The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 10

by Unknown

CHAPTER VI. FERDINAND AND ISABELLA

[1474-1504 A.D.]

It was fortunate for Spain that her sceptre, at this crisis, was swayed by a sovereign possessed of sufficient wisdom to devise, and energy to execute the most salutary schemes of reform, and thus to infuse a new principle of vitality into a government fast sinking into premature decrepitude.

The whole plan of reform introduced into the government by Ferdinand and Isabella, or more properly by the latter, to whom the internal administration of Castile was principally referred, was not fully unfolded until the completion of her reign. But the most important modifications were adopted previously to the war of Granada in 1482. These may be embraced under the following heads: (1) the efficient administration of justice; (2) the codification of the laws; (3) the depression of the nobles; (4) the vindication of ecclesiastical rights belonging to the crown, from the usurpation of the papal see; (5) the regulation of trade; (6) the pre-eminence of the royal authority.

In the dismal anarchy which prevailed in Henry IV’s reign, the authority of the monarch and of the royal judges had fallen into such contempt that the law was entirely without force. The cities afforded no better protection than the open country. Every man’s hand seemed to be lifted against his neighbour. Property was plundered; persons were violated; the most holy sanctuaries profaned; and the numerous fortresses scattered throughout the country, instead of sheltering the weak, converted into dens of robbers. Isabella saw no better way of checking this unbounded license than to direct against it that popular engine, the Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, which had more than once shaken the Castilian monarchs on their throne. By the activity of this new military police, the country was, in the course of a few years, cleared of its swarms of banditti, as well as of the robber chieftains, whose strength had enabled them to defy the law. The ministers of justice found a sure protection in the independent discharge of their duties; and the blessings of personal security and social order, so long estranged from the nation, were again restored to it. At length, in 1498, the objects for which it was established having been completely obtained, it was deemed advisable to relieve the nation from the heavy charges which its maintenance imposed; and the magnificent apparatus of the Santa Hermandad, stripped of all but the terrors of its name, dwindled into an ordinary police.

[1474-1476 A.D.]

Isabella was so intent on the prosecution of her schemes of reform, that even in the minuter details she frequently superintended the execution of them herself. For this she was admirably fitted by her personal address, and presence of mind in danger, and by the influence which a conviction of her integrity gave her over the minds of the people. A remarkable exemplification of this occurred, the year but one after her coronation, at Segovia. The inhabitants, secretly instigated by the bishop of that place and some of the principal citizens, rose against Cabrera, marquis of Moya, to whom the government of the city had been entrusted, and who had made himself generally unpopular by his strict discipline.

The queen, on receiving tidings of the event at Tordesillas, mounted her horse and proceeded with all possible despatch towards Segovia, attended by Cardinal Mendoza, the count of Benavente, and a few others of her court. At some distance from the city she was met by a deputation of the inhabitants, requesting her to leave behind the count of Benavente and the marchioness of Moya (the former of whom as the intimate friend, and the latter as the wife, of the alcalde, were peculiarly obnoxious to the citizens), or they could not answer for the consequences. Isabella haughtily replied that she was queen of Castile; that the city was hers, moreover, by right of inheritance; and that she was not used to receive conditions from rebellious subjects. Then passing forward with her little retinue through one of the gates, which remained in the hands of her friends, she effected her entrance into the citadel.

The populace, in the meanwhile, assembling in greater numbers than before, continued to show the most hostile dispositions, calling out “Death to the alcalde! Attack the castle!” She herself descended into the courtyard, where she ordered the portals to be thrown open for the admission of the people. She stationed herself at the further extremity of the area, and as the populace poured in, calmly demanded the cause of the insurrection. “Tell me,” said she, “what are your grievances, and I will do all in my power to redress them; for I am sure that what is for your interest must be also for mine, and for that of the whole city.” The insurgents, abashed by the unexpected presence of their sovereign, as well as by her cool and dignified demeanour, replied that all they desired was the removal of Cabrera from the government of the city. “He is deposed already,” answered the queen, “and you have my authority to turn out such of his officers as are still in the castle, which I shall entrust to one of my own servants, on whom I can rely.” The people, pacified by these assurances, shouted, “Long live the queen!” and eagerly hastened to obey her mandates. The mob dispersed, and the queen, after a candid examination, having ascertained the groundlessness or gross exaggeration of the charges against Cabrera, and traced the source of the conspiracy to the jealousy of the bishop of Segovia and his associates, reinstated the deposed alcalde in the full possession of his dignities, which his enemies, either convinced of the altered dispositions of the people, or believing that the favourable moment for resistance had escaped, made no further attempts to disturb. Thus by a happy presence of mind, an affair which threatened disastrous consequences was settled without bloodshed, or compromise of the royal dignity.[50]

[1476-1479 A.D.]

In the summer of the following year, 1477, Isabella resolved to pay a visit to Estremadura and Andalusia, for the purpose of composing the dissensions and introducing a more efficient police in these unhappy provinces; which, from their proximity to the stormy frontier of Portugal, as well as from the feuds between the great houses of Guzman and Ponce de Leon, were plunged into the most frightful anarchy. Cardinal Mendoza and her other ministers remonstrated against this imprudent exposure of her person, where it was so little likely to be respected. But she replied that it was true there were dangers and inconveniences to be encountered; but her fate was in God’s hands, and she felt a confidence that he would guide to a prosperous issue such designs as were righteous in themselves and resolutely conducted.

Isabella experienced the most loyal and magnificent reception from the inhabitants of Seville, where she established her headquarters. The first days of her residence there were consumed in fêtes, tourneys, tilts of reeds, and other exercises of the Castilian chivalry. After this she devoted her whole time to the great purpose of her visit, the reformation of abuses. She held her court in the saloon of the Alcazar, or royal castle, where she revived the ancient practice of the Castilian sovereigns of presiding in person over the administration of justice. Every Friday she took her seat in her chair of state, on an elevated platform covered with cloth of gold, and surrounded by her council, together with the subordinate functionaries and the insignia of a court of justice. The members of her privy council and of the high court of criminal law sat in their official capacity every day in the week, and the queen herself received such suits as were referred to her adjudication, saving the parties the usual expense and procrastination of justice. By the extraordinary despatch of the queen and her ministers, during the two months that she resided in the city, a vast number of civil and criminal causes were disposed of, a large amount of plundered property was restored to its lawful owners, and so many offenders were brought to condign punishment, that no less than four thousand suspected persons, it is computed, terrified by the prospect of speedy retribution for their crimes, escaped into the neighbouring kingdoms of Portugal and Granada.

The royal audience, or chancery, the supreme and final court of appeal in civil causes, was entirely remodelled. The place of its sittings, before indeterminate, and consequently occasioning much trouble and cost to the litigants, was fixed at Valladolid. Laws were passed to protect the tribunal from the interference of the crown, and the queen was careful to fill the bench with magistrates whose wisdom and integrity would afford the best guarantee for a faithful interpretation of the law. An attorney was provided at the public expense, under the title of “advocate for the poor,” whose duty it was to defend the suits of such as were unable to maintain them at their own cost. The sovereigns testified their respect for the law by reviving the ancient but obsolete practice of presiding personally in the tribunals at least once a week. “I well remember,” says Oviedo,[b] one of their court, “to have seen the queen, together with the Catholic king her husband, sitting in judgment in the Alcazar of Madrid, every Friday, dispensing justice to all such, great and small, as came to demand it. This was indeed the golden age of justice,” continues the enthusiastic writer, “and since our sainted mistress has been taken from us, it has been more difficult, and far more costly, to transact business with a stripling of a secretary, than it was with the queen and all her ministers.” By the modifications then introduced, the basis was laid of the judiciary system, such as it has been perpetuated to the present age. The law acquired an authority which, in the language of a Spanish writer, “caused a decree, signed by two or three judges, to be more respected since that time than an army before.”[51]

[1479-1480 A.D.]

Whatever reforms might have been introduced into the Castilian judicatures, they would have been of little avail without a corresponding improvement in the system of jurisprudence by which their decisions were to be regulated. This was made up of the Visigothic code as the basis, the fueros of the Castilian princes, as far back as the eleventh century, and the Siete Partidas, the famous compilation of Alfonso X, digested chiefly from maxims of the civil law. The deficiencies of these ancient codes had been gradually supplied by such an accumulation of statutes and ordinances as rendered the legislation of Castile in the highest degree complex, and often contradictory. The embarrassment resulting from this may be imagined.

In 1480, Dr. Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo was charged with the commission of revising the laws of Castile, and of compiling a code which should be of general application throughout the kingdom. Although the many innovations which were introduced in that age of reform required the addition of two subsidiary codes in the latter years of Isabella, the Ordenanças of Montalvo continued to be the guide of the tribunals down to the time of Philip II, and may be said to have suggested the idea, as indeed it was the basis, of the comprehensive compilation, Nueva Recopilacion, which has since formed the law of the Spanish monarchy.

Under the profuse reigns of Juan II and Henry IV, the nobles had introduced themselves into every great post of profit or authority. They had ravished from the crown the estates on which it depended for its maintenance as well as dignity. They coined money in their own mints, like sovereign princes; and they covered the country with their fortified castles, whence they defied the law, and desolated the unhappy land with interminable feuds. It was obviously necessary for the new sovereigns to proceed with the greatest caution against this powerful and jealous body, and, above all, to attempt no measure of importance in which they would not be supported by the hearty co-operation of the nation.

The first measure which may be said to have clearly developed their policy was the organisation of the hermandad, which, although ostensibly directed against offenders of a more humble description, was made to bear indirectly upon the nobility, whom it kept in awe by the number and discipline of its forces, and the promptness with which it could assemble them on the most remote points of the kingdom; while its rights of jurisdiction tended materially to abridge those of the seigniorial tribunals. It was accordingly resisted with the greatest pertinacity by the aristocracy; although, as we have seen, the resolution of the queen, supported by the constancy of the commons, enabled her to triumph over all opposition, until the great objects of the institution were accomplished.

Another measure, which insensibly operated to the depression of the nobility, was making official preferment depend less exclusively on rank, and much more on personal merit, than before. The sovereigns, instead of confining themselves to the grandees, frequently advanced persons of humble origin, and especially those learned in the law, to the most responsible stations, consulting them, and paying great deference to their opinions, on all matters of importance. The nobles, finding that rank was no longer the sole, or indeed the necessary avenue to promotion, sought to secure it by attention to more liberal studies, in which they were greatly encouraged by Isabella, who admitted their children into her palace, where they were reared under her own eye.

A Spanish Noblewoman of the Fifteenth Century

But the boldest assaults on the power of the aristocracy were made in the famous cortes of Toledo, in 1480, which Carbajal[e] enthusiastically styles “cosa divina para reformacion y remedio de las desordenes pasadas.” The first object of its attention was the condition of the exchequer, which Henry IV had so exhausted by his reckless prodigality that the clear annual revenue amounted to no more than 30,000 ducats, a sum much inferior to that enjoyed by many private individuals; so that, stripped of his patrimony, it at last came to be said he was “king only of the highways.” Such had been the royal necessities that blank certificates of annuities assigned on the public rents were hawked about the market, and sold at such a depreciated rate that the price of an annuity did not exceed the amount of one year’s income. The commons saw with alarm the weight of the burdens which must devolve on them for the maintenance of the crown thus impoverished in its resources; and they resolved to meet the difficulty by advising at once a resumption of the grants unconstitutionally made during the latter half of Henry IV’s reign and the commencement of the present. This measure, however violent and repugnant to good faith it may appear at the present time, seems then to have admitted of justification, as far as the nation was concerned; since such alienation of the public revenue was in itself illegal, and contrary to the coronation oath of the sovereign; and those who accepted his obligations held them subject to the liability of their revocation, which had frequently occurred under the preceding reigns.

The plan suggested by Cardinal Mendoza seems to have been partially adopted. It was decided that all whose pensions had been conferred without any corresponding services on their part should forfeit them entirely; that those who had purchased annuities should return their certificates on a reimbursement of the price paid for them; and that the remaining creditors, who composed the largest class, should retain such a proportion only of their pensions as might be judged commensurate with their services to the state. Admiral Enriquez, for instance, resigned 240,000 maravedis of his annual income; the duke of Alva, 575,000; the duke of Medina Sidonia, 180,000. The loyal family of the Mendozas were also great losers, but none forfeited so much as the overgrown favourite of Henry IV, Beltran de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque, who had uniformly supported the royal cause, and whose retrenchment amounted to 1,400,000 maravedis of yearly rent.[52]

By this important reduction, the final adjustment and execution of which were intrusted to Ferdinand de Talavera, the queen’s confessor, a man of austere probity, the gross amount of 30,000,000 maravedis, a sum equal to three-fourths of the whole revenue on Isabella’s accession, was annually saved to the crown. The retrenchment was conducted with such strict impartiality that the most confidential servants of the queen, and the relatives of her husband, were among those who suffered the most severely. It is worthy of remark that no diminution whatever was made of the stipends settled on literary and charitable establishments. It may be also added that Isabella appropriated the first-fruits of this measure, by distributing the sum of 20,000,000 maravedis among the widows and orphans of those loyalists who had fallen in the war of the Succession. This resumption of grants may be considered as the basis of those economical reforms which, without oppression to the subject, augmented the public revenue more than twelvefold during this auspicious reign.

Several other acts were passed by the same cortes, which had a more exclusive bearing on the nobility. They were prohibited from quartering the royal arms on their escutcheons, from being attended by a mace-bearer and a bodyguard, from imitating the regal style of address in their written correspondence, and other insignia of royalty which they had arrogantly assumed. They were forbidden to erect new fortresses, and they were expressly restrained from duels.

Resistance to Papal Encroachment

In the earlier stages of the Castilian monarchy, the sovereigns appear to have held a supremacy in spiritual, very similar to that exercised by them in temporal matters. It was comparatively late that the nation submitted its neck to the papal yoke, so closely riveted at a subsequent period; and even the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till long after it had been adopted in the rest of Europe. But when the code of the Partidas was promulgated in the thirteenth century, the maxims of the canon law came to be permanently established. The ecclesiastical encroached on the lay tribunals. Appeals were perpetually carried up to the Roman court; and the popes, pretending to regulate the minutest details of church economy, not only disposed of inferior benefices, but gradually converted the right of confirming elections to the episcopal and higher ecclesiastical dignities into that of appointment.

