It is well worth while [he adds] to see the four large hospital tents that her goodness of heart has designed, not only for the succour and cure of the wounded, but for every imaginable illness. Such is the number of doctors, chemists, surgeons, and their assistants; such the organization and energy; such the quantity of supplies that it is in no way inferior to your Hospital of the Holy Ghost outside the city, or to the great one in your Milan.
The “Queen’s Hospitals,” as they were called, were in keeping with the other methods of warfare now adopted by the sovereigns, and show their intention that the old careless campaigning of the past should cease. On the one hand the Castilian soldier should be assured in return for his patriotism of all that foresight and care could do for him; on the other there should be meted out to the enemy either the prospect of submission or the alternative of death or slavery. Ferdinand showed himself ready to grant favourable terms to those cities that opened their gates at his summons; allowing the inhabitants to seek their fortunes elsewhere with what goods they could carry, or to remain if they preferred as his subjects. In the latter case he assured them of his protection, a promise that he strictly enforced to the admiration of the chroniclers and dismay of his own troops.
His vengeance on rebellious mudejares, as the Moors were called who had at any time accepted the Castilian yoke, was in inverse ratio to this clemency, as the smoking ruins of Benemaquez were to bear witness.
And the King [we are told] commanded justice to be executed on those Moors who were within; and there were put to the sword, or hung, one hundred and eight of the principal men, and he commanded the rest with the women and children to be made captive, and that the town should be burnt and its walls razed to the ground.
Equally drastic was the new campaign of devastation that marked the trail of the Christian army. No longer were inroads to be made only in the spring, but instead a perpetual invasion, slackening in the hottest months when the sun forbade strenuous action, and renewed again with the coming of autumn, that neither crops nor fruit might have time to recover from the previous onslaught. For this work of destruction were set aside thirty thousand foragers, whose task it was, spreading out on either side of the main army often to the distance of two leagues, to burn all the mills, orchards, and trees within that area.
“Both to the right and left we lay waste fields, houses, demesnes, everything in fact that we see,” says a letter of Peter Martyr, describing the Christian advance on Granada, “and every day we press on further. Thus the Moors grow more and more enfeebled.”
Such a policy of siege and destruction, carried out with the pitiless logic that humaner ages have condemned, and backed by the united resources of Castile and Aragon, though necessarily slow, was certain of its ultimate success.
As the Marquis of Cadiz had foreseen, the issue was further hastened by the release of Boabdil, that at once threw the kingdom of Granada into fresh convulsions of civil war. During the young Sultan’s imprisonment, his father, Muley Hacen, had appeared in the capital and established himself in his old palace of the Alhambra, relying on the disgust that he knew his son’s failure would awaken amongst Moorish patriots.
True to his expectations the majority of the inhabitants received him joyfully; but the poorest quarter of the city, called the Albaycin where Aixa had taken refuge on his approach, still maintained its former allegiance; and thither one dark night came Boabdil with the few Moorish nobles who had remained faithful to his cause. Before dawn a desperate struggle was in progress; Boabdil being unable to drive his enemy from the Alhambra but gaining possession of the Alcazaba, its twin fortress on the opposite hilltop. At length, when the extermination of one or other faction seemed the only prospect, an armistice was arranged, by which Muley Hacen retained Granada, while his son retired with kingly honours to the port of Almeria on the Mediterranean coast.
Such a settlement could not prove lasting, nor was the young Sultan, in spite of his personal bravery, the man to alter its terms to his own advantage. Without strength of purpose either to break his Christian shackles, or to take the initiative once more against his father, he remained inactive at his new capital, until the discovery in 1484 of a plot amongst his garrison to sell him to his uncle “El Zagal” sent him in hot flight to Cordova. The sovereigns somewhat contemptuously granted him an asylum. He was a pawn in their game they could not afford to ignore; but their hatred of the Infidel, combined with the self-reliance that was so marked a feature of both their characters, inspired them with little pity for his helplessness.