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Title: Isabel of Castile and the making of the Spanish nation, 1451-1504
Author: Ierne L. Plunket
Release date: October 22, 2023 [eBook #71930]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Clarity, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ISABEL OF CASTILE AND THE MAKING OF THE SPANISH NATION, 1451-1504 ***
[Illustration:
ISABEL OF CASTILE
AFTER A PAINTING IN THE PRADO GALLERY ATTRIBUTED TO MIGUEL ZITTOZ
FROM “TORQUEMADA AND THE SPANISH INQUISITION” BY RAFAEL SABATINI
]
ISABEL OF CASTILE
AND
THE MAKING OF THE SPANISH NATION
1451–1504
BY
IERNE L. PLUNKET
AUTHOR OF “THE FALL OF THE OLD ORDER, 1763–1815”
_Illustrated_
[Illustration: Fleuron]
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
=The Knickerbocker Press=
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
=The Knickerbocker Press, New York=
FOREWORD
Isabel of Castile is one of the most remarkable, and also one of the
most attractive, figures in Spanish history. Her marriage with Ferdinand
the Wise of Aragon brought about the union of the Spanish nationality,
which had so long been distracted and divided by provincial prejudices
and dynastic feuds. She is the ancestress of the Spanish Hapsburg line.
But she is also important in Spanish history as a wise and energetic
ruler, who rendered invaluable assistance to her husband and to some
extent moulded his policy. Under their government Spain was reduced from
anarchy to order and took her place among the great Powers of Europe.
Isabel is perhaps best known as the patroness of Christopher Columbus
and the unflinching ally of the Spanish Inquisition. But her career
presents many other features of interest. In particular it reveals the
problems which had to be faced by European governments in the critical
period of transition from mediæval to modern forms of national
organization.
H. W. C. D.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD,
Dec. 17, 1914.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
CASTILE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 1
CHAPTER II
THE REIGN OF HENRY IV.: MISGOVERNMENT. 1454–1463 22
CHAPTER III
THE REIGN OF HENRY IV.: CIVIL WAR AND ANARCHY. 1464–1474 51
CHAPTER IV
ACCESSION OF ISABEL: THE PORTUGUESE WAR. 1475–1479 88
CHAPTER V
ORGANIZATION AND REFORM 121
CHAPTER VI
THE MOORISH WAR. 1481–1483 158
CHAPTER VII
THE FALL OF GRANADA: THE MOORISH WAR. 1484–1492 185
CHAPTER VIII
THE INQUISITION 231
CHAPTER IX
THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS AND MUDEJARES 263
CHAPTER X
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS 285
CHAPTER XI
ISABEL AND HER CHILDREN 319
CHAPTER XII
THE ITALIAN WARS. 1494–1504 346
CHAPTER XIII
CASTILIAN LITERATURE 387
APPENDIX I. HOUSE OF TRASTAMARA IN CASTILE AND ARAGON 424
APPENDIX II. PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES FOR THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
ISABEL OF CASTILE 425
INDEX 427
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
ISABEL OF CASTILE _Frontispiece_
After a painting in the Prado Gallery attributed
to Miguel Zittoz.
From _Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition_,
by Rafael Sabatini.
HENRY IV 22
From _Boletin de la Real Academia de la
Historia_, vol. lxii.
From a photograph by Hauser and Menet.
ALFONSO V. OF ARAGON 24
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
JUAN PACHECO, MARQUIS OF VILLENA 28
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
ALFONSO, BROTHER OF ISABEL OF CASTILE 66
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
FERDINAND OF ARAGON 90
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
TOLEDO, LA PUERTA DEL SOL 106
From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.
TOLEDO, CHURCH OF SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES 110
From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.
SEGOVIA, THE ALCAZAR 114
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
PRINCE JOHN, SON OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL (FUNERAL
EFFIGY) 116
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
JOANNA “LA BELTRANEJA” 118
From Sitges’ _Enrique IV. y la Excelente
Señora_.
SPANISH HALBERDIER, FIFTEENTH CENTURY 162
From _Spanish Arms and Armour_.
Reproduced by courtesy of the author, Mr. A. F.
Calvert.
SPANISH CROSSBOWMAN, FIFTEENTH CENTURY 166
From _Spanish Arms and Armour_.
Reproduced by courtesy of the author, Mr. A. F.
Calvert.
ARMS BELONGING TO BOABDIL 172
From Lafuente’s _Historia General De España_,
vol. vii.
ALHAMBRA, COURT OF LIONS 178
From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.
DOUBLE BREECH-LOADING CANNON, IN BRONZE 192
From _Spanish Arms and Armour_.
Reproduced by courtesy of the author, Mr. A. F.
Calvert.
RONDA, THE TAJO OR CHASM 200
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
MALAGA TO-DAY 214
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
BOABDIL, LAST KING OF GRANADA 222
From Altamira’s _Historia de España_.
ALHAMBRA, PATIO DE L’ALBERCA 226
From a photograph by Anderson, Rome.
THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN, DON PEDRO GONSÁLEZ DE MENDOZA 234
From _Historia de la Villa y Corte de Madrid_,
by Amador de los Rios.
XIMINES DE CISNEROS 242
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
TORQUEMADA 258
After a painting attributed to Miguel Zittoz.
From _Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition_.
Reproduced by kind permission of the author, Mr.
Rafael Sabatini.
TOMB OF FRANCISCO RAMIREZ (“EL ARTILLERO”) 282
From _Historia de la Villa y Corte de Madrid_,
by Amador de los Rios.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS 286
From _Christopher Columbus_, by Washington
Irving.
A CARAVEL UNDER SAIL 298
From _Christopher Columbus_, by Washington
Irving.
ISABEL OF CASTILE 322
Carved wooden statue from the Cathedral at
Granada.
From _A Queen of Queens_, by Christopher Hare,
published by Messrs. Harper.
TOMB OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL 330
From Nervo’s _Isabelle La Catholique_.
Reproduced by permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder
& Co., publishers of translated edition.
AVILA, TOMB OF PRINCE JOHN, SON OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL 334
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
AVILA, THE CATHEDRAL 336
From a photograph by Hauser and Menet.
ISABEL, QUEEN OF PORTUGAL, ELDEST DAUGHTER OF FERDINAND
AND ISABEL 338
From _Iconografia Española_, by Valentin
Carderera y Solano.
AVILA FROM BEYOND THE CITY WALLS 344
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
A KING-AT-ARMS 364
From _Spanish Arms and Armour_.
Reproduced by courtesy of the author, Mr. A. F.
Calvert.
SPANISH MAN-AT-ARMS, FIFTEENTH CENTURY 368
From _Spanish Arms and Armour_.
Reproduced by courtesy of the author, Mr. A. F.
Calvert.
TILTING ARMOUR OF PHILIP THE FAIR 376
From _Spanish Arms and Armour_.
Reproduced by courtesy of the author, Mr. A. F.
Calvert.
JOANNA “THE MAD,” DAUGHTER OF QUEEN ISABEL 380
From _Historia de la Villa y Corte de Madrid_,
by Amador de los Rios.
CODICIL TO ISABEL’s WILL, WITH HER SIGNATURE 384
From Lafuente’s _Historia General De España_,
vol. vii.
FERDINAND OF ARAGON 388
Carved wooden statue from the Cathedral at
Malaga.
GRANADA CATHEDRAL, ROYAL CHAPEL, TOMB OF FERDINAND AND
ISABEL 392
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
BURGOS CATHEDRAL 396
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS 402
From Lafuente’s _Historia General De España_,
vol. vii.
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS 404
From Lafuente’s _Historia General De España_,
vol. vii.
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS 406
From Lafuente’s _Historia General De España_,
vol. vii.
COINS, FERDINAND 408
From Lafuente’s _Historia General De España_,
vol. vii.
FAÇADE OF SAN PABLO AT VALLADOLID 420
From a photograph by Lacoste, Madrid.
MAP AT END
ISABEL OF CASTILE
CHAPTER I
CASTILE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
There are some characters in history, whose reputation for heroism is
beyond reproach in the eyes of the general public. There are others,
however, whose claims to glory are ardently contested by posterity, and
none more than Isabel of Castile, in whose case ordinary differences of
opinion have been fanned by that most uncompromising of all foes to a
fair estimate, religious prejudice. Thus the Catholic, while deploring
the extreme severity of the methods employed for the suppression of
heresy, would yet look on her championship of the Catholic Faith as her
chief claim to the admiration of mankind. The Protestant on the other
hand, while acknowledging the glories of the Conquest of Granada and the
Discovery of the New World, would weigh them light in the balance
against the fires and tortures of the Inquisition and the ruthless
expulsion of the Jews.
One solution of the problem has been to make the unfortunate Ferdinand
the scapegoat of his Queen’s misdeeds. Whatever tends to the glory of
Spain, in that, if not the originator, she is at least the partner and
moving spirit. When acts of fanaticism hold the field, they are the
result of Ferdinand’s material ambitions or the religious fervour of her
confessors; Isabel’s ordinarily independent and clear-sighted mind being
reduced for the sake of her reputation to a condition of credulous
servility.
Such a view has missed the consistency of real life. It is probably
responsible for the exactly opposite summary of another critic, who
denies Isabel’s superiority to her husband in anything but hypocrisy and
the ability to make her lies more convincing. He even fails to admit
that, this being granted, her capacities in one direction at least must
have been phenomenal, since Ferdinand was the acknowledged liar of his
day _par excellence_.
Faced by the witness of the Queen’s undoubted popularity, he sweeps it
away with a tribute to Spanish manhood: “The praise bestowed on the
character of Isabel is, to no small amount, due to the chivalrous
character of the Spaniards, who never forgot that the Queen was a lady.”
Such an assumption must be banished, along with Isabel’s weak-mindedness
on religious matters, to the realms of historical fiction. The very
Castilians who extol her glory and merit do not hesitate to draw
attention in bald terms to her sister-in-law’s frailties. Indeed a
slight perusal of Cervantes’ famous novel, embodying so much of the
habits and outlook of Spain at a slightly later date will show it was
rather the fashion to praise a woman for her beauty than to credit her
with mental or moral qualities of any strength.
The Catholic Queen, like other individuals of either sex, must stand or
fall by the witness of her own actions and speech; and these seen in the
light of contemporary history will only confirm the tradition of her
heroism, which the intervening centuries have tended to blur. The odium
that sometimes attaches to her name is largely due to the translation of
Spanish ideals and conditions of life in the Middle Ages into the terms
that rule the conduct of the twentieth century.
“Quien dice España dice todo,” says the old proverb,—“He who says Spain
has said everything.”
This arrogance is typical of the self-centred, highly strung race, that
had been bred by eight centuries of war against the Infidel. The other
nations of Western Europe might have their occasional religious
difficulties; but, in the days before Luther and Calvin were born, none
to the same extent as Spain were faced by the problem of life in daily
contact with the unpardonable crime of heresy, in this case the more
insidious that it was often masked by outward observance of rule and
ritual.
The greater part of the modern world would dismiss the matter with a
shrug of its shoulders and the comfortable theory that truth, being
eternal, can take care of itself; but this freedom of outlook was yet to
be won on the battlefields of the Renaissance and in the religious wars
of the sixteenth century. It would be an anachronism to look for it in
Spain at a time when the influence of the new birth of thought and
culture had extended no further than an imitation of Italian poets.
Isabel’s bigotry is an inheritance she shared with the greater part of
her race in her own day, the logical sequence of her belief in the
exclusive value of the divine in man’s nature, as against any claims of
his human body. If she pursued her object, the salvation of souls, with
a relentless cruelty, from which we turn away to-day in sick disgust, we
must remember that Spain for the most part looked on unmoved. Where
opposition was shown, as in her husband’s kingdom of Aragon, it was
rather the spirit of independence than of mercy that raised its head.
Indeed the religious persecution was in no way disproportionate to the
severity of the criminal procedure of the reign, as will be seen by a
glance at the usual sentences passed on those convicted of any crime.
The least with which a thief could hope to escape from his judges was
the loss of a limb, but the more likely fate was to be placed with his
back to a tree, and there, after a hasty confession of his sins, shot or
burnt.
Many of Queen Isabel’s contemporaries remark her intolerance of crime
and disorder, and a few of the younger generation who had grown to
manhood in the atmosphere of peace she had established, condemn her
justice as excessive. By modern standards it is undoubtedly barbarous;
but long centuries of anarchy had bred a spirit of lust and brutality
little above the barbarian level, and only drastic measures could hope
to cure so deep-rooted an evil. Isabel herself, throughout her
childhood, had been a forced witness of her brother’s policy of
“sprinkling rose-water on rebellion” instead of employing the surgeon’s
knife; and her strength of character despised the weakness, that under
the pretext of humanity made life impossible for nine-tenths of the
population.
It is her great achievement that she raised the crown, the mediæval
symbol of national justice, from the political squalor into which
seventy years of mingled misfortune and incapacity had thrown it, and
that she set it on a pedestal so lofty, that even the haughtiest
Castilian need not be ashamed to bow the knee in reverence. By this
substitution of a strong government for a weak, of impartiality for
favouritism, she secured peace at home and thus laid a firm foundation
for Ferdinand’s ambitious foreign policy, and the establishment of Spain
as the first nation in Europe.
It is perhaps difficult to apportion exactly the respective shares of
Isabel and her husband in the administrative measures of their reign;
for their unanimity of aim and action was in keeping with their motto
_tanto monta_,—“the one as much as the other.” Yet in this connection it
is necessary to realize the contrast between the two kingdoms. Aragon,
with its three divisions of Aragon proper, Valencia, and the
Principality of Catalonia, measured in all scarcely a quarter of the
territory of its western neighbour. Moreover the spirit of the people
and the democratic character of its laws rendered it a soil peculiarly
ill-suited for the growth of the royal prerogative. Thus, in spite of
the sovereigns’ best endeavours, it stubbornly withstood their
centralizing policy, and the main burden of taxation and governmental
measures fell on Castile. The latter, “the corona” or “big crown,” in
contradistinction to the “coronilla” or “little crown” of Aragon,
continued throughout the Queen’s lifetime to look on her husband as more
or less of a foreigner; and all the many documents signed “Yo, El Rey”
could not weigh with a true Castilian against Isabel’s single “Yo, La
Reina.” It is she, who, when “Los Reyes” are not mentioned together, is
hailed to-day in Spain as the chief representative of national grandeur,
just as “castellano,” the speech of the larger kingdom, has become
synonymous with our term “Spanish.”
The word “Castile” itself conveys to an imaginative mind a picture of
that mediæval land of castles, whose ramparts were not only a defence
against the Moors but also the bulwark of a turbulent nobility. In vain
the Crown had striven to suppress its over-powerful subjects. The
perpetual crusade upon the southern border proved too alluring a
recruiting-ground for the vices of feudalism; and many a mail-clad count
led out to battle a larger following of warriors than the sovereign to
whom he nominally owed obedience.
So long as the crusade continued, rulers of Castile could not attempt to
disband the feudal levies on which their fortune depended; and each
acquisition of Moorish territory was followed by fresh distributions of
lands amongst the conquering troops. Sometimes these grants carried with
them complete fiscal and judicial control of the district in question,
at others merely a yearly revenue; but, whatever the tenure, the new
owner and his descendants were certain to take advantage of royal
embarrassments and national disorder to press their claims to the
farthest limit. A few communities, _behetrias_, succeeded in obtaining
the privilege of choosing their own over-lord with the more doubtful
corollary of changing him as often as they liked, a process fruitful of
quarrels which not unnaturally resulted in their gradual absorption by
more settled neighbours.
Since the practice of primogeniture was common in Castile and lands were
inalienable, large estates were rapidly built up, whose owners, unable
to rule all their property directly, would sublet some of their towns
and strongholds to other nobles and knights in return for certain
services. These dependencies, or _latifundia_, yielded ultimate
obedience not to the King but to the over-lord from whom their commander
had received them. On one occasion Alvaro de Luna, the favourite
minister of John II., appeared before the castle of Trujillo and
demanded its surrender in his master’s name. To this the “Alcayde,” or
Governor, replied that he owed allegiance to the King’s uncle, John of
Aragon, and would open the gates to none else: an answer typical of the
days when aristocratic independence ran riot in Castile.
A great territorial magnate could also renounce the obedience he owed to
his sovereign by the simple method of sending a messenger who should, in
the King’s presence, make the following declaration: “Señor, on behalf
of ... I kiss your hand and inform you that henceforth he is no more
your vassal.”
The weakness of the Castilian Crown was further aggravated in the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries by disputed successions and
long minorities; the nobles using the confusion these engendered to
wring concessions from the rival claimants, or to seize them from
inexperienced child rulers.
“A breastplate would have served him better!” exclaimed the Count of
Benavente, when at the beginning of Queen Isabel’s reign he heard of the
death of some man bearing a royal safe-conduct.
“Do you wish then that there was no King in Castile?” asked the Queen
indignantly; to which the Count replied cheerfully: “Not so! I would
there were many, for then I should be one of them.”
His words are the expression of the aristocratic ideal of life in his
own day. It was perhaps most nearly realized in the case of the Grand
Masterships of the three great Military Orders of Santiago, Calatrava,
and Alcantara. These Orders had been called into existence by the
crusade; but their original purpose was gradually obscured by the wealth
and influence that made them the resort of the ambitious rather than of
the enthusiast. Like the Monastic Orders, their members were bound by
vows: obedience, community of property, strict conjugal fidelity,
sometimes celibacy; but dispensations could be bought, and the gains to
be reaped more than compensated for any theoretical austerities or
submission.
The main canon of their creed, war against the Infidel, was readily
accepted by every aspirant knight; the only drawback being that his
inborn love of fighting led him to take part as well in whatever other
kind of war happened to dawn on the horizon, no matter if it were
against his own sovereign. How formidable this would prove for the
sovereign we can imagine when we learn that in the fifteenth century the
combined revenues of the Orders amounted to something like 145,000
ducats,[1] while the Master of Santiago could call into the field a
force of four hundred fully-armed cavaliers and one thousand lances. In
addition he possessed the patronage of numerous “commanderies,” rich
military posts that brought with them the rents of subject towns and
villages, and that were eagerly sought by the highest in the land.
Footnote 1:
“The monetary unit of Castile was the ‘maravedi,’ anciently a gold
coin of value; but, in the fifteenth century, diminished to a fraction
of its former estimation.”—Lea, _History of Spanish Inquisition_, vol.
i., Appendix III.
The ducat would be worth about 374 maravedis, or about 8_s._ 9_d._ in
English money.
Extreme power and privilege are often their own undoing; and from the
fruits of its triumph the Castilian aristocracy was to reap a bitter
harvest. Had the fight with the Crown been more strenuous and the
victory less certain, the _ricos-hombres_ or great men of the land,
might have learned to combine if not with other classes at least amongst
themselves; but the independence they had gained so easily they placed
in jeopardy by individual selfishness and mutual distrust. It has been
said with truth that it was almost impossible to persuade the mediæval
Castilian noble to act with his fellows. Pride, ambition, the courage
that vaunts itself in duels, the revenge that lurks, dagger-drawn, in
back streets or lonely roads: these were the source of constant feuds
and internecine warfare, incapable of a final settlement save by the
pressure of some outside force.
Nor could the noble, who distrusted the members of his own class, rely
in times of danger on the co-operation of his humbler neighbours.
Believing that war was the profession of the gentleman, he despised the
burgher, the artisan, and the farmer. Like the French “seigneur” he had
won freedom from direct taxation as the privilege of his Order, and thus
lost touch completely with the _pecheros_ or “taxable classes.” He had
appropriated the majority of the high-sounding offices of state, the
Grand Constable, the Admiral of Castile, and so forth; but he valued
them from the wealth or honour they conveyed, not from any sense of
responsibility. The very fact that such offices had tended to become
hereditary had done much to destroy their official character. An
“Enriquez” was Admiral of Castile, not on account of his seamanship, nor
even on the system of the modern English Cabinet because of a certain
“all-round” ability to deal with public business, but because his father
and grandfather had held the post before him. The _ricos-hombres_ might,
from personal motives, defy the government or nullify its measures; but
in placing themselves above the law they had lost the incentive to
control legislation. A world of experience, or rather a lack of it,
separated them from those below, to whom edicts and ordinances were a
matter of daily concern.
The Castilian Church was also in a sense above the law; for the clergy
were exempt from ordinary taxation, paying to the Crown instead a small
portion of their tithes. Like the nobles they could neither be
imprisoned for debt nor suffer torture; while legally they came under
ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and were subject only to its penalties and
censures. Archbishops, bishops, and abbots, were for the most part
younger sons of wealthy nobles and shared the outlook and ambitions of
their class. The Castilian prelate of the early fifteenth century found
it as natural to don his suit of mail and draw his sword as to celebrate
Mass or hear confessions. It would not be dislike of shedding blood nor
a faint heart that would distinguish him from laymen on the battlefield,
but the surcoat embroidered with a cross, that he wore in deference to
his profession.
The worldly character of the higher ranks of the clergy had permeated
also to the lower; and vice, ignorance, and careless levity sapped the
influence of the ordinary parish priest and corrupted the monasteries
and convents. Here and there were signs of an awakening, but for the
most part the spiritual conscience of the Castilian Church lay dormant.
Its sense of nationality on the other hand was strong; that is to say if
dislike of foreign interference and strong racial prejudice deserve such
a definition. Partly from very worldliness, local and provincial
interests tended to predominate over any claims of a universal Church;
and submission to Rome was interpreted with a jealous regard to private
ambitions. The members of the episcopate, concerned in the civil wars of
Henry IV.’s reign, looked on with cool indifference when a papal legate,
vainly seeking to arbitrate between the armies on the eve of a battle,
was forced to save his life by flight. Similarly, the Archbishop of
Toledo, Primate of Castile, thought little of throwing into a dungeon
the candidate who, armed with letters of appointment from Rome, had
dared to dispute a rich living in the diocese with his own nominee. The
Pope was a convenient “King Log”; but his subjects had not the least
wish for him to develop the authority of a “King Stork.”
The Castilian Church also displayed her national prejudice, as we shall
see later, in her hatred and suspicion of the alien races that formed
such a large element of the Spanish population. These had sunk their
roots deep in the soil during the centuries of Moorish conquest when,
from behind the barrier of the Asturian mountains in the far north-west,
the pure Castilian alone had been able to beat back the advancing waves
of Mahometanism. As he at length descended from his refuge, where the
sword or the hunting-spear had been his sole means of livelihood, he
might profess to despise the believers in Allah, from whom he wrested
back the land of his fathers, but in practice he was glad enough to
accept them as a subject race. The Moorish warriors, who fell on the
battlefield or retreated southwards before their foes, left in Christian
territory a large residue of the more peaceful Arabs and Berbers,
willing to till the fields, work at the looms, and fulfil all those
other tasks of civilized national life that the Castilian was inclined
to imagine degrading to his own dignity. Left behind also were colonies
of prosperous Jews, whose ancestors, hounded from every Christian court,
had found a home under the tolerant rule of the caliphs of Cordova.
Agriculture, industry, and commerce thus became stamped, unfortunately
for Spain, with the taint of subjection. Not that the Castilian took no
share as the years passed in the economic life of his country; for the
legislation of the fifteenth century shows the middle and lower classes
busily engaged in occupations such as cattle-breeding, sheep-farming,
and mining; and, more especially in the south, of fruit-growing, and the
production of silk, wine, and oil. The basis of a progressive national
life was there; but perpetual war against the Moors and internal
discord, combined with racial prejudice against the industrious alien,
gave to the profession of arms a wholly disproportionate value.
Many of the towns were in their origin border outposts; and their
massive towers, fortified churches, and thick walls, with the suburbs
huddling close against them for protection, marked the enveloping
atmosphere of danger. Since it had been difficult at first to attract
the industrial classes to such surroundings, rulers of Castile had been
driven to grant _fueros_ or charters, to the inhabitants embodying
numerous privileges and a large measure of self-government. Then the
time of danger passed; the Castilian boundary pushed farther south, and
other fortified towns were needed to defend it; but the citizens of the
old outposts clung jealously to the _fueros_ of their fathers and defied
either royal or seignorial control.
“Ce sont de veritables petits états,” says Mariéjol, speaking of the
Castilian municipalities in mediæval days; but the description that
implies peculiar powers shadows forth also peculiar difficulties. The
city that would keep its independence would have to struggle continually
against the encroachments both of the Crown and of neighbouring
territorial lords. It must for this purpose maintain its own militia,
and, most arduous of all, watch carefully lest it should fall into
subjection to its very defenders. Not a few of the municipal councils
came in time to be dominated by a class of “knights,” or nobles of
secondary rank, whose quarrels and feuds endangered industry and filled
the streets with bloodshed.
The principal civic official was the “regidor”; but the Crown had by the
early fifteenth century succeeded in introducing in many cases a
representative, the “corregidor,” whose business it was to look after
royal interests. His presence was naturally resented by the more
influential citizens and, where he dealt corruptly with the people,
disliked by all; but an honest corregidor, who was unconnected with
local families and therefore without interest in the local feuds, and
who had no axe of his own to grind, was a Godsent help to the poorer
classes.
Besides appointing corregidors, the Crown had also begun to influence
the municipalities in another way, through a gradually increasing
control of the “Cortes,” or national parliament of Castile. This body
consisted of three “Estates”; the nobles, whether _ricos-hombres_ or
_hidalgos_ of lesser grade; ecclesiastics; and the Third Estate, or
“Commons.” On an occasion of outward or obvious importance, when a
succession or a Council of Regency were under dispute, or if an oath of
homage to a new sovereign or the confirmation of some unprecedented act
were required; all three “Estates” would meet together at whatever town
the King happened to be staying. Such was a “General Cortes.”
An ordinary Cortes was of a very different character; for, since its
business mainly concerned taxation, only the Commons, or “taxable”
element of the population was in the habit of attending. In the early
days of Castilian history the number of places represented was
unlimited; but a right that in the disordered state of the country was
both expensive and tiresome, if not actually dangerous, was regarded as
a burden by most of the municipalities. By the fifteenth century only
seventeen cities and towns sent members to the Cortes. These were:
Toledo, Burgos, Seville, Cordova, Murcia, Leon, Segovia, Avila,
Salamanca, Zamora, Cuenca, Jaen, Valladolid, Madrid, Toro, Soria, and
Guadalajara, while Granada was added after her conquest in 1492.
The “Procuradores,” or representatives, were in theory free to act at
their own discretion; but in practice they went tied by the instructions
of their fellow-citizens. Nor had they much scope for independence in
the Cortes itself; for though they might and did air their grievances
and press for reform, redress rested with the Crown and did not precede
but follow the assent to taxation. All legislative power was in fact
invested in the King; who might reject, amend, or accept suggestions as
he thought fit.
“We hold that the matter of your petition is to our service.” “We
command that it shall take effect.” Such phrases expressed sovereignty
in a gracious mood, and all were satisfied; while the absence of royal
sanction sent the _procurador_ back to his city, his efforts wasted. He
could, of course, on the next occasion that the King, in need of money,
summoned his deputies to grant it, refuse the supply; but in the
meantime three more years might have elapsed and conditions and needs
would have altered. Moreover a system of bribes and flattery went far to
bring the Commons into line with the royal will; while the shortsighted
complaints of some of the municipalities at the expense of maintaining
their representatives paved the way for the Crown to accept the burden,
thereby establishing an effective control over those who became
practically its nominees.
That the towns missed the future significance of this change is hardly
surprising. The civil wars that devastated Castile had taught the people
that their most dangerous enemies were not their kings but the turbulent
aristocracy; and they often looked to the former as allies against a
common foe. In the same way the more patriotic of the nobles and
ecclesiastics saw in the building up of the royal power the only hope of
carrying the crusade against the Moors to a successful conclusion, or of
establishing peace at home. At this critical moment in the history of
Castile, national progress depended on royal dominance; and it was Queen
Isabel who by establishing the one made possible the other.
CHAPTER II
THE REIGN OF HENRY IV.: MISGOVERNMENT
1454–1463
“I the King ... make known to you that by the grace of Our Lord, this
Thursday just past the Queen Doña Isabel, my dear and well-beloved wife,
was delivered of a daughter; the which I tell you that you may give
thanks to God.”
With this announcement of her birth to the chief men of Segovia was
“Isabel of Castile” ushered by her father John II. into public life; but
on that April day of 1451 none could have suspected the important part
she would play in the history of her country. The future of the throne
was already provided for in the person of her elder half-brother, Henry,
Prince of Asturias; and nearly three years later the birth of another
brother, Alfonso, made that inheritance apparently secure from any
inconvenience of a female succession.
[Illustration:
HENRY IV.
FROM “BOLETIN DE LA REAL ACADEMIA DE LA HISTORIA,” VOL. LXII.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HAUSER AND MENET
]
Castile was at this time nearing the end of a long and inglorious reign,
signalized by the struggles of the King and his selfish favourite
against the domination of an equally selfish nobility. The latter
triumphed; the favourite was beheaded and John II., broken-hearted at
his own weakness in agreeing to the sentence, died in the following
year. His life had been one long negation of everything for which true
kingship stands,—dignity, honour, and power; but the son who succeeded
to his title and troubles was even less fitted for the task.
Feeble and vain, Henry, Prince of Asturias, had been from boyhood the
puppet of his father’s rebellious nobles, led by their flattery into
attacking the royal authority that it would be one day his duty to
maintain.
“In him,” says the chronicler Pulgar, “desire had the mastery over
reason”; and, when he ascended the throne, it was with a character and
constitution that self-indulgence had utterly undermined. One virtue he
possessed, strangely out of keeping with his age, a compassion arising
from dislike of bloodshed; but, since he failed to draw any distinction
between justice and indiscriminate mercy, this attribute rather
endangered than distinguished his rule. A corresponding indifference,
also, to his property, and a reluctance to punish those who tampered
with it, might have a ring of magnificence, but it could hardly inspire
awe of the King’s law.