These usurpations of the church had been repeatedly the subject of grave remonstrance in cortes. The sovereigns, highly dissatisfied, ordered their subjects, ecclesiastical as well as lay, to quit the papal dominions; an injunction which the former, fearful of the sequestration of their temporalities in Castile, obeyed with as much promptness as the latter. At the same time Ferdinand and Isabella proclaimed their intention of inviting the princes of Christendom to unite with them in convoking a general council for the reformation of the manifold abuses which dishonoured the church. No sound could have grated more unpleasantly on the pontifical ear than the menace of a general council, particularly at this period, when ecclesiastical corruptions had reached a height which could but ill endure its scrutiny. The pope became convinced that he had ventured too far, and that Henry IV was no longer monarch of Castile. He accordingly despatched a legate to Spain, fully empowered to arrange the matter on an amicable basis; but the legate received orders instantly to quit the kingdom, without attempting so much as to disclose the nature of his instructions, since they could not but be derogatory to the dignity of the crown.

Far from resenting this ungracious reception, the legate affected the deepest humility. Cardinal Mendoza, whose influence in the cabinet had gained him the title of “third king of Spain,” at length so far mitigated the resentment of the sovereigns that they consented to open negotiations with the court of Rome. The result was the publication of a bull by Sixtus IV, in which his holiness engaged to provide such natives to the higher dignities of the church in Castile as should be nominated by the monarchs of that kingdom.

The Regulation of Trade

[1480-1481 A.D.]

It will be readily conceived that trade, agriculture, and every branch of industry must have languished under the misrule of preceding reigns. In addition to pestilences a fatal shock was given to commercial credit by the adulteration of the coin. Under Henry IV it is computed that there were no less than 150 mints openly licensed by the crown, in addition to many others erected by individuals without any legal authority; and the little trade which remained in Castile was carried on by barter, as in the primitive stages of society.

The magnitude of the evil was such as to claim the earliest attention of the cortes under the new monarchs. Acts were passed, fixing the standard and legal value of the different denominations of coin. A new coinage was subsequently made. Five royal mints were alone authorised, afterwards augmented to seven, and severe penalties denounced against the fabrication of money elsewhere. The reform of the currency gradually infused new life into commerce, as the return of the circulations, which have been interrupted for a while, quickens the animal body. This was furthered by salutary laws for the encouragement of domestic industry. Internal communication was facilitated by the construction of roads and bridges. Absurd restrictions on change of residence, as well as the onerous duties which had been imposed on commercial intercourse between Castile and Aragon, were repealed. Public credit was re-established by the punctuality with which the government redeemed the debt contracted during the Portuguese war; and notwithstanding the repeal of various arbitrary imposts which enriched the exchequer under Henry IV, such was the advance of the country, under the wise economy of the present reign, that the revenue was augmented nearly sixfold between the years 1477 and 1482.

Thus released from the heavy burdens imposed on it, the spring of enterprise recovered its former elasticity. The productive capital of the country was made to flow through the various channels of domestic industry. The hills and the valleys again rejoiced in the labour of the husbandman; and the cities were embellished with stately edifices, both public and private, which attracted the gaze and commendation of foreigners. The writers of that day are unbounded in their plaudits of Isabella, to whom they principally ascribe this auspicious revolution in the condition of the country and its inhabitants, which seems almost as magical as one of those transformations in romance wrought by the hands of some benevolent fairy.

The Pre-eminence of the Royal Authority

This, which, we have seen, appears to have been the natural result of the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella, was derived quite as much from the influence of their private characters as from their public measures. Under such a sovereign, the court, which had been little better than a brothel under the preceding reign, became the nursery of virtue and generous ambition.

Isabella watched assiduously over the nurture of the high-born damsels of her court, whom she received into the royal palace, causing them to be educated under her own eye, and endowing them with liberal portions on their marriage. By these and similar acts of affectionate solicitude she endeared herself to the higher classes of her subjects, while the patriotic tendency of her public conduct established her in the hearts of the people. She possessed, in combination with the feminine qualities which beget love, a masculine energy of character which struck terror into the guilty. She enforced the execution of her own plans, oftentimes even at great personal hazard, with a resolution surpassing that of her husband. Both were singularly temperate, indeed frugal, in their dress, equipage, and general style of living; seeking to affect others less by external pomp than by the silent though more potent influence of personal qualities. On all such occasions as demanded it, however, they displayed a princely magnificence, which dazzled the multitude, and is blazoned with great solemnity in the garrulous chronicles of the day.

Thus laudable objects were gradually achieved by a course of measures equally laudable; and the various orders of the monarchy, brought into harmonious action with each other, were enabled to turn the forces which had before been wasted in civil conflict to the glorious career of discovery and conquest which it was destined to run during the remainder of the century.

No sooner had Ferdinand and Isabella restored internal tranquillity to their dominions, and made the strength effective which had been acquired by their union under one government, than they turned their eyes to those fair regions of the peninsula over which the Moslem crescent had reigned triumphant for nearly eight centuries. Fortunately, an act of aggression on the part of the Moors furnished a pretext for entering on their plan of conquest at the moment when it was ripe for execution.

Mulei Abul-Hassan, who succeeded his father in 1466, was of a very different temperament. His fiery character prompted him, when very young, to violate the truce by an unprovoked inroad into Andalusia. When, in 1476, the Spanish sovereigns required, as the condition of a renewal of the truce which he solicited, the payment of the annual tribute imposed on his predecessors, he proudly replied that the mints of Granada coined no longer gold, but steel. His subsequent conduct did not belie the spirit of this Spartan answer.

[1481-1482 A.D.]

At length, towards the close of the year 1481, the storm which had been so long gathering burst upon Zahara, a small fortified town on the frontier of Andalusia, crowning a lofty eminence, washed at its base by the river Guadalete, which from its position seemed almost inaccessible. The garrison, trusting to these natural defences, suffered itself to be surprised, on the night of the 26th of December, by the Moorish monarch, who, scaling the walls under favour of a furious tempest, which prevented his approach from being readily heard, put to the sword such of the guard as offered resistance, and swept away the whole population of the place, men, women, and children, into slavery in Granada.

It was not long before the desired opportunity for retaliation presented itself to the Spaniards. One Juan de Ortega, a captain of escaladores, or scalers, so denominated from the peculiar service in which they were employed in besieging cities, reported that the fortress of Alhama, situated in the heart of the Moorish territories, was so negligently guarded that it might be easily carried by an enemy who had skill enough to approach it. Its strength of position lulled its defenders into a security like that which had proved so fatal to Zahara. A sentinel, who was found sleeping on his post, was despatched, and the whole of the little garrison put to the sword after the short and ineffectual resistance that could be opposed by men suddenly roused from slumber. The city in the meantime was alarmed, but it was too late; the citadel was taken. Nearly a quarter of the population is said to have perished in the various conflicts of the day, and the remainder, according to the usage of the time, became the prize of the victors.

The report of this disaster fell like the knell of their own doom on the ears of the inhabitants of Granada. Isabella had been employed in making vigorous preparation for carrying on the war, by enforcing the requisite supplies, and summoning the crown vassals, and the principal nobility of the north, to hold themselves in readiness to join the royal standard in Andalusia. After this, she proceeded by rapid stages to Cordova, notwithstanding the state of pregnancy in which she was then far advanced.

Here the sovereigns received the unwelcome information that the king of Granada, on the retreat of the Spaniards, had again sat down before Alhama; having brought with him artillery, from the want of which he had suffered so much in the preceding siege. It was settled that the king should march to the relief of the besieged, taking with him the most ample supplies of forage and provisions, at the head of a force strong enough to compel the retreat of the Moorish monarch. This was effected without delay; and Abul-Hassan once more breaking up his camp on the rumour of Ferdinand’s approach, the latter took possession of the city, without opposition, on the 14th of May, 1482.

Ferdinand, having strengthened the garrison with new recruits, under the command of Portocarrero, lord of Palma, and victualled it with three months’ provisions, prepared for a foray into the vega of Granada. This he executed in the true spirit of that merciless warfare so repugnant to the more civilised usage of later times, not only by sweeping away the green, unripened crops, but by cutting down the trees and eradicating the vines, and then, without so much as having broken a lance in the expedition, returned in triumph to Cordova.

Isabella in the meanwhile was engaged in active measures for prosecuting the war. She issued orders to the various cities of Castile and Leon, as far as the borders of Biscay and Guipuzcoa, prescribing the repartimiento, or subsidy of provisions, and the quota of troops, to be furnished by each district respectively, together with an adequate supply of ammunition and artillery. The whole were to be in readiness before Loja by the 1st of July, when Ferdinand was to take the field in person at the head of his chivalry, and besiege that strong post. As advices were received that the Moors of Granada were making efforts to obtain the co-operation of their African brethren in support of the Mohammedan empire in Spain, the queen caused a fleet to be manned under the command of her best two admirals, with instructions to sweep the Mediterranean as far as the straits of Gibraltar, and thus effectually cut off all communication with the Barbary coast.

Ferdinand, crossing the Jenil at Ecija, arrived again on its banks before Loja on the 1st of July. The army encamped among the hills, whose deep ravines obstructed communication between its different quarters; while the level plains below were intersected by numerous canals, equally unfavourable to the manœuvres of the men at arms. Ali Atar made a sortie from the town, for the purpose of dislodging his enemies. The latter poured out from their works to encounter him; but the Moslem general, scarcely waiting to receive the shock, wheeled his squadrons round, and began a precipitate retreat. The Spaniards eagerly pursued; but when they had been drawn to a sufficient distance from the redoubt, a party of Moorish ginetes, or light cavalry, who had crossed the river unobserved during the night and lain in ambush, after the wily fashion of Arabian tactics, darted from their place of concealment, and, galloping into the deserted camp, plundered it of its contents, including the lombards, or small pieces of artillery, with which it was garnished. The Castilians, too late perceiving their error, halted from the pursuit, and returned with as much speed as possible to the defence of their camp. Ali Atar, turning also, hung close on their rear, so that when the Christians arrived at the summit of the hill they found themselves hemmed in between the two divisions of the Moorish army.

Ferdinand resolved to fall back as far as Rio Frio, and await there patiently the arrival of such fresh reinforcements as might put him in condition to enforce a more rigorous blockade. An alarm spread through the whole camp. Instead of standing to the defence, each one thought only of saving himself by as speedy a flight as possible. In vain did Ferdinand, riding along their broken files, endeavour to reanimate their spirits and restore order. Ali Atar’s practised eye speedily discerned the confusion which prevailed through the Christian camp. Without delay, he rushed forth impetuously at the head of his whole array from the gates of Loja.

A Spanish Nobleman of the Fifteenth Century

At this perilous moment nothing but Ferdinand’s coolness could have saved the army from total destruction; he was repeatedly exposed to imminent peril, and narrowly escaped with his own life, his horse being shot under him at the very moment when he had lost his lance in the body of a Moor. Never did the Spanish chivalry shed its blood more freely.

The Moors, finding it so difficult to make an impression on this iron band of warriors, began at length to slacken their efforts, and finally allowed Ferdinand to draw off the remnant of his forces without further opposition. The king continued his retreat, without halting, as far as the romantic site of the Peña de los Enamorados, about seven leagues distant from Loja, and, abandoning all thoughts of offensive operations for the present, soon after returned to Cordova. Mulei Abul-Hassan arrived the following day with a powerful reinforcement from Granada, and swept the country as far as Rio Frio. Had he come but a few hours sooner, there would have been few Spaniards left to tell the tale of the rout of Loja.

[1482-1483 A.D.]

The loss of the Christians must have been very considerable, including the greater part of the baggage and the artillery. It occasioned deep mortification to the queen; but, though a severe, it proved a salutary lesson. It showed the importance of more extensive preparations for a war which must of necessity be a war of posts; and it taught the nation to entertain greater respect for an enemy who, whatever might be his natural strength, must become formidable when armed with the energy of despair.

Information being soon after received that Louis XI was taking measures to make himself master of the strong places in Navarre, Isabella transferred her residence to the frontier town of Logroño, prepared to resist by arms, if necessary, the occupation of that country by her insidious and powerful neighbour.

There is probably no period in which the princes of Europe felt so sensibly their own penury as at the close of the fifteenth century; when, the demesnes of the crown having been very generally wasted by the lavishness or imbecility of their proprietors, no substitute had as yet been found in that searching and well-arranged system of taxation which prevails at the present day. The Spanish sovereigns, notwithstanding the economy which they had introduced into the finances, felt the pressure of these embarrassments peculiarly at the present juncture. The maintenance of the royal guard and of the vast national police of the hermandad, the incessant military operations of the late campaign, together with the equipment of a navy, not merely for war, but for maritime discovery, were so many copious drains on the exchequer. Under these circumstances, they obtained from the pope a grant of 100,000 ducats, to be raised out of the ecclesiastical revenues in Castile and Aragon. A bull of crusade was also published by his holiness, containing numerous indulgences for such as should bear arms against the infidel, as well as those who should prefer to commute their military service for the payment of a sum of money. In addition to these resources, the government was enabled on its own credit to negotiate considerable loans.

With these funds the sovereigns entered into extensive arrangements for the ensuing campaign; causing cannon, after the rude construction of that age, to be fabricated at Huesca, and a large quantity of stone balls, then principally used, to be manufactured in the Sierra de Constantina; while the magazines were carefully provided with ammunition and military stores.

An event not unworthy of notice is recorded by Pulgar as happening about this time. A common soldier, named Juan de Corral, contrived, under false pretences, to obtain from the king of Granada a number of Christian captives, together with a large sum of money, with which he escaped into Andalusia. The man was apprehended by the warden of the frontier of Jaen; and the transaction being reported to the sovereigns, they compelled an entire restitution of the money, and consented to such a ransom for the liberated Christians as the king of Granada should demand. This act of justice, it should be remembered, occurred in an age when the church itself stood ready to sanction any breach of faith, however glaring, towards heretics and infidels.

While the court was detained in the north, tidings were received of a reverse sustained by the Spanish arms, which plunged the nation in sorrow far deeper than that occasioned by the rout at Loja.[g]

[1483-1487 A.D.]

A plundering expedition had been organised against Malaga and it included the flower of Spanish chivalry. After some conflicts the force turned back, laden with plunder. In the mountainous passes of the Axarquia it met such treatment as Pelayo had once meted out to the Moslem invaders. From every height the Moors poured down volleys of arrows, shot, and stones. At night great fires were built to reveal their hiding places. Panic, fatigue, and famine made chaos of resistance and in two days over eight hundred were killed and sixteen hundred made prisoners. But of these a large proportion were the choice youth of Spain, and the grief at court was excessive.

In the meanwhile there had occurred a feud among the Moors that served the Christians a better turn than many victories. The old king of Granada, Mulei Abul-Hassan, had for Queen Ayesha; in his harem he had a Greek concubine and also a Christian woman of Andalusia, Isabella de Solis, daughter of the governor of Martos. She was called Zoraya by the Moors and she bore the king a son named Abu Abdallah, more famously called Boabdil. Mother and son, eager for power, planned intrigues which were punished with imprisonment. But they escaped and stirred up a revolution so successfully that the old king was dethroned and driven to Malaga, where he defeated the Christian foray just described.

