, as was the action of the Holy Office, acquiesced in by the Queen, there were many reasons why no combined opposition to it in Castile was offered, although for the first years of its existence it was bitterly hated.
To the Queen during these first few years of ceaseless activity, no other child had been born but the Infanta Isabel, the first fruit of her marriage in 1470. The constant long journeys on horseback, the hardships and risk entailed by her work, thus for eight years prevented the birth of a male heir. But during Isabel’s stay at Seville, on the 30th June 1478, the prayed for Prince of Asturias, Juan, was born. Ferdinand was away in the north at the time, but all the pomp and splendour, which Isabel knew so well how to use, heralded the birth of the Prince. On the 15th July the Queen was sufficiently well to ride in state to the cathedral from the Moorish Alcazar where she lived, and to present her first-born son to the Church. Through the narrow, tortuous lanes of the sunny city, packed with people, Isabel rode on a bay charger; her crimson brocade robe, all stiff with gold embroidery, trailing almost to the ground, over the petticoat covered with rich pearls. Her saddle, we are told, was of gold, and the housings black velvet, with bullion lace and fringe. Ferdinand’s base brother Alfonso, and his kinswoman the Duchess of Vistahermosa, followed close behind, and the Queen’s bridle was held by the Constable of Castile and Count Benavente. The merry music of fife, tabor, and clarion preceded the royal party; and behind there came on foot the nobles and grandees, and the authorities of the city. The baby Prince was borne in the arms of his nurse, seated upon a mule draped with velvet, and embroidered with the scutcheons of Castile, Leon, and Aragon, and led by the Admiral of Castile. At the high altar of the famous Mudejar Cathedral, Isabel solemnly devoted her child to the service of God, and then, with splendid largess to all and sundry, she returned to the palace.[36]
Isabel was unremitting always in the performance of her religious duties, and wherever she stayed, endowments for purposes of the Church commemorated her visit. Her humility and submission to priests and nuns is cited with extravagant praise by her many ecclesiastical eulogists, and they tell the story of how, when Father Talavera first succeeded Torquemada as her confessor, he bade her kneel at his feet like an ordinary penitent. When she reminded him that monarchs always sat by the side of the confessor, as she had always done before, he rebuked her by saying that his seat was the seat of God, before whom all kneeled without distinction; and the Queen thenceforward kept upon her knees before the priest, whom she honoured thenceforward for what in our days we should consider unpardonable arrogance.
There was little of repose for Isabel, even after the birth of her child. To Seville came the news a few months afterwards that the old soldier Archbishop of Toledo and the Pachecos had once more persuaded Alfonso of Portugal to strike a blow for his niece and wife the Beltraneja. Raising what troops she could, Isabel rode through Estremadura at the head of her force, determined to end for good claims that she thought had already been disposed of. Ferdinand was in Aragon, where, his father having just died, his presence could not be dispensed with; but Isabel was undismayed. In vain her councillors begged her to refrain from undertaking the campaign in person. The country was devastated by famine and war, they said; pestilence prevailed in the towns, and the raids of the Portuguese and rebels would expose her to great danger. ‘I did not come hither,’ Isabel replied, ‘to shirk danger and trouble, nor do I intend to give my enemies the satisfaction, nor my subjects the chagrin, to see me do so, until we end the war we are engaged upon or make the peace we seek.’[37] Isabel, in command of the Castilians, finally crushed the Portuguese at the battle of Albuera; and then, after reducing to submission the rebel noble fortresses, she negotiated a peace with Portugal and France at Alcantara, by which both powers were compelled to recognise her as Queen of Spain. Suppressing revolt, deciding disputes, and punishing transgressions on her way, Isabel then rode to Toledo, where Ferdinand joined her, and there her third child, Joan, was born, in November 1479.