The problems by which Henry was faced at the beginning of his reign were
not acutely dangerous; and their chief difficulty lay in the constant
friction between Castile and the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon. Between
these two the tie of mutual descent from the House of Trastamara had
been drawn ever closer by frequent intermarriage. Henry IV. was not only
cousin of Alfonso V. of Aragon, but also his nephew, while he was
son-in-law to Alfonso’s ambitious brother, John, King of Navarre. Here
was scope for the time-honoured right of family interference, a right
strengthened by quarrels as to confiscated property and abused
privileges.
[Illustration:
ALFONSO V. OF ARAGON
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
It is only fair to say of Alfonso V. himself, that he took little part
in these feuds. A true Aragonese by instinct, though of Castilian
descent, his interests were not so much directed towards acquiring
Spanish territory as to extending a maritime empire in the East. Such
had been for generations the ambition of a kingdom, whose backbone was
the hardy race of Catalan merchants and sailors. Alfonso dreamed of
making Barcelona and Valencia the rivals of Genoa and Venice. To this
purpose he strengthened his hold over Sardinia, and fought with the
Genoese for the sovereignty of Corsica. Foiled in his designs on that
island by a superior fleet, he sailed away to make good a claim that
Joanna II. of Naples had allowed him to establish, when in a capricious
moment she had adopted him as her son. What favour and affection she had
to bestow, and she was capable of very little, she had given to the
House of Anjou; and when she died without descendants, Naples became the
battleground of Aragonese and French claimants.
Alfonso V., after a series of misfortunes, was at length victorious; and
delighted with this new kingdom, the land of sunshine and culture in
spite of the grim background of its history, he established his court
there, and henceforth ranked rather as an Italian than a Spanish
sovereign.
While, at his ease, he wove chimerical schemes of a crusade for the
recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, and extended a liberal patronage to
Renaissance poets and philosophers; his wife, Queen Maria, remained as
regent at home, and strove to keep peace with Castile and temper the
ambitions of her brothers-in-law. This was a well-nigh impossible task,
for John the eldest and most turbulent, in default of any legitimate
descendants of Alfonso, was heir to the Aragonese throne. A judicious
marriage with Blanche, the heiress of a small state of Navarre, had made
him virtual master of that kingdom, when on her father’s death in 1425
they assumed the joint sovereignty.
Fiction has never devised a more painful domestic tragedy than resulted
from this match. Of the three children of Blanche and John of Navarre,
the death of two was to be laid at their father’s door, the third to
earn the unenviable reputation of connivance in a sister’s murder. The
Queen, with some premonition of the future, strove feebly on her
death-bed to guard against it, and in her will, that left her son
Charles of Viana as the rightful ruler of Navarre, she begged him not to
claim the title of King in his father’s lifetime. To this the Prince
agreed, but the attempt at compromise was to prove ineffectual.
In 1447, King John married again, a woman of very different temperament
to his former wife. This lady, Joanna Enriquez, daughter of the Admiral
of Castile, was as unscrupulous and greedy of power as her husband, and
from the first adopted the rôle of “cruel stepmother.” The birth of her
son, Ferdinand, in March, 1452, set fire to the slumbering jealousy she
had conceived for Charles of Viana, and henceforth she devoted her
talents and energy to removing him from her path.
It is the penalty of public characters that their private life is not
only exposed to the limelight, but its disagreements involve the
interference of many who are not directly concerned. The hatred of Queen
Joanna for her stepson not only convulsed Navarre and Aragon but dragged
Castile also into the scandal.
Throughout the long reign of John II. of Castile, the King of Navarre
had on various pretexts interfered continually in his cousin’s affairs.
On some occasions he had posed as the protector of sovereignty from the
schemes of an ambitious favourite. On others he had been an open rebel,
harrying the royal demesnes, or sulkily plotting revenge when, as the
result of his rebellion, the estates he had inherited in Castile were
taken from him. Through all these vicissitudes the thread of his policy
ran clear,—to fish in waters that he himself had previously troubled. If
his own haul proved empty, he could at least boast of spoiling the sport
of others.
In 1440, in a brief moment of reconciliation with Castile, he married
his eldest daughter Blanche to Henry, then Prince of Asturias, and was
thus provided with a plausible excuse for henceforth thwarting his
cousin in his son-in-law’s interests. From no other point of view could
the alliance be called a success. Henry proved as faithless a husband as
he was disloyal a son; and, after thirteen years of fruitless union, the
marriage was annulled on the grounds of impotence.
Blanche returned to her own land; but her father found the man who had
been her husband too useful an ally to resent her repudiation, and as
soon as Henry became King he agreed to a treaty by which, in return for
an annual income, he surrendered any rights he might have to estates or
property in Castile. With such a settlement the political horizon seemed
fair; but the Castilian royal favourite, Juan Pacheco, Marquis of
Villena, to whom a lion’s share of the said estates had fallen,
mistrusted its serenity, believing that as soon as the King of Navarre
succeeded his brother Alfonso V. on the throne of Aragon, he would
revive claims so obviously to his advantage.
The Marquis of Villena was deaf to the voice of patriotism or personal
loyalty to his master, but he was more than ordinarily acute, where his
own prosperity was concerned. He had garnered successfully the
confiscated property, but “he lived” we are told “always with the fear
of losing it, as those live who possess what does not belong to them.”
[Illustration:
JUAN PACHECO, MARQUIS OF VILLENA
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
In this malicious but eminently shrewd estimate of his attitude lies the
clue to the tortuous mazes in which he involved Castile. Pacheco was a
noble of Portuguese extraction, who had entered Prince Henry’s service
as a page, being created Marquis of Villena by John II. When that
sovereign died, the favourite succeeded to the practical sovereignty of
Castile through the influence he had acquired over his master’s weak and
impressionable nature. It was a position that would have dazzled and
satisfied most favourites, but Pacheco despised all but the most
tangible gains. Power was reckoned in his vocabulary as a means towards
procuring fresh wealth, and for this his thirst was insatiable. All King
Henry’s eagerness to alienate royal estates and revenues in his favour
failed to meet his constant demand for fresh grants either to himself or
to his immediate relatives. The gift of half a province, with the
lordship of all its towns and castles would leave him envious of the
small village across the border, whose rent-roll passed into other
pockets.
“He knew,” says the chronicler, “how to conceal all other vices save his
greed: that he could neither conceal nor moderate.”
In pursuance of his own interests Villena, who distrusted the King of
Navarre’s future intentions, suggested a counter-alliance with Portugal.
This western kingdom had always seemed in danger of absorption by its
more powerful neighbour; once their common enemy, the Moor, had been
driven southwards; but good fortune and a spirit of sturdy independence
had preserved its freedom. By the great victory of Aljubarrota in 1385
Portugal had vindicated her claim to be a separate nationality; and
Castile, leaving the flower of her chivalry dead on the battlefield, had
retired to nurse her resentment in secret. Nearly a century had passed,
and mutual hatred still smouldered between the two peoples, though
frequent intermarriage had long broken down the barriers in the case of
the royal families.
The bride now selected by Henry IV. was the Infanta Joanna, sister of
the reigning King, Alfonso V., a lady of sufficient youth and beauty to
appeal, at any rate temporarily, to her bridegroom’s jaded taste. Her
journey to her new home was a triumphal progress of banquets and
receptions, culminating in jousts and feasts at Madrid, where a crowning
touch of extravagant display was given by Alonso de Fonseca, Archbishop
of Seville, when, after a magnificent banquet, he ordered salvers, laden
with rings and precious stones to be handed round, that the Queen and
her ladies might take their choice.
Unfortunately, real feelings, if they had ever been in tune, ceased to
correspond with these outward rejoicings. Henry soon tired of his bride,
probably because he was legally bound to her, and bestowed his
attentions instead on a Portuguese lady of her retinue, Doña Guiomar.
The latter increased the Queen’s mortification by her insolent
behaviour; and, after a stormy scene, in which royal dignity was thrown
to the winds and slaps and blows were administered, Henry removed his
mistress to a country-house. The Court, watching to see which way the
wind would blow, divided into factions according to its decision; the
Marquis of Villena supporting the Queen, the Archbishop of Seville the
cause of Doña Guiomar.
Matters became even more serious when scandal, always busy with the
King’s name, began to attack the honour of his bride. Queen Joanna, who
according to Zurita had objected to the match from the first, was
incapable of the gentle resignation of her predecessor, Blanche of
Navarre. As extravagant and devoted to pleasure as her husband, she had
no intention of playing the rôle of deserted wife.
“She was a woman to whom love speeches were pleasant ... delighting more
in the beauty of her face than in the glory of her reputation.” Such was
the court chronicler’s summary of her character; nor did public opinion
remain vague in its accusations.
Amongst the principal Castilian nobles was a certain Beltran de La
Cueva, who by his handsome looks and adroit manners had gained for
himself the King’s confidence and the lucrative office of “Mayordomo,”
or Lord High Steward.
On one occasion the King and Queen had been entertaining the ambassadors
of the Duke of Brittany at their country-house at Pardo. Returning to
Madrid after three days’ hunting, they found on nearing the city that
Beltran de La Cueva, gorgeously arrayed, was waiting lance in hand to
challenge all who came by that road. This was a form of entertainment
highly popular with the chivalry of the time; and the tiers of
scaffolding erected for spectators were soon crowded.
Every knight, as he rode up, was summoned to tilt six rounds with the
Mayordomo or to leave his left glove in token of his cowardice. If he
succeeded in shivering three lances, he might go to a wooden archway,
resplendent with letters of gold, and from there take the initial of the
lady of his choice. This famous “Passage of Arms” lasted from morning
till sunset; and thus to the satisfaction of the Court did Beltran de La
Cueva maintain the cause of an unknown beauty, to whom rumour gave no
less a name than that of royalty itself.
If the King had his suspicions, they did not hinder his pleasure in the
spectacle; and he proceeded to celebrate the event by establishing a
monastery on the site, to be called “San Jeronimo del Paso,” or “Saint
Jerome of the Passage of Arms.” Such an origin for a religious
foundation was to say the least of it bizarre; yet it compares
favourably with Henry’s cynical appointment of a discarded mistress as
abbess of a convent in Toledo, on the excuse that the said convent was
in need of reform.
Little good could be expected from a Court whose rulers set such an
example of licence and selfish pleasure; but, fortunately for Castile,
her hopes for the future lay not in the idle throng that surrounded
Henry IV. and Joanna, but in the old walled town of Arévalo. Here, since
the death of John II., had lived his widow, Isabel of Portugal, and her
two children, in an atmosphere rendered doubly retired by her own
permanent ill-health.
“Her illness,” according to the chronicler, “was so grievous and
constant that she could in no way recover”; and with conventional
propriety he attributes the cause to grief at the loss of her husband.
This may have been, though John II. was hardly the type of man to
inspire _une grande passion_. It is more likely that her mind was
already the prey of the burden of melancholy that became the curse of
her descendants; and that the malady was aggravated by the uncertainty
of her new position.
According to one of the royal chaplains Henry treated his half-brother
and sister “with much love and honour and no less the Queen their
mother.” This account, however, conflicts with Pulgar’s description of
Isabel as “brought up in great necessity.” It is more than probable that
the fortunes of the family at Arévalo varied with the policy or whim of
the Marquis of Villena; and thus, in her most impressionable years, the
little Princess learned her first lessons in the hard school of
experience. Such a theory would explain the extraordinary discretion and
foresight she displayed at an age when most girls are still dreaming of
unrealities. If the contrast is not wholly to her advantage, and
precocity is seldom charming, we must remember that only sheltered fruit
can keep its bloom. What Isabel lost of childish softness, she gained in
self-reliance and a shrewd estimate of the difference between true and
false.
Though far enough removed from the succession to escape the flattery
that had ruined her elder brother, she was early a pawn on the political
chess-board, and by the age of six had made her début in the matrimonial
market. Henry IV. and King John of Navarre were at that time eager to
show their mutual love and confidence; and a double alliance was
suggested that would make this patent to all the world. For Isabel was
destined John’s favourite son, the five-year-old Ferdinand, while the
latter’s sister Leonora was chosen as bride for the little Alfonso,
Henry’s half-brother.
Amid all the turns of Fortune’s wheel that were to bring in search of
Isabel’s hand now one suitor, now another, this first alliance alone was
to reach consummation; yet few, versed in the changing politics of the
day, could have believed it likely. The kings had sworn eternal
friendship; but in little more than twelve months an event happened that
made of their treaties and complimentary letters a heap of waste paper.
In 1458, Alfonso V. died at Naples leaving his newly acquired Italian
kingdom to his illegitimate son Ferrante, and the rest of his dominions,
including the island of Sicily, to his brother John. The latter was now
in a far stronger position than ever before; he need not depend on
Henry’s friendship; indeed his inheritance from past rulers was rather a
policy of feud and aggression against the neighbouring kingdom, while
the influence of his father-in-law, the Admiral of Castile, drew him in
the same direction.
This Admiral, Don Fadrique Enriquez, was himself a descendant of the
royal House of Trastamara; and his haughty and choleric nature found the
dreary level of loyalty little to its taste. His sense of importance,
vastly increased by his daughter’s brilliant marriage, revelled in plots
of all sorts; and soon conspiracy was afoot, and he and the majority of
Castilian nobles were secretly leagued with John of Aragon against their
own sovereign. Even the Marquis of Villena consented to flirt with their
proposals, in the hope of reaping some benefit; while his uncle, the
Archbishop of Toledo, and his brother, Don Pedro Giron, Master of
Calatrava, were amongst the leading members of the league.
Looking about him for an ally, Henry’s glance lit naturally on Charles
of Viana, whose disputes with his father had reached a stage beyond the
chance of any peaceful settlement. Navarre, always a prey to factions as
irreconcilable as Montagues and Capulets, had broken into civil war on
the advent of Queen Joanna as regent; the powerful family of the
Agramonts welcoming her eagerly; while the Beaumonts, their rivals, out
of favour at Court and wild with jealousy, called hourly upon Charles to
avenge their wrongs and his own. His mother’s will, leaving Navarre to
her husband during his lifetime, had, they declared, been made null and
void by the King’s subsequent remarriage. Not only was it the duty of a
son to resist such unlawful tyranny, but it was folly to refuse with
imprisonment or a poison cup lurking in the background.
The latter argument was convincing; but never was rebellion undertaken
with a heavier heart. The Prince of Viana was a student and philosopher
who, like the Clerk of Oxenford, would have preferred a shelf of
Aristotle’s books at his bed’s head to the richest robes, or fiddle, or
psaltery. The quiet of a monastery library, with its smell of dust and
parchment, thrilled him more than any trumpet-call; and he would gladly
have exchanged his birthright for the monk’s garb of peace. Fortune
willed otherwise, laying on his shoulders in pitiless mockery the burden
of the man of action; and the result was the defeat that is the usual
reward of half-heartedness.
His uncle’s Court at Naples proved a temporary asylum for him in his
subsequent enforced exile; and also the island of Sicily, where he soon
won the affection of the people, and lived in happiness, till Alfonso’s
death awoke him rudely from his day-dreams. He was overwhelmed by fear
for his own future; though, had he been a different man, he might have
wrested away the sceptre of Sicily. In Aragon itself public opinion had
been growing steadily in his favour, and not only in Navarre were there
murmurs at his absence, but up and down the streets of Barcelona, where
the new King was far from popular, and his haughty Castilian wife an
object of dislike.
Prudence dictated to King John a policy of reconciliation; and after
prolonged negotiations the exile returned; but the cold forgiveness he
received from his father and stepmother for the wrongs they had done him
was in marked contrast to the joyous welcome of the nation. No outward
ceremony of a loving father pardoning a prodigal son could mask the lack
of confidence that still denied the Prince his recognition as rightful
heir, and drove him to enter into a secret alliance with Henry IV. of
Castile.
As a result of these negotiations, a marriage was arranged between
Charles and the Infanta Isabel. That the suggested bride was only ten
and the bridegroom nearing forty was a discrepancy not even considered;
and the messengers, who went to Arévalo to report on the appearance of
the Princess, returned to her suitor, as the chroniclers expressed it,
“very well content.” Far different were the feelings of the King of
Aragon, when he learned of the intended match from his father-in-law,
the Admiral of Castile. Isabel had been destined for his favourite son,
and, in spite of the conspiracy to which he had lent his aid, this
alliance still held outwardly good. It did not need the jealous
insinuations of his wife to inflame afresh his hatred of his first-born;
and the Prince of Viana soon found himself in prison, accused of no less
a crime than plotting against his father’s life.
Unfortunately for King John, popular belief ran in a contrary direction,
and his son’s release was soon demanded by all parts of the kingdom. In
Barcelona, the citizens rose, tore down the royal standard and took the
Governor prisoner. Revolt flamed through the land; but even more
alarming was the sudden declaration of war by Henry IV., who, taking
advantage of the King of Aragon’s embarrassments, hastily dispatched a
force to invade Navarre, where the Beaumonts were already in the field.
It was a bitter moment for King John. Realizing his critical position,
he agreed to his son’s release; and Charles of Viana passed in triumph
to Barcelona. For once, almost without his intervention, Fortune had
smiled on him; but it proved only a gleam before the final storm. Three
months after he had been publicly proclaimed as his father’s heir, the
news of his sudden illness and death fell on his supporters with
paralysing swiftness.
Nothing, on the other hand, could have been more opportune for King John
and his Queen; and their joy can be gauged by the haste with which they
at once proclaimed the ten-year-old Ferdinand heir to the throne,
demanding from the national Cortes of the three kingdoms the oath they
had so long denied his elder brother. Yet Queen Joanna’s maternal
ambitions were not to be satisfied by this easy assumption of victory.
Charles of Viana dead was to prove an even more potent foe than Charles
of Viana living.
Gentle and unassuming, yet with a melancholy dignity that accorded well
with his misfortunes, he had been accepted as a national hero by the
impulsive Catalans; and after death they translated the rather negative
qualities of his life into the attributes of a saint. Only the halo of
martyrdom was required to fire the general sympathy into religious
fervour; and this rumour supplied when it maintained that his tragic end
had been due to no ordinary fever, but to poison administered by his
stepmother’s orders.
The supposition was not improbable; and the inhabitants of Barcelona did
not trouble to verify the very scanty evidence for the actual fact. They
preferred to rest their accusations on the tales of those who had seen
the Prince’s unhappy spirit, like Hamlet’s father, walking abroad at
midnight demanding revenge. Soon his tomb became a shrine for pilgrims,
and there the last touch of sanctity was added. He who in life had
suffered acutely from ill-health became in death a worker of miracles, a
healer whom no absence of papal sanction could rob of popular
canonization.
The effect upon the public mind was to fan smouldering rebellion into
flames; and when Queen Joanna, having gained the recognition of her son
as heir to the throne by the Aragonese Cortes at Calatayud, proceeded
with the same object to Barcelona, the citizens rose and drove her from
their gates. Only the timely intervention of some French troops, which
Louis XI. had just hired out to King John, saved her and Ferdinand from
falling into the hands of their furious subjects.
This foreign assistance had contributed not a little to the bitterness
of the Catalans, for the French King had secretly encouraged their
turbulence and disaffection, promising them his support.
“As for peace he could hardly endure the thought of it,” wrote Philip de
Commines of his master, Louis XI. That monarch, like King John of
Aragon, had studied the art of “making trouble,” and in this truly
mediæval pursuit excelled all rivals. It suited his purpose admirably
that his ambitious neighbour should be involved in civil war, just as it
fitted in with his schemes that his troops should prevent that conflict
from going too far. The question was all part and parcel of his policy
of French aggrandizement; the ultimate object of his design nothing less
than the kingdom of Navarre, that semi-independent state, nominally
Spanish, but projecting in a tantalizing wedge across the Pyrenees.
With Charles of Viana the male line of Evreux had come to an end, and
the claims on Navarre had passed to his sister Blanche. On Blanche’s
death, and Louis in his schemes leapt to the possibility of such a
fortunate accident, the next heir would be Eleanor, her younger sister,
wife of a French Count, Gaston de Foix. It would be well for France to
establish a royal family of her own nationality on the throne of
Navarre. It would be even better for that family to be closely connected
with the House of Valois; and, calculating on the possibilities, Louis
gave his sister Madeleine in marriage to the young Gaston de Foix,
Eleanor’s son and the heir to her ambitions.
It only remained to turn the possible into the certain: to make sure
that Blanche’s claims should not prejudice those of her younger sister.
At this stage in his plans Louis found ready assistance in the King of
Aragon, who included in his hatred of Charles of Viana a still more
unnatural dislike of his gentle elder daughter, whose only sins were
that she had loved her brother in his misfortunes and proved too good a
wife for Henry of Castile.
Thus the tragedy was planned. Blanche must become a nun or pass into the
care of her brother-in-law in some mountain fortress of Navarre. Then
the alternative was whittled away. Nunneries and vows were not so safe
as prison walls and that final silence, whose only pleading is at God’s
judgment-bar. Eleanor, fierce and vindictive as her father, was
determined there should be no loophole of escape, no half-measures by
which she might miss her coveted inheritance.
John of Aragon went himself to fetch his elder daughter to her fate,
assuring her of his intention of marrying her to a French prince, once
they had crossed the Pyrenees; but his victim was not deceived.
Powerless to resist, as she had been in bygone days to help her brother,
Blanche made one last desperate appeal before the gates of the castle of
Orthez closed for ever behind her. On the 30th of April, 1462, she wrote
a letter to Henry IV. of Castile, ceding to him her claims on Navarre,
and beseeching him by the closeness of the tie that had once united
them, and by his love for her dead brother, to accept what she offered
and avenge her wrongs.
It was in vain. Even before Charles of Viana’s death, Henry IV.,
repenting of his rash invasion of Navarre, had come to terms with the
Aragonese King, regardless of his ally’s plight; while just at the
climax of Blanche’s misfortunes, an event happened in Castile that was
to make all but domestic affairs slide into the background.
In March, 1462, Queen Joanna gave birth to a daughter in the palace at
Madrid. The King had at last an heir. Great were the festivities and
rejoicings at Court, many the bull-fights and jousts in honour of the
occasion. Below all the sparkle of congratulation and rejoicing,
however, ran an undercurrent of sneering incredulity. It was nearly
seven years since the Queen came a bride to Cordova, and for thirteen
before that had Henry been married to the virtuous Blanche of Navarre,
yet neither by wife nor mistress had he been known to have child.
“Enrique El Impotente,” his people had nicknamed him, and now, recalling
the levity of the Queen’s life and her avowed leaning towards the hero
of the famous “Passage of Arms,” they dubbed the little Princess in
mockery “Joanna La Beltraneja.”
Was the King blind? or why was the handsome Beltran de La Cueva created
at this moment, almost it seemed in celebration of the occasion, Count
of Ledesma, and received into the innermost royal councils? There were
those who did not hesitate to affirm that Henry was indifferent to his
own honour, so long as his anxiety for an heir was satisfied.
Whatever the doubts and misgivings as to her parentage, there was no
lack of outward ceremony at the Infanta’s baptism, in the royal chapel
eight days after her birth. The Primate himself, the Archbishop of
Toledo, performed the rites, and Isabel, who with her brother Alfonso,
had been lately brought up to court, was one of the godmothers, the
other, the Marquesa de Villena, wife of the favourite. Two months later,
a Cortes, composed of prelates, nobles, and representatives of the Third
Estate, assembled at Madrid, and, in response to the King’s command,
took an oath to the Infanta Joanna as heir to the throne; Isabel and her
brother being the first to kneel and kiss the baby’s hand.
The Christmas of 1462 found Henry and his Queen at Almazon; and thither
came messengers from Barcelona with their tale of rebellion and the
fixed resolution they had made never to submit to King John’s yoke.
Instead the citizens offered their allegiance to Castile, imploring help
and support in the struggle before them.
Henry had been unmoved by Blanche’s appeal, for he knew the difficulties
of an invasion of Navarre, but the present project flattered his vanity.
He would merely dispatch a few troops to Barcelona, as few as he could
under the circumstances, and the Catalans in return would gain him, at
best an important harbour on the Mediterranean, at worst would act as a
thorn in the side of his ambitious neighbour. He graciously consented
therefore to send 2500 horse, under the leadership of one of the
Beaumonts, as earnest of his good intentions; but almost before this
force had reached Barcelona, those intentions had already changed, and
he had agreed to the mediation of the King of France in the disputes
between him and the King of Aragon.
Louis XI., “the universal spider,” as Chastellain called him, had been
spreading his web of diplomacy over the southern peninsula. By the
Treaty of Olito, signed by him and King John in April, 1462, he had
promised to lend that monarch seven hundred lances, with archers,
artillery, and ammunition, in return for two hundred thousand gold
crowns to be paid him on the reduction of Barcelona. Whether he would
ever receive this sum was perhaps a doubtful matter; but Louis had
accepted the pledge of the border counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne,
that commanded the eastern Pyrenees, should the money fail, and would
have been more annoyed than pleased by prompt repayment. According to
his own calculations he stood to gain in either case; and in the
meantime he was well content to increase his influence by posing as the
arbiter of Spanish politics.
After a preliminary conference at Bayonne, it was arranged that the
Kings of Castile and France should meet for a final discussion of the
proposed terms of peace on the banks of the Bidassoa, the boundary
between their two territories. It is a scene that Philip de Commines’
pen has made for ever memorable; for though he himself was not present
he drew his vivid account from distinguished eye-witnesses on both
sides. Through his medium and that of the Spanish chroniclers we can see
the showy luxury of the Castilian Court, the splendour of the Moorish
guards by whom Henry was surrounded, the favourite Beltran de La Cueva
in his boat, with its sail of cloth-of-gold dipping before the wind, his
very boots as he stepped on shore glittering with precious stones. Such
was the model to whom Castilian chivalry looked, the man, who with the
Archbishop of Toledo and the Marquis of Villena dictated to their master
his every word.
It is small wonder if Louis XI. had for the ruler of Castile “little
value or esteem,” or that Commines himself, summing up the situation,
caustically dismisses Henry as “a person of no great sense.” There could
not have been a stronger contrast between the two kings: Henry with his
pale blue eyes and mass of reddish hair, his awkwardly-built frame,
overdressed and loaded with jewels, towering above his meagre companion;
Louis, sardonic and self-contained, well aware of the smothered laughter
his appearance excited amongst Castilian courtiers, but secretly
conscious that his badly cut suit of French homespun and queer shaped
hat, its sole ornament an image of the Virgin, snubbed the butterfly
throng about him.
“The convention broke up and they parted,” says Commines, “but with such
scorn and contempt on both sides, that the two kings never loved one
another heartily afterwards.”
The result of the interview, May, 1463, was soon published. In return
for King John’s future friendship, and in compensation for her expenses
as an ally of Charles of Viana, a few years before, Castile found
herself the richer for the town of Estella in Navarre, a gain so small
that it was widely believed the Archbishop of Toledo and his
fellow-politicians had allowed themselves to be bribed.
If the Castilians were bitter at this decision, still more so were the
Catalans, deserted by their ally and offered nothing save the
unpalatable advice that they should return to King John’s allegiance.
The messengers from Barcelona quitted Fuenterrabia as soon as they
heard, openly uttering their contempt for Castile’s treachery.
“It is the hour,” they exclaimed, “of her shame and of her King’s
dishonour!”
They could not realize to the full the truth of their words, nor to what
depths Henry was shortly to fall and drag the fortunes of his country
with him.
CHAPTER III
THE REIGN OF HENRY IV.: CIVIL WAR AND ANARCHY
1464–1474
Henry IV. had been merely a figurehead at the meeting of Fuenterrabia, a
rôle to which with his habitual lethargy he had no objection. When,
however, he attempted to obtain possession of the town of Estella and
failed to do so in spite of Villena’s outwardly strenuous efforts, he
began at last to suspect that he had been also a dupe, and that French
and Aragonese money had bribed his ministers to his own undoing.
He could not make up his mind to break openly with the Marquis and his
uncle, the Archbishop of Toledo; but a perceptible coldness appeared in
his manner where they were concerned, in contrast to the ever-increasing
favour that he now bestowed on Beltran de La Cueva, Count of Ledesma.
The latter’s share in the conferences had been mainly ornamental. Indeed
his talents had lain hitherto rather in the ballroom or the lists than
in the world of practical politics; but success had stirred his
ambitions, and especially his marriage with the daughter of the Marquis
de Santillana, head of the powerful family of Mendoza. With this
connection at his back he might hope to drive Villena and his relations
from Court, and with the Queen’s aid control the destinies of Castile.
In the struggle between the rival favourites, the Princess Isabel was
regarded as a useful pawn on their chess-board. She and her brother had
been summoned to Court at Villena’s suggestion that “they would be
better brought up and learn more virtuous customs than away from his
Majesty’s presence.” Whether irony were intended or no, Henry had
accepted the statement seriously; and while Alfonso was handed over to a
tutor, his sister joined the Queen’s household.
There were hopes at this time of another heir to the crown; and the
King, foreseeing in the prospect of a son the means to raise his fallen
dignity, was anxious to gratify his wife’s wishes. When she pleaded
therefore for an alliance with her own country, to be cemented by the
marriage of her brother Alfonso, then a widower, with the
twelve-year-old Isabel, he readily agreed. The scheme was the more
pleasing that it ran counter to the union of Isabel and Ferdinand of
Aragon, still strongly advocated by King John. Villena, who had been
bribed into assisting the latter negotiation, received the first real
intimation that his ascendancy was shaken, when he learned that the King
and Court had set off to the south-western province of Estremadura
without consulting him.