So great was the enthusiasm among the Moors that Abu Abdallah saw it would be necessary to make some military success to counteract the prestige of his old father. He secured the aid of Ali Atar and with a force of some ten thousand raided the Christian territory and besieged Lucena about April 21st, 1483. The count of Cabra coming to relieve Lucena, Abdallah was caught between two armies. When Ali Atar fell, the Moors fled; but Abdallah’s horse giving out, he was captured—the first royal Moorish prisoner in Christian hands. His mother immediately sought to ransom him, and finally secured his release at the cost of an annual tribute, and a subservience to Spain. Thus the Christians not only divided the Moors among themselves, but gained a large faction as ally.[a]

PROGRESS OF THE WAR

Notwithstanding the importance of the results in the war of Granada, a detail of the successive steps by which they were achieved would be most tedious and trifling. No siege or single military achievement of great moment occurred until nearly four years from this period, in 1487; although in the intervening time a large number of fortresses and petty towns, together with a very extensive tract of territory, were recovered from the enemy. Without pursuing the chronological order of events, it is probable that the end of history will be best attained by presenting a concise view of the general policy pursued by the sovereigns in the conduct of the war.

The Moorish wars under preceding monarchs had consisted of little else than cavalgadas, or inroads into the enemy’s territory, which, pouring like a torrent over the land, swept away whatever was upon the surface, but left it in its essential resources wholly unimpaired. The bounty of nature soon repaired the ravages of man, and the ensuing harvest seemed to shoot up more abundantly from the soil enriched by the blood of the husbandman. A more vigorous system of spoliation was now introduced. Instead of one campaign, the army took the field in spring and autumn, intermitting its efforts only during the intolerable heats of summer, so that the green crop had no time to ripen, ere it was trodden down under the iron heel of war.

The apparatus for devastation was also on a much greater scale than had ever before been witnessed. From the second year of the war, thirty thousand foragers were reserved for this service, which they effected by demolishing farm-houses, granaries, and mills (which last were exceedingly numerous in a land watered by many small streams), by eradicating the vines and laying waste the olive gardens and plantations of oranges, almonds, mulberries, and all the rich varieties that grew luxuriant in this highly favoured region. This merciless devastation extended for more than two leagues on either side of the line of march. At the same time, the Mediterranean fleet cut off all supplies from the Barbary coast, so that the whole kingdom might be said to be in a state of perpetual blockade. Such and so general was the scarcity occasioned by this system, that the Moors were glad to exchange their Christian captives for provisions, until such ransom was interdicted by the sovereigns as tending to defeat their own measures.

Ferdinand, who appeared at the head of his armies throughout the whole of this war, pursued a sagacious policy in reference to the beleaguered cities. He was ever ready to meet the first overtures to surrender in the most liberal spirit; granting protection of person, and such property as the besieged could transport with them, and assigning them a residence, if they preferred it, in his own dominions. Many, in consequence of this, migrated to Seville and other cities of Andalusia, where they were settled on estates which had been confiscated by the inquisitors, who looked forward, no doubt with satisfaction, to the time when they should be permitted to thrust their sickle into the new crop of heresy whose seeds were thus sown amid the ashes of the old one. Those who preferred to remain in the conquered Moorish territory, as Castilian subjects, were permitted the free enjoyment of personal rights and property, as well as of their religion; and such was the fidelity with which Ferdinand redeemed his engagements during the war, by the punishment of the least infraction of them by his own people, that many, particularly of the Moorish peasantry, preferred abiding in their early homes to removing to Granada or other places of the Moslem dominion.

Isabella, solicitous for everything that concerned the welfare of her people, sometimes visited the camp in person, encouraging the soldiers to endure the hardships of war, and relieving their necessities by liberal donations of clothes and money. She caused also a number of large tents, known as “the queen’s hospitals,” to be always reserved for the sick and wounded, and furnished them with the requisite attendants and medicines at her own charge. This is considered the earliest attempt at the formation of a regular camp hospital on record.

Isabella may be regarded as the soul of this war. She engaged in it with the most exalted views, less to acquire territory than to re-establish the empire of the cross over the ancient domain of Christendom. On this point she concentrated all the energies of her powerful mind, never suffering herself to be diverted by any subordinate interest from this one great and glorious object. When the king, in 1484, would have paused a while from the Granadine war, in order to prosecute his claims to Roussillon against the French after the death of Louis XI, Isabella strongly objected to it; but, finding her remonstrance ineffectual, she left her husband in Aragon, and repaired to Cordova, where she placed the cardinal of Spain at the head of the army, and prepared to open the campaign in the usual vigorous manner. Here, however, she was soon joined by Ferdinand, who, on a cooler revision of the subject, deemed it prudent to postpone his projected enterprise.

Ever since the victory of Lucena, the sovereigns had made it a capital point of their policy to foment the dissensions of their enemies. The young king Abdallah, after his humiliating treaty with Ferdinand, lost whatever consideration he had previously possessed. Although the sultana Zoraya, by her personal address and the lavish distribution of the royal treasures, contrived to maintain a faction for her son, the better classes of his countrymen despised him as a renegade and a vassal of the Christian king. As their old monarch had become incompetent, from increasing age and blindness, to the duties of his station in these perilous times, they turned their eyes on his brother Abdallah, surnamed El Zagal, or “the valiant,” who had borne so conspicuous a part in the rout of the Axarquia. The Castilians depict this chief in the darkest colours of ambition and cruelty; but the Moslem writers afford no such intimation, and his advancement to the throne at that crisis seems to be in some measure justified by his eminent talents as a military leader.

On his way to Granada he encountered and cut to pieces a body of Calatrava knights from Alhama, and signalised his entrance into his new capital by bearing along the bloody trophies of heads dangling from his saddle-bow, after the barbarous fashion long practised in these wars. It was observed that the old king Abul-Hassan did not long survive his brother’s accession. The young king Abdallah sought the protection of the Castilian sovereigns in Seville, who, true to their policy, sent him back into his own dominions with the means of making headway against his rival.

Notwithstanding these auxiliary circumstances, the progress of the Christians was comparatively slow. Every cliff seemed to be crowned with a fortress; and every fortress was defended with the desperation of men willing to bury themselves under its ruins. The old men, women, and children, on occasion of a siege, were frequently despatched to Granada. Such was the resolution, or rather ferocity, of the Moors, that Malaga closed its gates against the fugitives from Alora, after its surrender, and even massacred some of them in cold blood. The eagle eye of El Zagal seemed to take in at a glance the whole extent of his little territory, and to detect every vulnerable point in his antagonist, whom he encountered where he least expected it, cutting off his convoys, surprising his foraging parties, and retaliating by a devastating inroad on the borders.

No effectual and permanent resistance, however, could be opposed to the tremendous enginery of the Christians. Tower and town fell before it. Besides the principal towns of Cartama, Coin, Setenil, Ronda, Marbella, Illora, termed by the Moors, “the right eye,” Moclin, “the shield” of Granada, and Loja, after a second and desperate siege in the spring of 1486, Bernáldez[h] enumerates more than seventy subordinate places in the Val de Cartama, and thirteen others after the fall of Marbella. Thus the Spaniards advanced their line of conquest more than twenty leagues beyond the western frontier of Granada. This extensive tract they strongly fortified, and peopled partly with Christian subjects and partly with Moorish, the original occupants of the soil, who were secured in the possession of their ancient lands, under their own law.

Thus the strong posts which might be regarded as the exterior defences of the city of Granada were successively carried. A few positions alone remained of sufficient strength to keep the enemy at bay. The most considerable of these was Malaga. Before commencing operations against Malaga, it was thought expedient by the Spanish council of war to obtain possession of Velez Malaga, situated about five leagues distant from the former.

The sensation excited in Granada by the tidings of its danger was so strong, that the old chief, El Zagal, found it necessary to make an effort to relieve the beleaguered city, notwithstanding the critical posture in which his absence would leave his affairs in the capital. But having been foiled in a well-concerted attempt to surprise the Christian quarters by night, he was driven across the mountains by the marquis of Cadiz, and compelled to retreat on his capital, completely baffled in his enterprise. There the tidings of his disaster had preceded him. The fickle populace, with whom misfortune passes for misconduct, unmindful of his former successes, now hastened to transfer their allegiance to his rival, Abdallah, and closed the gates against him; and the unfortunate chief withdrew to Guadix, which, with Almeria, Baza, and some less considerable places, still remained faithful.

Malaga

(From the Alameda)

Ferdinand conducted the siege all the while with his usual vigour, and spared no exposure of his person to peril or fatigue. On one occasion, seeing a party of Christians retreating in disorder before a squadron of the enemy, who had surprised them while fortifying an eminence near the city, the king, who was at dinner in his tent, rushed out with no other defensive armour than his cuirass, and, leaping on his horse, charged briskly into the midst of the enemy, and succeeded in rallying his own men. In the midst of the rencounter, however, when he had discharged his lance, he found himself unable to extricate his sword from the scabbard which hung from the saddle-bow. At this moment he was assaulted by several Moors, and must have been either slain or taken but for the timely rescue of the marquis of Cadiz, and a brave cavalier, Garcilasso de la Vega, who, galloping up to the spot with their attendants, succeeded, after a sharp skirmish, in beating off the enemy. Ferdinand’s nobles remonstrated with him on this wanton exposure of his person, representing that he could serve them more effectually with his head than his hand. But he answered that he could not stop to calculate chances when his subjects were perilling their lives for his sake—a reply, says Pulgar,[c] which endeared him to the whole army. At length the inhabitants of Velez consented to capitulate. The capitulation of this place (April 27th, 1487) was followed by that of more than twenty places of inferior note lying between it and Malaga, so that the approaches to this latter city were now left open to the victorious Spaniards.

THE SIEGE OF MALAGA

[1487 A.D.]

The old chronicler Bernáldez[h] warms at the aspect of the fair city of Malaga, encompassed by Christian legions, whose deep lines, stretching far over hill and valley, reached quite round from one arm of the sea to the other. In the midst of this brilliant encampment was seen the royal pavilion, proudly displaying the united banners of Castile and Aragon, and forming so conspicuous a mark for the enemy’s artillery that Ferdinand, after imminent hazard, was at length compelled to shift his quarters.

The Moors were not unmindful of the importance of Malaga, or the gallantry with which it was defended. They made several attempts to relieve it, the failure of which was owing less to the Christians than to treachery and their own miserable feuds. A body of cavalry, which El Zagal despatched from Guadix to throw succours into the beleaguered city, was encountered and cut to pieces by a superior force of the young king Abdallah, who consummated his baseness by sending an embassy to the Christian camp, charged with a present of Arabian horses sumptuously caparisoned to Ferdinand, and of costly silks and oriental perfumes to the queen; at the same time complimenting them on their successes, and soliciting the continuance of their friendly dispositions towards himself. Ferdinand and Isabella requited this act of humiliation by securing to Abdallah’s subjects the right of cultivating their fields in quiet, and of trafficking with the Spaniards in every commodity save military stores. At this paltry price did the dastard prince consent to stay his arm at the only moment when it could be used effectually for his country.

More serious consequences were like to have resulted from an attempt made by another party of Moors from Guadix to penetrate the Christian lines. Part of them succeeded, and threw themselves into the besieged city. The remainder were cut in pieces. There was one, however, who, making no show of resistance, was taken prisoner without harm to his person. Being brought before the marquis of Cadiz, he informed that nobleman that he could make some important disclosures to the sovereigns. He was accordingly conducted to the royal tent; but, as Ferdinand was taking his siesta, in the sultry hour of the day, the queen, moved by divine inspiration, according to the Castilian historian, deferred the audience till her husband should awake, and commanded the prisoner to be detained in the adjoining tent. This was occupied by Doña Beatrice de Bobadilla, marchioness of Moya, Isabella’s early friend, who happened to be at that time engaged in discourse with a Portuguese nobleman, Don Alvaro, son of the duke of Braganza.

The Moor did not understand the Castilian language, and, deceived by the rich attire and courtly bearing of these personages, he mistook them for the king and queen. He suddenly drew a dagger, and darting on the Portuguese prince, gave him a deep wound on the head, and then, turning like lightning on the marchioness, aimed a stroke at her, which fortunately glanced without injury, the point of the weapon being turned by the heavy embroidery of her robes. Before he could repeat his blow, the Moorish Scævola, with a fate very different from that of his Roman prototype, was pierced with a hundred wounds by the attendants, who rushed to the spot, alarmed by the cries of the marchioness, and his mangled remains were soon after discharged from a catapult into the city; a foolish bravado, which the besieged requited by slaying a Galician gentleman and sending his corpse astride upon a mule through the gates of the town into the Christian camp.

The Castilian army, swelled by daily augmentations, varied in its amount, according to different estimates, from sixty to ninety thousand men. Throughout this immense host the most perfect discipline was maintained. Gaming was restrained by ordinances interdicting the use of dice and cards, of which the lower orders were passionately fond. Blasphemy was severely punished. Prostitutes, the common pest of a camp, were excluded; and so entire was the subordination, that not a knife was drawn, and scarcely a brawl occurred, says the historian, among the motley multitude.

The battle raged with fire and sword, above and under ground, along the ramparts, the ocean, and the land, at the same time. But no virtue or valour could avail the unfortunate Malagans against the overwhelming force of their enemies, who, driving them back from every point, compelled them to shelter themselves within the defences of the town. The Christians followed up their success. A mine was sprung near a tower connected by a bridge of four arches with the main works of the place. The Moors, scattered and intimidated by the explosion, retreated across the bridge; and the Spaniards, carrying the tower, whose guns completely enfiladed it, obtained possession of this important pass into the beleaguered city. The citizens of Malaga, dismayed at beholding the enemy established in their defences, and fainting under exhaustion from a siege which had already lasted more than three months, now began to murmur at the obstinacy of the garrison, and to demand a capitulation.

A deputation was despatched to the Christian quarters, with the offer of the city to capitulate, on the same liberal conditions which had been uniformly granted by the Spaniards. The king refused to admit the embassy into his presence, and haughtily answered, through the commander of Leon, that these terms had been twice offered to the people of Malaga, and rejected; that it was too late for them to stipulate conditions, and nothing now remained but to abide by those which he, as their conqueror, should vouchsafe to them. After a tumultuous debate, the deputies were despatched a second time to the Christian camp, charged with propositions in which concession was mingled with menace. They were willing to resign to him their fortifications, their city, on his assurance of their personal security and freedom: if he refused this, they would take their Christian captives, amounting to five or six hundred, from the dungeons in which they lay, and hang them like dogs over the battlements; and then, placing their old men, women, and children in the fortress, they would set fire to the town, and cut a way for themselves through their enemies, or fall in the attempt. Ferdinand, unmoved by these menaces, coolly replied that he saw no occasion to change his former determination, but they might rest assured, if they harmed a single hair of a Christian, he would put every soul in the place, man, woman, and child, to the sword.