CHAPTER II
Castile and Aragon, now being indissolubly united, and internal peace secured, it was time for the sovereigns to prepare for the execution of the great designs that had respectively moved them to effect what they had done. These designs were to some extent divergent from each other. Ferdinand’s main object was to cripple his rival, France, in the direction of Italy, and assume for Aragon the hegemony of the Mediterranean and of the sister Peninsula, of which Sicily already belonged to him and Naples to a member of his house. Castile, on the other hand, had for centuries cultivated usually harmonious relations with France, the frontiers not being conterminous except at one point, the mouth of the Bidasoa; and the ambitions of Castile were traditionally towards the absorption of Portugal, the domination of the coast of North Africa, and the spread of the Christian power generally to the detriment of Islam, its secular enemy. Its own Moorish populations were as yet but imperfectly assimilated, and the existence of the realm of Granada in the Peninsula kept hopes alive in the breasts of the Castilian Moors. The presence of many thousands of potential enemies in the midst of Christian Spain, and the wealth and number of the Jews, who, in a struggle, would probably side with the Moors, undoubtedly influenced greatly in causing the severity of the Inquisition against them and their subsequent expulsion. The first step, therefore, to be taken towards the objects either of Aragon and Castile, was to reduce to impotence any Moorish power in Spain itself that might cause anxiety to the Christian rulers whilst they were busy upon plans abroad, though this step was mainly important to Castile rather than to Aragon.
This was the state of affairs in the beginning of 1481. The Castilians were subdued and prepared to do the bidding of their Queen, but the Catalans and Aragonese, rough and independent, had to be conciliated before they could be depended upon to give their aid to an object apparently for the advantage of Castile. Isabel had summoned a Cortes of her realms to the imperial city of Toledo late in 1480, to take the oath of allegiance to her infant son Juan as heir to the throne: and thence, with a splendid train, she rode to visit for the first time her husband’s kingdoms, to receive their homage as joint sovereign. Ferdinand met his wife at Calatayud in April 1481, and there, before the assembled Cortes of Aragon, the oath of allegiance to the sovereigns and their heir was taken. The Aragonese were rough-tongued and jealous, and even more so the Catalans, dreading the centralising policy of Isabel and their assimilation by Castile; and throughout Ferdinand’s dominions Isabel was forced to hear demands and criticisms to which the more amenable Cortes of Castile had not accustomed her. It was gall and wormwood to her proud spirit that subjects should haggle with monarchs, and in Barcelona she turned to her husband, when the Cortes had refused one of his requests, and said: ‘This realm is not ours, we shall have to come and conquer it.’ But Ferdinand knew his subjects better than she, and gradually made them understand that in all he did he had their interests in view. He was forced, indeed, by circumstances and his wife to allow precedence to Castilian aims, the better to compass those of Aragon.
The turbulent Valencians were being won to benevolence by the presence of their King and the smiles of his wife in the last days of 1481, when the news reached the sovereigns that the pretext they needed for their next great step had been furnished by the Moors of Granada. From the fairy palace of the Alhambra for the previous two hundred and fifty years, the Kings of Granada had ruled a territory in the South of Andalucia, running from fifteen miles north of Gibraltar along the Mediterranean coast two hundred and twenty miles to the borders of Murcia, and including the fine ports of Malaga, Velez, and Almeria. The industry of the people and the commerce of their important seaboard, facing the African land of their kinsmen, made the population prosperous and their standard of living high; but a series of petty despots, successively reaching the throne by usurpation and murder, had enabled the Kings of Castile, by fomenting the consequent discord, to reduce Granada to the position of a tributary. When Isabel succeeded, and the treaties between Castile and Granada had to be renewed in 1476, Ferdinand had demanded the prompt annual payment of the tribute in gold. Muley Abul Hassan had paid no tribute to Isabel’s brother, and intended to pay none to her. ‘Tell the Queen and King of Castile,’ he replied, ‘that steel and not gold is what we coin in Granada.’ From the day they received the message Isabel and Ferdinand knew that they could not wield a solid Spain to their ends until the Cross was reared over the Mosque of Granada. When, therefore, all the rest of Spain was pacified, and the sovereigns were at Valencia at Christmas 1481, the pretext for action came, not unwelcome, at least for Isabel. The Moors of Granada had swept down by night and captured the Christian frontier fortress of Zahara.[38] Isabel and her husband had never ceased since their accession to prepare for the inevitable war. The civil conflict they had passed through had proved the superiority for their purpose of paid troops of their own over feudal levies, and already the organisation of a national army existed. The Royal Council appointed by Isabel had brought from France, Italy, and Germany the best skilled engineers and constructors of the recently introduced iron artillery; great quantities of gunpowder had been imported from Sicily, and improved lances, swords, and crossbows had been invented and manufactured in Italy and Spain.