Through the medium of the Queen and Count of Ledesma, the Portuguese
alliance was successfully arranged; and Alfonso V. was so impressed by
the young Princess that he gallantly protested his wish that the
betrothal could take place at once. Isabel replied with her strange
unchildlike caution, that she could not be betrothed save with the
consent of the National Cortes, an appeal to Cæsar that postponed the
matter for the time being. Perhaps she knew her brother well enough to
doubt his continued insistence that “she should marry none save the King
of Portugal”; or she may thus early have formed a shrewd and not
altogether flattering estimate of the volatile and uncertain Alfonso.
In the meantime the Marquis of Villena was plotting secretly with his
brother, the Master of Calatrava, the Archbishop of Toledo, the Admiral
of Castile, and other nobles how he might regain his old influence.
After a series of attempts on his rival’s life, from which Beltran de La
Cueva emerged scatheless with the additional honour of the coveted
Mastership of Santiago, he and his fellow-conspirators retired to
Burgos, where they drew up a schedule of their grievances. Secret
measures having failed they were determined to browbeat Henry into
submission by playing on his well-known fears of civil war.
The King’s hopes of an undisputed succession had been shattered by the
premature birth of a still-born son; and thus the question of the
Infanta Joanna’s legitimacy remained as a convenient weapon for those
discontented with the Crown. Nor had the gifts and honours heaped on
Beltran de La Cueva encouraged the loyalty of the principal nobles. The
new favourite was rapacious and arrogant, while even more intolerable to
courtiers of good family and wealth was the rise of an upstart nobility,
that threatened to monopolize the royal favour.
Louis XI. was astute enough to develop such a policy to his own
advantage; but the feeble Henry IV. was no more able to control his new
creations than their rivals. Almost without exception they betrayed and
sold him for their own ends, poisoning his mind against the few likely
to remain faithful, and making his name odious amongst his poorer
subjects by their selfishness and the corruption of their rule.
The conspirators of Burgos were thus enabled to pose as the defenders of
national liberties; and their insolent letter of censure took the
colouring most likely to appeal to popular prejudice. Complaints of the
King’s laxity in religious matters, of the unchecked violence of his
Moorish guard, of the debasement of the coinage, and of the incompetence
and venality of the royal judges—these were placed in the foreground,
but the real crux of the document came later. It lay in two petitions
that were veiled threats, first that the King would deprive the Count of
Ledesma of the Mastership of Santiago, since it belonged of right to the
Infante Alfonso, and next that the said Alfonso should be proclaimed as
heir to the throne. The illegitimacy of the Princess Joanna was openly
affirmed.
Henry received this letter at Valladolid, and, calling together his
royal council, laid it before them. He expressed neither resentment at
its insolence nor a desire for revenge; and when the aged Bishop of
Cuenca, who had been one of his father’s advisers, bade him have no
dealings with the conspirators save to offer them battle, he replied
with a sneer that “those who need not fight nor lay hands on their
swords were always free with the lives of others.”
Peace at all costs was his cry, and the old Bishop, exasperated, forgot
prudence in his anger. “Henceforth,” he exclaimed, “you will be thought
the most unworthy King Spain ever knew; and you will repent it, Señor,
when it is too late to make amends.”
Already knights and armed men were flocking to the royal standard, as
they heard of the rebels’ ultimatum. Many of them were genuinely shocked
at the attack on the dignity of the Crown, but for the greater number
Henry’s reckless prodigality of money and estates was not without its
attractions.
The King, however, proved deaf alike to warnings and scorn. After
elaborate discussions he and the Marquis of Villena arranged a temporary
peace, known as the Concord of Medina del Campo. Its terms were entirely
favourable to the conspirators, for Henry, heedless of the implied slur
on his honour, agreed to acknowledge Alfonso as his heir, on the
understanding that he should later marry the Infanta Joanna. With
incredible shortsightedness he also consented to hand his brother over
to the Marquis; and on the 30th of November, 1464, the oath to the new
heir to the throne was publicly taken. This was followed by the
elevation of the Count of Ledesma, who had resigned the Mastership of
Santiago in favour of the young Prince, to the rank of Duke of
Alburquerque.
The question of the misgovernment of the country and its cure was to be
referred to a committee of five leading nobles, two to be selected by
either party, while the Prior-General of the Order of San Geronimo was
given a casting vote. This “Junta of Medina del Campo,” held in January,
1465, proved no lasting settlement, for the King’s representatives
allowed themselves to be won over to the views of the league, with
disastrous results for their own master.
“They straitened the power of the King to such an extent,” says a
chronicler, “that they left him almost nothing of his dominion save the
title of King, without power to command or any pre-eminence.”
Henry was roused at last, but it was only to fall a victim to fresh
treachery.
Two of the most prominent members of the league in its beginnings had
been Don Alonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, uncle of the Marquis of
Villena, and the Admiral of Castile, Don Fadrique Enriquez. The former
had little of his nephew’s suave charm and adaptability, and his
haughty, irascible nature was more suited to the camp than the Primacy
of the Castilian Church.
“He was a great lover of war,” says Pulgar in his _Claros Varones_, “and
while he was praised on the one side for his open-handedness he was
blamed on the other for his turbulence, considering the religious vows
by which he was bound.”
At the time of the Concord of Medina del Campo, he and the Admiral of
Castile had professed themselves weary of the consistent disloyalty of
their colleagues, and had returned to Court with the King. They now
denounced the “Junta” and advised their master to revoke his agreement
to the Concord, and to demand that the Infante Alfonso should be
instantly restored to his power. As might be expected, the league merely
laughed at this request. They declared that they held the young Prince
as a guarantee of their safety, and that, since the King had determined
to persecute them, they must renounce his service.
Not a few of those at Court suspected the Archbishop and Admiral of a
share in this response, but Henry refused to take a lesson from the
ill-results of past credulity. Instead he submitted entirely to his new
advisers, surrendering at their request two important strongholds. This
achieved, Don Fadrique and the Archbishop deserted to the league without
further pretence; and when the royal messengers discovered the latter in
full fighting gear, on his way to one of his new possessions, and
ventured to remind him that the King awaited him, that warlike prelate
replied with an air of fury: “Go, tell your King that I have had enough
of him and his affairs. Henceforward he shall see who is the true
Sovereign of Castile.”
This insult with its cryptic threat was explained almost immediately by
messengers hurrying from Valladolid, who brought word that the Admiral
had raised the standard of revolt, proclaiming in the market-place,
“Long live the King—Don Alfonso!”
From defiance in words the rebel leaders proceeded to show their scorn
of Henry IV. in action. On June 5th of the same year, they commanded a
wooden scaffold to be set up on the plain outside the city of Avila, so
that it could be clearly seen from all the surrounding neighbourhood. On
it was placed an effigy of the King, robed in heavy black and seated in
a chair of state. On his head was a crown, before him he held a sword,
and in his right hand a sceptre—emblems of the sovereignty he had failed
to exercise. Mounting the scaffold, the chief members of the league read
aloud their grievances, declaring that only necessity had driven them to
the step they were about to take. Then the Archbishop of Toledo removed
the crown and others of the league the sword and sceptre. Having
stripped the effigy of its royal robes, they threw it on the ground,
spurning it from them with their feet.
Immediately it had fallen and their jests and insults had died away, the
eleven-year-old Alfonso ascended the scaffold, and when he had been
invested with the insignia of majesty, the nobles knelt, and kissed his
hand, and took the oath of allegiance. Afterwards they raised him on
their shoulders, shouting, “Castile for the King, Don Alfonso!”
Messengers soon brought Henry news of his mock dethronement; and reports
of risings in different parts of the land followed in quick succession.
Valladolid and Burgos had risen in the north; there were factions in the
important city of Toledo; a revolt had blazed up in Andalusia, where Don
Pedro Giron, Master of Calatrava, had long been busy, sowing the seeds
of disaffection.
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall the earth receive
me,” exclaimed the King when he was told, and he found a melancholy
satisfaction in quotations from Isaiah concerning the ingratitude of a
chosen people. The tide had, however, turned in his favour. Even in
Avila, amid the shouts of triumph and rejoicing, when Henry’s effigy was
thrown to the ground, some of those present had sobbed aloud with
horror. More practical assistance took the shape of an army that rapidly
collected in response to Henry’s summons, “eager,” as the chronicler
expressed it, “to come to blows with those tyrants who had thus
dishonoured their natural lord.”
Villena who much preferred diplomacy to the shock of warfare had in the
meanwhile induced his master to agree to a personal interview, with the
result that the King broke up his camp, compensating his troops for
their inaction by large gifts of money. The league, it was understood,
would return to Henry’s allegiance within a certain time; but its
leaders had fallen out amongst themselves, and at length Villena thought
it as well that he and his family should seek advantageous terms on
their own account.
He demanded with incredible insolence that Henry should give his sister
Isabel in marriage to Don Pedro Giron, Master of Calatrava. In return
the Master would pay into the impoverished royal treasury an enormous
sum of money, amassed by fraud and violence, besides entering the royal
service with the 3000 lances, with which he was just then engaged in
harrying the fields of Andalusia. By way of securing future peace, the
Infante Alfonso was to be restored to his brother, and the Duke of
Alburquerque and his brother-in-law, the Bishop of Calahorra, banished.
For all his folly and weakness, it is difficult to believe that Henry
would consent to such terms, but so low were the straits in which he
found himself that he immediately expressed his satisfaction, sending
word to Don Pedro Giron to come as quickly as he could. Isabel on her
part was aghast and, finding entreaties and remonstrances of no avail,
she spent days and nights upon her knees, praying that God would either
remove the man or herself, before such a marriage should take place. Her
favourite lady-in-waiting, Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla, moved by her
distress, assured her that neither God nor she would permit such a
crime, and, showing her a dagger that she wore hidden, swore to kill the
Master, if no other way of safety should present itself.
Help, indeed, seemed far away, for the bridegroom, having obtained from
Rome a dispensation from his ill-kept vow of celibacy, was soon on his
way to Madrid at the head of a large company of knights and horsemen.
His only reply to those who told him of the Infanta’s obstinate refusal
of his suit was that he would win her, if not by gentleness then by
force.
At Villa Real, where he halted for the night, the unexpected happened,
for, falling ill of an inflammation of the throat, he died a few days
later.
“He was suddenly struck down by the hand of God,” says Enriquez del
Castillo; while Alonso de Palencia describes how at the end “he
blasphemously accused God of cruelty in not permitting him to add forty
days to his forty and three years.”
Both the King and the Marquis of Villena were in consternation at the
news. The latter had begun to lose his influence with the league, who
justly suspected him of caring more for his own interests than theirs;
and, while he bargained and negotiated with a view to securing for
himself the Mastership of Santiago, a position that he no longer
considered belonged to the young Alfonso “of right,” the Archbishop of
Toledo and the Admiral were bent on bringing matters to an issue by open
war.
Henry was forced to collect his loyalists once more; and on the 20th of
August, 1467, a battle took place on the plain of Olmedo, just outside
the city. The King’s army had the advantage in numbers; indeed he had
been induced to advance on the belief that the enemy would not dare to
leave the shelter of their walls, and by the time they appeared it was
too late to sound the retreat. Conspicuous amongst the rebels were the
Infante Alfonso clad, notwithstanding his youth, in full mail armour,
and the fiery Archbishop of Toledo in his surcoat of scarlet emblazoned
with a white cross. The latter was wounded in his left arm early in the
fight but not for that ceasing to urge on his cavalry to the attack. On
the other side the hero of the day was Beltran de La Cueva, whose death
forty knights had sworn to accomplish, but whose skill and courage were
to preserve him for service in a better cause.
Alone, amongst the leading combatants, Henry IV. cut but a poor figure,
for, watching the action from a piece of rising ground, he fled at the
first sign of a reverse, persuaded that the battle was lost. Late that
evening a messenger, primed with the news of victory, discovered him
hiding in a neighbouring village, and he at last consented to return to
the camp.
The royalists succeeded in continuing their march, but since the enemy
remained in possession of the larger number of banners and prisoners,
both armies were able to claim that they had won.
The battle of Olmedo was followed by the treacherous surrender to the
league of the King’s favourite town of Segovia. Here he had left the
Queen and his sister; but while the former sought refuge in the Alcazar,
which still held out for her husband, Isabel preferred to remain in the
palace with her ladies-in-waiting. She had not suffered such kindness at
the hands of Henry IV. as would make her rate either his love or his
power of protection highly; and, when the rebels entered the town she
surrendered to them with a very goodwill.
Henceforward her fortunes were joined to those of Alfonso; but death
which had saved her from marriage with a man she loathed, was soon to
rob her of her younger brother. It is difficult to form a clear estimate
of either Alfonso’s character or abilities from the scanty references of
the chroniclers; but already, at the age of fourteen, he had proved
himself a better soldier than Henry IV.; and we are told that those who
knew him personally judged him more upright. The news of his death, on
July 5, 1468, was therefore received with general dismay. His death had
been ostensibly the result of swollen glands, but it was widely believed
that the real cause of its seriousness was a dish of poisoned trout
prepared for him by a secret ally of the King.
With his disappearance from the political chess-board, the whole balance
of affairs in Castile was altered; and Isabel emerged from comparative
obscurity into the prominent position she was afterwards to hold. Would
she take Alfonso’s place as puppet of the league? or would she be
reconciled to her elder brother? In the latter case, how would the King
decide between her claims and those of Joanna “La Beltraneja”? These
were the questions on whose answers depended the future of the land.
The principal members of the league had no doubts at all as to her
complete acquiescence in their plans, and in the town of Avila they made
her a formal offer of the throne, inviting her to assume the title of
Queen of Castile and Leon. Isabel received the suggestion with her usual
caution; for though but a girl of seventeen, she had few illusions as to
the glories of sovereignty. She knew, moreover, that several prominent
insurgents had taken the opportunity of reconciling themselves at Court,
while the Marquis of Villena, now acknowledged Master of Santiago, was
once more hand in glove with the King. She therefore replied that while
her brother lived she could neither take the government nor call herself
Queen, but that she would use every effort to secure peace in the land.
[Illustration:
ALFONSO, BROTHER OF ISABEL OF CASTILE
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
This answer deprived the league of any legitimate excuse for rebellion;
and they therefore sent letters to the King, declaring their willingness
to return to his service, if he would acknowledge Isabel as heir to the
throne. The Marquis of Villena also pressed the suggestion, thinking by
this means to re-establish his influence completely; since his enemies,
the House of Mendoza, and especially its cleverest representative Pedro
Gonsalez, Bishop of Siguenza, who had been promoted from the See of
Calahorra, had taken up the cause of Queen Joanna and her daughter.
Henry, anxious for peace, no matter what the price, fell in with
Villena’s schemes. On the 19th of September, 1468, a meeting was held at
the Toros de Guisandos near Avila; and there, in the presence of the
Papal Legate, Henry swore away for a second time the honour of his
so-called daughter, and recognized Isabel as legitimate heir to the
throne and Princess of Asturias. By the terms of an agreement previously
drawn up, he also promised that his sister should not be compelled to
marry against her will, while she in return agreed to obtain his
consent; furthermore he declared that he would divorce and send back to
her own land his wife, whose lax behaviour had now become a byword.
Isabel’s own position had materially improved; and there were no lack of
suitors for this eligible heiress. Amongst them was a brother of Edward
IV. of England, but whether the Duke of Clarence or Richard of
Gloucester, the chroniclers do not say. The English alliance was never
very seriously considered, whereas a veritable war of diplomacy was to
be waged around the other proposals.
The Infanta’s chief adviser at this time was the Archbishop of Toledo,
though it does not appear that she was as much under his thumb, as
Enriquez de Castillo would have us believe. There is evidence of
considerable independence of judgment both in her refusal of the crown
on Alfonso’s death, and in her willingness to meet her brother at the
Toros de Guisandos, in spite of the Archbishop’s violent opposition.
Throughout the negotiations, the Archbishop had been on the watch for
evidence of some hidden plot, and only Isabel’s tact and firmness had
induced him to accompany her to the meeting.
Nevertheless it was natural that a girl of her age should rely
considerably on the judgment of a man so well versed in the politics of
the day, especially as the alliance that he urged appealed in every way
to her own inclinations. Ferdinand of Aragon, the Archbishop’s protégé,
was her junior by eleven months; a slight disparity in comparison with
the age of former suitors such as Charles of Viana, Alfonso of Portugal,
and the Master of Calatrava, all her seniors by at least twenty years.
In modern reckoning, Ferdinand would be called a boy, but his childhood
had been spent amidst surroundings of war and rebellion, from which he
had emerged as his father’s right hand; and John II., in token of his
love and confidence, had created this son of his old age King of Sicily
to mark his dignity and independence. Shrewd, practical, and brave,
Ferdinand united to a well-set-up, manly, appearance all those qualities
that Henry IV. so conspicuously lacked. It was little wonder then if he
found grace in the Infanta Isabel’s eyes, not only as an eligible
husband, but as a fitting consort with whose help she might subdue the
turbulence of Castile.
It can be imagined that Ferdinand found no grace at all in the eyes of
the Marquis of Villena, to whom opportunities for turbulence were as the
breath of life, and whose affection for the House of Aragon had never
been sincere.
Policy dictated to him a counter-alliance and at first the importunate
Alfonso of Portugal won support. Villena had re-established his old
influence over his master, and at this time formed an ambitious scheme,
by which his son should marry the Infanta Joanna; the idea being to draw
up a new settlement, settling the crown on his own descendants, if
Isabel and her Portuguese husband had no children.
At Ocaña, where Henry IV. and his sister held a meeting of the Cortes in
1468, a magnificent embassy appeared from Alfonso V., with the
Archbishop of Lisbon at its head, seeking the betrothal of their master
to the Infanta Isabel.
“They thought it an easy matter to bring about the marriage,” says
Alonso de Palencia; but they were destined to return to their own land,
with their mission unfulfilled. Isabel had never been attracted to the
Portuguese King; and her coldness was hardened into antipathy by the
Archbishop of Toledo, who sent her secret warnings that the alliance was
a plot to ruin her prospects. Once married, she would become a foreigner
in the eyes of Castile, and while her children could not hope to succeed
to the throne of Portugal, since Alfonso had already an heir, the
Infanta Joanna would be preferred to her in her own land. Isabel, moved
both by these arguments and her own feelings, thereupon gave a secret
promise to marry her cousin Ferdinand, returning a steady refusal to her
brother’s persuasions and threats.
Henry now made an attempt to capture her, with a view to imprisoning her
in the Alcazar at Madrid; but the attitude of the principal knights of
Ocaña, who loved neither Villena nor the Portuguese, was so threatening
that he quickly changed his manner. Assuring the Archbishop of Lisbon
that some other means would be found to placate the Princess, whose
opposition would only be increased by violence, he sent him and his
fellow-ambassadors away, not altogether despairing but with their
confidence somewhat shaken.
In the meanwhile the fires of rebellion were alight once more in
Andalusia and burnt so furiously, that it was felt only the King in
person could hope to allay them. With great reluctance he left his
sister in Ocaña, but he dared not risk further unpopularity by using
force. At the Master of Santiago’s suggestion he demanded that she
should promise to take no new steps about her marriage until his return,
thinking in this way to place her in an equivocal position. Either she
would refuse, in which case she would stand self-convicted of some
secret plot, or she would take the oath, condemning herself as a
perjurer if she broke it.
Isabel, appreciating the situation, gave her promise. Even the Master of
Santiago, for all his vigilance, did not know that her consent to the
Aragonese alliance was of previous date, and therefore arrangements
concerned with it could be argued not to fall under the heading “new.”
As soon as Henry IV. and his favourite had gone southwards, she herself
left Ocaña, with the ostensible object of taking her brother Alfonso’s
body to be buried in state at Avila, and from there went to Madrigal her
birthplace, where her mother was living. It was her hope that here she
would be able to complete her negotiations with King John and his son,
undetected; but she found the Bishop of Burgos, a nephew of the Master
of Santiago, in the town ready to spy on all her actions.
The King had by now planned for his sister a new match, with Charles,
Duke of Berri, brother and heir-presumptive to Louis XI. Not only would
this alliance cement the customary friendship of Castile and France, but
Isabel’s close connection with the French throne would remove her very
thoroughly from the danger zone of Castilian affairs. When the Cardinal
of Arras arrived in Andalusia he was therefore encouraged by Henry to go
to Madrigal in person and urge the Duke’s suit.
Nothing doubting the success of his mission, for he was a man famed for
his oratory, the Cardinal, having gained admittance to the Princess,
brought forward all his arguments, laying stress not only on the wealth
and personal charms of the Duke, but on the joy such an alliance would
give her father in the other world. Now Isabel had previously sent
secret messengers to report on the respective appearance and bearing of
Ferdinand and the French Duke, and the comparison was hardly favourable
to the latter, who was a weakling with thin ungainly limbs and watery
eyes. She could thus estimate the worth of the Cardinal’s statements and
replied firmly that “she could not dispose of her hand in marriage save
by the advice of the leading nobles and knights of the kingdoms, and
that having consulted them she would do what God ordained.”
This was equivalent to a refusal; and the Cardinal, having exerted his
eloquence once more in vain, returned to France, nursing his resentment
and wrath. He left the Princess in a critical position; for her brother
could draw but one conclusion from her refusal of such an advantageous
match; and he and the Master of Santiago now strained every effort to
stop her marriage with the King of Sicily.
Unable to leave Andalusia themselves, they warned the citizens of
Madrigal that any favour shown to the Princess would be regarded as an
act of treachery to the Crown, while she was so surrounded by spies and
enemies that even her faithful lady-in-waiting, Beatriz de Bobadilla,
grew frightened and besought her to break off the Aragonese alliance.
Isabel knew that, once intimidated into doing this, she would remain
absolutely at her brother’s mercy, and she therefore implored the
Archbishop of Toledo to come to her assistance before it was too late. A
lover of bold and decisive actions, that warlike prelate was soon at the
gates of Madrigal at the head of an armed force; and Isabel, refusing to
listen to the threats of the Bishop of Burgos, at once joined him, going
with him to Valladolid, the headquarters of the Admiral, Don Fadrique.
She had burned her boats, and it only remained for the man on whom she
had pinned her faith to play his part in the drama adequately. Both
Ferdinand and his father realized the seriousness of the situation. If
the treaty of Fuenterrabia had spelled trouble and disaster for Castile,
it had been the source of even greater evils in Aragon; for the
Catalans, far from returning to their old allegiance, as they were
advised, had continued to maintain their desperate resistance in
Barcelona. They had elected as their Count first one prince of royal
extraction and then another; each new puppet doomed to ultimate failure,
but leaving behind him a defiance increasing in ferocity as it lost
power in other ways.
Nor was chronic rebellion John II.’s only serious trouble. The important
counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne, pledged to Louis XI. in return for
troops, had been seized by that monarch, as soon as he saw his neighbour
too involved in difficulties to show practical resentment; and the web
of French diplomacy was now being spun over Navarre, through the medium
of the King of Aragon’s son-in-law, the Count of Foix. Personal sorrows
added their quota: the loss of sight at a time when political clouds
looked blackest, followed by the death of Queen Joanna, whose courage
and brains had made her a fitting helpmate for her ambitious husband,
whether in the council-chamber or on the battlefield. John was indeed
repaid with added measure for the turbulence and treachery of his early
days; but like many men of his type he showed better in adversity than
in success.
Doggedly he laid fresh plans, and Providence that seldom hates the brave
rewarded him by the recovery of his eyesight.
The realization of his son’s marriage with Isabel of Castile, always
favoured by him, was now his dearest ambition; for he believed that the
final union of the two kingdoms would mean the death-blow to Louis XI.’s
hopes of dominating the Pyrenees, as well as the building up of the
power of the Crown at home against unruly subjects. Such designs were,
however, of the future, while the immediate steps to achieve them were
fraught with danger.
Isabel, the bride-elect was at Valladolid, temporarily protected by the
Archbishop of Toledo and the Admiral; but to the north lay the hostile
Bishopric of Burgos, to the south-east a line of fortified strongholds,
all in the hands of the Mendozas, the chief supporters of Joanna La
Beltraneja and therefore enemies of the Aragonese match. It only needed
the return of Henry IV. from Andalusia to make her position untenable.
Isabel and the Archbishop of Toledo therefore dispatched messengers to
Aragon in haste to insist that the King of Sicily should come to
Valladolid. They found him in Saragossa, and suggested that, as every
moment of delay increased the danger, he should disguise himself and go
to Castile with only a few adherents, thus hoodwinking the Mendozas, who
would never expect him to take this risk, and who also believed the
negotiations for the marriage to be at a much earlier stage.
Notwithstanding his later reputation for a hard head and a cool heart,
Ferdinand in his youth possessed a certain vein of adventurous chivalry.
It was with difficulty that he had been prevented from leading an
entirely rash expedition to Isabel’s rescue at Madrigal, and he now
readily agreed to a scheme, whose chief merit lay in its apparent
impossibility.
Sending one of the Castilian messengers on before to announce his
coming, he and a few of the most trusted members of his household boldly
crossed the frontier. The rest were disguised as merchants, Ferdinand
himself as a servant; and at the inns where they were forced to halt he
played his part, waiting at table and tending the mules. They did not
stop often, riding in spite of the intense cold by day and night; with
the result that they arrived before they were expected at the friendly
town of Burgo de Osma. Ferdinand, whom excitement had rendered less
tired and sleepy than the others, spurred forward as they came in sight
of the gates, narrowly escaping death at the hands of an over-zealous
sentry. Soon, however, their identity was explained, and amid the
blowing of trumpets and joyful shouts the young King was welcomed by his
allies.
At Valladolid the news of his arrival into safe territory was the signal
for feasting and jousts, and preparations for the marriage were pushed
on apace. Ferdinand came by night to Valladolid, and, being met at a
postern gate by the Archbishop of Toledo was led to the house where the
Princess lodged.
Four days later, on October 18, 1469, the formal betrothal took place.
Isabel and Ferdinand as second cousins stood within the prohibited
degrees of consanguinity; but the Archbishop of Toledo produced a bull,
affording the necessary dispensation. This bore the signature of Pius
II., who had died in 1464, and authorized Ferdinand to marry within the
third degree of consanguinity, on the expiration of four years from the
date of the bull. Granted its authenticity, the marriage was perfectly
legal; but it is almost certain the document was an elaborate forgery,
constructed by John of Aragon and the Archbishop to meet their pressing
needs.[2] The dispensation was essential to satisfy, not only Isabel,
but any wavering supporters of orthodox views. On the other hand, apart
from the haste required and known dilatoriness of the Papal Court, Paul
II., who at that time occupied the See of Saint Peter, was the sworn
ally of Henry IV.; and those who were negotiating the Aragonese alliance
recognized that there could be no successful appeal to his authority.
Footnote 2:
See Clemencin, _Elogio de Isabella_, Illustracion II.
Another matter requiring delicate handling had been the marriage
settlement that, signed by Ferdinand and ratified by his father, was
read aloud at the betrothal ceremony by the Archbishop of Toledo. In it
Ferdinand declared his devotion to the Mother Church and Apostolic See,
and his undying allegiance to Henry IV. The document then went on to say
that the signatures of both husband and wife must be affixed to all
ordinances and public deeds; while the remainder of the clauses were
directed to allaying the suspicions of those who feared that the King of
Sicily might use his new position for the good of Aragon rather than
Castile. In them he promised not to leave the kingdom himself without
consent of the Princess, nor to remove any children that they might
have, whether sons or daughters. He would not on his own account make
peace nor war nor any alliance. He would not appoint to offices any save
natives of Castile; while he pledged himself to take no new steps with
regard to the lands that had once belonged to his father but had since
been alienated.
After the ceremony was over, Ferdinand retired with the Archbishop to
his lodging in Valladolid; and the next day, October 19th, he and Isabel
were married; and for six days the town kept festival in honour of the
event.
Henry learned of his sister’s marriage from the Master of Santiago, and
naturally nothing of the insolence of such proceedings towards himself
was lost in the telling. The news found him in broken health, the result
of his life-long self-indulgence, and with his vanity badly wounded by
the scorn and defiance he had encountered in Andalusia. He was therefore
in no mood for conciliation, and received Isabel’s letters, explaining
the necessity under which she had acted and her assurances of loyalty,
in gloomy silence, lending a willing ear to the Master of Santiago’s
suggestion that he might retract the oath he had taken at the Toros de
Guisandos.
Circumstances favoured such a course; for Louis XI., who looked on the
Castilian-Aragonese alliance with alarm as inimical to French expansion,
offered Isabel’s rejected suitor, Charles, now Duke of Guienne, to the
Infanta Joanna, the underlying condition being of course that Henry
should disinherit Isabel in her favour. Negotiations were at once begun;
and in 1470, the Cardinal of Arras appeared at the Spanish Court charged
with the final conclusion of the terms. He had never forgiven the
Infanta’s indifference to his oratory; and, as diligent enquiry had made
him cognizant of the fact that Pius II.’s bull must be a forgery, he
proceeded to denounce her in words, according to Enriquez de Castillo,
“so outrageous that they are more worthy to be passed over in silence
than recorded.”
Henry far from being shocked was obviously pleased; and, having
completed the agreement with the Cardinal, in October, 1470, he publicly
withdrew his oath, taken at the Toros de Guisandos, and acknowledged the
Infanta Joanna, then nine years old, as his daughter and heir. Her
formal betrothal to the Duke of Guienne followed, and then the little
Princess was handed over to the care of the Master of Santiago, much to
the indignation of the Marquis of Santillana and the Mendozas, in whose
keeping she had hitherto been.
Henry now published a manifesto, in which he declared that his sister
had broken her oath in marrying without his consent, and had aggravated
her offence by her choice of an enemy of Castile, and by not waiting to
obtain a dispensation from the Pope. He had therefore judged her unfit
to succeed to the throne and had restored Doña Joanna to her rights.