[1487-1489 A.D.]

On the eighteenth day of August, being somewhat more than three months from the date of opening trenches, Ferdinand and Isabella made their entrance into the conquered city, attended by the court, the clergy, and the whole of their military array. The procession moved in solemn state up the principal streets, now deserted and hushed in ominous silence, to the new cathedral of St. Mary, where mass was performed. At length, the whole population of the city, comprehending every age and sex, was commanded to repair to the great courtyard of the Alcazaba. The dreadful doom of slavery was denounced on the assembled multitude.[53] One-third was to be transported into Africa in exchange for an equal number of Christian captives detained there; and all who had relatives or friends in this predicament were required to furnish a specification of them. Another third was appropriated to reimburse the state for the expenses of the war. The remainder were to be distributed as presents at home and abroad. Thus, one hundred of the flower of the African warriors were sent to the pope, who incorporated them into his guard, and converted them all in the course of the year, says the curate of Los Palacios, into very good Christians. Fifty of the most beautiful Moorish girls were presented by Isabella to the queen of Naples, thirty to the queen of Portugal, others to the ladies of her court; and the residue of both sexes were apportioned among the nobles, cavaliers, and inferior members of the army, according to their respective rank and services.

Malaga was computed to contain from eleven to fifteen thousand inhabitants, exclusive of several thousand foreign auxiliaries, within its gates at the time of surrender. One cannot, at this day, read the melancholy details of its story without feelings of horror and indignation. It is impossible to vindicate the dreadful sentence passed on this unfortunate people for a display of heroism which should have excited admiration in every generous bosom. It was obviously most repugnant to Isabella’s natural disposition, and must be admitted to leave a stain on her memory which no colouring of history can conceal. The fate of Malaga may be said to have decided that of Granada.[g]

THE CAPTURE OF GRANADA

The western fortresses of the kingdom being in the power of the Christians, Ferdinand had now two plans before him for attaining his great object: he could either at once fall on the capital, or begin with the reduction of the eastern strongholds. He chose the latter; he knew that, if he triumphed over Abdallah el Zagal, who possessed Guadix, Baza, Almeria, Vera, etc., he should have little difficulty in dethroning the fallen Abu Abdallah. Velez el Rubio, Vera, Mujacar, etc., opened their gates on the first summons. But the Christians failed before Huescar, Baza, and Tabernas; and had the worst in more than one skirmish.

Ferdinand again hastened to the field at the head of fifty thousand foot and twelve thousand horse, resolved with this formidable force to deprive the Moors of all hopes of a successful resistance. Under the pretence that his arms were to be directed against only the enemy of his ally, he hoped to divide still further the Moorish power. He succeeded in his purpose: the people of Granada looked on, not indeed with indifference, but certainly without much anxiety for themselves, while their ally marched against the places which still held for El Zagal. Abu Abdallah, however, was aware of the result: he even purchased a temporary security, by consenting not only to abandon his uncle, but to receive into Granada itself a Christian garrison; in other words, to deliver that capital, after the destruction of El Zagal, into the hands of Ferdinand. In return, he was to receive ample domain, under the title of vassalage, from his feudal superior. Though the conditions of the alliance were secret, El Zagal, convinced that he should now have to encounter the whole power of the Castilians, prepared for a vigorous defence. His kinsman, the cid Yahya, with ten thousand men, he sent to Baza, which he rightly judged would be one of the first places to be invested by Ferdinand.

[1489-1491 A.D.]

Having reduced Xucar, the Christian monarch, as had been foreseen, laid siege to Baza. This place made a brave resistance during several months: but in the end, seeing that the provisions were exhausted, and many of the soldiers cut off in the frequent sorties; that the Christians had entrenched their camp, and were even encouraged to persevere by the arrival of queen Isabella—Yahya wrote to El Zagal to say that the place must inevitably be surrendered unless speedily succoured. The latter, who was busily occupied in the defence of Guadix, could not spare a single soldier for the relief of Baza; it was therefore constrained to capitulate; but conditions highly advantageous to the people were obtained from the two sovereigns. Yahya, who had several interviews with these sovereigns in their own camp, received signal proofs of their favour. He vowed not only never again to take up arms against his liege superior, but to prevail on his kinsman El Zagal to discontinue a fruitless resistance, and submit as he had done.

Like a true Mussulman, El Zagal coincided in his kinsman’s doctrine of predestination; he acknowledged that Allah in his eternal decrees had resolved the destruction of Granada; and he consented to throw himself on the generosity of Ferdinand. He too hastened to the Christian camp; and if personal kindness, or even regal liberality, could have atoned for the loss of a throne, he might have been satisfied. Like Yahya, he received ample domains, to be forever possessed by his descendants—-the jurisdiction of Andaraz; the valley of Alhaman, containing two thousand vassals (between Malaga and Marbella); and half the produce of some salt mines: the annual return was four millions of maravedis—on his consenting to receive Christian garrisons into Almeria and Guadix, the inhabitants of which were guaranteed in all their privileges as subjects. The following year Abdallah el Zagal, tired, perhaps, of living privately where he had ruled as a king, sold most of these possessions, and retired to Africa. Purchena, Tabernas, Almuñecar, Salobrena, and some other towns of the Alpujarras were eager to follow the example of Baza; so that the once proud kingdom of the Moors was almost literally confined to the walls of the capital.

Nothing now remained but to complete the overthrow of the Moorish power by the conquest of Granada. In virtue of the preceding convention, Ferdinand summoned Abu Abdallah to receive a Castilian garrison. The poor shadow of a king in vain appealed to the magnanimity of his ally, whom he besought to remain satisfied with the rich spoils already acquired. The bare mention of such a proposal would have cost him his head in the then excited state of feeling. The disastrous position of Mohammedan affairs, which they imputed, not without some justice, to his ambition and his subsequent inactivity, roused their wrath so much, that they rose against him, and would doubtless have been satisfied with nothing less than his blood, had he not fled precipitately into the Alhambra. Erelong, however, the violence of the commotion ceased, as everyone perceived the necessity of combining to save the capital. Its fate was for a time suspended by the arrival of numerous volunteers from the neighbouring towns, especially from the villages of the Alpujarras, which had not yet acknowledged the Christian sway; and from several other places, which now openly revolted. Abu Abdallah endeavoured to regain the good will of his people by vigorously preparing for their defence, and even by making incursions on the new possessions of the Christians. But neither the revolt nor his own efforts were of much avail. The inhabitants of Adra were signally punished for their want of faith; the king was compelled to seek shelter within his walls, from the summit of which he soon perceived the advancing cross of his enemies.

A Spanish Merchant, Fifteenth Century

[1491-1492 A.D.]

In the spring of 1491 Ferdinand invested this great city with fifty thousand foot and ten thousand horse. That the siege would be long and bloody was to be expected from the strength of the fortifications and the fanaticism of the people. Some time, indeed, elapsed before the place could be effectually invested; convoys of provisions were frequently received, in spite of Ferdinand’s vigilance; and in the sorties which from time to time took place, the advantage was not always on the side of the assailants. These partial actions so thinned the Christian host, that the king at length forbade them; and to protect his camp against the daring irruptions of the Moors, he surrounded it with thick walls and deep ditches. The enemy now saw that he was resolute in the reduction of the place, however tardy that reduction might prove. His own soldiers, whether in the camp or in the newly erected city of Santa Fé,[54] which he built and fortified both as a security against the possible despair of the Moors, and for the greater comfort of his army and court, were abundantly supplied with every necessary. The privations to which they were now subject, caused the besieged inhabitants first to murmur, and next to threaten their imbecile ruler with destruction. In this emergency, Abu Abdallah hastily summoned a council, to hear the sentiments of his chief subjects on the deplorable posture of affairs. All agreed that the camp, the city, and policy of Ferdinand were but too indicative of his unalterable determination, and of the fate which ultimately, nay soon, awaited them; that the people were worn out by abstinence and fatigue; and that, as the necessity was imperative, an attempt should be made to procure favourable terms of capitulation from the Castilian.

It was on the fourth day of the moon Rabia I [January 2nd, 1492], at the dawn of day, that Abu Abdallah sent his family and treasures into the Alpujarras, while he himself, accompanied by fifty horsemen, rode out to meet Ferdinand, whom he saluted as his liege lord. The keys of the city were delivered to the latter by Abul-Kassim: the Christians entered, and their standards were speedily hoisted on the towers of the Alhambra, and all the fortresses in the place. The fourth day following, Ferdinand and his royal consort made a solemn entry into the city, which they made the seat of an archbishopric, and in which they abode several months. As for the feeble Abu Abdallah, he had not courage to re-enter it. As he disconsolately took the road to the Alpujarras, and from time to time cast back his weeping eyes on the magnificent towers behind him, his mother, the sultana Zoraya, is said to have observed, “Thy womanly tears for the loss of thy kingdom become one who had not courage to defend it like a man!”[j] “Alas!” exclaimed the unhappy exile, “when were woes ever equal to mine!” The scene of this event is still pointed out to the traveller by the people of the district; and the rocky height from which the Moorish chief took his sad farewell of the princely abodes of his youth is commemorated by the poetical title of El ultimo Sospiro del Moro—“the last sigh of the Moor.”

The sequel of Abdallah’s history is soon told. Like his uncle, El Zagal, he pined away in his barren domain of the Alpujarras, under the shadow, as it were, of his ancient palaces. In the following year he passed over to Fez with his family, having commuted his petty sovereignty for a considerable sum of money paid him by Ferdinand and Isabella, and soon after fell in battle in the service of an African prince, his kinsman. “Wretched man,” exclaims a caustic chronicler of his nation, “who could lose his life in another’s cause, though he did not dare to die in his own!”

END OF MOSLEM SWAY IN SPAIN

The fall of Granada excited a general sensation throughout Christendom, where it was received as counterbalancing, in a manner, the loss of Constantinople nearly half a century before. The war of Granada is often compared by the Castilian chroniclers to that of Troy in its duration, and certainly fully equalled the latter in variety of picturesque and romantic incidents, and in circumstances of poetical interest. With the surrender of its capital terminated the Arabian empire in the peninsula, after an existence of seven hundred and forty-one years from the date of the original conquest. The consequences of this closing war were of the highest moment to Spain. The most obvious was the recovery of an extensive territory, hitherto held by a people whose difference of religion, language, and general habits made them not only incapable of assimilating with their Christian neighbours, but almost their natural enemies; while their local position was a matter of just concern, as interposed between the great divisions of the Spanish monarchy, and opening an obvious avenue to invasion from Africa.

By the new conquest, moreover, the Spaniards gained a large extent of country, possessing the highest capacities for production, in its natural fruitfulness of soil, the temperature of climate, and the state of cultivation to which it had been brought by its ancient occupants; while its shores were lined with commodious havens that afforded every facility for commerce. The scattered fragments of the ancient Visigothic empire were now again, with the exception of the little state of Navarre, combined into one great monarchy, as originally destined by nature; and Christian Spain gradually rose, by means of her new acquisitions, from a subordinate situation to the level of a first-rate European power.

THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA

The moral influence of the Moorish war, its influence on the Spanish character, was highly important. The inhabitants of the great divisions of the country, as in most countries during the feudal ages, had been brought too frequently into collision with each other to allow the existence of a pervading national feeling. The war of Granada subjected all the various sections of the country to one common action, under the influence of common motives of the most exciting interest; while it brought them in conflict with a race the extreme repugnance of whose institutions and character to their own served greatly to nourish the nationality of sentiment. In this way the spark of patriotism was kindled throughout the whole nation, and the most distant provinces of the peninsula were knit together by a bond of union which has remained indissoluble.

The consequences of these wars in a military aspect are also worthy of notice. Up to this period, war had been carried on by irregular levies, extremely limited in numerical amount and in period of service, under little subordination, except to their own immediate chiefs, and wholly unprovided with the apparatus required for extended operations. The Spaniards were even lower than most of the European nations in military science, as is apparent from the infinite pains of Isabella to avail herself of all foreign resources for their improvement. In the war of Granada, masses of men were brought together far greater than had hitherto been known in modern warfare. They were kept in the field not only through long campaigns, but far into the winter; a thing altogether unprecedented. They were made to act in concert, and the numerous petty chiefs brought into complete subjection to one common head, whose personal character enforced the authority of station. Lastly, they were supplied with all the requisite munitions through the providence of Isabella, who introduced into the service the most skilful engineers from other countries, and kept in pay bodies of mercenaries—as the Swiss, for example, reputed the best disciplined troops of that day. In this admirable school the Spanish soldier was gradually trained to patient endurance, fortitude, and thorough subordination; and those celebrated captains were formed, with that invincible infantry, which in the beginning of the sixteenth century spread the military fame of their country over all Christendom.

But, with all our sympathy for the conquerors, it is impossible without a deep feeling of regret to contemplate the decay and final extinction of a race who had made such high advances in civilisation as the Spanish Arabs; to see them driven from the stately palaces reared by their own hands, wandering as exiles over the lands which still blossomed with the fruits of their industry, and wasting away under persecution, until their very name as a nation was blotted out from the map of history.

SPANISH EXPLORERS, AND CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

[1492 A.D.]

While Ferdinand and Isabella were at Santa Fé, the capitulation was signed that opened the way to an extent of empire compared with which their recent conquests, and indeed all their present dominions, were insignificant. The extraordinary intellectual activity of the Europeans in the fifteenth century, after the torpor of ages, carried them forward to high advancement in almost every department of science, but especially nautical, whose surprising results have acquired for the age the glory of being designated as peculiarly that of maritime discovery.

The Portuguese were the first to enter on the brilliant path of nautical discovery, which they pursued under the infante Dom Henry with such activity that before the middle of the fifteenth century they had penetrated as far as Cape Verd, doubling many a fearful headland which had shut in the timid navigator of former days; until at length, in 1486, they descried the lofty promontory which terminates Africa on the south, and which received the cheering appellation of the Cape of Good Hope.

The Spaniards, in the meanwhile, did not languish in the career of maritime enterprise. Certain adventurers from the northern provinces of Biscay and Guipuzcoa, in 1393, had made themselves masters of one of the smallest of the group of islands since known as the Canaries. Other private adventurers from Seville extended their conquests over these islands in the beginning of the following century. These were completed in behalf of the crown under Ferdinand and Isabella, who equipped several fleets for their reduction, which at length terminated in 1495 with that of Teneriffe. From the commencement of their reign, Ferdinand and Isabella had shown an earnest solicitude for the encouragement of commerce and nautical science. Under them, and indeed under their predecessors as far back as Henry III, a considerable traffic had been carried on with the western coast of Africa, from which gold-dust and slaves were imported into the city of Seville. The annalist of that city notices the repeated interference of Isabella in behalf of these unfortunate beings, by ordinances tending to secure them a more equal protection of the laws, or opening such social indulgences as might mitigate the hardships of their condition.