The troops that had been expelled from Zahara, and those that at first revenged the insult by the capture and sack of the important Moorish fortress of Alhama, between Malaga and Granada, were the vassals of the princely Andalucian nobles, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the Marquis of Cadiz; but the sovereigns, hurrying from Valencia to the Castilian town of Medina del Campo, set about organising the coming war with national forces. The efficiency and foresight shown were extraordinary, and, up to that time, unexampled. Nothing seems to have been forgotten or left to chance; flying hospitals, field ambulances, and army chaplains, testify to Isabel’s personal influence. Whatever may have been the case with Ferdinand, his wife approached the struggle as to a sacred crusade. Torquemada, though not yet Inquisitor-General, was busy with the Holy Office, and had just been replaced as Isabel’s confessor by the saintly Father Talavera, whose influence over the Queen was greater still; and whose zeal for the conquest of Granada for the cross was a consuming passion, only comparable in its strength with his proud humility.[39]
The kingdom of Granada was girt around with mountain fortresses of immense strength upon the spurs and peaks of the Sierra Nevada; and in the midst stood the lovely city, as it stands to-day, with its twin fortresses upon their sister cliffs, the Alhambra and the Albaycin, each capable of housing an army. The task of reducing the mountain realm was a great one, for the outlying fortresses had to be subdued separately before the almost impregnable capital could be attacked, whilst the long line of coast had to be watched and blockaded to prevent, if possible, succour being sent from Africa by kinsmen across the sea. In the first days of March 1482, the news of the capture of Alhama by the Andalucian nobles, and the awful slaughter of the women and children, as well as the men, who so heroically defended it, reached Isabel at Medina; and the splendid exploit and vast booty won uplifted all Castilian hearts. It is said by many historians, but is not true, that Isabel herself set out barefooted on a pilgrimage to Compostella, to thank Santiago for the victory. But though she had no time for this, she bade the Church throughout Castile sing praises for the boon vouchsafed to the Christian cause. But then came tidings less bright. The Moorish King, with all his force of 80,000 men, was besieging the Marquis of Cadiz in Alhama: the water supply had been cut off, food was scarce, and the Christians surrounded. Within a week of the news Ferdinand was on the march with his army, and the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with his 40,000 armed retainers, was rapidly approaching Alhama to succour his ancient foe the Marquis of Cadiz. The slaughter of Moors in the constant unsuccessful assaults upon Alhama had been immense; the King, Muley Abul Hassan, had bitter domestic enemies, and daring not to face the approaching Christians, he raised the siege and returned to Granada. The rich booty taken in the town by the original captors aroused the cupidity of the relieving force, and dissensions between the Christians arose over the division of the spoil. Medina Sidonia and his army marched away, and again Muley Abul Hassan beleaguered Alhama, with artillery this time, and a powerful army. Once more deeds of unheard of gallantry and hardihood were done by the Moorish chivalry; but, as before, unavailingly. By the end of March Ferdinand’s great host, with 40,000 beasts of burden carrying supplies and munitions, approached, and again Muley Abul Hassan retreated to his disaffected capital. It was a blow from which the Moorish power in Spain never recovered, and thenceforward Granada fought hopelessly with her back to the wall.
Into the fertile vega of Granada swept Ferdinand’s host in the midsummer of 1482, carrying devastation and ruin in its van. From the heights of Granada the Moors, with impotent hate and rage, saw their blazing villages, their raided flocks and herds, their murdered countrymen, and desolated fields; and yet within the fair city treason and civil discord numbed all hearts, and paralysed the warrior’s arms. For Muley Abul Hassan was fighting foes within his own harem more deadly than the Christians who raided beneath his walls; and a palace revolution led by his wife and his undutiful son, Abu Abdalla (Boabdil), was already plotting his downfall. To secure his position in the vega of Granada, it was necessary for Ferdinand to capture the frowning fortress that crowned the height of Loja, and commanded the pass into Castile. It had long been a thorn in the Christian flesh, and now Ferdinand, with all the chivalry of Spain, were pledged to capture it at any cost. Though brave and cool, Ferdinand was no great tactician, and was easily outwitted by the wily Moors, who led his forces into ambush and utterly routed the Christian host. Panic and flight ensued, with the loss of baggage, standards, and arms; and Ferdinand himself escaped only by the efforts of a small devoted band of Castilian knights. The ruin was complete, and when Ferdinand joined his heroic wife at the ancient Moorish Alcazar of Cordova, even her faith and steadfastness for a time wavered.