This document did not meet with general approval. Indeed the principal
towns of Andalusia, already disaffected, openly expressed their refusal
to consent to its terms. Yet to Isabel in Dueñas, where her first child,
a daughter named after herself, had been born in the October of this
year, the prospect seemed bleak enough. Her difficulties in Castile were
intensified by the ill-fortunes of John of Aragon in his war against
Louis XI. for the recovery of Roussillon and Cerdagne; so that in spite
of the critical position of affairs at home, she was forced to let
Ferdinand go to his father’s assistance.
Hiding her fears, she replied to Henry’s manifesto by a counter-protest,
in which she recalled her own moderation in refusing the crown on her
brother Alfonso’s death, and vindicated her marriage as performed on the
advice of the wiser and larger section of the leading nobility. Henry,
she declared had broken his oath, not only in acknowledging Joanna, who
was known to be illegitimate, as his daughter and heiress; but long
before, when he had failed to divorce and send away the Queen as he had
promised, and when he had tried to force his sister to marry the King of
Portugal against her will.
In the meanwhile, in spite of the flourish of trumpets with which the
betrothal had taken place, the French marriage hung fire. Gossip
maintained that the Duke of Guienne’s interest in Joanna had been merely
the result of pique at Isabel’s refusal; while Louis XI. had used it as
a temporary expedient against his enemy, the King of Aragon. At any rate
the French Prince was openly courting the heiress, Mary of Burgundy,
when death cut short his hopes in May, 1472.
Various bridegrooms were now suggested for the Infanta Joanna; amongst
them her own uncle the King of Portugal.
Henry IV. was at this time at Segovia, whose Alcayde, Andres de Cabrera,
husband of Isabel’s lady-in-waiting, Beatriz de Bobadilla, had always
been one of his faithful adherents. In the Alcazar was stored a
considerable sum of money; and the Master of Santiago now advised the
King to demand its surrender and also that of the fortress, hoping to
get them into his own hands, as he had done with the Alcazar at Madrid.
Cabrera, suspecting rightly a plot for his own ruin, stoutly refused;
and his enemy, after stirring up in the town a rebellion which the
Alcayde promptly quelled, left the city in disgust. Henry, who loved
Segovia, remained behind, unable to make up his mind to any decisive
action.
The favourite’s departure was the opportunity for which those inclined
to Isabel’s interests had long been waiting; and Beatriz de Bobadilla
urged her husband to effect a reconciliation between the King and his
sister. This plan met with the approval of no less important a person
than Pedro Gonsalez de Mendoza, Bishop of Siguenza, whose material
position had been lately increased, not only by the Archbishopric of
Seville, but also by receiving a long-coveted Cardinal’s hat. At the
time of the Aragonese marriage the Mendozas had been amongst Isabel’s
most formidable opponents, but their enforced surrender of the Infanta
Joanna to the Master of Santiago after the French betrothal, had quite
altered their views; and the Cardinal of Spain, as Pedro Gonsalez was
usually called, now worked to secure Isabel’s accession, as the best
means of ruining his rival.
Another person, who had set himself to negotiate an agreement, was the
Papal Legate, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, by birth a Valencian. John of
Aragon’s old enemy, Paul II. had died in 1471; and Sixtus IV., his
successor, when dispatching Cardinal Borgia to Castile, in 1473, to
demand a clerical subsidy, gave him at the same time a bull of
dispensation, which legalized Ferdinand and Isabel’s marriage, and also
affirmed the legitimacy of their daughter and her rights of inheritance.
Isabel’s prospects had considerably brightened, and a bold action on her
part was to put them to the test. One day, Beatriz de Bobadilla, who had
secretly kept her informed of the current state of affairs, disguised
herself as a countrywoman and, mounted on an ass, rode out to the city
of Aranda, where her mistress was living. She begged her to come to
Segovia immediately; and, on a day arranged, Isabel and the Archbishop
of Toledo appeared in the city before dawn and were received into the
Alcazar. Henry was then in his hunting-box in the woods outside, but
that evening he returned to the palace and saw his sister. With his
usual impressionability he echoed the joy of all around him, and
embracing her informed her of his goodwill and the pleasure her coming
had given him. The next day they rode through the city together, his
hand on her bridle-rein; and some little time afterwards Ferdinand, who
had been hastily summoned, was reconciled to his brother-in-law.
Andres de Cabrera, delighted at the success of his hazardous scheme,
arranged an elaborate dinner on the Feast of the Epiphany of that year,
1474, in order to celebrate the occasion; but unfortunately Henry, who
was in delicate health, fell ill. Secret supporters of the Master of
Santiago cleverly suggested that he had been poisoned, and that this had
been the main object of the reconciliation. Henry, thoroughly alarmed,
in spite of all his sister’s efforts to allay his fears, left Segovia,
as soon as he was well enough to bear the journey, joining the Master of
Santiago and the Infanta Joanna at Madrid.
All the old trouble and discord seemed destined to begin once more, but
in reality the labours of both schemer and dupe were nearly at an end.
Early in the autumn the Master of Santiago hastened to Estremadura to
gain possession of a certain fortress, and there, on the eve of
achieving his purpose, he fell ill and died.
Henry, though almost inconsolable at the news, transferred his
affections to his favourite’s son, the Marquis of Villena, confirming
him in all his father’s offices and titles and creating him Master of
Santiago. It was to be almost the last of the many honours and gifts
that he bestowed in the course of his long reign, for on December 11,
1474, a few weeks before his fiftieth birthday, he also died.
The same atmosphere of vacillation, in which he had moved in his life,
enveloped his death-bed. When questioned as to the succession, the
chronicler, Alonso de Palencia, declares that he equivocated, saying
that his secretary knew what he wished; other writers that he confessed
to a friar that the Princess Joanna was indeed his daughter, and that he
left a will to this effect. Enriquez del Castillo, his chaplain and
chronicler, makes no mention of Joanna’s name. Henry’s personal beliefs
and wishes had availed little in his own day, and he may have guessed
that they would carry no weight after his death. One at any rate was
fulfilled, and he was buried, as he had asked, in the Church of Sancta
Maria de Guadalupe, at the foot of his mother’s tomb.
CHAPTER IV
ACCESSION OF ISABEL: THE PORTUGUESE WAR
1475–1479
The news of Henry IV.’s death was the signal for Isabel’s proclamation
as Queen in Segovia. Riding through the crowded streets, her palfrey led
by two of the “regidores” of the city, she came amid the shouts of the
people to the principal square. Before her walked four kings-at-arms,
and after them Gutierre de Cardenas, bearing a naked sword, emblem of
the justice that should emanate from kingship. In the square stood a
high scaffold, hung with rich embroidered stuffs, and on it a throne,
raised by three steps from the surrounding platform. Isabel ascended
these and took her place; and then, a king-at-arms having called for
silence, a herald cried in a loud voice: “Castile! Castile for the King
Don Fernando and the Queen Doña Isabel, his wife.” Those watching below
took up the shout, and amid cheers the royal standard was raised.
Ferdinand was in Aragon; but news had at once been sent him of the
King’s death, and in the meanwhile Isabel received the homage of the
great nobles and knights who were ready to pledge themselves to her
cause. Chief amongst them were the Admiral of Castile, the Cardinal of
Spain, his brother, the Marquis of Santillana, and the rest of the
Mendozas; while they brought with them Beltran de La Cueva, Duke of
Alburquerque, whose fortunes scandal would naturally have linked with
the cause of the Infanta Joanna.
Significant was the tardy appearance of the Archbishop of Toledo, once
so hot in Isabel’s cause. Now he came in the train of all the rest, with
little enthusiasm in his homage or in the oath he took in the hall of
the palace, his hand resting on a copy of the Gospels. On the 2d of
January he and the Cardinal of Spain rode out to meet the King of
Sicily, returning with him, one on either side, amid such crowds that it
was past sunset before they reached the palace.
He was a young man of twenty and two years ... [says Colmenares, the
historian of Segovia, commenting on Ferdinand’s appearance], of medium
height, finely built, his face grave but handsome and of a fair
complexion, his hair chestnut in shade but somewhat spare on the
temples, his nose and mouth small, his eyes bright with a certain
joyful dignity, a healthy colour in his cheeks and lips, his head well
set on his shoulders, his voice clear and restful. He carried himself
boldly both on horse and foot.
His character, his new subjects could not fully gauge; but the contrast
with Henry’s vacillating puerility was obvious. Here at any rate was a
man, who would not fail in what he undertook through indecision or lack
of courage.
The Cardinal of Spain and Archbishop of Toledo proceeded to draw up
“Provisions” for the future government of the kingdom, adjusting the
exact relations of the sovereigns on the basis of the marriage
settlement. Royal letters and proclamations were to be signed by both,
the seals affixed to be stamped with the joint arms of Castile and
Aragon, the coinage engraved with the double likeness. Justice was to be
awarded by the two sovereigns, when together; by each, when separated.
Castile safeguarded her independence by placing the control of the
Treasury in the hand of the Queen, and by insisting that the governors
of cities and fortresses should do homage to her alone. She alone, also,
might appoint “corregidores” and provide incumbents for ecclesiastical
benefices, though the nominations were to bear Ferdinand’s signature as
well as her own.
[Illustration:
FERDINAND OF ARAGON
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
It can be imagined that such a settlement would depend for its success
largely on the goodwill and tact of those called on to fulfil it; and
Ferdinand though he consented to sign his name to the document did so
with considerable reluctance. Many of the nobles in Segovia, though
mainly those of Aragonese birth, had professed their annoyance that
Ferdinand’s position should be in any way subordinated to that of his
wife. They declared that the Salic law, excluding women from the royal
succession, should hold good in Castile as well as in France; and that,
the Castilian House of Trastamara having died out in the male line with
Henry IV., the crown should pass directly to the Aragonese branch, in
the person of King John and his son, the King of Sicily.
Loud was the indignation of Isabel’s Castilian supporters at this
suggestion. The Salic law, they maintained, had never been acknowledged
in Castile; on the contrary, cases could be cited in which women had
succeeded to the throne to the detriment of the obvious male heir.
Thus, between arguments on the one side and the other, feelings ran
high, for Ferdinand himself inclined to a theory that flattered his love
of power and independence. Isabel, who had no intention of ceding her
rights, at length exerted her influence to win him to her point of view.
“Señor,” she said, after a stormy council-meeting that had in the end
upheld her right of succession, “this matter need never have been
discussed, because, owing to the union that, by the Grace of God, there
is betwixt us, there can be no real disagreement.”
She then alluded to her duty of obedience as his wife; but perhaps to
Ferdinand her most convincing argument was the pertinent suggestion that
if the Salic law were acknowledged and they should have no male heirs,
their daughter Isabel could not lawfully succeed them. It would ill have
pleased Ferdinand to leave his possessions to any of his Aragonese
cousins. “The King,” we are told, “having heard the Queen’s reasons was
highly pleased, because he knew them to be true; and both he and she
gave orders that there should be no more talk on this matter.”
The chronicler then goes on to remark on the complete concord that ever
afterwards existed between the sovereigns.
And when it was necessary that the King should go to look after
affairs in one part of the kingdom and the Queen in another, it never
happened that he or she issued a command that conflicted with those
that the other gave. Circumstances might separate them, but love held
their wills joined.
Ferdinand and Isabel had shown their wisdom in refusing to let the rift
between them widen into an open quarrel. In a crisis the least straw may
turn the balance; and the condition of affairs required their combined
energies in the one scale. It is true that the majority of nobles and
knights had either in person, or by deputy, expressed their allegiance;
but there still remained a small though powerful group, headed by the
young Marquis of Villena, who maintained that the Infanta Joanna was the
rightful Queen.
That their objective was rather self-interest than any deep loyalty to
the little Princess was obvious from Villena’s letter, mentioning the
terms on which he and his followers would consent to submit. For himself
he demanded, first his acknowledgment as Master of Santiago, next the
confirmation of all lands, castles, and revenues that had belonged to
his father, including the Alcazar at Madrid, and thirdly a yearly income
of over two million maravedis to be paid by the Crown. The Count of
Plasencia, his ally, whom Henry IV. had created Duke of Arévalo with the
gift of that town (taken from the widowed Queen Isabel for the purpose),
sought also the confirmation of his honours.
With regard to Joanna, whom Villena and his followers styled “Princess
of Castile,” they insisted that she should be suitably married; and on
this demand all negotiations ultimately broke down. Ferdinand and Isabel
were willing to grant the Marquis the Mastership, in spite of the
clamours of seven other candidates; they agreed to the idea of Joanna’s
marriage; but their stipulation that, while this subject was under
consideration, she should be handed over to some trustworthy person,
virtually put an end to all hopes of reconciliation. Joanna was the
Marquis’s trump card, and he had no intention of playing her until he
was certain of his trick, far less of passing her into the hands of
anyone, whom her rivals would consider trustworthy.
Dazzled by the schemes he had planned, he believed it would be an easy
matter to secure Isabel’s ruin, and in this view he was strengthened by
the secret correspondence he had been carrying on with his great-uncle,
the Archbishop of Toledo. The latter’s conduct is on the surface
inexplicable; for, having maintained Isabel’s cause with unswerving
loyalty throughout the negotiations for her marriage, when she was in
danger of imprisonment and he of incurring, on her account, not only
papal censure but the loss of his archbishopric, he had yet at the end
of Henry IV.’s reign reconciled himself to that monarch and his
favourite the young Marquis of Villena, to the weakening of his old
allegiance. His tardy appearance at Segovia, and the sulky manner he had
adopted towards Ferdinand and the Queen, were alike in keeping with a
change of policy that in a man of his ambitions seemed as shortsighted
as it was unaccountable. The explanation lies in Carrillo’s lack of
self-control that made his ambition the plaything of his besetting vice.
Like Juan Pacheco, he loved wealth, the more that he was in secret an
alchemist and squandered the revenues of his see in a vain endeavour to
make gold; but even the glitter of precious metals lost its charm beside
his lust for power and influence. He must be first. This was the motive
that had driven him to desert Henry IV., to break with his nephew in the
revolt of the League, and now, finally, when the cause for which he had
laboured was on the eve of success, to renounce his allegiance to
Isabel, because of his jealousy of her new adviser the Cardinal of
Spain.
In vain the Queen, who knew his character, tried to dissipate his
suspicions. Carrillo’s temperament set his imagination afire at the
least glimmer of insult or neglect; his manner grew morose and
overbearing, his desire for gifts and rewards every day more rapacious.
At length, when Ferdinand ventured to oppose his demands, the Archbishop
openly expressed his anger and, leaving the Court, withdrew to his town
of Alcalá de Henares, where he began to plot secretly with Joanna’s
supporters.
Between them he and the Marquis hatched a scheme, whose success would,
they hoped, make them the arbiters of Castile. This was nothing less
than a Portuguese alliance by which Alfonso V., married to his niece,
would in her name cross the border, and aided by his Castilian allies
drive out Ferdinand and his Queen. With this intention, the Marquis
dispatched a letter to Alfonso full of showy promises. The most
important Castilian nobles, he declared, including himself and all his
relations, the Duke of Arévalo, and the Archbishop of Toledo, were
pledged to Joanna’s cause; while numbers were only waiting to follow
their example as soon as they were reassured by the first victory.
Furthermore, he guaranteed the goodwill of fourteen of the principal
towns in the kingdom; while, alluding to the factions that convulsed the
rest, he prophesied that one side would be certain to adopt the
Portuguese cause and with a little help secure the upper hand. Victory
was the more certain by reason of the penniless state in which Henry IV.
had left the treasury. It was impossible that Ferdinand and Isabel could
compete without financial assistance against the wealth and well-known
military strength of Portugal.
Such arguments had a surface plausibility; though a statesman might have
asked himself if they did not take Fortune’s smiles too much for
granted. Was it safe to ignore the deep-rooted dislike that Castile bore
Portugal, or to assume the friendliness of the larger towns, on whose
possession the ultimate victory must depend? Alfonso V. was not the type
of man to ask uncomfortable questions. He saw the object of his desire
in a glamour that obscured the pitfalls along the road on which he must
travel; and where courage and enthusiasm were the pilgrim’s main
requisites he was rewarded by success. Three times he had defeated the
Moors beyond the sea; and, dowered with the proud title “El Africano,”
he now aspired to be the victor of a second Aljubarrota. The rôle
pleased his romantic and highly strung nature for, while posing as the
defender of injured womanhood in the person of his niece, he could also
hope to avenge on Queen Isabel the slight his vanity had suffered from
her persistent refusal of his suit.
Practical-minded councillors shook their heads over his sanguine
expectations and pointed out the untrustworthy reputations of the
Marquis of Villena and the Archbishop of Toledo. That these same men had
sworn to Joanna’s illegitimacy and made it a cause of rebellion against
King Henry looked as if love of self rather than love of justice were
now their inspiration.
Isabel and the Cardinal of Spain wrote letters of remonstrance to the
same effect, begging Alfonso to submit the matter to arbitration; but
that credulous monarch chose to believe that their advice arose merely
from a desire to gain time, and therefore hurried on his preparations
for war.
In May, 1475, having collected an army of 5600 horse and 14,000 foot, he
crossed the border and advanced to Plasencia. His plan of campaign was
to march from there northwards in the direction of Toro and Zamora, as
secret correspondence had aroused his hope of winning both these
strongholds. At Plasencia he halted, until the Marquis of Villena and
the Duke of Arévalo appeared with his niece, and then he and Joanna were
married on a lofty platform in the centre of the city, the marriage
awaiting fulfilment pending the necessary dispensation from Rome. A
herald, however, using the old formula at once proclaimed the union:
“Castile! Castile for the King Don Alfonso of Portugal and the Queen
Doña Joanna his wife, the rightful owner of these kingdoms.”
From Plasencia the Portuguese at length marched to Arévalo, where
another delay, this time of two months, took place, Alfonso determining
to await the troops that had been promised him by his Castilian allies.
He had with him the chivalry of his own Court, young hot-bloods, who had
pledged their estates in the prospect of speedy glory and pillage. In
their self-confidence the easy theories of Villena found an echo; and
they loudly boasted that Ferdinand and his wife would never dare to meet
them, but were in all probability on the road to Aragon. “Before gaining
the victory they divided the spoil,” comments Pulgar sarcastically.
The Castilian sovereigns were far from meditating flight. The war had
not been of their choosing, but, since it had been forced upon them,
they were ready to prosecute it to the end. For the moment affairs
looked threatening. Not only was their treasury practically empty, and a
hostile army on the march across their western border, but news came
from France that Louis XI., who had at first expressed his pleasure at
their accession, was now in league with their enemies and intended to
invade the provinces of Biscay and Guipuzcoa; Villena and his companions
were in arms; the Archbishop of Toledo sulking in Alcalá de Henares.
To him the Queen determined to go and address a last appeal in person,
leaving her husband to watch the movements of the Portuguese from
Valladolid. Some of those at Court, who knew the pitch of resentment and
fury to which the old Primate had brought his broodings, assured her
that her mission would be in vain, saying that it was beneath her
dignity to thus humble herself to a subject. Isabel replied that she
counted as little on his service as she feared his disloyalty, and that
if he had been anyone else, she would most certainly have weighed the
matter more carefully, but she added, “I would not accuse myself later
with the thought that if I had gone to him in person, he would have
withdrawn from the false road he now seeks to follow.”
She then set out southwards, accompanied by the Marquis of Santillana
newly-created Duke of Infantado, and the Constable of Castile, the Count
of Haro, sending the latter on in advance as they drew near to Alcalá to
announce her coming. Carrillo listened to the Constable’s skilful
reasoning in uneasy silence; but he was not to be cajoled either by his
conscience or by appeals to his vanity, and at length burst into a storm
of passion, declaring that it was his intention to serve the King of
Portugal, and none should turn him from it. If Isabel entered Alcalá by
one gate, he himself would leave by another.
This was plain speaking; and the Queen, who had planned the interview
less from policy than out of regard for the old man, whose restless
jealousy she knew so well, continued on her way to Toledo, where she
intended to make preparations for the defence of Estremadura and
Andalusia.
Ferdinand, in the meanwhile, mustered his forces in Valladolid. So great
was the hatred of the Portuguese that many of the towns of Old Castile
sent citizens equipped at their own expense; while nobles in mail, and
_ginetes_, or lightly-armed horsemen, flocked to the royal standard
along with Biscayan archers and hardy mountaineers from the north.
Joined with the levies of Segovia and Avila, that Isabel had collected
on her journey to Toledo, the whole army mustered about 12,000 horse and
80,000 foot, as it advanced to the relief of the citadel of Toro, both
that town and Zamora having surrendered to the Portuguese through the
treachery of their respective governors. The enthusiasm was general, and
Ferdinand himself burned with the desire to achieve some great deed.
Unfortunately Toro, flanked by fortresses in the power of the
Portuguese, and protected on the rear by the Douro, whence provisions
could be passed into the town, proved altogether too strong for the
besiegers. A stormy council-of-war was held in the Castilian camp, it
being decided that the only wise course would be to retreat. This rumour
spread, gradually taking the shape that the nobles were forcing the King
for their own ends to give up the siege; and in a fury the ordinary
soldiery rushed to the royal tent, swearing to stand by Ferdinand in
whatever act of daring he sought to do, and above all to protect him
from traitors. In bitterness of spirit they learned that he also
counselled retreat, and in disorderly fashion they shook the dust of
Toro from their feet and returned to Valladolid. Their departure
resulted in the surrender of the citadel to the Portuguese, with whom
the Archbishop of Toledo now openly allied himself, rancorously
declaring that he had called Isabel from her spinning-wheel and would
send her back to it again.
From Valladolid Ferdinand was summoned to Burgos. The city was almost
entirely in his favour, but the fortress and the church of Santa Maria
La Blanca were held by the men of the Duke of Arévalo, whose catapults
caused so much destruction that the inhabitants declared unless help was
given they must surrender. In one of the principal streets alone, over
three hundred houses had been burned, while the firing never ceased by
night or day.
Ferdinand and his illegitimate brother, Alfonso, Duke of Villahermosa,
were soon on the scenes, for Burgos was too important a place to be
lost; and earthworks and fortifications were hastily constructed over
against the citadel to prevent help reaching it from the King of
Portugal. All this, however, cost time, and, still more disastrous,
money; for the contents of the treasury in Segovia, handed over by
Andres de Cabrera, were exhausted, and the land, impoverished by Henry
IV.’s misgovernment, could obviously yield few taxes.
The sovereigns, in deep gloom, called a meeting of the Cortes in Medina
del Campo, and laid their monetary difficulties before it. How was the
army to be paid? The problem was the harder for the reckless generosity
of the Portuguese, who gave fine promises of lands and revenues to all
who joined them, the fulfilment depending on the success of the war. One
solution was to permit the Castilian troops to provide for themselves by
pillage and robbery. This the sovereigns at once rejected, nor would
they consent to alienate the few royal estates still remaining to them.
A third suggestion was to exact a loan from the Church, and it speaks
well for the reputation that Ferdinand and Isabel had already
established, that the clergy at once consented to this arrangement. In
the end it was settled that the Church should surrender half her silver
plate to specified royal officials, and that this should be redeemed at
the end of three years by the payment of thirty millions of maravedis.
The war now continued with unabated vigour, not only in the north-west
corner, occupied by Alfonso V., but throughout Castile and even across
the Portuguese border. On hearing of the proclamation at Plasencia,
Ferdinand and Isabel, by way of retaliation, had added to their titles
that of King and Queen of Portugal. This encouraged their partisans in
Galicia and Estremadura to cross the frontier and seize certain of the
enemy’s strongholds, from which they raided the country round, carrying
off cattle and burning villages. In the neighbourhood of Toledo, those
who were discontented with the over-lordship of Archbishop Carrillo and
his nephew the Marquis of Villena took the opportunity to proclaim their
allegiance to Isabel, and in the latter’s name threw off the yoke they
hated. The Count of Paredes, an old warrior who had fought against the
Moors, and who was one of the candidates for the Mastership of Santiago,
joyfully went to their assistance with a large body of troops,
collecting his rival’s revenues at the point of the sword, until the
turmoil forced Villena to leave the King of Portugal and hurry to the
protection of his own estates.
He did not attempt to conceal his indignation with his ally, insisting
that Alfonso should go immediately to Madrid, that from there he might
aid those who had put their trust in him. To this the King replied with
equal bitterness that he saw no reason to risk the loss of Toro and
Zamora by leaving the north; nor was his conscience burdened with the
ill-luck of his allies, seeing that their help had fallen far short of
their promises. This was very true. But a small portion of the nobles
committed to Joanna’s cause had appeared when expected at Arévalo, the
majority of the defaulters not having dared to leave their own
territory, where Ferdinand and Isabel’s partisans kept them occupied in
the defence of their houses and lands.
Isabel herself from Valladolid placed careful guard over the road to
Burgos, that the King of Portugal might not send relief to that citadel.
Ever since the beginning of the war, she had spared herself no pains or
trouble, in her effort to aid Ferdinand in his campaign. At one time she
had journeyed to Toledo to raise the levies of New Castile, at another
hastened northwards to rescue Leon from a governor suspected of
treachery; then again collected and dispatched troops to the help of
Guipuzcoa, where Louis XI. was endeavouring to win a stretch of coveted
seaboard. One evil result of the strain entailed by such exertions had
been her miscarriage in the summer of 1475. Her daughter Isabel was now
doubly precious; and her parents for her better safety had sent her to
Segovia, where she remained in the charge of Andres de Cabrera, lately
created for his services Marquis of Moya.
While the siege of Burgos still delayed, Ferdinand succeeded in gaining
possession of the town of Zamora, after secret correspondence with the
captain who had guard of the main entrance, a strongly fortified bridge.
The Portuguese King was forced to retreat to Toro, and the Castilians,
entering at once, placed siege to the citadel; Isabel supplied troops
and artillery from Valladolid, while each day fresh loyalists appeared
from Galicia.
[Illustration:
TOLEDO, LA PUERTA DEL SOL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON, ROME
]
Alfonso now found himself cut off from Portugal, and, aware that his
fortunes had not matched his hopes, began to try and negotiate
favourable terms of peace. These were still in keeping with his lofty
pretensions; for, in addition to a large sum of money and the permanent
surrender of Toro and Zamora, he demanded that the kingdom of Galicia
should be joined to Portugal.
These conditions Ferdinand and Isabel indignantly refused; whereupon
Alfonso, who had been reinforced by his son, Prince John, and a large
body of troops, advanced once more on Zamora, pitching his tents near
the river-bank. On the other side was a formidable array of earthworks
and ramparts, making communication with the citadel impossible; and
after a few weeks he broke up his camp and slipped away one dark night
as silently as possible in the direction of Toro.
This was the opportunity for which the Castilians had been waiting, and
as soon as they discovered what had happened they swarmed over the
fortifications in hot pursuit. The Portuguese had broken up the bridge
behind them to cover their retreat, so that long hours were spent in
repairing it sufficiently for the transit of the troops. The road also
was often narrow, winding between the Douro and the hills, and it was
almost dusk before Ferdinand came in touch with the enemy’s rear-guard
about three leagues from Toro.
Then the battle began in grim earnest. Prince John of Portugal, who was
on his father’s left, by the use of his small ordnance followed by a
daring charge, succeeded in shattering the forces opposed to him; but on
the centre and right a prolonged struggle ensued, intensified by all the
bitterness of national hatred. Here fought the rival kings, and hard by,
with a lust of war ill becoming their office, the Archbishop of Toledo
on the one side, the Cardinal of Spain on the other. After three hours
of hand-to-hand combat, the Portuguese broke and fled. In the darkness
and the rain, Prince John sounded his trumpets and, rallying such of his
forces as he could, retreated in good order towards Toro. Before him
went a mass of flying fugitives who, coming to the city, beat in vain
upon the closed gates for admittance.
“Where is your King?” cried those within. “You guarded his person in his
room and at his table, in his pleasures and at his feasts, but when his
life and honour were most in your care, you left him alone in the
battle. Where is your King?”
Those of the royal body-guard that stood without hung their heads in
shame and misery. They could not answer. The Archbishop of Toledo
appeared, later Prince John, but neither knew aught of Alfonso. The
Portuguese looked at their Castilian allies askance. Had these betrayed
him? The Castilians returned their glances with defiance. Little good
had foreign help ever brought them!
In this suspense the city continued till morning, when messengers came
from Castronuño, a small fortress in the neighbourhood, to say that
Alfonso had taken refuge there. As easily cast into the depths of
despair, as buoyed by main hopes, he had believed all lost when the
retreat began and imagined Toro already in Ferdinand’s power. This mood
of depression did not last long; for his dispatches to Lisbon narrated a
signal victory.
Isabel was at this time in Tordesillas and celebrated her husband’s
triumph by a religious procession to the church of San Pablo, where
barefoot she gave thanks to God for the mercy He had shown them. She and
Ferdinand also founded the magnificent monastery of San Juan de Los
Reyes in Toledo in memory of the event.
The battle of Toro did not end the Portuguese war, which was destined to
drag on its somewhat uninteresting course for another three years; but
it was decisive enough to show with whom the final victory would be.
Alfonso, in spite of claiming success, left Toro in the charge of a
lieutenant and retired in disgust to his own land. He complained
bitterly of his Castilian allies and the failure of their promises, but
soon recovered heart in the conception of another scheme. This was
nothing less than a personal interview with Louis XI., by which he hoped
to persuade that monarch to join with him in an invasion of Castile; and
with this intention he left his government and niece to the care of his
son, and set sail for France.
Less sanguine of the future, most of his captains in Castile struck the
best bargains with their opponents that they could; the citadels of
Burgos and Zamora both surrendering at once, while Toro followed their
example in the early autumn. Characteristic also of the trend of events
was the appearance of the Duke of Arévalo’s son at Tordesillas to beg
forgiveness for his father; a petition to which Isabel, who was more
anxious to pacify the country than to extort vengeance, readily agreed.