A misunderstanding gradually arose between the subjects of Castile and Portugal, in relation to their respective rights of discovery and commerce on the African coast, which promised a fruitful source of collision between the two crowns, but which was happily adjusted by an article in the treaty of 1479, that terminated the war of the Succession. By this it was settled that the right of traffic and of discovery on the western coast of Africa should be exclusively reserved to the Portuguese, who in their turn should resign all claims on the Canaries to the crown of Castile. The Spaniards, thus excluded from further progress to the south, seemed to have no other opening left for naval adventure than the hitherto untravelled regions of the great western ocean. Fortunately, at this juncture an individual appeared among them, in the person of Christopher Columbus, endowed with capacity for stimulating them to this heroic enterprise and conducting it to a glorious issue.[g]

The great story of the discovery of America and the new crusade it began against ignorance and also, unfortunately, against innocent savages, has a vital bearing, it is true, upon the fortunes, the glory, and the wars of Spain. But since almost every country in Europe was soon involved in the same cry of “Westward, ho!” and since the general outlines are familiar to everybody, it will be permissible to defer the account until the volume on America, where the details can be given with fullness, consecution, and a proper sense of proportionate value.

None the less, the reader must not forget that the period of discovery and the encouragement given it by Isabella and her consort form one of the most important as one of the most beautiful major features of their reign.

Leaving it to the reader’s imagination to give this better element its due brilliance and its right significance as a partial atonement to history, we must turn to the evil side of the reign, an evil so tremendous and loathsome that it seems incredible when associated with the noble deeds of the sovereigns. This is the persecution of the non-orthodox in the name of religion and without a shadow of that gentleness and mercy which one associates with that name, little as history may have to substantiate that association.

The Inquisition we shall leave to a separate chapter in the appendix in which its origin in other countries will be taken up and its history traced in entirety until its end in the last century. A few words of allusion will not, however, be amiss in this place.[a]

THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS

While the Spanish sovereigns were detained before Granada, they published their memorable and most disastrous edict against the Jews; inscribing it, as it were, with the same pen which drew up the glorious capitulation of Granada and the treaty with Columbus. The envy raised by their prosperity, combined with the high religious excitement kindled in the long war with the infidel, directed the terrible arm of the Inquisition against this unfortunate people; but the result showed the failure of the experiment, since comparatively few conversions, and those frequently of a suspicious character, were effected, while the great mass still maintained a pertinacious attachment to ancient errors. The inquisitors asserted that the only mode left for the extirpation of the Jewish heresy was to eradicate the seed; and they boldly demanded the immediate and total banishment of every unbaptised Israelite from the land.

The Jews tendered a donative of 30,000 ducats towards the expense of the Moorish war. The negotiations, however, were interrupted by the inquisitor-general who held up a crucifix, exclaiming: “Judas Iscariot sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver. Your highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand. Here he is; take him and barter him away!” So saying, the frantic priest threw the crucifix on the table, and left the apartment. The sovereigns, instead of chastising this presumption, or despising it as a mere freak of insanity, were overawed by it.

The edict for the expulsion of the Jews was signed by the Spanish sovereigns at Granada, March 30th, 1492. It decreed that all the unbaptised Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, should depart from the realm by the end of July next ensuing; prohibiting them from revisiting it, on any pretext whatever, under penalty of death and confiscation of property. It was, moreover, interdicted to every subject to harbour, succour, or minister to the necessities of any Jew, after the expiration of the term limited for his departure. The persons and property of the Jews, in the meantime, were taken under the royal protection. They were allowed to dispose of their effects of every kind on their own account, and to carry the proceeds along with them, in bills of exchange, or merchandise not prohibited, but neither in gold nor silver.

The doom of exile fell like a thunderbolt on the heads of the Israelites. A large proportion of them had hitherto succeeded in shielding themselves from the searching eye of the Inquisition, by an affectation of reverence for the forms of Catholic worship, and a discreet forbearance of whatever might offend the prejudices of their Christian brethren. They had even hoped that their steady loyalty and a quiet and orderly discharge of their social duties would in time secure them higher immunities. Many had risen to a degree of opulence by means of the thrift and dexterity peculiar to the race, which gave them a still deeper interest in the land of their residence. Their families were reared in all the elegant refinements of life; and their wealth and education often disposed them to turn their attention to liberal pursuits, which ennobled the character, indeed, but rendered them personally more sensible to physical annoyance and less fitted to encounter the perils and privations of their dreary pilgrimage. They were to go forth as exiles from the land of their birth—the land where all whom they ever loved had lived or died; the land not so much of their adoption as of their inheritance; which had been the home of their ancestors for centuries, and with whose prosperity and glory they were of course as intimately associated as was any ancient Spaniard. They were to be cast out helpless and defenceless, with a brand of infamy set on them, among nations who had always held them in derision and hatred.

Spanish Cavalier of the Fifteenth Century

Those provisions of the edict which affected a show of kindness to the Jews were contrived so artfully as to be nearly nugatory. As they were excluded from the use of gold and silver, the only medium for representing their property was bills of exchange. But commerce was too limited and imperfect to allow of these being promptly obtained to any very considerable, much less to the enormous amount required in the present instance. It was impossible, moreover, to negotiate a sale of their effects under existing circumstances, since the market was soon glutted with commodities; and few would be found willing to give anything like an equivalent for what, if not disposed of within the prescribed term, the proprietors must relinquish at any rate. So deplorable, indeed, was the sacrifice of property that a chronicler of the day mentions that he had seen a house exchanged for an ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes! Yet there were found but very few, when the day of departure arrived, who were not prepared to abandon their country rather than their religion. This extraordinary act of self-devotion by a whole people for conscience’ sake may be thought to merit other epithets than those of “perfidy, incredulity, and stiff-necked obstinacy,” with which the worthy curate of Los Palacios,[h] in the charitable feeling of that day, has seen fit to stigmatise it.

When the period of departure arrived, all the principal routes through the country might be seen swarming with emigrants, old and young, the sick and the helpless, men, women, and children, mingled promiscuously together, some mounted on horses or mules, but far the greater part undertaking their painful pilgrimage on foot. The sight of so much misery touched even the Spaniards with pity, though none might succour them; for the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, enforced the ordinance to that effect by denouncing heavy ecclesiastical censures on all who should presume to violate it. Much the largest division, amounting according to some estimates to eighty thousand souls, passed into Portugal; whose monarch, João [John] II, dispensed with his scruples of conscience so far as to give them a free passage through his dominions on their way to Africa, in consideration of a tax of a cruzado a head. He is even said to have silenced his scruples so far as to allow certain ingenious artisans to establish themselves permanently in the kingdom.

A considerable number found their way to the ports of Santa Maria and Cadiz, where, after lingering some time in the vain hope of seeing the waters open for their egress, according to the promises of the rabbis, they embarked on board a Spanish fleet for the Barbary coast. Having crossed over to Ercilla, a Christian settlement in Africa, whence they proceeded by land towards Fez, where a considerable body of their countrymen resided, they were assaulted on their route by the roving tribes of the desert, in quest of plunder. Notwithstanding the interdict, the Jews had contrived to secrete small sums of money, sewed up in their garments or the linings of their saddles. These did not escape the avaricious eyes of their spoilers, who are even said to have ripped open the bodies of their victims in search of gold which they were supposed to have swallowed. The lawless barbarians, mingling lust with avarice, abandoned themselves to still more frightful excesses, violating the wives and daughters of the unresisting Jews, or massacring in cold blood such as offered resistance.

But, without pursuing these loathsome details further, it need only be added that the miserable exiles endured such extremity of famine that they were glad to force a nourishment from the grass which grew scantily among the sands of the desert; until at length great numbers of them, wasted by disease and broken in spirit, retraced their steps to Ercilla, and consented to be baptised, in the hope of being permitted to revisit their native land. The number, indeed, was so considerable that the priest who officiated was obliged to make use of the mop, or hyssop, with which the Roman Catholic missionaries were wont to scatter the holy drops whose mystic virtue could cleanse the soul in a moment from the foulest stains of infidelity. “Thus,” says the Castilian historian, Ferreras,[k] “the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use of to unseal their eyes, which they now opened to the vain promises of the rabbis; so that, renouncing their ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the cross!”

Many of the emigrants took the direction of Italy. Those who landed at Naples brought with them an infectious disorder, contracted by long confinement in small, crowded, and ill-provided vessels. The disorder was so malignant, and spread with such frightful celerity, as to sweep off more than twenty thousand inhabitants of the city in the course of the year, whence it extended its devastation over the whole Italian peninsula. Many of the exiles passed into Turkey, and to different parts of the Levant, where their descendants continued to speak the Castilian language far into the following century. Others found their way to France, and even England. Part of their religious services is recited to this day in Spanish, in one or more of the London synagogues.

The whole number of Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella is variously computed at from 160,000 to 800,000 souls; a discrepancy sufficiently indicating the paucity of authentic data. Most modern writers, with the usual predilection for startling results, have assumed the latter estimate; and Llorente[l] has made it the basis of some important calculations in his History of the Inquisition. A view of all the circumstances will lead us without much hesitation to adopt the most moderate computation. This, moreover, is placed beyond reasonable doubt by the direct testimony of Bernáldez.[h] He reports that a Jewish rabbi, one of the exiles, subsequently returned to Spain, where he was baptised by him. This person estimated the whole number of his unbaptised countrymen, at the publication of the edict, at thirty-six thousand families. Another Jewish authority, quoted by the curate, reckoned them at thirty-five thousand. This, assuming an average of four and a half to a family, gives the sum total of about 160,000 individuals.[55]

The detriment incurred by the state, however, is not founded so much on any numerical estimate as on the subtraction of the mechanical skill, intelligence, and general resources of an orderly, industrious population. In this view, the mischief was incalculably greater than that inferred by the mere number of the exiled; and although even this might have been gradually repaired in a country allowed the free and healthful development of its energies, yet in Spain this was so effectually counteracted by the Inquisition, and other causes in the following century, that the loss may be deemed irretrievable.

The expulsion of so numerous a class of subjects by an independent act of the sovereign might well be regarded as an enormous stretch of prerogative, altogether incompatible with anything like a free government. But, to judge the matter rightly, we must take into view the actual position of the Jews at that time. Far from forming an integral part of the commonwealth, they were regarded as alien to it, as a mere excrescence, which, so far from contributing to the healthful action of the body politic, was nourished by its vicious humours, and might be lopped off at any time when the health of the system demanded it. Far from being protected by the laws, the only aim of the laws in reference to them was to define more precisely their civil incapacities, and to draw the line of division more broadly between them and the Christians. Even this humiliation by no means satisfied the national prejudices, as is evinced by the great number of tumults and massacres of which they were the victims. In these circumstances, it seemed to be no great assumption of authority to pronounce sentence of exile against those whom public opinion had so long proscribed as enemies to the state.

It has been common with modern historians to detect a principal motive in the avarice of the government. It is, however, incredible that persons possessing the political sagacity of Ferdinand and Isabella could indulge a temporary cupidity at the sacrifice of the most important and permanent interests, converting by a measure so manifestly unsound, their wealthiest districts into a wilderness and dispeopling them of a class of citizens who contributed beyond all others not only to the general resources but to the direct revenues of the crown.

We need look no further for the principle of action, in this case, than the spirit of religious bigotry which led to a similar expulsion of the Jews from England, France, and other parts of Europe, as well as from Portugal, under circumstances of peculiar atrocity, a few years later.[56] Indeed, the spirit of persecution did not expire with the fifteenth century, but extends even into our own more luminous days. How far the banishment of the Jews was conformable to the opinions of the most enlightened contemporaries, may be gathered from the encomiums lavished on its authors from more than one quarter. Spanish writers, without exception, celebrate it as a sublime sacrifice of all temporal interests to religious principle.[g]

PERSECUTION AND REVOLT OF THE MOORS (1499-1502 A.D.)

[1492-1499 A.D.]

The establishment of the Inquisition led to the banishment of the Jews; the latter, in its turn, to the persecution of the Mohammedans. These soon found that their religious toleration, so solemnly guaranteed by the articles of capitulation, would be little respected by a prince who did not always hesitate to break his royal word—nor even his oath—when his interests or his bigotry was concerned. It is certain that, from the very year in which Granada submitted, the resolution was taken to convert or expel the Moors; but their number, the assistance they might receive from Africa, and the unsettled state of the new conquests, delayed its execution.

In 1499, however, Ferdinand, being at Granada, seriously entered on what he doubtless considered a path of stern but necessary duty. Having assembled some of his counsellors and prelates to deliberate on the proper means of attaining an object so momentous, it was agreed that both end and means should be left to two eminent prelates—to Francisco Ximenes [or Jimenes] de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo, and to Ferdinand de Talavera, metropolitan of Granada. In selecting two such opposite instruments, it was doubtless intended that the gentleness of Don Ferdinand should be fortified by the decision of his colleague: through his influence it doubtless was that the first steps in the great work were of a mild and rational nature. The alfaquis were assiduously courted; were persuaded to dispute on the merits of their respective faiths; and were severally dismissed with presents.

Whether through conviction or fear, through persuasion or interest, these men forsook their old religion, and consented not only to be baptised, but to become the instruments of converting their countrymen. Their example had great effect: thousands applied for admission into the church; and thousands more would have joined them at the same time, but for the fiery zeal of Cardinal Ximenes,[57] which occasioned a serious disturbance. Seeing that some of their body, who protested against the prelate’s violence, were by his order conducted to prison, they arose, murdered an obnoxious alguazil, and hastened to Ximenes’ hotel, which they assailed. He fought with great spirit. The commotion continued for several days: the whole Albaycin was in arms; and the insurrection would have spread further, but for the metropolitan of Granada. Though a messenger of peace had been stoned to death the preceding day by the Moors of that quarter, he resolved to go among them, and finally persuaded them to lay down their arms.

But the mischief was not yet ended. Those especially who abode in the mountains of the Alpujarras were filled with fury at the forcible attempts made to seduce their brethren from the faith of the prophet; and they flew to arms. The king himself marched to reduce them; pursued them into the heart of their hills; forced or persuaded them to submit, and to surrender both their fortified places and their arms. His success emboldened him to more decisive measures: missionaries were despatched, wherever there was a Mohammedan village, to preach the necessity of immediate conversion; and the efficacy of their labours was not a little owing to the armed bodies of soldiers who accompanied them. Terrified by the recent fate of the Jews, whole towns submitted to baptism—the more willingly, perhaps, as no previous instruction was forced upon them; there was no time for catechism or preaching: hundreds were sprinkled with holy water at the same time; the same prayers were repeated over them, and then they stood cleansed in the laver of regeneration! That such conversions could not be very durable need not surprise us.