But not for long. Talavera, Torquemada, and Mendoza, the Cardinal of Spain, with fiery zeal for the extirpation of heresy, were at her side. Not for territory alone, but to fix God’s realm on earth freely, must sacrifice be made and final victory won: and, though Ferdinand with longing eyes towards his own aims, yearned to use his arms against France for the recapture of his own provinces of Rosellon and Cerdagne, and tried to persuade his wife that though ‘her war might be a holy one, his against the French would be a just one,’ Isabel had her way, and with unflinching zeal set about organising to snatch conquest from defeat.[40] Muley Abul Hassan, expelled from his city of Granada, but holding his own in Malaga and the south, had been succeeded in his capital by the weak, rebellious Boabdil. The old King and his brother, El Zagal, were still fighting doughtily, and even successfully raiding the Christian land near Gibraltar; and Boabdil, jealous of their activity, determined to sally from Granada and strike a blow for his cause, at the instigation of his masculine mother. At the head of 9000 Moors, all glittering and confident, the Prince sallied out of Granada in April 1483, and, collecting the veteran guard of Loja on the way, marched towards Cordova. The Moors were undisciplined, loaded with loot, and led by a fool, when they approached the Christian Cordovese city of Lucena, and their ostentatious march into Christian land had been heralded. Their attack upon the city was repulsed with great valour, and whilst they were meditating a renewed assault, a relieving force of Christians approached. The Moors retired, but were overtaken and utterly routed. Boabdil the King, garbed in crimson velvet mantle heavy with gold, and armed in rich damascened steel, was singled out from amongst the mob of fugitives, captured by a Castilian man-at-arms, and borne in triumph by the Christian chief, the Count of Cabra, to the strong castle of Porcuna, there to await the sovereign’s decision as to his fate. Isabel and her husband were far away at the time; for, after the birth of her fourth child, Maria, in the previous summer of 1482, she and Ferdinand had travelled north to Madrid to meet the Castilian Cortes, and ask for supplies for carrying on the war. Thence, on a more questionable errand, they had moved further north. The little mountain realm of Navarre on the Pyrenees, a buffer state between Castile and France, belonged to the descendants of Ferdinand’s father by his first wife. The desire of the Aragonese King to unite Navarre to Ferdinand’s kingdoms, had removed by murder one Navarrese sovereign after another, until now, in 1482, the beautiful young half French Francis Phœbus was King. He was one more obstacle to be removed; for after him a sister would come to the throne, and she might be easily dealt with: so poison ended the budding life of Francis Phœbus—by Ferdinand’s orders, it was credibly said at the time;[41] and Ferdinand and his wife hurried up to Vitoria, bent, if possible, upon adding one more crown to the brows of the Queen of Castile.[42] It was a cynically clever move of Ferdinand’s, for it would bring Castile in touch with France, and thus play into the hands of the Aragonese, but the threatening attitude of Louis XI. convinced Ferdinand that he must wait for a more fitting opportunity, which he did for thirty years, when Isabel had long been dead. When the news came to Tarazona, where the Cortes of Aragon were in session, that Boabdil was captured, Ferdinand hurried south to Cordova to reap the fruits of victory, leaving Isabel in Castile.