The Duke restored to her the town of Arévalo, changing his title to
Plasencia.
[Illustration:
TOLEDO, CHURCH OF SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON, ROME
]
The Marquis of Villena and Archbishop of Toledo, deprived of their
friends, also sued for mercy, thinking that it was better to lose a
portion of their estates than the whole, but there was little sincerity
in the homage they offered. The rift had widened too far between
Carrillo and his royal mistress ever to be bridged again by mutual
trust; and the Primate remained on his estates brooding over his fallen
fortunes.
Ferdinand in the meanwhile, having realized that the crisis of the war
was over, had gone to Aragon to see his father. The old King, clear of
mind and enterprising as ever at an age when most men have set aside
their life work in weariness of spirit, was planning new schemes for
gaining Roussillon and Cerdagne, while he worked to keep Navarre, now
owned by his grandson Francis Phœbus, from undue French influence. He
had fought through his other difficulties, recovered his sight, subdued
Barcelona, achieved the Castilian alliance; perhaps time would be given
him to realize the rest of his ambitions. If not, there was the son in
whom he had always believed to carry on his work; and he greeted
Ferdinand, not with the mediæval condescension of father to child, but
with the reverence one sovereign offers to another of somewhat higher
rank.
From Aragon Ferdinand was called to help the men of Biscay and Guipuzcoa
in their struggle against their French invaders; while Isabel, left as
sole ruler in Castile, carried on her policy of mingled suppression and
reconciliation.
At the beginning of August, 1476, what threatened to be a serious
rebellion broke out in Segovia, during the absence of the governor,
Andres de Cabrera, now Marquis of Moya. The malcontents, whose
disaffection had been roused by his appointment of certain officials,
succeeded by a ruse in gaining entrance to the citadel and seized the
deputy governor, the father of Beatriz de Bobadilla, while the rest of
the garrison were forced to take refuge in one of the towers with the
Infanta Isabel.
The Queen, warned by messengers, came in haste from Tordesillas and
found the city in confusion, all but one of the gates being in the hands
of the insurgents. The latter begged her not to enter by the gate of San
Juan, which remained faithful to Moya, nor to take with her Beatriz de
Bobadilla his wife nor the Count of Benavente his friend, as such
actions would be bitterly resented by the mob. To this Isabel sent
prompt reply:
Tell these knights and citizens of Segovia that I am Queen of Castile
and this city is mine.... I need not laws nor conditions, such as they
would impose, to enter into my own.
Then with the Count of Benavente and the Cardinal of Spain, one on
either side, she rode through the gate of San Juan and so to the
Alcazar. Behind her surged the crowd, crying death to the Marquis and
his adherents. So threatening was their attitude that the Cardinal of
Spain begged her for her own safety to have the doors tightly closed and
barred; but she, bidding them stay within, went out alone to the top of
the staircase overlooking the big courtyard. At her command the gates
were flung wide, and the mob surged through them, howling and
gesticulating, but at the sight of the Queen their cries died away to
silence.
“My vassals, what do you seek?” she demanded, “for that which is for
your good is for my service, and I am pleased that it should be done.”
One of the crowd, speaking for the rest, begged that Andres de Cabrera
might no longer have command of the Alcazar.
“That which you wish, I wish also,” answered the Queen.
She then bade them go up at once to the towers and walls and drive out
all who were in possession, whether of Cabrera’s following or the actual
rebels who had since occupied the place.
“I will entrust it,” she added, “to one of my servants, who will guard
both his loyalty to me and your honour.”
Her words put an end to the rebellion for, both Cabrera’s adherents and
the insurgent leaders being suppressed, the city remained quiet, and
Isabel was able to enquire into the true facts of the case. This
resulted in the punishment and dismissal of various minor officials, but
the Marquis of Moya, whose conduct was cleared, was restored to his
responsible post.
When Ferdinand returned from Biscay, the sovereigns, after a short time
together, were separated once more; he remaining in the north to watch
over the affairs of Aragon and France, while she went south to
Estremadura and Andalusia. The civil war was practically at an end. Here
and there some strongly fortified place still floated the Portuguese
standard; or the nobles, like wild horses bridled for the first time and
unable to believe themselves mastered, chafed in secret conspiracies or
flamed into spasmodic rebellion. The history of their suppression is
connected rather with the work of reconstruction than of actual warfare.
For the moment this one change, effected by the sovereigns’ methods,
challenges our attention,—that the great cities of the south, lately the
scenes of chronic feuds and rebellions, were turning again to be the
centres of civilization and justice for their neighbourhoods.
[Illustration:
SEGOVIA, THE ALCAZAR
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
It was in Seville, whose streets had often run red in the faction fights
of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia and the Marquis of Cadiz, that Isabel made
her headquarters; and here on the 30th of June, 1478, the long-hoped-for
heir to the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon was born. John, Prince of
Asturias, opened his eyes on a world of fairer prospects than the
dangers and doubts that had hung about his sister’s cradle. Not only
within their own territories but elsewhere in Europe the sovereigns had
begun to make their power felt, and as their influence grew that of
Alfonso of Portugal diminished.
His journey to France, so magnificently conceived, had ended in even
greater ignominy than the rest of his castles in Spain; perhaps because
Louis XI., so necessary a _persona_ of his drama, utterly failed to play
the part assigned to him. Alfonso’s reception at Orleans had been all
that his heart could desire; citizens had bowed themselves before him,
the torchlit streets had been hung with tapestry, feasts and music had
entertained him at his lodging. From Orleans he passed to Tours and here
Louis XI. met him, and the two sovereigns affectionately embraced. They
declared that the one hour in their lives for which they had always
longed had come; but when they descended to business the French King
showed himself coldly obtuse to his companion’s eloquence. He admitted
the heinousness of Isabel’s offence, but protested that he had already
shown his indignation by his invasion of Biscay and Guipuzcoa. At
present he was too fully occupied with his quarrel with Charles of
Burgundy to do more, but when that was settled he would have his hands
free to embark on wider schemes. Besides by that time Alfonso would have
obtained the dispensation for his marriage and so stand on far surer
ground. It would be as well for all concerned to have Joanna’s claims
acknowledged by the Papal Court.
The King of Portugal was in no position to apply pressure and could only
wait in blind trustfulness for the fulfilment of these hints. He on his
part did his best to carry out the conditions suggested; and messengers
were sent at once to Rome, who, mainly through French influence, wrung
the desired bull from Sixtus IV. Fortune seemed to throw her weight into
his scales, for in January, 1477, Charles the Bold was killed at Nanci,
and Alfonso now looked eagerly for his ally to turn his attention to
Spanish affairs.
[Illustration:
PRINCE JOHN, SON OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL. (FUNERAL EFFIGY.)
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
Disillusionment followed. Far from having his hands free, Louis XI. was
busier than ever. It had been more arduous work perhaps to set pitfalls
and traps for the warlike Duke than to attempt the annexation of Biscay
and Guipuzcoa; but the profits and interest to be gained from robbing
Charles’s daughter and heiress, the Duchess Mary, of her outlying lands
and possessions were infinitely greater than any to be found in Spain.
Thus the Duke’s death had not only advanced the Portuguese schemes no
further, but the French King had begun to look on his royal guest as an
unmitigated bore, of whom he was only longing to see the last.
The truth that he was being duped dawned on Alfonso at length, and in
abject despair he vowed that he would cast aside his crown and go on a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or at least end his days in a monastery. So
vehement were the messages that he dispatched to Lisbon to this effect
that his people took him at his word; and when, having somewhat
recovered his spirits, he landed on his own shores, it was to learn that
his son had been proclaimed King in his stead. His adventures had now
reached a stage when they might easily have drifted from the ludicrous
into the tragic, had not Prince John generously withdrawn his claims in
his father’s favour. Alfonso V. reigned once more.
With unabated anger he laid his plans for a new invasion of Castile and
allied himself with malcontent nobles of Estremadura. Rebellion blazed
again along the border, fomented by the Bishop of Ebora at the head of
some Portuguese troops, but it was the last spurt of an almost exhausted
fire.
Sympathy at home and abroad were alienated. Louis XI., more hopeful of
adding Franche Comté to his possessions than the hostile population of
Northern Spain, had come to terms with Castile; Sixtus IV., under
pressure from Castile, Aragon, and the Aragonese House of Naples, had
revoked his bull of dispensation for Joanna’s marriage; Ferdinand
himself, in January, 1479, had succeeded his father peacefully in the
three divisions of the western kingdom.
[Illustration:
JOANNA “LA BELTRANEJA”
FROM SITGES’ “ENRIQUE IV, Y LA EXCELENTE SEÑORA.”
]
Circumstances thus urged peace; and Alfonso, bowing to necessity,
consented to negotiations which ended in the treaty of Lisbon, signed on
September 24, 1479. The sovereigns on either side renounced the titles
they had usurped; the King of Portugal bound himself by oath never to
marry with his niece; Isabel and Ferdinand agreed to pardon their
rebellious subjects. For Joanna there was a choice of three things:
either to wed the little Prince of Asturias, sixteen years her junior,
when he should have reached a marriageable age; or else to enter a
convent of the Order of Santa Clara; failing these, to leave Portugal
and its dominions for ever.
Joanna had been given six months, within which to make her decision. She
had suffered much in her troubled life from suitors who had asked her
hand for their own ends and for the same reason repudiated her. She had
found in her mother’s land her only refuge. These remembrances may have
coloured her choice, for in the following year she entered the convent
of Santa Clara at Coimbra; two ambassadors from Castile being present.
One of these, Isabel’s confessor Fra Fernando de Talavera, while making
her a last offer of the hand of the Prince of Asturias, assured her that
she had chosen the better part, from which no true friend or adviser
would tempt her to turn aside. To this the Princess answered that her
decision had been given willingly and without reward; and thus passed
for the time being from the pages of history.
CHAPTER V
ORGANIZATION AND REFORM
Isabel and Ferdinand had emerged victorious from the Portuguese war; but
the wounds their power had received were to be long in healing; and one
at least, the poverty of their exchequer, remained a constant sore and
vexation.
A certain Canon of Toledo, in an oration made to the Catholic sovereigns
at the height of their power, recalls the opening of their reign:
You received your sceptre [he said] from the hands of the Most High
God ... at a time when the flames of civil war burned fiercely and the
rights of the community were well-nigh lost. Then were our swords
employed, not to defend the boundaries of Christendom, but to rip up
the entrails of our country. Enemies at home drank greedily the blood
of our citizens; he was the most esteemed among us who was the
strongest in violence; justice and peace were far removed.
Murder, rape, and robbery! These, according to the Sicilian historian
Lucio Marineo, were hourly crimes, perpetrated without fear of
punishment by the marauding bands, who haunted the highways, and even
commandeered royal fortresses and strongholds as bases of operations for
their raids.
“Many a man was taken prisoner,” says Marineo, “whose relations ransomed
him no less dearly than if he had been a captive of the Moors or of some
other enemy of the Holy Catholic Faith.”
In a letter, written in the autumn of 1473, Hernando de Pulgar portrays
no less clearly the absolute negation of government in Southern Spain.
Andalusia is the prey of rival families; for the moment they have
consented to a truce, but none knows whether the exhausted land will
bear, nor who will reap the harvest. As to the neighbouring province of
Murcia, “I dare swear, Señor,” adds Pulgar, “that we look on it as a
country more alien than Navarre, seeing that it is now over five years
since letter, messenger, procurador, or magistrate, either went or came
from thence.”
Amid such scenes of anarchy, the mass of the people made what shift they
could to protect their lives and goods. In their despair, “God,” in the
words of the chronicler, “inspired them,” so that they endeavoured to
take the justice that had been denied them into their own hands. Here
and there throughout the country troops of armed men were raised who,
under the title of “La Santa Hermandad,” or “Holy Brotherhood,” bound
themselves to maintain the peace of their district and to punish
evildoers.
The idea was not original. Introduced towards the end of the thirteenth
century as a political expedient, the organization of local levies had
developed as the years passed into a recognized means of providing armed
police in times of danger or distress. Yet, in spite of charters and
laws determining its functions and resources, the Holy Brotherhood had
never hardened in practice into a permanent institution. It depended too
largely for its upkeep on a class of men, whose sole interest was the
preservation of the commerce and industry by which they earned their
livelihood. Only the anxiety of the moment could persuade such
peace-loving citizens either to take arms themselves, or to buy immunity
by opening their shallow purses. Thus, when the crisis of any
disturbance was over, enthusiasm for the scheme of protection would
almost certainly wane; and the police-machinery either collapse or waste
its energies in contentions with local magistrates.
Henry IV. had joyfully welcomed the reappearance of the “Santa
Hermandad.” Here was an ally to whom he could leave the summary
administration of justice that he found so irksome, and for whose
maintenance he need not beggar his exchequer. When told of a brotherhood
formed at Tordesillas, he exclaimed with his usual glib quotation of
scripture: “This is God’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.”
Acknowledging his own helplessness, he addressed the chief officials in
terms of encouragement that for all their extravagance cost him little:
Go forth with your pennons! Display your banners! That ten may conquer
a hundred, and that a hundred may be as a thousand, and that a
thousand may quell all who come against you. For should you not go,
Castile will cease to be. Should you not rouse yourselves her ruin is
certain.
Whether the Hermandad, thus exhorted, found the praise satisfying
chroniclers do not say. In the face of the almost universal anarchy,
purely local efforts, whether inspired by panic or genuine patriotism,
were doomed to failure: and when the horrors of a foreign invasion were
added to domestic discord, the last feeble attempts at self-defence
flickered out into helplessness.
In this extremity the new sovereigns, recognizing that the restoration
of order must originate with them, consented in the Cortes of Madrigal
of 1476 to a proposal that there should be a general Hermandad for the
kingdoms of Castile, Leon, and Asturias. Two months later the deputies,
assembled in Dueñas, discussed its organization and character, the
authors of the suggested reform meeting at first with stormy opposition.
Some present denounced the methods under question as entirely wrong,
while others complained that the good to be reaped would not balance the
necessary expenditure; but in the end all such arguments were
overridden, and the Santa Hermandad was established for three years on
its new basis.
The executive was to consist of some two thousand horsemen and a number
of foot-soldiers to be held in perpetual readiness to pursue and punish
evildoers. At the head of this force was placed Ferdinand’s illegitimate
brother, Alfonso, Duke of Villahermosa; and below him captains for each
locality, whose business it was to raise the hue and cry, as soon as a
well-authenticated tale of crime came to their ears.
Wherever there was a case of burglary or rape; wherever, in the open
country some assault or act of violence was perpetrated; or if the
offender, having committed his crime within the precincts of a town,
fled for safety to the woods and fields beyond the walls; or if, being
charged with some offence, he resisted the summons, the matter fell
within the jurisdiction of the local Hermandad.
Raising his force, the captain of the district must pursue his man
relentlessly, summoning to him as he went all the privates and officers
of the Brotherhood within sound of his alarm, till at some five leagues
distant from his home, a colleague would take up the chase; and so from
boundary to boundary the suspected criminal would be hunted down. Led
back in triumph to the scene of the crime, he would be hailed at once
before the local “Alcaldes,” or Judges of the Hermandad, and there, if
convicted, receive summary justice, of which this one thing was certain,
that it would not err on the side of mercy.
The least punishment administered was mutilation, the loss of a foot for
some small robbery that the thief, whatever his inclinations, should
have power to steal no more. In the majority of cases there was but one
sentence—“death.” A priest was fetched, and the convicted man, having
confessed his sins and received the Sacraments as a “Catholic
Christian,” was at once bound to a tree, and there met his doom from the
arrows of the troopers who had so lately captured him. Of the lasting
power of the repentance expressed by such ruffians contemporaries had
their doubts, for an ordinance of the Hermandad commanded that the
guilty man “should die as speedily as possible that his soul might pass
from him with the greater safety.”
The whole of the proceedings, from the hasty trial to the merciless
sentence and its immediate enactment, bears the taint of barbarism. It
can only be estimated rightly in connection with the burning homesteads
and their murdered and tortured inhabitants that such stern justice came
to check. One safeguard against local tyranny the regulations of the
Hermandad provided,—an appeal in doubtful cases from the Alcaldes to a
central Junta, or Supreme Court, and if necessary beyond that to the
sovereigns themselves. Save for royal supervision the decisions of this
court, which was composed of a deputy from each province with the Bishop
of Cartagena as its president, were absolute; and thus it was given full
scope for its work of controlling the different branches and for
securing cohesion between their officials.
The expenses of the new machinery were met by a tax of 1800 maravedis on
every one hundred householders, to provide for the maintenance and
equipment of a single horseman. In a country, poverty-stricken through
long years of internal unrest and consequent commercial insecurity, such
a burden could only be justified by extreme need; but time was to prove
the compensation more than adequate.
“None of the reforms of Ferdinand and Isabella were so efficient in
restoring order,” says a modern historian, speaking of the Santa
Hermandad, and, he also adds, “none did more to centralize power.” This
latter fact was realized by many of the nobles. Here was the nucleus of
a standing army, controlled by a central council under royal
supervision. Its officers, when in pursuit of their prey, claimed the
right of entry, not only within the gates of walled cities under
municipal jurisdiction, but into fortified castles hitherto inviolable.
Thus the Santa Hermandad, in attacking anarchy, threatened territorial
independence; and an aristocracy, that had zealously fomented trouble
for its private ends, received the due reward of its efforts.
In vain a gathering of prelates and nobles complained at Corbeñas of the
arbitrary and illegal character of the new police force. They had lived
as a class apart and could expect no sympathy from the mass of the
nation. Neither with peasant nor burgher were the expenses of the Holy
Brotherhood popular, but both were willing to pay a high price for the
security of their lives and goods.
The citizens and artisans and all the poor people desirous of peace
[says Pulgar] were very joyful; and they gave thanks to God, because
they saw a time in which it pleased Him to have pity on these
kingdoms, through the justice that the King and Queen began to
execute, and because each man thought to possess his own without fear
that another would take it from him by force.
At the end of three years the Hermandad, to the general satisfaction,
was granted a new lease of life. Its path was also smoothed by the
conduct of the Constable of Castile, Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, Count
of Haro,—the same who had once argued with the recalcitrant Archbishop
of Toledo on the subject of loyalty. Eager to prove his own, he
willingly gave the officers of the Hermandad access to his demesnes,
even joining with the members of his household to assist them in their
work. As he was accredited with more vassals than any other of his
peers, his example was followed by those of the leading nobles who
wished to win royal favour. Lesser territorial magnates yielded perforce
to the trend of popular opinion; and the sphere of action enjoyed by the
Hermandad widened, not only to include the entire dominions of Castile
but also the kingdom of Aragon.
Its work was the more effective from the attitude adopted towards it by
Ferdinand and Isabel. Had they sought only the aggrandizement of their
own power, using the judges and officials merely as royal agents to
gratify their personal dislikes, or to bring money into their coffers,
they would have speedily disillusioned the nation. Tyranny that apes
justice can never conceal for long its guiding principle of
self-interest; but in the case of the Queen it soon became obvious that
she entered into the spirit of righteous dealing as eagerly as the
poorest and least protected of her subjects.
It must not be inferred from this that the Castilian Princess had been
endowed with a love of truth under any circumstances. Her life had been
spent for the most part in an atmosphere of treachery, where he who was
the least reliable or conscientious scored highest in the game of
politics; and, when necessity forced her to play a hand as in the case
of her marriage, she had proved herself capable of “bluffing” with the
best. The threading of such intricate mazes was an ordinary statesman’s
career, and Isabel had been born with an aptitude for statecraft. What
was worth a great deal more to Spain was her aptitude for kingship.
Throughout the troublous years, spent first at the Court of one brother
and then wandering in rebellion with another, she had seen the Crown
dragged through the mire. Instinct had taught her that its degradation
was largely deserved. The sovereign who fails to keep the respect of his
subjects has forfeited the claim even to respect himself; he has truly
abdicated his rights.
Isabel’s conscience might suffer no pangs for those she had deceived in
the war of politics, but her whole soul revolted from a lowering of her
ideal of sovereignty. “The king was the father of his people, the
fountain of law and justice.” The pride that insisted on the recognition
of this dignity insisted also on a king’s fulfilment of its conditions.
Isabel had been the first to repudiate the notion that the Santa
Hermandad should be suppressed directly the crisis of public unrest was
ended, but she had no mind that it should earn an evil reputation for
the Crown by unbridled tyranny. In 1483 she and Ferdinand held an
enquiry into its past administration, and punished not only those who
had defied its justice, but also judges convicted of favouritism and
officials who had been guilty of excessive demands, or who had
appropriated more than their share of the funds.
Such equitable dealing was in marked contrast with the methods of Henry
IV., whose practice it had been to farm out the posts of “corregidor”
amongst his dissolute favourites and to allow them to recoup themselves
for the purchase by what means they liked. In vain the citizens had
complained that under this system any robber or murderer could buy his
freedom. The “corregidores,” as they released those who bribed them,
were ready with the cynical justification that human blood would neither
pay the King nor reward them for their labours.
The appointments made by Henry’s successor were based on a totally
different standard, that of capability for the office in question. Great
was the surprise of men who had supported Isabel in the civil war, when
their petitions for royal agencies met with the response that their
services would be recompensed in some other way. This promise, we are
told, was faithfully kept; but the offices they had coveted passed into
different hands. The Queen’s experience had taught her that the loyal
soldier is not always gifted with the best business head, nor with the
most persuasive tongue.
An instance of the difficulties encountered by the new régime may be
seen in the settlement of Galicia at the end of the Portuguese war. That
turbulent province had been the prey of tyrant nobles since the days of
John II., Isabel’s father. Mushroom fortresses had sprung up to defend
the bands of robbers who infested its highways and oppressed the smaller
towns and villages. Rents and tithes were collected by those whose only
right was the sword with which they emphasized their demand; while even
the lands belonging to the monasteries and churches had been sequestered
for secular purposes.
In 1481, two officials appeared at Santiago, charged by Ferdinand and
Isabel with the Herculean task of restoring peace and justice. In
response to their summons the Procuradores of the various towns and
country districts came to assist them; but, though all bore witness to
the prevailing anarchy, none showed enthusiasm for its cure. Their sole
response to the suggestions offered was that “disorder was sanctioned by
custom and must therefore be the natural state of affairs.” It is a type
of argument that centuries of use have not worn threadbare.
By dint of persuasion and encouragement the royal officials at length
discovered the true objection to their mission. The Procuradores could
remember the visits of previous officials who had undertaken a like
work. Either they had proved worse rogues than those they came to
punish, or else they had found their means of justice totally
insufficient and had fled, leaving the men who had supported them to
face the rebels’ vengeance. Not till the newcomers had taken a solemn
oath that they would never desert the province until they had
established peace and order there, would those who listened agree to
give them aid.
With this mutual understanding a strange day dawned for Galicia. Here
were a governor and corregidor established in Santiago, just and
incorruptible, who enforced their sentences with a swift certainty that
struck terror into the most hardened bravado. Fired by this example the
Procuradores, when they went to their own homes, adopted like measures,
and within three months over 1500 robbers had been driven from the
province to seek fresh fields of plunder. Many of the leaders were dead.
They had been unable to believe that money would not save their lives
when captured, and eagerly but in vain had made offers of their
ill-gotten riches.
Royal agents, both in Galicia and other parts of Castile, might have
proved more susceptible to bribery but for the example set by the Queen
herself, whose path of justice was not without its temptations. On one
occasion, when in Medina del Campo, a poor woman threw herself at her
feet and begged for assistance and protection. Her husband, who was a
notary, had disappeared and she felt certain he was the victim of some
cruel plot. Isabel commanded her officials to make instant enquiry, and
the body of the notary was discovered, buried in the courtyard of a
certain wealthy noble of the neighbourhood, called Alvar Yañez. At the
trial it was proved that Yañez had first induced his victim to sign a
forged document, by which he himself hoped to gain possession of a
neighbour’s property, and that he had then murdered his witness, never
expecting that anyone would dare to lay the accusation at his door, far
less that he would be punished if discovered.
On account of his wealth he still hoped to save his life, and cunningly
offered, in return for a pardon, the enormous sum of 40,000 ducats to go
towards the expenses of a war against the Infidel. This was a project
that Isabel was known to have much at heart; and, since its main
hindrance had been the poverty of the royal exchequer not a few of her
counsellors urged her to let such a pious gift atone for the crime.
“The Queen,” we are told, “preferred justice to money”; and Alvar Yañez
was beheaded. Even then she might, on some specious pretext, have seized
the guilty man’s possessions; but instead she commanded that the
inheritance should go to his sons, so that all might recognize her
object in maintaining the sentence had not been to enrich herself but to
punish evil.
Other instances of her rigorous justice there are many, but none more
characteristic than her famous “Audiences” in Seville. Thither she had
gone in the spring of 1477 to supervise the pacification of Southern
Spain; while Ferdinand in the north kept watch over the Portuguese army
and the chronic disturbances on the Pyrenean border.
The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, riding out from the city to meet her with
the four-and-twenty gaily clad nobles of his suite and a throng of royal
officials and clergy, tended her with complacent homage the keys of the
different gates. Was he not lord of the city? “Duke of Seville” he was
popularly called, since he had succeeded in driving his rival, the
Marquis of Cadiz, beyond the walls. The Marquis, it is true, had
retaliated by seizing the strong fortress of Xerez; but the Duke now
meant to recover this through the Queen’s influence and favour. By good
fortune his rival had married a sister of that arch-rebel the Marquis of
Villena, and chastisement of the brother-in-law could therefore, he
hoped, be looked on as a piece of disinterested patriotism.
It was in this spirit the Duke had chosen to regard the faction fights
that had decimated the population of Seville and forced many of its
leading citizens into exile. Not so those, whose fathers, husbands,
sons, and brothers had died fighting in sheer self-defence, their backs
against the very houses now hung with tapestries and brocades! Not so
those, whose wives and daughters had been the prey of dissolute
mercenaries! Not so those, who had been dispossessed of their lands, or
whose shops had been raided and sacked!
It was the cry of such as these that made Isabel hold public audience
every Friday, that the injured might bring her their complaints. Raised
high on a dais in the large hall of the Alcazar, with the prelates and
knights below her on the one side, and the Doctors of her Council on the
other, she listened, weighed evidence, and gave judgment, referring the
more doubtful cases for enquiry by special “Alcaldes,” with the
injunction that there should be no delay. As a result hundreds of
criminals were executed, and lands and goods were restored to their
rightful owners; while in some instances so strong was the fear aroused
that voluntary restitution was made, in the hope of avoiding a trial.
It is characteristic of Isabel that the ever-increasing revelation of
crime failed to shake her purpose. It was her will, as “the fountain of
justice,” to see justice prevail; and through all the long hours of
accusation and defence, through case after case, she and her
fellow-judges listened with a grave impartiality that won for her
tribunal a respect bordering on the horror accorded to the superhuman.
If there was to be nothing but strict justice, who in Seville should be
saved?
At length the Bishop of the city and its leading citizens ventured to
remonstrate. The number of murders and robberies committed had been so
great, they declared, that scarcely a family could call itself
guiltless; and they petitioned that an amnesty might be granted, lest
the people in despair were driven to fresh crime.
A ruler of more obstinate fibre would have contended with pitiless logic
that justice being equivalent to right could never prove excessive.
Isabel had too much inherent common-sense to make this mistake; and,
realizing that the advice was good, she consented to the publication of
a general pardon for the city and its environs, that should cover all
crimes and offences with one exception, the unpardonable sin of heresy.
Seville at large heaved a sigh of relief; but the Duke of
Medina-Sidonia, at this stage of the proceedings, was not so pleased. He
had been steadily poisoning Isabel’s mind against his rival since her
advent to the city, accusing him of giving secret support to some
fortresses in the neighbourhood that still upheld the claims of “La
Beltraneja.” Nothing but force, he protested, would succeed against such
a traitor; but in the midst of his denunciations the Marquis of Cadiz
appeared in Seville, accompanied only by a few attendants. Riding to the
Alcazar, he petitioned for a private audience with the Queen, and there
pleaded his cause with a brevity and directness that appealed to his
listener more than the most subtle arguments. Plain speaking was almost
a virtue to Isabel’s mind.
Declaring that individuals were responsible for their own conduct alone,
he repudiated any connection with Villena save the tie of marriage with
his sister. His sword had been drawn in self-defence when the Duke
attacked him in his house and drove him from the city; but he had
neither the time nor inclination to help the Portuguese. In token of his
loyalty he offered to hand over Xerez and the other fortresses in his
power to whatever officials Isabel chose to send in her name.
Such a complete surrender bears witness to the impression already
created in Castile by the new sovereigns. It was the certainty that he
would obtain justice that had brought the Marquis of Cadiz so trustingly
to Seville. It was fear of what disobedience might cost him that made
the Duke of Medina-Sidonia submit to his enemy’s return to favour. The
Queen on her part accepted their compliance as if she thought it the
only possible course they could have adopted; but she knew their rivalry
still smouldered, and, having gained control of their fortresses, took
steps to prevent further trouble. Neither Duke nor Marquis, she
declared, should put foot in Seville henceforth without her leave;
though she and Ferdinand gave their promise that they would enquire into
the quarrel when leisure permitted, and would see what could be done to
effect a settlement, that both might return to the city in safety.
Circumstances, however, were to make this interposition unnecessary, as
will be seen in a later chapter.
The justice shown in Galicia and Seville was typical of the measures
adopted elsewhere; measures so widespread that the old machinery of
government proved totally inadequate for their execution. Reconstruction
went perforce hand in hand with reform; and, just as in the Cortes of
Madrigal and Dueñas the Santa Hermandad had been placed on a new and
more practical basis, so in the Cortes of Toledo of 1480 the whole
executive and judicial system was subjected to a close revision.