[1499-1502 A.D.]

The following year, the independent mountaineers again revolted, and massacred all the Christians on whom they could lay hands. They were again reduced: ten thousand submitted to the necessary rite; while a greater number fled to their African brethren. A third time, in the space of a very few months, were the embers of discontent fanned into a flame—partly by the injudicious zeal of the Christian priests, partly by the strong breath of indignation. This insurrection was the most difficult to quell: one or two partial successes were obtained over the royal troops; but, on the appearance of Ferdinand in person, with a formidable power, the revolted fortresses submitted. Again did thousands obtain his permission to settle on the opposite coast, and bade a final adieu to the peninsula. By their departure, those who remained were still less able to make head against the victor, who no longer hesitated to issue his irrevocable decree of expulsion against every obstinate follower of the Arabian prophet.[j]

A Man of Granada

The sovereigns came to the extraordinary resolution of offering the alternative of baptism or exile. They issued a pragmática from Seville, February 12th, 1502, that all the unbaptised Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon above fourteen years of age if males, and twelve if females, must leave the country by the end of April following; that they might sell their property in the meantime, and take the proceeds in anything save gold and silver and merchandise regularly prohibited; and, finally, that they might emigrate to any foreign country, except the dominions of the Grand Turk, and such parts of Africa as Spain was then at war with. Obedience to these severe provisions was enforced by the penalties of death and confiscation of property.

This stern edict, so closely modelled on that against the Jews, must have been even more grievous in its application. For the Jews may be said to have been denizens almost equally of every country; while the Moors, excluded from a retreat among their countrymen on the African shore, were sent into the lands of enemies or strangers. The former, moreover, were far better qualified by their natural shrewdness and commercial habits for disposing of their property advantageously, than the simple, inexperienced Moors, skilled in little else than husbandry or rude mechanic arts. We have nowhere met with any estimate of the number who migrated on this occasion.

Castile might now boast, for the first time in eight centuries, that every outward stain, at least, of infidelity, was purified from her bosom. But how had this been accomplished? By the most detestable expedients which sophistry could devise and oppression execute; and that, too, under an enlightened government, proposing to be guided solely by a conscientious regard for duty.

It is a singular paradox, that Christianity, whose doctrines inculcate unbounded charity, should have been made so often an engine of persecution; while Mohammedanism, whose principles are those of avowed intolerance, should have exhibited, at least till later times, a truly philosophical spirit of toleration.[58] Even the first victorious disciples of the prophet, glowing with all the fiery zeal of proselytism, were content with the exaction of tribute from the vanquished.[g]

We may now take up in condensed form certain foreign relations that had busied the Spanish monarchs simultaneously with their religious activities.[a]

SPAIN IN ITALY; THE GREAT CAPTAIN

[1479-1502 A.D.]

Soon after his accession, Ferdinand was naturally anxious to procure the restitution of Roussillon and Cerdagne. But to his pressing embassies on this subject, Louis XI returned evasive answers. But when Ferdinand, indignant at the evasions of his successor, Charles VIII, began to arm for the recovery of this frontier, the latter, who meditated the conquest of Naples, and who wished to have no enemies to harass France during his absence, commanded Perpignan and the fortresses of the province to be evacuated by the French troops; they were immediately occupied by those of Aragon.

The severity of Ferdinand king of Naples had long been borne with dissatisfaction by the people. Their discontent appeared to the French king an excellent opportunity for vindicating the claims of his family on that country, and for gratifying an ambition which was seldom restrained by considerations of justice. He was the more confirmed in his purpose, when several Neapolitan nobles, through disgust with their ruler, sought his protection, and offered to aid him in gaining possession of so fair a kingdom. The death of the Neapolitan king, and the accession of his son Alfonso, in 1494, produced no change, either on the intentions of Charles, or the disaffection of the people; Alfonso was as unpopular as Ferdinand.

In alarm at the preparations of the Frenchmen, and the suspected hostility of the pope, the new king implored the aid of his Spanish brother and received the assurance he solicited. In the meantime Charles invaded Italy by way of Grenoble, and passed through Pavia and Florence direct on Rome. Having forced the pope into his interests, he continued his march towards Naples. Alfonso, terrified at the approaching danger, and convinced how much his subjects wished for his overthrow, abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand, who, he hoped, would be able to rally them round the national standard; and retired to a monastery in Sicily. The hope was vain; the Neapolitans fled—perhaps as much through cowardice as disaffection—the moment they came in contact with the French; and the capital, with the fortified places, submitted to the invader.

But Ferdinand of Spain was not idle; by his ambassadors at Venice he formed a league with the pope, the republic, the duke of Milan, and the fugitive king of Naples for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Fortunately for the common cause, the rapacity and insolence of the invaders had turned the eyes of the Neapolitans towards their dethroned king, whom they invited to resume his dignity, and at whose approach they opened the gates not only of the capital, but of several important fortresses.

[1495-1501 A.D.]

At this time, Don Gonsalvo de Cordova, the captain of Ferdinand, who had acquired distinction in the wars of Granada, commenced his brilliant career. The rapidity with which he reduced many of the fortified places, and triumphed over the French generals on the field, drew the attention of Europe towards this part of Italy. His exploits at the very first campaign procured him the appellation of the Great Captain. The Calabrias were soon entirely forced from the invaders, who were glad to take refuge in the states of the church, until the arrival of the expected succours from France. The restored king did not long survive his success; the fatigues of the campaign consigned him, in 1496, to the grave. He was succeeded by his uncle, Frederick, son of the first Aragonese king of Naples.

To the new monarch Gonsalvo continued the same eminent services; and not unfrequently the pope made use of his valour in humbling the temporal enemies of the church. The king of France in vain attempted, by way of diversion, to withdraw the attention of Ferdinand from the affairs of Italy, by the powerful armaments which he frequently moved on Roussillon; he found the Spanish king, as usual, prepared both to defend the frontiers, and to secure the crown on the head of Frederick.

But in that relative’s behalf Ferdinand soon ceased to be interested. For his progressive coolness towards that prince, various reasons have been assigned; the chief one has been omitted—the king’s all-grasping ambition, which sometimes took no counsel from justice. On hearing that Louis XII, the successor of Charles, was preparing to arm for the recovery of Naples, he besought that monarch to desist from the undertaking; and when he found that solicitations were useless, he was unprincipled enough to propose a division of the whole kingdom. Louis eagerly seized the proposal, and the royal robbers immediately entered into negotiations for adjusting their respective share of the spoils. At first the city and kingdom of Naples were adjudged to Louis; the two Calabrias and the Abruzzi to Ferdinand; the revenue arising from the pasturage of Apulia was to be divided between them. But a dispute arising, a new division was effected; the latter assigned the two Calabrias and Apulia to the Spanish king; Naples and the Abruzzo to the Frenchman. To preserve harmony in other quarters, Louis agreed at the same time to relinquish his claims over Roussillon and Cerdagne, and Ferdinand over Montpellier. Both sovereigns sent powerful armaments to execute this iniquitous compact. No sooner did it reach the ears of the unfortunate Frederick than he complained to the Spanish monarch of the monstrous injustice. Ferdinand replied—no doubt with truth—that he had done his utmost to prevent the French king from the enterprise; that when entreaties failed, he had even offered a considerable sum to the same effect; and that it was only when he found Louis bent on the undertaking, and leagued with the Italian powers to insure its success, that he had consented to the division; he added, that, as such a division was inevitable, it was better that France should have a part than the whole. In private life such reasoning would be characterised as it ought; but kings have too often pleaded their sovereign exception from obligations which they have been ready enough to enforce on the rest of mankind.

[1501-1510 A.D.]

While the French troops on one side, and the great captain on the other, were seizing his provinces, it was impossible for Frederick, with a people so disaffected as the Neapolitans, to make head against them. As Louis promised to allow him a pension suitable to his rank, he sought an asylum in France. Scarcely were the armies in possession of the country, when their leaders began to quarrel about the precise extent of their respective territories. A bloody war followed, the details of which may be found in the Italian history of the period. It exhibits little beyond a continued succession of victories for the great captain, who triumphed over the veteran general and armies of France; it ended, in 1504, in the entire subjugation of the kingdom by the Spaniards.

The brilliant success of the Spanish general now roused the envy of a few brother officers, who represented him to the sovereign as meditating designs inconsistent with the preservation of the new conquest to the Castilian crown. In the frequent orders he received, he but too plainly saw the distrust of Ferdinand, whom, however, he continued to serve with the same ability and with unshaken fidelity.[59] In 1506, Ferdinand arrived at Naples, and his distrust was greatly diminished by his frequent intercourse with the general. But, as his own heart taught him that human virtue is often weak, he brought Gonsalvo with him to Spain, leaving the viceregal authority in the hands of Don Raymond de Cardona.

Into the interminable affairs of Italy, from this time to the death of Ferdinand, the ever varying alliances between the pope, the emperor, the Venetians, and the kings of France and Spain, and their results, as they had not any influence over Spain—scarcely, indeed, any connection with it—we forbear to enter. We need only observe that Spain retained uninterrupted possession of her conquest; the investiture of which, in 1510, was conferred by the pope, as a fief of the church, on Ferdinand.

The happiness of the Catholic sovereigns was not commensurate with the splendour which surrounded them. To whom must their magnificent empire devolve? In 1497, the infante Juan, their only son, whom they had just married to the archduchess Margaret of Austria, died, and his widow was soon afterwards brought to bed of a still-born child. Hence their daughters only remained through whom they could hope to transmit their sceptre to posterity; but even in this expectation they were doomed to much disappointment.

Doña Isabella, the eldest of the princesses, who was married to the heir of the Portuguese monarchy, was left a widow as soon as the archduchess Margaret; and though she was next given to her brother-in-law, Dom Emmanuel, now become king of Portugal, and the following year was delivered of a son, she died at the time; nor did the young prince, the acknowledged heir of the whole peninsula, Navarre excepted, long survive her. Still, to be prepared against every possible contingency, they married another daughter, the princess Maria, to the Lusitanian widower; and their youngest, Catherine, destined to be so famous from her connection with the English reformation, first to Arthur prince of Wales, and next to Henry, his brother, afterwards Henry VIII.

Their hopes of an heir, however, rested in their second daughter, the wife of Philip archduke of Austria, Juana, who, in 1500, was delivered of a prince, afterwards the celebrated Charles V.

Thus, the crown of Spain was to devolve on a foreign brow—the first example of the kind which had occurred from the foundation of the monarchy by Pelayo. Their disappointments, too, were embittered by the unhappiness of their children. The princess Isabella, who had always shown more affection for the cloister than for the throne, had been forced into the marriage, and died a premature and painful death. Juana, though extravagantly fond of her husband, was treated by him with the most marked neglect; and the fate of Catherine is but too well known. The misfortunes of her children sank deeply into the heart of the queen, and brought on a melancholy which ended in her death.[j]

ILLNESS AND DEATH OF ISABELLA

[1503-1504 A.D.]

In the beginning of 1503 she had declined so visibly that the cortes of Castile, much alarmed, petitioned her to provide for the government of the kingdom after her decease, in case of the absence or incapacity of Juana. She seems to have rallied in some measure after this; but it was only to relapse into a state of greater debility, as her spirits sank under the conviction, which now forced itself on her, of her daughter’s settled insanity.

Early in the spring of the following year (1504) that unfortunate lady embarked for Flanders, where, soon after her arrival, the inconstancy of her husband and her own ungovernable sensibilities occasioned the most scandalous scenes. Philip became openly enamoured of one of the ladies of her suite; and his injured wife, in a paroxysm of jealousy, personally assaulted her fair rival in the palace, and caused the beautiful locks which had excited the admiration of her fickle husband to be shorn from her head. This outrage so affected Philip that he vented his indignation against Juana in the coarsest and most unmanly terms, and finally refused to have any further intercourse with her. The account of this disgraceful scene reached Castile in the month of June. It occasioned the deepest chagrin and mortification to the unhappy parents. Ferdinand soon after fell ill of a fever, and the queen was seized with the same disorder, accompanied by more alarming symptoms. Her illness was exasperated by anxiety[60] for her husband, and she refused to credit the favourable reports of the physicians while he was detained from her presence. His vigorous constitution, however, threw off the malady, while hers gradually failed under it. Her tender heart was more keenly sensible than his to the unhappy condition of their child, and to the gloomy prospects which awaited her beloved Castile.

Her faithful follower, Martyr,

p was with the court at this time in Medina del Campo. In a letter to the count of Tendilla, dated October 7th, he states that the most serious apprehensions were entertained by the physicians for the queen’s fate. “Her whole system,” he says, “is pervaded by a consuming fever. She loathes food of every kind, and is tormented with incessant thirst, while the disorder has all the appearance of terminating in a dropsy.”

On the 12th of October she executed that celebrated testament which reflects so clearly the peculiar qualities of her mind and character. She begins with prescribing the arrangements for her burial. She orders her remains to be transported to Granada, to the Franciscan monastery of Santa Isabella in the Alhambra, and there deposited in a low and humble sepulchre, without other memorial than a plain inscription on it. “But,” she continues, “should the king my lord prefer a sepulchre in some other place, then my will is that my body be there transported, and laid by his side; that the union we have enjoyed in this world, and, through the mercy of God, may hope again for our souls in heaven, may be represented by our bodies in the earth.” Then, desirous of correcting by her example, in this last act of her life, the wasteful pomp of funeral obsequies to which the Castilians were addicted, she commands that her own should be performed in the plainest and most unostentatious manner, and that the sum saved by this economy should be distributed in alms among the poor.

Isabella

(From an old print)

She next provides for several charities, assigning, among others, marriage portions for poor maidens, and a considerable sum for the redemption of Christian captives in Barbary. She enjoins the punctual discharge of all her personal debts within a year; she retrenches superfluous offices in the royal household, and revokes all such grants, whether in the forms of lands or annuities, as she conceives to have been made without sufficient warrant. She inculcates on her successors the importance of maintaining the integrity of the royal domains, and, above all, of never divesting themselves of their title to the important fortress of Gibraltar.

After this she comes to the succession of the crown, which she settles on the infanta Juana as “queen proprietor,” and the archduke Philip as her husband. She gives them much good counsel respecting their future administration; enjoining them, as they would secure the love and obedience of their subjects, to conform in all respects to the laws and usages of the realm. She recommends to them the same conjugal harmony which had ever subsisted between her and her husband; she beseeches them to show the latter all the deference and filial affection “due to him beyond every other parent, for his eminent virtues”; and finally inculcates on them the most tender regard for the liberties and welfare of their subjects.