In the great hall of the Alcazar of Cordova, Ferdinand sat in council in August 1483, surrounded by the soldiers who in his absence had overrun the vega, and two Moorish embassies claimed audience. One came from the old King, Muley Abul Hassan, in Malaga, begging with heavy bribes the surrender of his rebellious son Boabdil. This embassy Ferdinand refused to receive; but the other from the Queen Zoraya, Boabdil’s mother, with offers of ransom, submission, and obedience, was admitted. Ferdinand was the craftiest man of his age, and saw that the imprisonment of Boabdil gave unity to the Granadan Moors, whilst his presence amongst them would again be the signal for fratricidal conflict. But the King of Aragon drove a hard bargain, as he always did, and the foolish, vain Boabdil only bought his liberty at a heavy price. He was to do homage to the Christian kings, to pay a heavy ransom and yearly tribute, and give passage to the Christian armies to conquer his father in Malaga. Boabdil meekly subscribed to any terms, and then paying homage on bended knee to his master, he wended his way to Moorish land, a mark for the scorn of all men, ‘Boabdil the Little’ for the rest of time.
Anarchy thenceforward reigned through the kingdom of Granada, as Ferdinand had foreseen. I shall pluck the pomegranate, seed by seed, chuckled the Christian king. And so he did; for, although a two years’ truce had been settled with Boabdil, the civil war gave to the Christian borderers constant opportunities of overrunning the land, on the pretext of aiding or avenging one of the combatants and attacking the old King. Ferdinand would fain have attacked the new King of France, Charles VIII., but Isabel was firm; and though Ferdinand was thereafter obliged to stay a time in his own dominions to placate the discontented Catalans, Isabel was tireless in her insistence upon the Christian crusade that she had undertaken, though, for appearance sake, she consented to both wars being carried on at the same time, which she knew was impracticable.[43] The spirit of the woman was indomitable. Travelling south towards the seat of war in 1484 with the new Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Mendoza, she herself took command of the campaign against the Moor.
It was, verily, her own war. In counsel with veteran soldiers she surprised them with her boldness and knowledge; and her harangues to the soldiery, and care for their welfare, caused her to be idolised by men who had never yet regarded a woman as being capable of such a stout heart as hers. She managed even to spur Ferdinand into leaving Aragon, and once more taking the field against the old King of Granada, and, one by one, the Moorish fortresses fell, and the Christian host encamped almost before the walls of Granada: the Queen herself, though approaching childbirth (in 1485), travelling from place to place in the conquered country, encouraging, supervising, and directing. The following year, 1486, Isabel and her husband again travelled to Cordova from Castile, and now with a greater force than ever before. For news of this saintly warrior Queen, who was fighting for the cross, had spread now through Christendom, and not Iberian knights alone, but the chivalry of France and Italy, Portugal and England, were flocking to share the glory of the struggle.
At the conquest of Loja in May 1486, Lord Rivers, Conde de Escalas, as the Spaniards called him, aided greatly with his men in capturing the place, and earned the praise of Isabel.[44] As each church was dedicated to the true worship in the conquered towns, Isabel herself contributed the sacred vessels and vestments necessary for Christian worship; relics of the saints, and blessed banners sent by her, went always with the Castilian hosts; and soon the spiritual pride, which had been the secret of all Spain’s strength in the past, became again the overwhelming obsession, which, whilst it strengthened the arms, hardened the hearts of all those who owned the sway of Isabel.
In December 1485, Isabel’s last child, Katharine, was born at Alcalá de Henares, and through most of the stirring campaigns of 1486 the Queen accompanied the army in their sieges of Moorish towns, and thence rode with her husband right across Spain to far Santiago, crushing rebellion (that of Count Lemos), holding courts of justice, punishing offences and rewarding services on the way. The next spring again saw her in the field against the important maritime city of Velez-Malaga, which was captured in April; and in the autumn the great port of Malaga fell after an heroic defence. But heroism of infidels aroused no clemency in the breast of the Christian Queen. By her husband’s side, with cross borne before them, and a crowd of shaven ecclesiastics around them, they rode in triumph through the deserted city to the mosque, now purified into a Christian cathedral. Christian captives in chains were dragged from pestilent dungeons that the manacles might be struck from their palsied limbs in the victors’ presence, and when the Christians had given thanks to the Lord of Hosts, the whole starving population of Malaga were assembled in the great courtyard of the fortress, and every soul was condemned to slavery for life: some to be sent to Africa in exchange for Christian captives; some to be sold to provide funds for the war, some for presents for the Pope and other potentates and great nobles, whilst all the valuables in the wealthy city were grabbed by greedy Ferdinand, by one of his usually clever and heartless devices.[45]