Amongst the changes effected, none was to prove of more lasting
influence than the decided bias there given towards the employment of
the lawyer class in all important matters of state. Sprung mainly from
the _bourgeoisie_, or from the ranks of the lesser nobility, the lawyers
had for a long time rendered to Castilian sovereigns their services of
penmanship and technical knowledge; but the preponderating power in the
royal counsels had remained the higher aristocracy with its claims of
blood and wealth.
Ferdinand and Isabel did not set themselves openly to humble the latter
class, as Henry IV. had attempted in his new creations; but the fact
that the government was daily growing more specialized made it necessary
that trained and expert officials should take the place of amateurs,
however high their personal qualifications. Thus, in the Cortes of
Toledo, the composition of the Royal Council, before mainly
aristocratic, was officially settled as one bishop, three “caballeros,”
or knights, and eight or nine lawyers. This does not mean that the
greater nobles suddenly received an intimation that their presence was
no longer required. They were welcomed as before with profound respect,
but the feeling that it rested with themselves whether they attended or
no would soon encourage the less strenuous to withdraw. A further
impetus to their exclusion would be given by the division of the
government into the specialized departments described by Hernando de
Pulgar in his account of the Cortes of Toledo.
Hitherto the Royal Council, “Nuestro Consejo” as the sovereigns were
fond of alluding to it, had been the chief medium of their will. At
times a consultative committee, its functions were also administrative
and judicial; and, in the latter aspect, it had tended to absorb much of
the work belonging to the other Courts of Law, such as the “Royal
Audiences” or “Chancery” for civil cases, and the supreme criminal court
of the “Alcaldes de Corte.”
In response to the deputies’ petitions, the encroachments of the Royal
Council in this respect were forbidden; while a scheme was discussed by
which the Court of Chancery, which had followed the sovereigns from
place to place to the great inconvenience of litigants, was in 1485
permanently established in Valladolid for the benefit of Northern
Castile. Another similar court was also placed in Ciudad Real to supply
the needs of the country south of the Tagus, being removed however at
the end of the Moorish war to the more important town of Granada.
At first sight it would seem from these measures as if the judicial
functions of the Royal Council had been destroyed, whereas on the
contrary they were to develop an authority, that not only threatened but
dominated the “Audiences” of Valladolid and the South. Of the five
departments of government defined by the Cortes of Toledo, it was in the
Council of Justice that the true nucleus of the Royal Council, their
common ancestor, remained. Here sat the King and Queen in person, the
recognized source of all Castilian law; here, in their absence, ruled a
President, whose authority was reckoned in the kingdom as second only to
that of Sovereignty itself; here was a body of highly trained lawyers,
whose official acts demanded the unqualified obedience of every subject,
and whose decisions on legal matters were final. It is little wonder if
the Council of Justice became the dominating element of the Castilian
Government.
The Council of State, the second of the new departments for public
affairs, was also presided over by the King and Queen, but it dealt
mainly with foreign negotiations, hearing embassies and transacting
business with the Court of Rome. In addition there was the Supreme Court
of the Santa Hermandad, a Council of Finance, and a Council for settling
purely Aragonese matters.
A link between these central councils and the local government of the
country was found in “pesquisidores,” or inspectors, sent out from
headquarters to enquire how the law was being administered and obeyed.
Were the repressive measures against the Jews sternly enforced? Were the
“corregidores,” now in 1480 imposed by royal authority on all cities and
towns, doing their duty both by the Crown and also by the municipalities
in which they were placed? Had any governor of a fortress or other
official oppressed the people in his neighbourhood, or for his own ends
shown favouritism to certain families? These were some of the questions
to which the inspector must require an answer, and where those answers
were unsatisfactory it rested with him to see justice performed.
Such was the revised machinery of government, revealing already that
decisively bureaucratic stamp that was to be so marked a feature of its
later development. Obvious also was its fatal dependence on the Crown,
the motive power alone capable of supplying the councils with
initiative, nor could any counterpoise to sovereignty be hoped for in
the type of official now prominent. The exaltation of the Crown was the
first article of belief for lawyers steeped in Justinian’s code with its
theories of imperial absolutism. Yet it must be remembered that,
although this system contained within itself the germs of tyranny, in
the early days of Ferdinand and Isabel’s rule centralized power stood
for the triumph of right over wrong, of order over anarchy. By no other
means could these ends have been so effectively and speedily won.
“Justice, which seems to have abandoned other lands,” wrote Peter Martyr
in 1492, “pervades these kingdoms.”
It had been bought by the sovereigns at the price of unflagging industry
and watchfulness, now employed in a struggle against foreign enemies or
subject rebels, now against the prejudices of class or community, now
against the corruption of trusted officials.
Sometimes the chief enemy to be faced was bewilderment,—the difficulty
of administering a law that was not one but many. The judge must have a
clear head who could steer his way through the mazes of the old “Fuero
Juzgo” of the Gothic kings, or the later compilations of Castilian
sovereigns, such as the “Fuero Real,” the “Siete Partidas,” or the
“Ordenamiento de Alcalá.” Even these did not cover the field of
legislation, further complicated by local charters and royal edicts,
involving a thousand variations and discrepancies.
After the matter had been discussed in the Cortes of Toledo, a noted
jurist, Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo, undertook by the Queen’s command the
task of clearing away the rubbish and compiling what remained into a
comprehensive code. Within four years the work stood completed in eight
bulky volumes, and the “Ordenanzas Reales” took their place on the legal
bookshelves; but though undoubtedly of great authority the new
compilation failed to fulfil the general expectations. A study of its
pages revealed not only mistakes and repetitions, but also many serious
omissions; while a further publication by the same author a few years
later scarcely proved more satisfactory. So conscious was Isabel of
these defects that in her will she entreated her daughter, Joanna, “to
select a learned and conscientious bishop and other persons wise and
experienced in the law,” that they might undertake this formidable task
anew.
Legal, judicial, and administrative abuses had thus received their share
of amendment; but it is scarcely too much to say that all the reforms in
these directions would have proved useless, but for the steps taken to
check financial disaster. That commerce and industry should have sunk to
a low ebb was the inevitable corollary of a foreign and civil war, but
still more evil in its influence had been the steady depreciation of the
coinage. Not only had the five royal mints turned out bad metal to
supply Henry IV. with the money which he squandered so lavishly, but his
very monopoly of coining rights had been squandered too, or disputed by
rebellious subjects. By the end of his reign the five mints had grown
into one hundred and fifty, and the _reals_ and _blancas_ produced by
private furnaces had descended to a mere fraction of their former value.
The decay of industry and the worthless coinage combined to inflate
prices extravagantly, with the result that men of moderate means were
ruined, and the distrust increased till no one would accept the current
issues either in payment of debts or in return for goods.
Such was the state of perdition into which the kingdom had fallen
[says a contemporary writer], that those who travelled by the highways
could not satisfy their hunger either for good money or for bad; nor
was there any price at which those who laboured in the fields were
willing to sell.
A primitive system of barter had sprung up when, in the first year of
their reign, Ferdinand and Isabel once more established the monopoly of
the royal mints, and fixed a legal standard to which the coinage must
approximate. These reforms were absolutely necessary to restore public
confidence, but they involved a drain on the treasury which it was
impossible to satisfy by ordinary means. We have seen already that in
1475 the sovereigns had recourse to a loan raised on the ecclesiastical
plate, but it was an expedient that would not bear repetition, even if
the Queen had not regarded the repayment of the original sum as her most
sacred duty. Some other way must be found that would not threaten the
property of the Church, if it was to find approval in her eyes.
The deputies assembled at Toledo shook their heads gloomily over the
suggestion of increased taxation. They represented the _pecheros_, or
taxed classes, and knew that the little that could be raised by this
method would slip in and out of the treasury as through a sieve.
Taxation might prove a momentary makeshift, but in the exhausted state
of the country it could offer no permanent solution of the problem.
On examination, the chief cause of the poverty was shown to be the
wholesale alienation of royal estates in the previous reign. Henry IV.
had silenced the remonstrances of his treasurer by announcing that
prodigality was a king’s duty. “Give to some,” he commanded, “that they
may serve me; to others lest they should rob me; for by the grace of God
I am King and have treasures and rents enough to supply all men.”
It was a boast that did not hold good, for towards the end of his reign
the wretched monarch had been driven to meet expenses by selling
annuities levied on his estates; and the Court, taking advantage of his
necessities as it had of his generosity, beat down the price till the
sums they paid often represented no more than a single year’s income.
Such transactions were not far removed from robbery; and the Cortes of
Toledo soon came to the conclusion that the only hope of lasting
financial reform lay in a resumption of the alienated lands and rents.
This decision was warmly approved by the Cardinal of Spain, the leading
nobles of the Court, and Doctors of the Royal Council; but Ferdinand and
Isabel were reluctant to take so large a step without further
consultation.
And because this business was difficult and of great importance [says
Hernando de Pulgar] the King and Queen wrote letters to all the dukes,
prelates, and barons of their kingdom, who were absent from their
Court, telling them of their great necessities and asking their
opinion, pressing them either to come themselves or to send word what
they thought should be done; and all were of opinion that the
alienated estates should be restored.
It was a resolution that reflected credit on a class of men who had too
often shown themselves selfish and disloyal. Many, however, like the
Count of Haro who threw open his lands to the Santa Hermandad, were
weary of anarchy and knew they must pay for its suppression. Others were
fired by the energy and courage of their rulers, or else hoped to
propitiate royal favour. Loyalty, so long dormant, was in the air.
By general consent it was agreed that the Cardinal of Spain should hold
an enquiry into the tenure of estates and rents acquired during the last
reign. Those that had not been granted as a reward for signal services
were to be restored without compensation; while those that had been sold
at a price far below their real value were to be bought back at the same
sum. The delicate work of apportioning these deductions was entrusted to
Isabel’s confessor, Fra Fernando de Talavera, a man respected throughout
Spain for his integrity and saintly life.
His settlement cost some of the nobles the half or even the whole of
their acquisitions, others some smaller fraction; but by Isabel’s
command there was no revocation of gifts made to churches, hospitals, or
the poor. The treasury became the richer by the substantial addition of
thirty millions of maravedis, of which Henry IV.’s old favourite,
Beltran de La Cueva, Duke of Alburquerque, contributed over a million.
The rest of the leading nobles suffered heavily though in a less degree,
nor was the Cardinal’s own family, the Mendozas, spared. “Some were
ill-content,” says the chronicler, “but all submitted, remembering how
these gifts had been obtained at the expense of the royal patrimony.”
In spite of their losses the nobles still remained the predominant class
in wealth, as the tales of their private resources during the Moorish
war bear witness. Ferdinand and Isabel themselves did not hesitate to
bestow large gifts on loyal servants such as the Marquis of Moya, nor to
confirm the aristocratic privilege of freedom from taxation; but the
fact that they were able to curb unlawful gains shows the new spirit
that had entered into Castilian life. Significant also is the social
legislation of the day that forbade even dukes to quarter the royal
crown on their scutcheons, or to make use of expressions such as _es mi
merced_! “It is my will!”
The sovereign had ceased to be _primus inter pares_ and had become a
being set apart by right of peculiar dignity and power.
Such a change would have been impossible, had the Military Orders
retained their old independence. They have been described as “states
within a state”; for the Masters with their rich “commanderies” that
they could bestow at pleasure, their fortresses and revenues, and their
private armies of knights had influence and wealth nothing less than
royal. The elective character of their office led almost invariably to
civil war; and we have seen that, in the case of the Mastership of
Santiago, when the old Marquis of Villena died, no less than seven
candidates appeared in the field, ready to contest the honour.
One of these, the aged Count of Paredes, had obtained confirmation of
his title many years before from Pope Eugenius IV., but had always been
cheated out of its enjoyment by the greed of royal favourites. In 1476
he died, and the Chief Commander of Leon, Don Alonso de Cardenas, having
mustered as large an armed force as possible hastened at once to the
Convent of Uccles, where the election was to be held, to press his
claims on the chapter. He had been one of Isabel’s most loyal adherents
and took her sanction for granted; but unfortunately for his hopes she
proved to have very different views.
Directly she heard of his designs, she wrote to the Pope begging that
the administration of the Order might be given into her husband’s hands.
Then, having dispatched the messenger, she mounted her horse and set off
at once from Valladolid, where she was staying. It was a three days’
journey to Ocaña, and when she reached that town it was already
nightfall, and the rain was descending in torrents, but she refused to
wait. Continuing her road to Uccles, she appeared before the astonished
commanders and told them of the request she had sent to the Pope,
begging them to suspend the election until she had received an answer.
Don Alonso de Cardenas was not unnaturally sulky at this frustration of
his ambitions; but on Isabel’s promise that she would faithfully
consider his claims, he at length agreed to withdraw them temporarily,
and the King in due course received the administration of the Order.
Alonso de Cardenas now redoubled his efforts to prove his loyalty; and
Ferdinand and Isabel at last consented to give him his long-coveted
honour; but they took care to make a favour of what he had sought as a
right. Each year he paid three millions of maravedis into the royal
treasury to be used for the defence of the frontier against the Moors,
and on his death his office lapsed finally to the Crown.
During the course of the reign, Ferdinand also assumed the
administration of the other two Orders of Calatrava and Alcantara, and
thus found himself possessed not only of vastly increased revenues, but
of a widely extended patronage.
The absorption of the Military Orders marked the decisive victory in the
sovereigns’ war against aristocratic pretensions; but the campaign had
other battles no less serious, though they did not involve such
important financial considerations. If it had been a difficult matter to
impress the idea of justice on the country at large, it was equally
arduous to persuade the leading families of Castile that they also stood
below the law and were expected to obey it.
They might surrender estates wrongly acquired, and even sink their
ambitions before the claims of royalty, but to admit of arbitration in
their private feuds, instead of dealing with them by the old-fashioned
method of duel or assassination, was a tax on their self-control too
great for Castilian pride.
On one occasion, when Queen Isabel was in Valladolid, high words broke
out between Don Fadrique Enriquez, son of Ferdinand’s uncle the Admiral
of Castile and a certain Ramir Nuñez de Guzman, Lord of Toral. In spite
of the fact that his enemy had received a safe-conduct from the Queen,
Don Fadrique attacked him in a public square, striking him several
times. Isabel’s indignation was unbounded, and she at once rode to
Simancas, whose fortress belonged to the Admiral, demanding either its
instant surrender or that of his son. The Admiral, faced by this plain
issue, dared not disobey; and, since he was ignorant of his son’s
hiding-place he gave up the keys of his stronghold. Isabel then returned
to Valladolid, but her anger was unappeased; and when questioned as to
its cause she replied: “I am suffering from the blows that Don Fadrique
hath struck at my safe-conduct.”
Not till the offender appeared himself at Court to sue for pardon would
she relax her coldness to his family; and even then she refused to see
him, but ordered that he should be led a prisoner through the streets
and thence to a fortress at Arévalo. Here he remained in close
confinement, until at his relations’ intercession he was instead exiled
to Sicily, there to remain at the Queen’s pleasure.
His enemy, Ramir Nuñez de Guzman, refusing to take warning from his
rival’s fate, attempted to assassinate the Admiral in revenge for the
attack made on himself, as soon as he had recovered from his wounds;
with the result that he was brought before the royal judges and deprived
of all his goods and revenues.
Such stern but impartial justice was of the type to inspire awe, but
severity alone might have defeated its own ends. The chivalry of Castile
had been fostered from its cradle in scenes of war and carnage. It could
not cool its hot blood suddenly to accept the discipline of what it
regarded as inglorious peace. Some outlet must be found for the wild
strain that looked to the rapier and the dagger rather than to books or
arguments. That outlet the sovereigns provided, when they took up the
challenge of the Moorish Sultan, and began again the old crusade, that
was the heritage of eight hundred years.
“Master, God give you good fortune against the Moors, the enemies of Our
Holy Catholic Faith.” With these words Ferdinand and Isabel had handed
to the new Master of Santiago his standards, when they gave him the
insignia of his Order at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480. Little over
twelve months was to find those standards in the battlefield, and the
nobility of Spain risking its life, not in private brawl nor a vain
struggle with the law, but against the enemies of its Queen and Faith.
CHAPTER VI
THE MOORISH WAR
1481–1483
“A people that for generations had lived to fight.” This summary of the
Castilian race explains the fervour of enthusiasm with which the project
of renewed war against Granada was greeted. Other nations, similarly
exhausted by misgovernment and internal strife, might have welcomed a
period of peace, which would enable them to pursue industry and commerce
undisturbed; but neither Isabel nor her subjects regarded the matter in
this light.
To them, the establishment of justice and order and the restoration of
the royal finances were but a prelude to the great crusade, that every
Castilian king inherited from his ancestors. It was a duty no true son
of the Church would dare to neglect; and even the sluggish Henry IV. had
made a pretence of raising the Christian banners. No less than three
incursions into Moorish territory had been organized at the beginning of
his reign; though by royal orders the army confined its attention to a
work of pillage and robbery amongst the villages scattered over the
fruitful “Vega.”
“The King was pitiful and not cruel,” says Enriquez del Castillo in
excuse. “He said that life has no price nor equivalent ... and thus it
did not please him that his men should take part in skirmishes or open
battles.”
Such a policy awoke anger and derision in Castilian hearts, the more so
that large quantities of money had been raised by means of a bull of
indulgence, especially granted by the Pope for the purposes of a holy
crusade. According to one of the chronicles, the sum realized was over a
hundred million maravedis, of which very little went to its professed
object. Henry quickly wearied of the display and pageantry that had
alone reconciled him to camp life; and he had neither the fanaticism nor
love of glory that could have held him to his task when this outward
glamour faded.
Moreover he soon began to suspect that his worst enemies were amongst
his own followers; and the picked Moorish guard that he adopted for his
protection became the scandal of all the faithful. “He eats, drinks, and
clothes himself after Moorish fashion,” wrote a Bohemian who visited his
Court; and we have already noticed that the conspirators of Burgos began
their complaints by censuring the open infidelity of those nearest to
the royal person. Orthodoxy proved a convenient weapon for rebellious
nobles; but it did not prevent the chivalry of Murcia and Andalusia from
accepting the hospitality of the Sultan of Granada, when they wished to
settle their private quarrels undisturbed.
The kingdom of the Moors which had once embraced the whole peninsula,
save the mountains in the north-west, had shrunk to somewhat less than
two hundred leagues; but this area comprised all that was best in soil
and atmosphere. In its fertile valleys was ample pasturage for flocks of
sheep; in the depths of its mountains, no lack of the ore and metals
that its furnaces converted with unrivalled skill into ornaments and
weapons. Its plains, protected from the northern winds by snow-capped
mountain peaks, and preserved from the ill effects of the sun by a
careful system of irrigation, were covered with maize and other grains,
producing between them a perpetual harvest. Its villages nestled amidst
vineyards and olive-groves; oranges, citrons, and figs grew in its
orchards; here and there were plantations of mulberry trees. The silk
woven in the looms of Granada could stand comparison with the coveted
fabrics of Bagdad and the Orient, and with Moorish tissues, velvets, and
brocades, found ready purchasers in Venetian markets, through the medium
of thriving ports on the Mediterranean, such as Velez-Malaga and
Almeria.
By these same ports, the rulers of Granada could receive assistance from
their Mahometan allies on the African coast, whether in the shape of
provisions or of men, though of the latter they possessed sufficient for
any ordinary campaign. Not only did the healthy climate and abundance of
food tend to a natural increase of the population, but for centuries
there had been a steady influx of Mahometan refugees from the provinces
reconquered by the Spaniards.
It has been estimated that towards the end of the fifteenth century, the
population of Granada was between three or four millions, and was
capable of sending into the field a force of 8000 horse and 25,000 foot.
The Moors, whether supple Arab or hardy Berber, were as fine soldiers as
they were skilful artisans and traders. Trained to shoot from early
boyhood, their archers had no match with the cross-bow; while their
lightly armed cavalry could manœuvre on the wide plains, or make their
way by narrow mountain paths, to the utter discomfiture of the crusader
in his heavy mail.
These were facts the Christian army was to learn to its cost during ten
years of unceasing war. They were not unknown beforehand to the more
seasoned warriors; but the peaceful character of the old Sultan Ismail,
and his readiness to pay the yearly tribute to Castile of 20,000 doblas
of gold rather than take advantage of Henry IV.’s weakness, had aroused
the latent scorn felt for the Infidel by a hot-headed younger
generation.
In 1476, Aben Ismail died; and his successor, Muley Abul Hacen, a
chieftain already famous in his own land for various daring raids into
Christian territory, ceased to send the required tribute to Castile.
When the ambassadors of Ferdinand and Isabel came before him to
remonstrate, he replied haughtily:
“Go, tell your sovereigns that the kings of Granada, who were wont to
pay tribute, are dead. In my kingdom there is no coin minted save
scimitars and iron-tipped lances.”
[Illustration:
SPANISH HALBERDIER, FIFTEENTH CENTURY
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
]
The sovereigns, who were in Seville at the time delivering justice,
received his message with indignation. “I will tear the seeds from this
pomegranate one by one,” exclaimed Ferdinand, punning on the meaning of
the word “granada.” But he and Isabel were still busy with the
Portuguese war and the task of restoring order in Andalusia. They
therefore dissembled their real feelings, and consented to a temporary
treaty, in which there was no mention of the disputed tribute; but they
did not cease from this time to redouble their preparations for the
inevitable crusade. In the end it was Muley Hacen who was to set the
spark to the mine.
Just over the Andalusian border, not many leagues distant from the
Moorish stronghold of Ronda, stood the fortress of Zahara, which had
been stormed in old days by the King’s grandfather and namesake “Don
Fernando de Antequera.” Raised on a height, surmounted by a fortress,
and approached only by slippery mountain paths, its Christian defenders
believed it almost impregnable, and had allowed themselves to grow
careless in their outpost duty. One night in the year 1481, when the
truce between Castile and Granada still held good, a band of Moors led
by Muley Hacen himself drew near under cover of the darkness. The wind
and rain were blowing in a hurricane across the mountain peaks, but the
Moors, heedless of its violence, placed their ladders against the rocks
above them, and scaled the ill-protected walls. Then they poured into
the town. The sound of their trumpets, as scimitar in hand they cleared
the narrow streets, was the first warning of their presence; and the
inhabitants of Zahara awoke to find themselves faced by death or
slavery.
It seemed to the affrighted inhabitants [says Washington Irving in his
vivid _Conquest of Granada_] as if the fiends of the air had come upon
the wings of the wind, and possessed themselves of tower and turret.
The war-cry resounded on every side, shout answering shout, above,
below, on the battlements of the castle, in the streets of the town;
the foe was in all parts, wrapped in obscurity but acting in concert
by the aid of preconcerted signals. Starting from sleep, the soldiers
were intercepted, and cut down, as they rushed from their quarters,
or, if they escaped, they knew not where to assemble or where to
strike. Wherever lights appeared, the flashing scimitar was at its
deadly work, and all who attempted resistance fell beneath its edge.
In a little while the struggle was at an end.... When the day dawned
it was piteous to behold this once prosperous community, which had
lain down to rest in peaceful security, now crowded together without
distinction of age, or rank, or sex, and almost without raiment during
the severity of a winter storm.
The next day the unhappy prisoners, first fruits of the Moorish
triumphs, were led back in chains to the capital; but the sight of their
misery aroused not so much rejoicing amongst the people as pity and
dismay. Courtiers might crowd to the palace of the Alhambra to
congratulate their warrior sovereign, but the general feeling of
foreboding found vent in the cries of an old dervish, as he wandered
through the streets wringing his hands:
Woe to Granada! Its fall is at hand. Desolation shall dwell in its
palaces, its strong men shall fall beneath the sword, its children and
its maidens shall be led into captivity. Zahara is but a type of
Granada.
In Medina del Campo, where the news of the disaster reached Ferdinand
and Isabel, there was burning indignation, and demands on all sides for
instant revenge. The gallant Don Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, Marquis of
Cadiz, took upon himself the task of retaliation. Having learned from
the “Asistente” of Seville, Don Diego de Merlo, that the town of Alhama,
only eight leagues from the Moorish capital and a regular granary and
storehouse for the neighbourhood, was ill-defended and quite unprepared
for any attack, he collected a considerable force both of horse and
foot, and set off at their head to effect its capture. Pushing forward
by night, and hiding at daybreak in whatever cover was afforded by
ravines and woods, on March 1, 1482, he arrived at his destination,
unperceived. He then selected some picked men; and these under the
command of Diego de Merlo, placed their ladders against the steepest
part of the citadel, from which attack would be least expected, and
scaling the walls slew the sentries whom they found on guard. Soon they
had opened the gates to admit the Marquis and their companions, and all
within Alhama was in confusion.
The Moors, waked from their sleep, fought desperately to preserve the
town itself from the fate of the citadel, throwing up barriers in the
streets, and maintaining a heavy cross-bow fire upon their assailants,
whenever they tried to emerge from the shelter of the gates. It seemed
for a time as if the Christian forces could make no headway; and some of
the captains counselled that the citadel and all the houses within reach
should be fired and the order for retreat should be sounded.
To this the Marquis replied with a stern negative. They had not made
such a splendid capture merely to reduce it to ashes; and he promised
his soldiers that once the city was taken he would allow them to put it
to the sack and keep what booty fell to their swords. Encouraged by this
prospect his troops made a breach in the wall of the citadel on the side
towards Alhama, and swarming through this opening and the main gateway
in great numbers, they succeeded in beating back their enemies and
destroying the barriers.
[Illustration:
SPANISH CROSSBOWMAN, FIFTEENTH CENTURY
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
]
_Ay de mi Alhama!_ “Woe is me Alhama!” was the cry in Granada, when
wounded fugitives brought news of the fate that had overtaken their
town. Muley Abul Hacen said little, but, putting himself at the head of
some 3000 horse and 50,000 infantry, advanced on Alhama to exact
vengeance on the Christians who had so daringly crossed his frontier. As
he approached the walls, his troops uttered groans of mingled fury and
horror, for the ground lay strewn with the dead bodies of their
countrymen, thrown out by those within the walls to the mercy of
vultures and pariah dogs.
The Marquis had made what preparations for defence he could, but he had
begun to realize that his situation was rather desperate. Not only was
he separated from his country by a wide stretch of hostile territory,
from which he could expect no provisions, but the food stored within the
town had been much of it squandered or destroyed during the sack. Large
quantities of grain had been deliberately burned by the Castilian
soldiery who, hearing it rumoured that they were about to retreat,
determined to leave nothing intact for their enemies. In the weeks that
followed, when the forces of Muley Hacen ranged themselves round the
walls, and his engineers turned aside the stream that supplied Alhama
with water, the Christians, fighting by day and night, half-starved and
tortured with thirst, were to pay dearly for their recklessness.
Messengers had been dispatched at once to Andalusia and Medina del
Campo, bearing news of the victory but demanding instant succour, lest
glory should be dimmed in even more signal defeat. Leaving Isabel to
send out letters and enroll captains and troops throughout Castile,
Ferdinand hastened south to Cordova; but it was only to find that he
came too late, and that help was already well on its way to the
beleaguered city. This prompt action was due to no less a person than
the Duke of Medina-Sidonia who, having received a piteous letter from
the Marquesa de Cadiz in which she described her husband’s plight,
generously put his old enmity aside and went to his rival’s assistance.
Bernaldez the chronicler, more often called the Curate of Los Palacios,
who was an eye-witness of much of the Moorish war and knew Andalusia
well, once described the Duke and Marquis as “the two columns on which
the province rested.” Their combined retinues provided an army that
Muley Hacen, with his hastily collected troops, dared not face; and the
Duke arrived before the gates of Alhama, as the last of the Moorish
banners dipped below the far horizon. It was a meeting worthy of a
chronicler’s pen, when with hands clasped the gallant young Marquis and
his former enemy pledged eternal friendship amid the applause and
shouting of their troops. Alhama was saved.
Its maintenance was a different matter, for hardly had the Duke and the
Marquis of Cadiz, leaving Diego de Merlo and a strong garrison behind
them, departed for Cordova, than Muley Abul Hacen made a new and more
strenuous attack on his old fortress. From every side the Moors swarmed
up by ladders or projecting masonry and hurled themselves upon the
ramparts. The Christians thrust them back only to face a fresh
avalanche; and when at length, after a prolonged struggle, some seventy
warriors who had made their entrance unnoticed were hemmed in and cut
down, the garrison although victorious was both exhausted and dismayed.
Fresh help must come from Cordova or they were lost.
The advisability of burning and deserting Alhama, as a too costly
capture, was warmly advocated in the royal councils; but Isabel who had
arrived at Cordova would not hear of it. Every war, she declared, must
have its heavy expenses; and, since she and the King were determined on
the conquest of Granada at all costs, the surrender of the first city
they had gained could appear nothing but cowardice.
Then the King [we are told] and the Cardinal of Spain and all his host
came to the city of Alhama, and they built up the fortifications and
supplied it with all things necessary for its defence.
It was not the last time that Isabel was to spur the lagging energies of
the Christian army to fresh enthusiasm and endeavours.
In the meantime Muley Abul Hacen was called on to cope with serious
trouble at home, as well as a campaign against foreign invaders. For
this the mixed character of the Moorish population could partly account.
The haughty Arab, with his sense of racial and mental superiority, had
not after centuries amalgamated well either with his Berber ally of
African origin, or with the Spanish _muladies_, that suspected sect
whose ancestors had changed their religion with their masters in the old
days of Moorish conquest, thus cutting off their descendants from their
natural kith and kin.
Belief in “one God and Mahomet as His Prophet,” alone held together
these heterogeneous peoples, whose mutual suspicion proved ever fertile
soil for plots and rebellions. Had the latter depended for their source
only on race hatred, Muley Hacen, prompt, cunning, and pitiless, might
have proved their match. It was that curse of Eastern politics, the
quarrels of the harem, that acting on his sensual nature betrayed his
statesmanship.