She next comes to the great question proposed by the cortes of 1503, respecting the government of the realm in the absence or incapacity of Juana. She declares that, after mature deliberation, and with the advice of many of the prelates and nobles of the kingdom, she appoints King Ferdinand her husband to be the sole regent of Castile, in that exigency, until the majority of her grandson Charles; being led to this, she adds, “by the consideration of the magnanimity and illustrious qualities of the king my lord, as well as his large experience, and the great profit which will redound to the state from his wise and beneficent rule.”

She then makes a specific provision for her husband’s personal maintenance, which, “although less than she could wish, and far less than he deserves, considering the eminent services he has rendered the state,” she settles at one-half of all the net proceeds and profits accruing from the newly discovered countries in the West; together with ten millions of maravedis annually, assigned on the alcabalas of the grand-masterships of the military orders. And lastly, concluding in the same beautiful strain of conjugal tenderness in which she began, she says, “I beseech the king my lord that he will accept all my jewels, or such as he shall select, so that, seeing them, he may be reminded of the singular love I always bore him while living, and that I am now waiting for him in a better world; by which remembrance he may be encouraged to live the more justly and holily in this.”

After performing this duty she daily grew weaker, the powers of her mind seeming to brighten as those of her body declined. The concerns of her government still occupied her thoughts; and several public measures, which she had postponed through urgency of other business or growing infirmities, pressed so heavily on her heart that she made them the subject of a codicil to her former will. It was executed November 23rd, 1504, only three days before her death. Three of the provisions contained in it are too remarkable to pass unnoticed. The first concerns the codification of the laws. For this purpose the queen appoints a commission to make a new digest of the statutes and pragmáticas, the contradictory tenor of which still occasioned much embarrassment in Castilian jurisprudence. This was a subject she always had much at heart; but no nearer approach had been made to it than the valuable though insufficient work of Montalvo[61] in the early part of her reign; and, notwithstanding her precautions, none more effectual was destined to take place till the reign of Philip II.

The second item had reference to the natives of the New World. Gross abuses had arisen there since the partial revival of the repartimientos, although, Las Casas[q] says, “intelligence of this was carefully kept from the ears of the queen.” Some vague apprehension of the truth, however, appears to have forced itself on her: and she enjoins her successors, in the most earnest manner, to quicken the good work of converting and civilising the poor Indians, to treat them with the greatest gentleness, and redress any wrongs they may have suffered in their persons or property. Lastly, she expresses her doubts as to the legality of the revenue drawn from the alcabalas,[62] constituting the principal income of the crown. She directs that the legislature be summoned to devise proper measures for supplying the wants of the crown—“measures depending for their validity on the good pleasure of the subjects of the realm.”

Such were the dying words of this admirable woman, displaying the same respect for the rights and liberties of the nation which she had shown through life, and striving to secure the blessings of her benign administration to the most distant and barbarous regions under her sway. These two documents were a precious legacy bequeathed to her people, to guide them when the light of her personal example should be withdrawn forever.

On receiving the extreme unction, she refused to have her feet exposed, as was usual on that occasion: a circumstance which, occurring at a time when there can be no suspicion of affectation, is often noticed by Spanish writers as a proof of that sensitive delicacy and decorum which distinguished her through life. At length, having received the sacraments, and performed all the offices of a sincere and devout Christian, she gently expired, a little before noon, on Wednesday, November 26th, 1504, in the fifty-fourth year of her age, and thirtieth of her reign.

No time was lost in making preparations for transporting the queen’s body unembalmed to Granada, in strict conformity to her orders. It was escorted by a numerous cortège of cavaliers and ecclesiastics, among whom was the faithful Martyr. The procession began its mournful march the day following her death, taking the route through Arevalo, Toledo, and Jaen. Scarcely had it left Medina del Campo when a tremendous tempest set in, which continued with little interruption during the whole journey. The roads were rendered nearly impassable; the bridges were swept away, the small streams swollen to the size of the Tagus, and the level country was buried under a deluge of water. Neither sun nor stars were seen during their whole progress. The horses and mules were borne down by the torrents, and the riders in several instances perished with them. At length, on the 18th of December, the melancholy and way-worn cavalcade reached the place of its destination; and, amidst the wild strife of the elements, the peaceful remains of Isabella were laid, with simple solemnities, in the Franciscan monastery of the Alhambra. Here, under the shadow of those venerable Moslem towers, and in the heart of the capital which her noble constancy had recovered for her country, they continued to repose till after the death of Ferdinand, when they were removed to be laid by his side in the stately mausoleum of the cathedral church of Granada.

PRESCOTT’S ESTIMATE OF ISABELLA

Her person was of the middle height, and well-proportioned. She had a clear, fresh complexion, with light-blue eyes and auburn hair—a style of beauty exceedingly rare in Spain. Her features were regular, and universally allowed to be uncommonly handsome. The portraits that remain of her combine a faultless symmetry of features with singular sweetness and intelligence of expression.

Her manners were most gracious and pleasing. They were marked by natural dignity and modest reserve, tempered by an affability which flowed from the kindliness of her disposition. She was the last person to be approached with undue familiarity; yet the respect which she imposed was mingled with the strongest feelings of devotion and love. She showed great tact in accommodating herself to the peculiar situation and character of those around her. She appeared in arms at the head of her troops, and shrank from none of the hardships of war. During the reforms introduced into the religious houses, she visited the nunneries in person, taking her needlework with her, and passing the day in the society of the inmates. When travelling in Galicia, she attired herself in the costume of the country, borrowing for that purpose the jewels and other ornaments of the ladies there, and returning them with liberal additions. By this condescending and captivating deportment, as well as by her higher qualities, she gained an ascendency over her turbulent subjects which no king of Spain could ever boast.

She spoke the Castilian with much elegance and correctness. She had an easy fluency of discourse, which, though generally of a serious complexion, was occasionally seasoned with agreeable sallies, some of which have passed into proverbs. She was temperate even to abstemiousness in her diet, seldom or never tasting wine; and so frugal in her table, that the daily expenses for herself and family did not exceed the moderate sum of 40 ducats. She was equally simple and economical in her apparel. On all public occasions, indeed, she displayed a royal magnificence; but she had no relish for it in private, and she freely gave away her clothes and jewels as presents to her friends.

Among her moral qualities, the most conspicuous, perhaps, was her magnanimity. She betrayed nothing little or selfish, in thought or action. Her schemes were vast, and executed in the same noble spirit in which they were conceived. She never employed doubtful agents or sinister measures, but the most direct and open policy. She scorned to avail herself of advantages offered by the perfidy of others. Where she had once given her confidence, she gave her hearty and steady support; and she was scrupulous to redeem any pledge she had made to those who ventured in her cause, however unpopular. She sustained Ximenes in all his obnoxious but salutary reforms. She seconded Columbus in the prosecution of his arduous enterprise, and shielded him from the calumny of his enemies. She did the same good service to her favourite, Gonsalvo de Cordova; and the day of her death was felt, and, as it proved, truly felt, by both, as the last of their good fortune. Artifice and duplicity were so abhorrent to her character, and so averse from her domestic policy, that when they appear in the foreign relations of Spain it is certainly not imputable to her. She was incapable of harbouring any petty distrust or latent malice; and, although stern in the execution and exaction of public justice, she made the most generous allowance, and even sometimes advances, to those who had personally injured her.

Armour of Isabella

But the principle which gave a peculiar colouring to every feature of Isabella’s mind was piety. Such was the decorum of her manners, that, though encompassed by false friends and open enemies, not the slightest reproach was breathed on her fair name in this corrupt and calumnious court. She gave a liberal portion of her time to private devotions, as well as to the public exercises of religion. She expended large sums in useful charities, especially in the erection of hospitals and churches, and the more doubtful endowments of monasteries. Her piety was strikingly exhibited in that unfeigned humility which is so rarely found; and most rarely in those whose great powers and exalted stations seem to raise them above the level of ordinary mortals. A remarkable illustration of this is afforded in the queen’s correspondence with Talavera, in which her meek and docile spirit is strikingly contrasted with the Puritanical intolerance of her confessor. Unfortunately, the royal conscience was at times committed to very different keeping; and that humility which made her defer so reverentially to her ghostly advisers led, under the fanatic Torquemada, the confessor of her early youth, to the establishment of the Inquisition and the exile of the Jews.

But though blemishes of the deepest dye on her administration, they are certainly not to be regarded as such on her moral character. It will be difficult to condemn her, indeed, without condemning the age; for these very acts are not only excused, but extolled by her contemporaries, as constituting her strongest claims to renown and to the gratitude of her country. They proceeded from the principle, openly avowed by the court of Rome, that zeal for the purity of the faith could atone for every crime. This immoral maxim, flowing from the head of the church, was echoed in a thousand different forms by the subordinate clergy, and greedily received by a superstitious people. It was not to be expected that a solitary woman, filled with natural diffidence of her own capacity on such subjects, should array herself against those venerated counsellors whom she had been taught from her cradle to look to as the guides and guardians of her conscience.

However mischievous the operations of the Inquisition may have been in Spain, its establishment, in point of principle, was not worse than many other measures which have passed with far less censure, though in a much more advanced and civilised age. Where, indeed, during the sixteenth and the greater part of the seventeenth century, was the principle of persecution abandoned by the dominant party, whether Catholic or Protestant? And where that of toleration asserted, except by the weaker? It is true, to borrow Isabella’s own expression in her letter to Talavera, the prevalence of a bad custom cannot constitute its apology. But it should serve much to mitigate our condemnation of the queen, that she fell into no greater error, in the imperfect light in which she lived, than was common to the greatest minds in a later and far riper period.[63]

Isabella’s actions, indeed, were habitually based on principle. Whatever errors of judgment be imputed to her, she most anxiously sought in all situations to discern and discharge her duty. Faithful in the dispensation of justice, no bribe was large enough to ward off the execution of the law. No motive, not even conjugal affection, could induce her to make an unsuitable appointment to public office. No reverence for the ministers of religion could lead her to wink at their misconduct; nor could the deference she entertained for the head of the church allow her to tolerate his encroachments on the rights of her crown. Isabella’s measures were characterised by that practical good sense without which the most brilliant parts may work more to the woe than to the weal of mankind. Though engaged all her life in reforms, she had none of the failings so common in reformers. Her plans, though vast, were never visionary. The best proof of this is that she lived to see most of them realised.

She was quick to discern objects of real utility. She saw the importance of the new discovery of printing, and liberally patronised it, from the first moment it appeared. She had none of the exclusive, local prejudices too common with her countrymen. She drew talent from the most remote quarters to her dominions by munificent rewards. She imported foreign artisans for her manufactures, foreign engineers and officers for the discipline of her army, and foreign scholars to imbue her martial subjects with more cultivated tastes. She consulted the useful in all her subordinate regulations; in her sumptuary laws, for instance, directed against the fashionable extravagances of dress, and the ruinous ostentation so much affected by the Castilians in their weddings and funerals. Lastly, she showed the same perspicacity in the selection of her agents, well knowing that the best measures become bad in incompetent hands.

But although the skilful selection of her agents was an obvious cause of Isabella’s success, yet another, even more important, is to be found in her own vigilance and untiring exertions. During the first busy and bustling years of her reign, these exertions were of incredible magnitude. She was almost always in the saddle, for she made all her journeys on horseback; and she travelled with a rapidity which made her always present on the spot where her presence was needed. She was never intimidated by the weather, or the state of her own health; and this reckless exposure undoubtedly contributed much to impair her excellent constitution.

She was equally indefatigable in her mental application. After assiduous attention to business through the day, she was often known to sit up all night dictating despatches to her secretaries. In the midst of these overwhelming cares she found time to supply the defects of early education by learning Latin, so as to understand it without difficulty, whether written or spoken, and indeed, in the opinion of a competent judge, to attain a critical accuracy in it. As she had little turn for light amusements, she sought relief from graver cares by some useful occupation appropriate to her sex; and she left ample evidence of her skill in this way, in the rich specimens of embroidery, wrought with her own fair hands, with which she decorated the churches.

With all her high qualifications, Isabella would have been still unequal to the achievement of her grand designs, without possessing a degree of fortitude rare in either sex; not the courage which implies contempt of personal danger—though of this she had a larger share than falls to most men; nor that which supports its possessor under the extremities of bodily pain—though of this she gave ample evidence, since she endured the greatest suffering her sex is called to bear without a groan; but that moral courage which sustains the spirit in the dark hour of adversity, and, gathering light from within to dispel the darkness, imparts its own cheering influence to all around. It was her voice that decided never to abandon Alhama. Her remonstrances compelled the king and nobles to return to the field, when they had quitted it after an ineffectual campaign. As dangers and difficulties multiplied, she multiplied resources to meet them; and when her soldiers lay drooping under the evils of some protracted siege, she appeared in the midst, mounted on her warhorse, with her delicate limbs cased in knightly mail, and, riding through their ranks, breathed new courage into their hearts by her own intrepid bearing. To her personal efforts, indeed, as well as counsels, the success of this glorious war may be mainly imputed.

Happily, these masculine qualities in Isabella did not extinguish the softer ones which constitute the charm of her sex. Her heart overflowed with affectionate sensibility to her family and friends. She watched over the declining days of her aged mother, and ministered to her sad infirmities with all the delicacy of filial tenderness. We have seen abundant proofs how fondly and faithfully she loved her husband to the last, though this love was not always as faithfully requited.[64] For her children she lived more than for herself; and for them too she died, for it was their loss and their afflictions which froze the current of her blood before age had time to chill it. Her exalted state did not remove her above the sympathies of friendship. With her friends she forgot the usual distinctions of rank, sharing in their joys, visiting and consoling them in sorrow and sickness, and condescending in more than one instance to assume the office of executrix on their decease. Her heart, indeed, was filled with benevolence to all mankind. In the most fiery heat of war she was engaged in devising means for mitigating its horrors. She is said to have been the first to introduce the benevolent institution of camp hospitals; and we have seen, more than once, her lively solicitude to spare the effusion of blood even of her enemies.

It is in these more amiable qualities of her sex that Isabella’s superiority becomes most apparent over her illustrious namesake, Elizabeth of England, whose history presents some features parallel to her own. Both were disciplined in early life by the teachings of that stern nurse of wisdom, Adversity. Both were made to experience the deepest humiliation at the hands of their nearest relative, who should have cherished and protected them. Both succeeded in establishing themselves on the throne after the most precarious vicissitudes. Each conducted her kingdom, through a long and triumphant reign, to a height of glory which it had never before reached. Both lived to see the vanity of all earthly grandeur, and to fall the victims of an inconsolable melancholy; and both left behind an illustrious name, unrivalled in the subsequent annals of their country.

