But she is deliberate and wise. She has more than her will and the weapon of her body. She has ideas for weapons. The modern State functioning under an almighty monarch, the medieval Church with its source in Rome and Christ, and for her people Justice: this is the triune tool whereby to weld the anarchies of Spain into her Spain at last.
Strabo already wrote of the separatism of Spain: Rome suffered here as nowhere else to unify her conquest. Spain lacked a nervous system and a base: she had to be subdued bit by bit—and so held. Since the Romans, twelve hundred years have stratified the chaos. Each new strain of blood, each fresh disposal of culture and of faith has become a claimant. The Spaniard bears in his nerves the variance of a past—all anarchy of dissent and self-assertion.
The Catholic Kings sit weekly in open court and dispense justice. The nobles are leveled down: the commoners are lifted. Finance is once more farmed from plenty, not extorted from indigence. Rome is compelled to relinquish to the Kings the right of nomination to high office. In all of this, the monarchs meet Spain’s intricate problem with the conventional measures—those which are unifying France and Britain.
In Spain, this is mere prelude. Spain’s chaos is more organic, and is unique in Europe. Isabel follows the logic of her weapons. What disrupts Spain is not banditry, not the insolence of nobles: but Spain’s free life of inimical ideas. All else is consequence, not cause. To the south is a whole kingdom of the Moors. Everywhere live Mussulmans and Jews. More insidious still, there are the converted Jews—los conversos—who under cover of acquiescence spread the poison of their immemorial discord. When France was truly Catholic with Saint Louis for king, her Dominican friars backed by Pope Gregory set up an Inquisitional Tribunal. France showed her mettle against the Albigenses. Isabel has even a closer precedent to hand: Aragon defended herself against the heretics in 1242; and six centuries before, the Visigoths made protective laws against the Jews—the accursed Jews who freed themselves from oppression by letting in the Arabs! They are the same Jews still: few in number, but with the strength of ferment. They turn Christian: they achieve power and wealth: they marry with the nobles: they become princes of the Church. And their anti-national nature, their passion for free thought and independent action rot the weak royal fabric. Isabel applies for a Papal Bull: the Inquisition is set up, not against open Jews and Moors, but against the subtle and treacherous conversos.
Granada, decomposed under the affluent Moors, falls to the Catholic Kings. The Inquisition, captained by Torquemada, sends thousands of souls upon their way to Heaven and fills Spain with the anguish of torn bodies. Her roads are safe, her nobles and churchmen buckle under; the last Moorish prince has crossed the Strait to the Moghreb. And yet Spain is not One. Spain must become a Being, rapt and single, serving Christ and conquering for Christ. She who is the symbol of Spain’s will strives to make her land in her own image. Spain, like her, must become chaste and absolute: a Catholic people as she is a Catholic woman.
The Jews are offered a merciful alternative: to be Catholic or to quit the land. Isabel argues that the conversos will lose their secret virulence if they have no nourishment from open Jewish neighbors. In 1492 a goodly fraction of the Jews of Spain “exchanging a House for an ass, a Vineyard for a coat,” leave the cities where they have lived for ages. Ten years later, the Moors of the conquered kingdom of Granada, meet the same fate. Again, a host of intellectuals, artists, tradesfolk is bled away. The peasants do not stir: they become Catholic with the same inert response which had made them Moslem seven centuries before, or Arian under the Visigoths, or pagan under Rome.
Isabel looks at her work—and nods—and is not satisfied.
She says: “We do unto the body of our beloved land as Christ did unto the possessed: we have cast out devils. But this is not enough. True disciple of our Lord, Spain must take up her burden and go forth: must forsake comfort and family and the long-sued peace: must bring His Word to all that dwell on earth. Spain is Christ’s true apostle. France turns away in trickery and ambition. Henri IV, Louis XI—how far they are from Saint Louis! Italy is helpless. Spain is the well-beloved: Spain is Israel, and Rome’s right hand. Let my king, Ferdinand, go with his hardened troops to Sicily and Naples.
“But even this suffices not. The Apostles did not stay among the Jews: they went out to the Gentile. There is more than Europe. Can this strange religious mariner, Cristobal Colón, be right?”
Isabel ponders what she has heard of Columbus. He is the author of a book of Prophecías. He has found and plotted in the Old Testament his rationale for a westward route to the Indies. God perhaps wrote down in Isaiah, not alone Christ and the Word of Christ in Europe, but Spain and how Spain shall bring the Word to the East. Columbus a prophet? (He says there is gold in the Indies. Spain needs gold, for her crusade.) He is the friend of holy men in Spain: the Dominicans bespeak him and his cause. He has been rejected by Juan II of Portugal, by Henry VII of England, by Anne of Beaujeu, Regent queen of France.