When well advanced in middle age, the Sultan had fallen a victim to a
slave girl of Christian origin and had raised her to the position of his
favourite wife, the Arabs calling her for her beauty “Zoraya,” or “Light
of the Morning.” This woman, who was as ambitious and unscrupulous as
she was fair, made common cause with a certain Emir, Cacim Venegas, a
descendant of an old Cordovan family, to ruin all who opposed their
power; and to their machinations had been due the horrible massacre of
the Abencerrages in the Alhambra, whose name still marks the scene of
the crime.
Chief of Zoraya’s enemies was the deposed favourite of the harem,
“Aixa,” “the Pure,” a Moorish lady of high birth and spotless character,
whose son, Abu Abdallah, more often alluded to by the chroniclers as
“Boabdil,” was universally regarded as his father’s heir. To bring about
his death and thus prevent his accession was the main object of Zoraya’s
life; but her rival was well aware of this and, taking advantage of the
fall of Alhama and the consequent loss of Muley Hacen’s reputation as a
general, she laid her schemes for placing the sceptre in Boabdil’s
hands.
The Sultan learnt of the plot on his return to Granada; and, determining
to exact vengeance at his leisure, he imprisoned his wife and son in one
of the strong towers of the Alhambra. All seemed lost; but Aixa,
inspired by the courage of despair, knotted together the gaily coloured
scarves that she and her ladies were wont to wear, and by this rope let
down Boabdil from her window to the banks of the Darro. Here some
attendants, who had been secretly warned, awaited him; and the Moorish
prince, setting spurs to his horse, went swiftly to Guadix, a town
perched amid the mountains of the Alpujarras.
[Illustration:
ARMS BELONGING TO BOABDIL
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑOLA,” VOL. VII.
]
The standard of rebellion was raised; and Muley Hacen, returning one day
from the gardens beyond the city walls, where he had been dallying in
idleness with Zoraya, found the gates closed against him. The people,
who had secretly hated him for his tyranny, now despised him, and had
therefore readily welcomed Boabdil, when he came riding from Guadix to
usurp the throne. The old Sultan was forced to fly, but his spirit was
far from broken; and, being joined not only by Cacim Venegas and all his
clan of relations and followers, but also by his brother, the renowned
warrior, Abdallah “El Zagal,” “the Bold,” he determined to have his
revenge.
One night, soon after dark, he appeared unexpectedly before the city,
and, scaling with his men the walls of the Alhambra, fell upon the
sleeping inhabitants sword in hand, sparing in his rage neither
grey-beards, women, nor children. For hours the fight raged through the
narrow streets, dimly lit from the windows above by hanging lanterns and
guttering torches. It was war to the death and no quarter was given; but
though Muley Hacen and his brother fought with a courage that equalled
their ferocity, the sympathy of the people was with their enemies, and
with difficulty at last they made their escape. Malaga, on the shores of
the Mediterranean, became their new capital; and thus, just at a time
when union was most needed, the kingdom of Granada was divided against
itself.
The final triumph of the Christian forces, though undoubtedly hastened
by the divisions amongst their enemies, was not to prove an easy
achievement; for the capture of Alhama and its subsequent successful
defence were soon counterbalanced by two disasters. In both cases the
cause was a self-confidence on the part of the Castilian commanders,
that blinded them to the ordinary precautions of warfare.
Ferdinand, in the later years of his life, was regarded by his fellow
sovereigns as a model of sagacity and caution; but we have already
noticed the strain of romance and daring that rendered his youth the
less responsible if the more attractive. Nothing exasperated him so much
as to be told it was a king’s place to remain in safety and to allow his
generals to fight for him; and it had been a bitter moment when he
arrived at Cordova and found his intended relief-expedition had been
forestalled by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. He had perforce contented
himself with meeting the party on their return at the border town of
Antequera; but he waited impatiently for a response to the Queen’s
letters that would enable him to take the initiative on his own account.
In time it came, and the sturdy mountaineers of Biscay and Guizpucoa, to
whose help he had once gone against the French, now joined his banner
along with the levies of Galicia and Estremadura, and cavaliers from New
and Old Castile.
Having collected his army, Ferdinand crossed the Moorish border late in
June, 1482, while Isabel dispatched a fleet to patrol the Western
Mediterranean and prevent assistance from Africa reaching Muley Hacen in
his retreat at Malaga. The objective of the Christian army was the town
of Loja, whose capture would ensure safe communication with Alhama. It
lay to the north-west of that outpost in a deep valley traversed by the
river Genil, almost like a gateway to the Vega of Granada; and its
wealth and natural beauty of situation in the midst of frowning
mountains had won for it the name of “the flower amongst the thorns.”
The Christian forces, eager to pluck this flower and heedless of the
dangers in the path, advanced with rash haste between the ridges.
Ferdinand in his anxiety to approach the city pitched his camp on uneven
ground amid the surrounding olive-groves, in a position wholly to the
disadvantage of either his cavalry or artillery. At the earnest
entreaties of the Marquis of Cadiz and the Duke of Villahermosa, who had
preached caution from the first, an attempt was made to rectify these
mistakes, but it proved too late.
Aliator, the Governor of Loja, who was father-in-law of the young Sultan
Boabdil, had been on the watch from the first for any opportunity of
throwing the besiegers into confusion. He therefore skilfully arranged
an ambush; and, some of the Christians falling into it, a sudden panic
spread through the camp, that had begun to realize the perils of its
locality. Only a hasty retreat saved Castile from a general massacre of
her leading chivalry, nay even the loss of the King himself; while many
a gallant warrior, such as the Master of Calatrava, came by his death.
Ferdinand, in disgust at his ignominious five days’ siege and the
failure of his tactics, departed to Cordova, leaving the command of the
frontier in other hands.
Early in February, 1483, the Christians once more took the offensive,
hoping to wipe out their previous defeat by some victory of
unprecedented magnitude. Alonso de Cardenas, the Master of Santiago, who
had been placed in command of the border country in the neighbourhood of
Ecija, had learned through certain of his scouts that, once an army had
pierced the mountains near Ajarquia, it would find itself in a fertile
plain, not far removed from the city of Malaga. Here would be a new
_vega_, stocked with fat herds and with opulent towns and villages,
providing spoils for its conquerors even more alluring than the riches
of Alhama. In vain the Marquis of Cadiz protested that these scouts were
renegade Moors and should not be trusted; the daring of the enterprise
had won the assent of Alonso de Cardenas and the other commanders
against their better judgment, while the bait of pillage was eagerly
swallowed by the ordinary soldiery.
From Antequera the army set out on its journey through the mountains,
more than three thousand horse and a thousand foot with the banners of
Seville, Cordova, Jerez, and other principal cities of Andalusia, waving
in their midst. Rarely had more famous names graced a military
enterprise: the Master of Santiago, hero of the Portuguese war; the
Marquis of Cadiz, victor of Alhama, with some five more of the warlike
house of Ponce de Leon; the Count of Cifuentes now Asistente of Seville;
and Don Alonso de Aguilar, a renowned general whose star has somewhat
paled before the brilliance of his younger brother’s fame, Gonsalvo de
Cordova—the “Great Captain.” Behind these warriors and their troops came
a heterogeneous crowd of merchants and adventurers, their pockets well
stocked with gold for barter, and their hands ready for any robbery that
would bring them profit so long as the swords of those in front had
cleared a way to it in safety.
The selfish motives, that in most hearts prompted the undertaking, were
clearly shown on the first day’s march through the mountains. High above
them, ridge on ridge, stretched ragged peaks bare of all save the most
meagre vegetation; the roadway on the slope below became a mere track,
winding through ravines and stony river-beds. Here and there were human
habitations; but the peasantry, warned by the glitter of spear and
helmet, had long climbed to distant heights or hidden with their cattle
in secret caves. The Castilians, picking their way in disorderly fashion
between marsh and boulder, revenged themselves for the lack of booty by
firing the deserted villages and huts until night fell; for of easy
ground or promised _vega_ there was no sign. Then in the darkness came
the sound of stones and rocks clattering down the mountainside. Some of
the horses were struck and, with others frightened by the noise, bolted
or stumbled; lights began to appear along the ridge; and showers of
poisoned arrows to descend; missiles from which the Christians, unable
to retaliate, could find no adequate protection. A crowning touch was
put to the ever-growing horror, when it was discovered that Muley Hacen,
having learned of the invasion by means of beacon fires, had sent his
brother “El Zagal” and Abul Cacim Venegas to the assistance of the
mountaineers.
[Illustration:
ALHAMBRA, COURT OF LIONS
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON, ROME
]
Conscious of their helpless plight, the Castilians turned and fled.
“Into such evil case were they fallen,” says the chronicler, “that none
listened to the sound of the trumpet, nor followed a banner, nor paid
attention to those who were his leaders.”
The Moors, hanging on their rear, and descending in swarms from the
ridges above, broke between the lines, preventing one commander from
assisting another; while many of the scouts, either of evil intention or
from sheer terror, advised ways of escape that ended in impassable
ravines or mere goat-tracks across the peaks. But a small portion of the
gallant army that had set out with such self-confidence from Antequera
returned safe from the “Heights of Slaughter,” as these mountains were
ever afterwards known.
The Master of Santiago, finding it impossible to rally his forces,
borrowed a horse from his servants, and in the darkness escaped by
secret footpaths.
“I turn my back not on the Moors,” he exclaimed, “but on a country that
for our sins has shown itself hostile.”
The Marquis of Cadiz and Don Alonso de Aguilar, after many detours and
wanderings, also found their way to Antequera; but the former had lost
his three brothers and two nephews; while the Count of Cifuentes, and
others of the Christian army, almost to the number of a thousand, were
captured and led to Malaga.
This defeat [says the Curate of Los Palacios] was marvellous for the
small band of Moors by whom it was inflicted. It would seem that Our
Lord consented, because robbery or merchandise rather than His service
had been the thought of the majority. For many of the same
acknowledged that they went not to fight against the Infidels, as good
Christians who had confessed their sins and received the Sacrament,
and made their will, and wished to fight against their enemies and
conquer them for the sake of the Holy Catholic Faith;—for but few of
them had this desire.
The shame and sorrow, aroused by the retreat from Loja, was as nothing
to the lamentations over this new disaster. There was scarcely a man or
a woman in Andalusia, it was said, who had not cause to weep; but
Castilian fortunes had touched their lowest depth.
“The good are punished for a time,” says the Curate of Los Palacios,
“because they have neglected God; but always He returns to succour and
console them.”
The victory of Ajarquia had redounded to the credit of Muley Hacen, and
still more to that of his brother “El Zagal,” with the result that the
popularity of Boabdil began to wane. Necessity demanded that the young
Sultan should take some steps to show his ability as a general; and,
since he was neither devoid of courage nor ambition, in April, 1483, the
gates of Granada were opened to permit the exodus of himself and the
flower of his nobility at the head of a picked army of horse and foot.
His plan of campaign was, marching through the _vega_, to cross the
Genil near Loja, where he would be reinforced by his father-in-law,
Aliator, and then on again beyond the Christian frontier, till he
arrived at Lucena in Andalusia, the object of his attack.
So much he achieved without difficulty; but the more superstitious of
his following shook their heads. Had not the King’s horse stumbled in
the very gateway of Granada, causing his master to shiver his lance
against the arch above? Had not a fox, also, rushed scatheless through
the army, almost in front of Boabdil himself, without suffering hurt
from the many arrows aimed at her? These were ill omens.
More disconcerting for military minds was the bold defiance of Don Diego
Fernandez de Cordova, the youthful Governor of Lucena. The Moors had
hoped to surprise the town, but it was obvious news of their coming had
preceded them; for hardly had they spread through the immediate
neighbourhood, burning and pillaging, than Don Diego and a small force
of Christians flung open the gates and began to attack them. This they
would hardly have dared to do, had they believed themselves unsupported;
and Boabdil and Aliator, looking behind them to account for this
temerity, saw to their horror the sun glittering on Christian spears and
banners.
It was the Count of Cabra, uncle of Don Fernandez, with a troop of not
more than two hundred horse and double that number of foot; but the
sound of his trumpets re-echoing in the hills, and the curve of the road
by which he came, as it descended to the plain, lent to his host a
phantom size. The Moors at any rate believed it the whole Christian
army, and at the first onslaught their infantry broke and fled. The
cavalry still continued the battle fiercely, till the arrival of Don
Alonso de Aguilar with reinforcements from Antequera, and the death of
Aliator deprived them of the last hope of victory. Then defeat became a
rout; and some, surrendering, begged for mercy, while others, missing
the ford across the river in their hurry to escape, were drowned in the
heavy flood. A few returned to Loja, but their king was not amongst
them. Crouching amongst the low bushes by the waterside, his scimitar
struck from his hand, Boabdil, “the Unfortunate” as astrologers had
proclaimed him at his birth, was forced to surrender, and led a captive
to the city he had meant to conquer.
The question of his fate was a matter for profound discussion in
Castilian councils. At first it was suggested that he should be placed
under lock and key in some inaccessible fortress; but the Marquis of
Cadiz pointed out that no decision could give Muley Hacen greater
pleasure. Better far than to remove Boabdil from Granada was to send him
back to his kingdom as a vassal of the Christian sovereigns, that he
might continue to foment discord amongst his own nation.
This advice pleased Ferdinand and Isabel, and soon the humiliating
terms, on which the Prince should receive his liberty, were drawn up and
signed. Boabdil did homage to the rulers of Castile, consenting to pay
an annual tribute of twelve thousand doblas of gold, and to surrender
four hundred Christian captives. Most galling of all, he publicly
promised to appear at the Castilian Court, whenever summoned, and to
allow the Christian armies free passage through his territory, in their
campaigns against Muley Hacen and “El Zagal.” Having surrendered his own
son and those of his principal nobles as hostages for his good faith, he
returned to his own kingdom, free; yet bound by chains that were to cost
him his kingdom and hold him in perpetual bondage.
CHAPTER VII
THE FALL OF GRANADA: THE MOORISH WAR
1484–1492
The kingdom of Granada had been cut off by land and sea from outward
assistance, her plains and valleys had been ravaged by a foreign foe,
her principal towns were torn by the factions of her ruling family, yet
she turned a defiant, almost mocking gaze on those who had pledged
themselves to her downfall. The thought of this defiance rankled with
the Queen as bitterly as had the contempt shown for her commands by the
young Enriquez.
There was nothing in her nature of the Oriental acceptance of
ill-fortune as the will of a far-seeing Providence. Disaster to her
spelt rather divine wrath visited on human incompetency; and Isabel
looked on even temporary failure as something unclean and abhorrent,
that could only be purified and overcome by perseverance ending in
success. So sincere was her conviction, so wholehearted and untiring her
share in whatever plan of action was laid down, that she could not but
inspire her generals and councillors with something of her own
enthusiasm.
At times her will clashed with Ferdinand’s ambitions, as when in 1484 he
urged her to leave the weary struggle against Granada and help him
regain the counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne; but though in later
years the foreign policy of Aragon was to assume predominance, on this
occasion the interests of Castile were jealously maintained.
Ferdinand argued his cause with no little truth and ability. The death
of Louis XI. in the previous summer had left his son Charles VIII., a
mere boy, as the figurehead of France, to the natural weakening of the
government. Now was the time, before the child developed into a man, to
win back Aragon’s lawful possessions, the Pyrenean counties, whose
sympathies were Spanish rather than French. Isabel did not attempt to
controvert these views. She even admitted that had it been a question of
making war on Granada for the first time, or recovering Roussillon or
Cerdagne, the latter policy would have been undoubtedly the best.
“But,” she continued, “seeing that it is now two years since we began
our war against the Moors, and that during that time we have been put to
great trouble and expense, I hold it as ill-advised that we should
burden ourselves with a fresh campaign elsewhere.”
She then departed southwards with the Cardinal of Spain to arrange for a
renewed invasion of Moorish territory, leaving the King with some
Castilian troops to settle his own projects in the north according to
his fancy. The result was, after due reflection, to bring him back to
her, with his designs on Roussillon and Cerdagne temporarily shelved.
There was nothing petty in the relation of either husband or wife; and
it is probable that the secret of their unanimity of action lay in their
mutual readiness to respond to reason.
It was about this date that their military policy developed a new and
more modern trend. The surprise of Alhama, the expedition to Ajarquia,
and the hasty march to Loja had all been in keeping with the tactics of
earlier crusades. That two out of the three expeditions had failed
showed either a lack of judgment or of courage; and the reckless daring
of the Castilian race forbade even the momentary consideration of the
latter suggestion. Where then did the error lie?
Experience showed that, in spite of her isolation, the kingdom of
Granada would not succumb to ordinary measures of ravage and blockade.
Even in the districts trampled underfoot, and burned and pillaged by
Christian armies, the vegetation hardly awaited the departure of the
invaders to spring up in fresh luxuriance. Ravages that would have made
the plains of Castile a desert were quickly effaced in this land of
sunshine, both by the help of nature and of the industrious inhabitants.
There were, moreover, hidden _vegas_ and tracts of seaboard, protected
on the north both from cold winds and foreign armies by high mountain
ranges, whose southern slopes, with the land stretching beyond them,
were a veritable paradise of fruits and crops. Granada might soon find
her luxury curtailed, but to starve her into submission would be a
Herculean task.
Another lesson learned was the futility of a campaign of midnight
assaults and surprises. These were well enough for a single expedition
that aimed at no more than intimidating the enemy, or establishing a
reputation for heroism amongst the leaders, though it has been shown
such glory could be dearly bought. In scaling walls or planting an
ambush the Castilian had not anything to teach his foe; while the
majority of Moorish fortresses were built in commanding positions by the
entrance to ravines, or were perched on almost inaccessible heights that
gave to the defender with his javelin and cross-bow an enormous
advantage over those scrambling up to the attack from below.
The reduction of such strongholds was a necessary part of the conquest
of Granada; but eight more years were to pass before the task was
completed, and the capital, whose ramparts were a series of fortresses,
was to surrender, subdued not so much by wild valour as by untiring
patience.
During these years the Castilian army lost much of its feudal character,
a transformation to be completed later, on the battlefields of Italy
under the supervision of Gonsalvo de Cordova. The levies of the
principal nobles had been the backbone of the war against the
Portuguese, and still supplied no mean contribution to the Christian
forces in the kingdom of Granada. The military retainers of the Cardinal
of Spain numbered some two thousand men, while, as we have already seen,
a combination of the vassals of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia and Marquis
of Cadiz was sufficient to make Muley Hacen raise the siege of Alhama.
This same Duke, in addition to his land forces, was able, in 1487, to
dispatch a private fleet and convoy of provisions to the royal camp at
Malaga, then suffering from famine; but the wealth and power that could
give these substantial proofs of loyalty were not without their
drawbacks. The patriotic Duke, when touched in his vanity, did not
hesitate to refuse Ferdinand’s commands as to the disposal of his
troops, exclaiming touchily: “I have brought them to his service, but
they shall go nowhere save under my command.”
The sovereigns dealt with such aristocratic independence by their usual
policy of creating a counter-balance. They had established a permanent
troop of soldiers in Galicia, paid by their treasury, to enforce the
sentences of the royal judges in that unruly province; while the natural
sequence of their employment of the Santa Hermandad for the restoration
of order was the dispatch of its well-armed bands to the seat of war.
The royal forces were further recruited by numbers of the robbers and
evildoers, who had created such havoc in Castile in the early years of
the reign. It had been impossible to punish them all, as was shown in
the case of Seville; and now a free pardon was offered to those who
would take their share in the great crusade and turn their love of
violence to patriotic use. Strict regulations prevented them from
yielding to their old habits; for the work of pillage and plunder was
kept within the bounds then considered legitimate, the women and the
camp followers who preyed upon the troops were banished; and even
gambling, a customary pastime of the soldiery and ever-fruitful source
of quarrels, was suppressed.
In addition to the troops already mentioned Ferdinand also possessed
what might be called his own private army, amounting to three thousand
men, personally pledged to his service. It consisted of vassals of the
royal demesnes led by their _adelantados_; an escort of young nobles and
knights and a royal guard of some five hundred _ginetes_, or light
horse, with an equal number of heavily armed cavalry.
As the war grew more serious the purely Spanish troops were augmented by
mercenaries, principally Swiss mountaineers. “Hardy warriors who fight
on foot,” Pulgar describes them, “so resolved never to turn their back
on the enemy that they wear defensive armour only in front, and are thus
able to move with the greater ease.” The Swiss had won their laurels
against Charles the Bold on the fields of Granson and Nanci; but even
farther reaching than their vindication of national independence had
been the triumph in their persons of infantry over cavalry; another blow
struck at the old feudal ideas. In the war of Granada, it is still the
cavalry who hold sway; but the presence of the Swiss foot-soldiers was
not without its influence in the history of Spain, whose infantry,
drilled and disciplined after their method by Gonsalvo de Ayora in the
latter years of Ferdinand’s reign, was to become the admiration and fear
of Europe.
More immediate in its effects was the improvement of the artillery, a
department of war that came under the Queen’s special supervision, and
on which she expended her usual vivid interest and energy. A study of
the almost barren results of the first two years of fighting had made it
obvious that future campaigns must resolve themselves into a war of
sieges, a war whose ultimate issue depended not so much on cavalry or
infantry as on gunners and engineers. Isabel had already summoned from
Germany and Flanders the men most gifted in this particular branch of
military science, placing at their head Francisco Ramirez, a knight of
Madrid, whose knowledge and experience was to win him the nickname “El
Artillero.”
[Illustration:
DOUBLE BREECH-LOADING CANNON, IN BRONZE; USED IN SPAIN FROM THE END OF
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
]
During the campaigns against the Moors in the reign of John II.,
Isabel’s father, the Christian army had been proud of its five
“lombards” or heavy guns; but the growing importance of the artillery
can be estimated, when we learn that in 1486, at the second siege of
Loja, there were twenty lombards in action, while in two of the
batteries placed before Malaga there were eleven heavy pieces, without
counting the smaller ordnance.
Some of the very lombards employed in the attack on Baeza can still be
seen in that city, constructed of thick bars of iron clamped together by
rings of the same metal; while in the fields around the peasants dig up
balls of iron and marble, that once made such havoc of the ramparts.
Beside a modern field-gun these cannon appear ludicrously clumsy. Fixed
so that they could be pointed neither to the right nor left, without
changing the position of the whole machine, and built only to fire
horizontally, the weight of their ammunition prevented the powder used
from igniting quickly; yet compared with the artillery of bygone days
their discharge had the swiftness of the wind. When two lombards could
arrive between them at one hundred and forty shots within the day, their
gunners could proclaim a marvellous achievement; and Isabel looking
round on her formidable batteries could boast, as Prescott has
complimented her, on having “assembled a train of artillery, such as was
probably not possessed at that time by any other European potentate.”
The kingdom of Granada, regardless of her enemy’s heavy guns, still kept
her derisive smile. Fatal to the most solid masonry these lombards might
prove indeed, when once in action, but who should bring them by
river-bed and goat-track to assault fortresses and castles built on
crags, that had hitherto defied the approach even of a battering-ram?
It was a question that might have dismayed the most intrepid of
generals; but Isabel was of the fibre of which Hannibals and Napoleons
are made. She recognized difficulties but to overcome them; and the
actual provision of guns was merely a section of her extensive
preparations. Carpenters, blacksmiths, stone-masons, bricklayers,
colliers, weavers of ropes and baskets; these were but a few of the army
of workmen and engineers who built bridges, filled in valleys, and
levelled heights, that the artillery might reach their destination. At
the head of each department was an official deputed to see that nothing
was lacking to his branch of the work, whether food for the troops,
fodder for the horses, wood for carts and bridges, forges for
iron-moulding, powder fetched from Sicily, Flanders, or Portugal, or
marble and stone to be fashioned into shot.
In the end two thousand gun-carriages, drawn by oxen, lumbered heavily
across the frontier, and soon were winding up the mountains into the
heart of Granada by peak and ridge. Pulgar describes how a road more
than three leagues in length was constructed within twelve days “by the
command and great insistence of the Queen”; while the Curate of Los
Palacios, lost in awe and admiration, declares that “he who had not seen
the passes by which those monstrous lombards and heavy artillery made
their way would have deemed it a thing incredible.”
“The Queen has provided for every need,” wrote the Italian scholar,
Peter Martyr, to the Archbishop of Milan, when at the seat of war before
Baeza; and his letter shows that Isabel’s thoughts were not wholly
occupied with the destruction of the Infidel.
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.
Muley Hacen, in the meantime, had fallen heir to the ill-luck that
seemed to dog the rulers of Granada; for, in his efforts to satisfy the
popular demand for Moorish victories, his army suffered in the autumn of
1483 a defeat approaching the disaster of Lucena. The fault did not lie
in the calibre of the troops, mainly recruited from the half-savage
Berbers who inhabited the mountains in the neighbourhood of Ronda and
Malaga, nor with its famous commander Hamet “El Zegri,” who lived but to
shed Christian blood. It lay rather, as in the case of the Christian
routs at Ajarquia and Loja, in the futility of an isolated expedition,
with the enemy everywhere on the watch. Surprised and outnumbered by the
levies of Andalusia and the Holy Brotherhood, the Moors after a fierce
struggle on the banks of the Lopera broke and fled, leaving many of
their generals dead or captured. Hamet “El Zegri” himself escaped, but
fifteen of his standards were carried to Vittoria, where the sovereigns
celebrated their triumph by illuminations and religious processions.
The battle of Lopera was followed by the reduction of numerous Moorish
strongholds on the western frontier, that were now too weak to withstand
the Christian advance. Most joyful of all was the recapture of Zahara,
whose fall had marked the original outbreak of the war. This triumph won
for the Marquis of Cadiz, its principal hero, the title “Duke of
Zahara”; but he declined to surrender the name under which he had gained
so many laurels, and compromised by styling himself Marquis-Duke of
Cadiz.
The culminating moment of the campaign was the capture of Ronda in May,
1485. This town, believed by its defenders impregnable, stood on the
summit of a precipice six hundred feet high.
Its walls [says a modern traveller, impressed by the grandeur even of
its ruins] are built on the very edge of the cliff and look as
weather-beaten and as solid. Indeed one could hardly tell where wall
begins and rock ends but for the Moresque arches that span the rents
in the face of the cliff to afford a firm basis for the continuous
fortification.
[Illustration:
RONDA, THE TAJO OR CHASM
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
To this stronghold Hamet “El Zegri” had retired after his crushing
defeat at Lopera; but, being informed that the Christians were
meditating a second attack on Loja, he hastily sent part of his garrison
to assist “El Zagal” in its defence. This did not, however, satisfy his
own desire for vengeance, and believing that his enemies were occupied
elsewhere he sallied out with a contingent of his fiercest troops to lay
waste the Duchy of Medina-Sidonia. His immediate mission was successful;
but Hamet “El Zegri” soon found his joy turned to ashes. His cunning had
been overreached.
A portion of the Christian army had in truth set out in the direction of
Loja; but the main body, under the command of Ferdinand himself, the
Marquis-Duke of Cadiz, and other great Castilian generals, only waited
till this subterfuge should take effect to march on Ronda. With them
went their deadly train of artillery; and soon the walls and towers were
battered from three sides, without those within being able to retaliate.
Breaches were made, and through these the Castilian chivalry rushed to
the assault, driving before them up the streets the diminished garrison.
At length a knight, more intrepid than the rest, leaping from roof to
roof along the low white houses, planted his banner on the principal
mosque. His action completed the enemy’s despair; and on Ferdinand’s
offer of generous terms the inhabitants surrendered.
Had they known it, even while they bargained, help was on the way; for
Hamet “El Zegri,” driving before him the herds of Medina-Sidonia, was
returning across the mountains, when the sound of distant cannon and
falling masonry caused him and his men to put spurs to their horses. It
was nightfall when they arrived in the neighbourhood of Ronda, and
descending from the mountains, sword in hand, attacked the sleeping
camp. Up and down the precipitous slopes the battle raged, but, fierce
as each onslaught proved, the Castilians beat it back; and “El Zegri,”
at length acknowledging his defeat, withdrew in sullen fury. Ronda had
fallen, and the western frontier of the Moorish kingdom was in Christian
hands.
Such a loss did not help to rebuild Muley Hacen’s military reputation;
indeed there was murmuring in Granada that no land could prosper whose
ruler was almost in his dotage, unable either to lead his armies or to
cope with the work of government. Things would have been different, if
only their King had been a hero like his brother Abdallah “El Zagal,”
“the Valiant.”
Muley Hacen, both weary of war and intrigue and terrified lest the
populace in their anger should clamour for his death, hastily abdicated;
whereupon El Zagal, who had only been awaiting a favourable opportunity
to seize the throne, hurried to the capital. Fortune threw a glamour
over his advent; for, as he passed through the Sierra Nevada, he
surprised by chance a body of Christian knights enjoying a halt in one
of the fertile valleys. These were Knights of the Order of Calatrava,
sent out from Alhama to forage for the garrison; but the success of
their raid had rendered them careless, and no sentry warned them of the
enemy’s approach. Dismounted and scattered, some without arms, and none
fully prepared, they broke before the thunder of the Moorish cavalry;
and “El Zagal” and his men entered Granada with a train of captives and
the heads of those whom they had slain hanging from their saddles.
It was an omen to delight the patriotic; but the new Sultan’s peace of
mind was soon rudely shaken, for Muley Hacen died within the year, and
rumour at once connected his sudden end with the brother who had usurped
his power. Boabdil also, from his refuge at Cordova, declared himself
the undoubted King of Granada now that his father was no more, and the
sovereigns, who saw their way to fomenting new discord amongst their
enemies, instantly offered him any assistance in their power.