But with these few circumstances of their history the resemblance ceases. Their characters afford scarcely a point of contact. Elizabeth, inheriting a large share of the bold and bluff King Harry’s temperament, was haughty, arrogant, coarse, and irascible; while with these fiercer qualities she mingled deep dissimulation and strange irresolution. Isabella, on the other hand, tempered the dignity of royal station with the most bland and courteous manners. Once resolved, she was constant in her purposes, and her conduct in public and private life was characterised by candour and integrity. Both may be said to have shown that magnanimity which is implied by the accomplishment of great objects in the face of great obstacles. But Elizabeth was desperately selfish; she was incapable of forgiving, not merely a real injury, but the slightest affront to her vanity; and she was merciless in exacting retribution. Isabella, on the other hand, lived only for others—was ready at all times to sacrifice self to considerations of public duty, and, far from personal resentments, showed the greatest condescension and kindness to those who had most sensibly injured her; while her benevolent heart sought every means to mitigate the authorised severities of the law, even towards the guilty.[65]

Both possessed rare fortitude. Isabella, indeed, was placed in situations which demanded more frequent and higher displays of it than her rival; but no one will doubt a full measure of this quality in the daughter of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was better educated, and every way more highly accomplished, than Isabella. But the latter knew enough to maintain her station with dignity; and she encouraged learning by a munificent patronage. The masculine powers and passions of Elizabeth seemed to divorce her in a great measure from the peculiar attributes of her sex; at least from those which constitute its peculiar charm, for she had abundance of its foibles—a coquetry and love of admiration which age could not chill; a levity most careless, if not criminal; and a fondness for dress and tawdry magnificence of ornament which was ridiculous, or disgusting, according to the different periods of life in which it was indulged. Isabella, on the other hand, distinguished through life for decorum of manners and purity beyond the breath of calumny, was content with the legitimate affection which she could inspire within the range of her domestic circle. Far from a frivolous affectation of ornament of dress, she was most simple in her own attire, and seemed to set no value on her jewels but as they could serve the necessities of the state; when they could be no longer useful in this way, she gave them away to her friends.

Isabella’s Crown

(From an old print)

Both were uncommonly sagacious in the selection of their ministers; though Elizabeth was drawn into some errors in this particular by her levity, as was Isabella by religious feeling. It was this, combined with her excessive humility, which led to the only grave errors in the administration of the latter. Her rival fell into no such errors; and she was a stranger to the amiable qualities which led to them. Her conduct was certainly not controlled by religious principle; and though the bulwark of the Protestant faith, it might be difficult to say whether she were at heart most a Protestant or a Catholic. She viewed religion in its connection with the state—in other words, with herself; and she took measures for enforcing conformity to her own views, not a whit less despotic, and scarcely less sanguinary, than those countenanced for conscience’s sake by her more bigoted rival.

This feature of bigotry, which has thrown a shade over Isabella’s otherwise beautiful character, might lead to a disparagement of her intellectual power compared with that of the English queen. To estimate this aright, we must contemplate the results of their respective reigns. Elizabeth found all the materials of prosperity at hand, and availed herself of them most ably to build up a solid fabric of national grandeur. Isabella created these materials. She saw the faculties of her people locked up in a death-like lethargy, and she breathed into them the breath of life for those great and heroic enterprises which terminated in such glorious consequences to the monarchy. It is when viewed from the depressed position of her early days that the achievements of her reign seem scarcely less than miraculous. The masculine genius of the English queen stands out relieved beyond its natural dimensions by its separation from the softer qualities of her sex; while her rival’s, like some vast but symmetrical edifice, loses in appearance somewhat of its actual grandeur from the perfect harmony of its proportions.

The circumstances of their deaths, which were somewhat similar, displayed the great dissimilarity of their characters. Both pined amidst their royal state, a prey to incurable despondency, rather than any marked bodily distemper. In Elizabeth it sprang from wounded vanity, a sullen conviction that she had outlived the admiration on which she had so long fed—and even the solace of friendship and the attachment of her subjects. Nor did she seek consolation where alone it was to be found, in that sad hour. Isabella, on the other hand, sank under a too acute sensibility to the sufferings of others. But, amidst the gloom which gathered around her, she looked with the eye of faith to the brighter prospects which unfolded of the future; and when she resigned her last breath, it was amidst the tears and universal lamentations of her people.

It is in this undying, unabated attachment of the nation, indeed, that we see the most unequivocal testimony to the virtues of Isabella. In the downward progress of things in Spain, some of the most ill-advised measures of her administration have found favour and been perpetuated, while the more salutary have been forgotten. This may lead to a misconception of her real merits. In order to estimate these, we must listen to the voice of her contemporaries, the eye-witnesses of the condition in which she found the state, and in which she left it.

We shall then see but one judgment formed of her, whether by foreigners or natives. The French and Italian writers equally join in celebrating the triumphant glories of her reign, and her magnanimity, wisdom, and purity of character. Her own subjects extol her as “the most brilliant exemplar of every virtue,” and mourn over the day of her death as “the last of the prosperity and happiness of their country”; while those who had nearer access to her person are unbounded in their admiration of those amiable qualities whose full power is revealed only in the unrestrained intimacies of domestic life. The judgment of posterity has ratified the sentence of her own age.[g]

This portrait of Isabella as drawn by Prescott is glowing with an enthusiasm that is not self-ashamed. It admits frankly many evils, but in the sweep of eulogy they practically lose their effect and make no impression on the mind. Yet Prescott’s opinion was based on a thorough search of the authorities and upon the impartiality of a foreigner enamoured of a character purely by the good deeds he had learned to credit to her. It must therefore be received with respect, though it has, like all such summings-up, provoked severe disagreements. Even a writer in possession of no new facts could use the same data for violent denunciation.

The most material attack on Prescott’s opinion is found in the very positive claim that Isabella’s daughter Juana was not mad, and that her mother’s treatment of her, founded on religious bigotry with which Juana did not sympathise, is therefore as cruel in kind as her mercilessness to the Jews. In the second place the genuineness of Isabella’s last will was questioned even by contemporaries, but it has never been disproved conclusively; admitting its authenticity, critics have said that in withdrawing from the nobility and others the various grants she had made them in payment of obligations, she committed an outrageous dishonesty or “posthumous royal plunder.”

Even her simplicity of attire has been denied, and it is said that she outdid all history in her display when she saw fit to affect splendour. But this much even Prescott admitted.

As to Juana, Bergenroth[s] is the strongest advocate of her sanity, though he has not convinced many. He declared that she was simply a heretic in religion. But even granting her insane, her parents treated her with “most odious duplicity,” according to Burke,[f] who can still see why Isabella should not want the hysterical daughter to take the throne of Castile, and reduce the great Ferdinand to the limits of Aragon. The proofs of Juana’s insanity we shall consider in the next chapter.

BURKE’S ESTIMATE OF ISABELLA; HUME’S ESTIMATE

Burke thinks that Isabella has suffered from too much praise of virtues she did not possess and too much neglect of her truer gifts. He places the blame for this largely on the fact that she and her husband were succeeded by foreign rulers, Habsburgs and Bourbons. He ridicules the tendency to blame Torquemada and others for the blots of cruelty on her reign, and blames them on the orthodoxy of the time. He makes of her a creature far different from the gentle Isabella of Prescott’s idea, and exclaims eloquently:[a]

The real Isabella is one of the most remarkable characters in history. Not only was she the most masterful, and, from her own point of view, by far the most successful ruler that ever sat upon the throne of Spain, or of any of the kingdoms of the peninsula; she stands in the front rank of the great sovereigns of Europe, and challenges comparison with the greatest women who have ever held sway in the world.

In one particular she stands alone among the great ruling women, the conquerors and empresses of history. She is the only royal lady, save, perhaps, Maria Theresa of Hungary, who maintained through life the incongruous relations of a masterful sovereign and a devoted wife, and shared not only her bed but her throne with her husband whom she respected—a fellow-sovereign whom she neither feared nor disregarded. To command the obedience of a proud and warlike people is given to few of the great men of history. To do the bidding of another with vigour and with discretion is a task that has been but rarely accomplished by a heaven-born minister. But to conceive and carry out great designs, with one hand in the grasp of even the most loyal of companions, is a triumphant combination of energy with discretion, of the finest tact with the most indomitable resolution that stamps Isabella of Spain as a being more vigorous than the greatest men, more discreet than the greatest women of history. Semiramis, Zenobia, Boadicea, Elizabeth of England, Catherine of Russia—not one of them was embarrassed by a partner on the throne. The partner of Isabella was not only a husband but a king, jealous, restless, and untrustworthy. It is in this respect, and in the immense scope of her political action, that the great queen of Castile is comparable with the bold empress-king of Hungary, rather than with any other of the great queens and royal ladies of history.

Isabella revolutionised the institutions of her country, religious, political, military, financial; she consolidated her dominions, humiliated her nobles, cajoled her commons, defied the pope, reformed the clergy; she burned some ten thousand of her subjects, she deported a million more, and of the remnant she made a great nation; she brooked no man’s opposition, in a reign of thirty years, and she died in the arms of the king, her husband! It is open to any man to call her a saint and a heroine. It is open to any man to call her a bigot and a tyrant. But no man at least may deny that she was a great queen.[f]

The contradiction between such an opinion and the opinion of Prescott is not after all a contradiction in facts but in point of view. Both regard different phases or facets of one great busy soul striding through a great life on a line which, whether it led through tenderness or mercilessness, was as nearly straight as any line ever trod by a human monarch. It is the mockery of history, however, that while great souls bear great fruits, those fruits are not always of lasting quality, and time may turn them to poison.

The epitaph that Martin Hume would place above the beautiful memory of Isabella is sad enough, yet only too just:[a]

“That her objects were high and noble may be conceded, and that she succeeded in consolidating Spain as no other monarch had done, is true. But at what a cost! She had, in conjunction with Ferdinand, encouraged forces of bigotry and religious hate which flooded her realm with blood and tears, and threw it back in the race of nations for centuries. Her patronage of Columbus is more than blotted out by her patronage of Torquemada; her exalted piety is drowned in the recollection of her treatment of the Jews and the Moriscos. She was a fair embodiment of the prevailing feeling of her countrymen: that to them all things are permitted; they can do no wrong, because they are working for and with the cause of God. We shall see the bitter fruit this feeling bore later. By the irony, or perhaps the eternal justice of fate, all the chicanery of Ferdinand, all the wisdom, the labours, and the fervour of Isabella brought disaster, ruin, and death to Spain. A thousand times happier would it have been for Castile to have remained isolated in its corner of Europe, untroubled with the complications of vast European connections, rather than to have been dragged by Aragon into a position of responsibility and world-wide ambition for which neither its native resources nor the extent nor character of its population befitted it. Its transient grandeur, dearly paid for by long and painful decline, brought to the Spanish people, even while it lasted, neither peace, happiness, nor enduring prosperity; and the king and queen who made Spain great were the worst enemies she ever had.”[t]

FOOTNOTES

[50] Gonzalo de Oviedo[b] lavishes many encomiums on Cabrera, for his “generous qualities, his singular prudence in government, and his solicitude for his vassals, whom he inspired with the deepest attachment.” The best panegyric on his character is the unshaken confidence which his royal mistress reposed in him to the day of her death.

[51] See the strong language, also, of Peter Martyr,[d] another contemporary witness of the beneficial changes in the government.

[52] [It is difficult to reduce these sums to modern values, for the maravedi has been coined in gold, silver, and the copper alloy or vellon, and its value has fluctuated bewilderingly from a farthing or quarter of a cent upwards. Assuming that at this time it was equal to about ½d or 1 cent, Enriquez lost £480 or $2,400; Alva £1,150 or $5,750; Albuquerque £2,800 or $14,000 annually. It is customary to multiply such sums by 7 to get the modern purchasing equivalent.]

[53] As a counterpart to the above scene, twelve Christian renegades, found in the city, were transfixed with canes, acañavereados, a barbarous punishment derived from the Moors, which was inflicted by horsemen at full gallop, who discharged pointed reeds at the criminal until he expired under repeated wounds. A number of relapsed Jews were at the same time condemned to the flames. “These,” says Father Abarca,[i] “were the fêtes and illuminations most grateful to the Catholic piety of our sovereigns!”

[54] About two leagues west of Granada.

[55] [Mariana[m] placed the number at nearly 800,000; Graetz[n] at 300,000; Burke[f] at 200,000; Prescott[g] as above at 160,000. The smallest of the estimates is sufficiently great to overwhelm the powers of imagination.]

[56] The Portuguese government caused all children of fourteen years of age, or under, to be taken from their parents and retained in the country, as fit subjects for a Christian education. The distress occasioned by this cruel provision may be well imagined. Many of the unhappy parents murdered their children to defeat the ordinance; and many laid violent hands on themselves.

[57] He consumed by fire all the Arabic controversial books he could find, which amounted to five thousand volumes, according to the lowest estimate; Condé[o] puts it at eighty thousand, which is commonly accepted.

[58] Prescott adds: “The spirit of toleration exhibited by the Moors, indeed, was made a principal argument against them in the archbishop of Valencia’s memorial to Philip III. The Mohammedans would seem the better Christians of the two.”

[59] [There are, however, not wanting documents to show that at times the great captain was goaded by Ferdinand’s jealous mistreatment into a serious consideration of deserting to the enemy, or declaring himself king in Italy.]

[60] [In 1492 Ferdinand had been almost killed by an insane assassin. Isabella had nursed him with the utmost devotion.]

[61] [Dr. Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo. “He first gave to light the principal Spanish codes, and introduced a spirit of criticism into the national jurisprudence.”—Prescott.[g]]

[62] [The alcavala or alcabala was a tax of one-tenth on all sales. Thus bread was thrice taxed, as wheat, then as flour, and finally as bread.]

[63] Even Milton, in his essay on The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, the most splendid argument, perhaps, the world had then witnessed in behalf of intellectual liberty, would exclude popery from the benefits of toleration, as a religion which the public good required at all events to be extirpated. Such were the crude views of the rights of conscience entertained, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, by one of those gifted minds whose extraordinary elevation enabled it to catch and reflect back the coming light of knowledge, long before it had fallen on the rest of mankind.

[64] [Burke[f] says, “Ferdinand had at least four illegitimate children by different ladies. Juana, who was offered with a double marriage portion, in 1489, to the king of Scots. Juan, archbishop of Saragossa, and two other daughters, both princesses. Raymond de Cardona (the unworthy successor of Gonsalvo de Cordova in Italy) was also commonly supposed to be a son of Ferdinand. But the king’s faults were certainly not those of a voluptuary.” Prescott[g] quotes Marineo[r] on “the queen’s discreet and most amiable conduct in these delicate matters.”]

[65] She gave evidence of this in the commutation of the sentence she obtained for the wretch who stabbed her husband, and whom her ferocious nobles would have put to death without the opportunity of confession and absolution, that “his soul might perish with his body!” (See her letter to Talavera.) She showed this merciful temper, so rare in that rough age, by dispensing altogether with the preliminary barbarities sometimes prescribed by the law in capital executions.