Boabdil, Abdallah “El Chico” “the Young,” as he was often called to
distinguish him from his rival Abdallah, “El Zagal,” could count as well
on the support of many Moorish families who hated and feared his uncle;
and though on the whole the chances of the duel were against him, yet
the issue was sufficiently doubtful to make both parties willing to
compromise. In the end a treaty of partition was signed. By this “El
Zagal” kept the seaboard with the important towns of Almeria, Malaga,
and Velez, the mountainous tract of the Alpujarras famous for its
warriors, and half the town of Granada with the palace of the Alhambra.
To Boabdil were left the Alcazaba and poorer quarter of the city, with
all the northern part of the kingdom adjoining Andalusia.
Delighted to be once more sovereign in his own land, the young Sultan
sent to inform his Christian patrons of the settlement he had made,
begging them in virtue of his submission to spare his territories in
their future invasions. Such a concession was far from Ferdinand’s
thoughts; and he replied by denouncing his vassal as a traitor who had
perfidiously allied himself with the open enemies of Castile. At the
same time he and his army advanced on Loja, one of the few important
towns that had been left to Boabdil, and whose possession the Christians
had long desired in order to establish easy communication with their
outpost of Alhama.
The unfortunate Abdallah “El Chico,” victim alike of craft and
circumstances, collected his Moorish supporters and sallied out to the
relief of his city with what show of scorn and defiance he could muster,
hoping by personal bravery to triumph over those whose skill and cunning
he had learned to dread. The ensuing combat, according to the
chronicles, was marked on both sides by striking deeds of valour, but
perhaps the honour of the day rested, amongst the Christians at least,
with an English noble, who had lately joined in the crusade with some
four hundred foot-soldiers of his nation, armed with bows and axes.
This knight, called by his Spanish allies the “Conde de Escalas” from
his family name of Scales, finding the scope for cavalry action too
restricted for his taste, dismounted and led his men to an assault on
the walls of Loja. He was already mounting a ladder, when a stone
well-aimed from above caught him full on the face, hurling him to the
ground, and he was with difficulty extricated and carried to his tent.
Here it was discovered that the blow had deprived him of two of his
front teeth, a loss likely to disturb the equanimity of a cavalier of
fashion however courageous. The Conde de Escalas nevertheless rose to
the occasion; and when the King, going to visit him during his
convalescence as a mark of favour, condoled with him on what he had
suffered, he replied cheerfully: “God Who hath made this building, my
body, hath but opened a door, that He may the more clearly see what
passeth within.” Rewarded for his assistance and valorous deeds by rich
gifts he departed not long afterwards to his own land.
Of the Moors, both Boabdil and his principal general, Hamet “El Zegri,”
were wounded, and after negotiations with the young Gonsalvo de Cordova
on behalf of the Christians, consented to the capitulation of Loja on
the 29th of May, 1486. The terms were sufficiently humiliating to punish
Boabdil well for his supposed perfidy; for he agreed to surrender his
title “King of Granada” and to become merely Duke of Guadix, with the
lordship of that town, if within six months he or his Christian allies
should succeed in wresting it from his uncle. On the latter he promised
to make unceasing war. In contrast to this severity, the inhabitants of
Loja were allowed to depart where they would, carrying with them their
movable property.
The capture of the famous “Flower among the Thorns” opened up a way into
the heart of Granada, of which the Christians were not slow to take
advantage, its possession being quickly followed by the reduction of
several Moorish fortresses of minor importance. To the camp before
Moclin, one of these strongholds, came the Queen herself to share in the
triumph of her army, and with her the Infanta Isabel, now a Princess of
marriageable age.
The Curate of Los Palacios has described the scene of her arrival with a
minute attention to detail that would have made his fortune as a modern
journalist of fashions. From him we know the exact costumes worn, not
only by the Queen and her daughter, but by Ferdinand and the young
English Conde de Escalas who rode in his train, while we are given a
curious little picture of the formal greeting between husband and wife.
Before they embraced, they bent low each of them three times in
reverence, and the Queen took off her hat, so that she remained in her
coif with her face uncovered; and the King came to her and embraced
her and kissed her on the cheek. Afterwards he went to his daughter
and embraced and kissed her also, making the sign of the cross in
token of his blessing.
Isabel remained with the Christian forces for the rest of the campaign;
while in the following spring she and Ferdinand collected a new army at
Cordova, mainly recruited from the levies of Andalusia. It was their
intention to attack the town of Velez-Malaga, now left high and dry, but
then a flourishing seaport, situated at the extremity of a long ridge of
mountains stretching down to the Mediterranean. Its capture would not
only lay bare the fertile valley to the west, but would also insert a
hostile wedge between the important city of Malaga some five miles
distant and the capital, where El Zagal maintained his uneasy throne.
The relations between the rival Sultans had not been improved by the
capitulation of Loja; and soon afterwards an unsuccessful attempt on the
part of the uncle to poison his nephew had led to renewed struggles in
Granada itself. Boabdil, in his eagerness for revenge had appealed to
Ferdinand for help; but the commander of the Christian troops sent to
the scene of action, while pretending to lend support, contented himself
with fomenting the discord that he found, thus encouraging the “King of
the Alhambra” and the “King of the Albaycin” to work their mutual
destruction.
When the news came that the Christian army had pitched its camp before
Velez-Malaga, bringing with it all its heavy guns, “El Zagal” was torn
with indecision. To go to the assistance of the besieged was to leave
his palace of the Alhambra exposed to Boabdil’s attack; to stay was to
sacrifice an important harbour, besides losing his popularity with the
inhabitants of Granada, who looked to him for the deeds of valour
befitting his name. His choice was that of the warrior; and the
despairing inhabitants of Velez-Malaga who were on the point of
surrender rejoiced to see the mountains lit up with bonfires, warning
them of their Sultan’s approach. The Christians on their part were fully
prepared to defend their camp; the bravest of their chivalry under the
Marquis-Duke of Cadiz opposed themselves again and again to the Moorish
onslaughts, until “El Zagal” was beaten back in confusion from
Velez-Malaga as Hamet “El Zegri” had been from Ronda.
The capitulation of the town followed at the end of April, 1487; and
then the Christian army pushed forward to Malaga, a port famous for its
commerce from the days of Phœnician traders. The enthusiasm of the
troops was raised to white heat by success and by the personal bravery
of Ferdinand, who, on one occasion during the late siege, seeing a
company of Castilians about to retreat, had hurled himself on the enemy
armed only with his breastplate and sword. On the remonstrances of his
generals, who besought him in future to remember what his death would
cost them, he replied: “I cannot see my men in difficulties and not go
to their aid.” It was an answer more likely to endear him to Castilian
hearts than any act of legislation.
The courage that inspired the Christians was not lacking in Malaga,
where the fierce Hamet “El Zegri” and his garrison had pledged
themselves to starve rather than yield. The fire of the heavy lombards,
disembarked from the Castilian ships and pointed on the Moorish towers
and ramparts, was answered by cannon equally deadly in their aim; the
mines planted deep behind trenches were met by counter-mines; the
Christian raids on the suburbs by midnight sallies of such unexpected
ferocity that often massacre ensued, until reinforcements at length
drove the invaders back to their walls.
The summer months passed slowly; and hunger and pestilence added their
gaunt spectres to the sufferings of the besieged. In vain Ferdinand,
courting a speedy surrender, sent messengers to offer generous terms,
such as he had granted at Ronda and Loja; in vain he threatened the
alternative of slavery in case of prolonged resistance; in vain the more
peace-loving citizens pleaded with their governor to accept a settlement
that would save the prosperity of their port. Hamet “El Zegri” returned
a scornful refusal. Soon, he declared the rainy season would begin, and
the Christian camp would be turned into a swamp, fit breeding-ground for
death in all its forms. Malaga had only to hold firm to triumph. What
matter if the victory cost her the ruin of her commerce? It was a
question to which garrison and merchants returned a different answer.
In the meanwhile Isabel had appeared in person at the Christian camp,
not, as the Moors expected, to persuade her husband to raise the siege,
but to second his efforts. Her presence was heralded by the fire of all
the guns at once, a thunder that shook Malaga to its foundations and
filled Castilian hearts with pride. Fanaticism was now to play its part
in the history of the siege, persuading Hamet “El Zegri” and his
supporters of divine interposition, when all human aid had failed them.
Their first would-be saviour was a certain Abraham “El Gerbi,” a dervish
of holy life imbued with a hatred of the Christians. This man, gathering
to his standard some four hundred warriors of Guadix, whom he had
inspired with the belief that he was protected by the angels of Mahomet,
led them to an attack on the camp before Malaga. Had his efforts ended
here the incident would have been speedily forgotten, for in spite of
its bravery the band of fanatics was too small to create more than a
momentary panic. Abraham “El Gerbi,” however, was captured alive. No one
suspected in that saintly face and wasted form the man who had planned
the mad expedition; and when the old dervish declared himself a prophet,
and begged for an interview with the King and Queen that he might
explain how Malaga could be taken, the Marquis-Duke of Cadiz led him at
once to headquarters.
There was some delay in seeing the sovereigns, so the prisoner was made
to wait in a neighbouring tent, where a Portuguese Prince, Don Alvaro, a
cousin of the Queen, and Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya, were
playing chess. Unable to understand Castilian, the dervish believed the
players the object of his fanatical hatred, and, drawing a knife he had
concealed in the folds of his cloak, he attacked the Prince, wounding
him in the head. Next he hurled himself on the Marchioness of Moya, but
before he could achieve his purpose the swords of those standing by had
ended his life. That night the body of Abraham “El Gerbi” was hurled by
Christian catapults into the Moorish town.
It would seem as if Malaga’s faith in dervishes might have been shaken;
but a new prophet shortly appeared, this time within the city, pledging
himself by a certain sacred banner to bring victory to Moorish arms. His
preaching, seconded by Hamet “El Zegri’s” fiery patriotism, stirred the
flagging energy of the besieged to a more desperate sally than any that
had yet been made. Out of the city they poured, the white standard
floating at their head, and before this unexpected avalanche of spears
and scimitars the Christians for the moment quailed; the next, their
courage returning, they closed upon their foes from all sides. The
battle wavered, then a stone from a catapult struck the dervish prophet
down, and with a shout of triumph the Christians saw the sacred banner
fall and drove back the Moors, routed and dismayed, within the walls of
Malaga.
The city was doomed. Even Hamet “El Zegri” acknowledged this, and
leaving the citizens to their fate, withdrew with some of his warriors
into the fortress of the Gibralfaro; but the offers of peace and safety
he had before derided could be no longer claimed. Fanaticism had left
its mark also on the Christian camp; and amongst the Castilian soldiery
the enemy’s entreaties for life and freedom were met by threats of a
general massacre.
Since hunger and not goodwill prompts you to the surrender of your
city [said the Chief Commander, of Leon, replying to an embassy from
Malaga], either defend yourselves or submit to whatever sentence shall
be pleasing to the King and Queen;—to wit, death to those for whom it
is destined, slavery to those for whom slavery.
It was a bitter answer; and only sheer necessity drove Malaga to a
submission from which she could hope so little. Amid fear and wailing,
the capitulation was signed, and on August 20th, the sovereigns made
their triumphal entry into the city. Hamet “El Zegri” still withstood
their power in the Gibralfaro, but treachery amongst his garrison at
length led to his betrayal, and the whole of Malaga lay at the Christian
mercy. Its renegades, where they were discovered, were put to death, and
on the rest of the inhabitants the sovereigns passed the sentence of
perpetual slavery;—so many to be distributed amongst the Castilian
nobles, so many to be sold for the benefit of the treasury, so many
apportioned for the ransom of Christian slaves in Africa. A picked group
of one hundred and eighty warriors were dispatched to the Pope as fruits
of the crusade, while the Queen of Portugal and the Queen of Naples each
received fifty of the fairest maidens.
[Illustration:
MALAGA TO-DAY
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
“The fate of Malaga,” says Prescott, “may be said to have decided that
of Granada.” Cut off entirely from the western part of the kingdom, that
had proved so valuable a storehouse of men and the necessaries of life,
she lay ringed round by enemies, who only awaited the moment to strike
her death-blow. Yet for this low estate to which she had fallen she
could not hold herself blameless. In her passionate distrust of failure
she had made and unmade her rulers, regardless of the handicap thus
placed upon their actions. “El Zagal” had been right in his fears for
his throne, when he sallied forth to the relief of Velez-Malaga. The
dread of the fickle populace he had left behind him had hung over his
wild encounters with the chivalry of Spain; and when he returned, beaten
but patriotic and valorous as of old, it was to find the gates of the
capital closed against him, and his rival Sultan, not only of the
Albaycin, but the Alhambra. In bitterness of spirit he marched eastwards
to protect the cities of Guadix, Baeza, and Almeria, that still remained
loyal to his cause; and it was against these that the Catholic
sovereigns planned their next campaign.
The early part of the year 1488 they spent in Aragon, settling the
affairs of that kingdom, and receiving the acknowledgment by the
national Cortes of Prince John, now a boy of ten as heir to the Spanish
throne. By June, however, Ferdinand arrived in Murcia and soon pushed
southwards with a large army; but the campaign was not destined to
follow the glorious lines of its predecessor. El Zagal, from his
headquarters at Guadix, and his brother-in-law Cid Haya at Baeza knew
the country well, and were on the watch for the least rash or mistaken
move that their opponents might commit. Several of the smaller
fortresses succumbed to Castilian lombards; but such gains were fully
counterbalanced by a repulse from Almeria, and a well-planned ambush,
from which the Marquis-Duke of Cadiz only extricated himself and his
troops with considerable difficulty and loss.
Ferdinand, despairing of further efforts at the moment, withdrew to
winter at Valladolid; but in the next spring he and Queen Isabel
appeared in Jaen, determined on the reduction of Baeza, the most
important town in eastern Granada. The preparations were on a scale that
surpassed all former efforts of the kind; for the neighbouring country
with its thick orchards and easily flooded rivers was difficult and
treacherous; while the inhabitants were even more hostile to the
Christians than their western compatriots.
The cornfields of Baeza had not ripened at the time of the enemy’s
advance; but the grain was already cut and stored within the city lest
the hated unbelievers should reap it for their own consumption. The
supply of food was but one of the many pressing problems that the
sovereigns were called on to solve; and, as the time passed, Ferdinand
was almost tempted to raise his camp and retire until he should have
made himself master of the surrounding district. To this policy he was
urged by the majority of his generals, who contrasted the massive
fortifications of Baeza, her hardy soldiers, and her stores of
provisions, with the Christian lines, then threatened by inundations of
water and decimated by disease.
Don Gutierre de Cardenas, Commander of Leon, alone protested against a
retreat that would represent the waste of so much labour and money; and
he was to find a staunch supporter in the Queen, who from Jaen implored
her husband not to listen to advice as cowardly as it was mistaken. If
he would continue the campaign, she on her part pledged herself to keep
a line of communication open, pouring daily into the camp all that it
should require in the way of food or ammunition.
The chroniclers have left us minute accounts of her labours to this end,
carried through with the characteristic thoroughness that had so often
brought her success. The purchase of the crops of Andalusia and the
lands belonging to the Military Orders; the transference of this grain
and hay by a procession of fourteen thousand mules to the seat of war
and the outposts already in Christian hands; the repair of the roads,
worn by traffic and the heavy rains, by the vigilance of an army of
engineers, kept ever at hand for the purpose; the enrollment of fresh
troops and workmen to replace those lives lost in the great crusade;
most arduous of all the continual disbursement of the money that came so
slowly again into the royal treasury. At times the attempt to adjust the
balance between demand and supply appeared impossible; and rents and
subsidies failed as expenses grew, but Isabel’s hand on the helm of
affairs never wavered. The crown jewels were pawned to the merchants of
Valencia and Barcelona, but the campaign against Baeza did not slacken.
Ferdinand and his generals, certain of support from their base of
operations, took new heart; and to the dismay of the besieged huts made
of clay and timber began to replace the old tents, and traders to appear
with their merchandise of comforts and luxuries, till the camp gradually
assumed the air of a permanent settlement or village.
To it amongst other strangers came Franciscan friars from the Holy Land,
bearing despatches from the Sultan of Egypt, in which he complained of
the destruction that was being wrought against the Mahometans in Spain.
Unless such hostility ceased, he declared his intention of venting his
wrath on any Christians he might find in Palestine. The sovereigns, in
answer, protested their right to reconquer the kingdom of Granada which
had belonged to their ancestors; but they expressed their willingness to
deal kindly by such Moors as proved themselves good subjects. Not
content with explaining the situation by letter they even sent an
embassy to the Sultan some years later, with Peter Martyr, the young
Italian noble who had been an eye-witness of so much of the war, at its
head; and his eloquence succeeded in establishing friendly relations.
In November, 1489, Isabel herself visited the camp; and Cid Haya, with
that courtesy that often lent so fine a shade to mediæval warfare,
granted a truce that she might go and inspect the farthest trenches and
outposts in safety. Pulgar declares enthusiastically that her advent
changed the whole spirit of the campaign, putting an end to the
vindictive bitterness that had hitherto marked the contest on either
side. Moors and Christians alike were weary of fighting; and Cid Haya,
who had none of Hamet “El Zegri’s” fierce intolerance, recognized that
he was waging a lost cause and decided to make good terms while he was
in a position to do so. At the beginning of December, Baeza capitulated
on the promise of security of life and property for all its defenders
and inhabitants; with the proviso that they might live if they chose as
Castilian subjects, keeping their own religion and laws.
Cid Haya himself was received by the sovereigns with such marked
attention and honour that he was speedily led to abjure his faith and
become a Christian, marrying in later years one of the Queen’s favourite
ladies-in-waiting. His first service to his new masters was to visit his
brother-in-law, “El Zagal,” at Guadix and to persuade him of the
futility of further resistance. Almeria had already surrendered, and but
for Guadix no independent city of importance remained save Granada, with
whom there could be no hope of any alliance.
“El Zagal,” bowing his pride to necessity, agreed to a treaty of
capitulation that left him the title “King of Andaraz” with the district
of that name and a considerable revenue; but he did not possess Cid
Haya’s light-hearted temperament, and soon found life in Spain
intolerable under the new conditions. Determined to break with all that
could remind him of his lost glory, he sold his estates to Ferdinand and
sailed to Africa; but he was to experience worse treatment at the hands
of co-religionists than from his Christian foes. A tale of his wealth
had spread abroad, and the King of Fez at once proceeded to rob and
imprison him. When at length he gained his freedom, “El Zagal,” the once
valiant warrior king, whose name had been the terror of the Andalusian
border, had fallen to beggary, and blind and ragged sought alms from
door to door, until a man who had known him in prosperity took pity on
him and granted him an asylum.
With the conquest of eastern Granada, the Moorish war entered on its
last phase. Boabdil was nominally at peace with Castile; but pretexts
were not lacking to embroil him afresh, as soon as the close of the
struggle with his uncle left Ferdinand and Isabel free to embark on a
fresh campaign.
By the terms of the capitulation of Loja Boabdil had agreed to surrender
his claims to the throne on the capture of Guadix, and to retire to that
city with the title of Duke. The sovereigns now demanded the fulfilment
of this promise; but the outlook had changed since the days when the
young Sultan had been merely doubtful “King of the Albaycin,” and knew
not if the next week would find him in exile. Lord of the whole of
Granada, the prospect of the Duchy of Guadix was not alluring to his
ambitions; nor, had he wished to surrender, was he in a position to do
so. Raised to the throne by all the martial element in the kingdom, that
had not bowed the knee before the Cross, his very life depended on his
popularity with the fierce warriors of the Alpujarras and the rest of
the Moorish soldiery, who for one reason or another were pledged to
maintain the city’s independence.
[Illustration:
BOABDIL, LAST KING OF GRANADA
FROM ALTAMIRA’S “HISTORIA DE ESPAÑOLA”
]
Thus it was that the Christian demands were met by defiance, and the
sovereigns provided with an excuse for prosecuting the war to its bitter
end. The Moorish messengers had found them in Seville, whither they had
gone in April, 1490, to celebrate the betrothal of their daughter Isabel
with Don Alfonso, the heir to the Portuguese throne; but, this
concluded, Ferdinand collected an army and, crossing the Sierra Elvira,
proceeded to ravage the plains of Granada. Within sight of the city he
knighted his son Prince John, on whom so many hopes were centred, that
in this last act of the crusade, inheritance of his race, the boy of
twelve might receive initiation into a great future.
Boabdil, in the meanwhile, had not waited to be attacked; and his
generals, taking the offensive, endeavoured to recapture some of the
smaller fortresses that had fallen into Christian hands, besides
stirring up revolt in the larger towns which had lately surrendered,
such as Guadix and Baeza. Both efforts met with a measure of success;
for many of the Moors, who had faithfully served “El Zagal” throughout
his struggles with his nephew, were so disgusted at seeing his banner in
the Christian camp, and at witnessing the soft complacency of Cid Haya,
that they turned willingly from their old allegiance to the Prince who
offered them deliverance from a foreign yoke.
Their patriotism came too late. The hour had passed when rebellion could
do more than temporarily retard the waning Crescent; and the punishment
of failure was meted out by Ferdinand and his generals with no unsparing
hand. Yet this severity had its semblance of mercy. The inhabitants of
the town in question might choose between exile with their movable
property, or a full judicial inquiry into their conduct. Who were
guilty? The citizens looked at one another and knew that few would be
able to prove complete innocence before a hostile judgment seat, with
racial hatred holding the balance; and their decision was not long in
forming.
From the fairest cities in Granada passed away the population that had
made her fame; and, as the exiles sailed to Africa, Castilians took
possession of their deserted homes. The Curate of Los Palacios, in the
case of Guadix, congratulates himself on Ferdinand’s cleverness in thus
winning this town so completely from the enemies of the Holy Catholic
Faith. “It is one of the mysteries of Our Lord,” he adds, “who would by
no means consent that so noble a city should remain longer in the power
of the Moors.”
Round Granada itself the Christian lines were closing in; and successful
though arduous campaigns into the mountains of the Alpujarras had cut
off the beleaguered city from hope of succour in that direction.
Christian Europe, humbled by the fall of Constantinople, awaited the
issue with expectant joy; and it seemed in this supreme moment as if the
chivalry of both the Crescent and the Cross, conscious of universal
interest, were inspired to a last emulation in the quest of glory. Never
before in the crusade had the sallies of the besieged or the furious
attacks of besiegers exhibited such contempt of personal danger; never
before had schemes emanating from the council-chamber been supplemented
by such deeds of individual bravery.
Chief hero of these days was the young Castilian noble, Hernando de
Pulgar, “He of the Exploits,” as his countrymen proudly named him.
Already in the earlier stages of the war he had earned a reputation for
reckless daring; but the crowning touch to his fame was given by his
midnight entry into Granada with fifteen companions of the same
hazard-loving temperament. Led by a converted Moor, the little band of
Christians scaled the walls and, making their way through the town by
deserted streets, arrived unperceived at the principal mosque. Here
Hernando de Pulgar drew from his pocket a strip of parchment, on which
were inscribed the words dear to every Catholic but anathema to the sons
of Islam, “Ave Maria!” and fixed it by his dagger to the door. Before he
could follow up his intention of setting fire to the neighbouring
houses, he was discovered; but nevertheless he and his friends succeeded
in making their escape by dint of hard riding and a liberal use of their
swords, before the majority of the inhabitants were even aware of their
inroad.
It was an action to fire the imagination of all the young hot-bloods in
the camp; and when in the summer of 1491 Isabel and a number of her
ladies-in-waiting appeared at the seat of war, the incentive to deeds of
prowess was redoubled. The sovereigns, though delighted with Hernando de
Pulgar’s exploit, for which they rewarded him with every mark of honour
and favour, were yet too practical to encourage a needless loss of life.
They had long recognized, as we have seen, that in patience rather than
in daring lay their hope of success; and when a fire broke out in the
Queen’s tent and destroyed a good part of the camp, they determined to
prepare for a long siege and to build more solid accommodation, as they
had done at Baeza.
To this end the Spanish soldier was converted into a workman; and under
his willing hands a city arose, not merely of clay and timber, but of
stone. In shape a square, cut into four by wide crossroads, each quarter
with its fine houses contained a block of marble inscribed with the
names of those cities of Spain that had helped in its construction, the
whole being finished within eighty days from its commencement.
[Illustration:
ALHAMBRA, PATIO DE L’ALBERCA
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON, ROME
]
The building of Santa Fé, “Holy Faith,” as Isabel characteristically
christened the city when asked to name it after herself, had been
witnessed from the walls of Granada; and Boabdil’s heart sank within him
at this token of the iron determination he knew and feared. Already
hunger was rife amongst his subjects; and though he might prolong the
siege for months or even longer he realized that only ultimate failure
lay before him. So did his principal councillors, and in October, 1491,
acting on their advice, he entered at last into negotiations for
surrender.
The terms to which both sides finally agreed, besides guaranteeing to
the inhabitants of Granada the safety of their lives and property,
granted them also the free exercise of their religion, laws, and
customs. They were to speak their own language, keep their own schools,
and appoint their own judges and priests, submitting to no Christian
authority save that of the Governor-General of the city. For three years
they were to pay no taxes, and after that date none that should exceed
those that had been ordinarily exacted by their Mahometan rulers. These
rights were to be enjoyed by Jews as well as Moors; while the Christian
captives then in the city were to be exchanged for an equal number of
Moorish slaves. Above all Boabdil stipulated that no partisan or servant
of “El Zagal” should be allowed a share in the government.
The surface value of these conditions was fair enough; treacherously
fair, according to the Moorish warriors still disinclined for peace.
“If you think,” exclaimed one of them, “that the Christians will remain
faithful to what they have promised, or that their sovereign will prove
as generous a conqueror as he has been a valiant enemy, you deceive
yourselves.”
His contemptuous refusal to have part or parcel in the transaction was
echoed through the streets.
“Traitors and cowards all!” cried an old dervish, gathering behind him
the more excitable element of the town; and soon a mob was beating on
the gates of the Alhambra.
Boabdil succeeded in restoring order; but the fear of another riot made
him hastily dispatch a letter to Ferdinand and Isabel, asking them in
view of his critical position to take possession of the town some days
earlier than they had settled. His interest in smoothing out all
difficulties is explained by the secret stipulations affixed to the
general terms of surrender. By these he and his immediate relations were
to keep the lands that already formed their private patrimony, while he
himself was to receive in addition the lordship and revenue of a large
district in the Alpujarras, the sovereigns paying him the sum of thirty
thousand castellanos on the day of their entry.
Thus Boabdil hoped to buy peace, and in the guise of a territorial
magnate to free himself from the unlucky star that had haunted his path
as King.[3] On the 2d of January, 1492, at the signal of a cannon fired
from the Alhambra he left for ever the palace that had been the scene of
so many vicissitudes in his life. At the same moment the Christian army
in festival attire, with banners flying and amid the blare of trumpets
issued from the gates of Santa Fé; the Cardinal of Spain and Don
Gutierre de Cardenas leading the triumphal march that was to end at last
in the goal of all their ambitions.
Footnote 3:
Boabdil, like his uncle “El Zagal,” finally sold his patrimony to the
Catholic sovereigns and sailed to Africa. He was killed in a battle
some years later fighting on behalf of the King of Fez against an
African tribe.
The two Kings met on the banks of the Genil, where Boabdil would have
knelt to kiss the other’s hand, had not Ferdinand with quick courtesy
prevented him. “Take these, Señor, for I and all in the city are thine,”
exclaimed the Moor, as in profound melancholy he yielded up the keys of
his capital. Then he passed on his way. As the turrets of the Alhambra
grew dim behind him, the vanguard of the Christian army crossed its
threshhold; and Ferdinand and Isabel without the gate saw raised on the
Tower of Colmares, first, the silver cross that had been blessed at
Rome, and then the royal banner and the standard of Santiago.
“Granada! Granada! for the sovereigns Don Fernando and Doña Isabel,”
cried the king-at-arms in a loud voice; and the Queen falling on her
knees and all with her, the solemn chant of the _Te Deum_ rose to
Heaven. The object of ten years of arduous warfare was achieved, the
dream of eight centuries realized; and none of those who knelt in
heartfelt thankfulness doubted that the gift was of God.
Four days later, on the 6th of January, 1492, the Feast of the Epiphany,
the Catholic sovereigns made their formal entry into Granada.
CHAPTER VIII
THE INQUISITION
Some allusion has already been made in our introductory chapter to the
character of the Castilian Church in mediæval times. Strongly national
in its resentment of papal interference, as in its dislike of alien
races within the Spanish boundaries, its wealth and popularity were a
sure index of the large part it must play in any difficult crisis.
Amongst churchmen both Henry IV. and the rebels who opposed him had
found their councillors and their generals; to the Church Queen Isabel
had turned, with a confidence that was not belied, for financial help
against the Portuguese; and it was a churchman, sitting in constant
deliberation with her and Ferdinand, who gained amongst contemporaries
the proud title of “the Third King.”
Pedro Gonsález de Mendoza had been a favourite of fortune from his
birth. A member of one of the proudest and wealthiest families in Spain,
the settlement of his profession had been almost coincident with his
admission to its material benefits; and, from holding a curacy in early
boyhood and a rich benefice at twelve years old, he had passed through
the lesser offices of the episcopate to succeed Don Alonso Carrillo, on
his death in 1482, as Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Castile.
Judicious influence had previously obtained him a Cardinal’s hat; but,
marked though her favour had been, his reputation was not solely of
fortune’s weaving.
Pedro Gonsález was in himself a striking personality. Nature had made
him a Castilian noble, and, in adopting one of the few careers
considered worthy of his rank, it never occurred to him that the claims
of religion should exclude those of his blood and class. A clear-headed
practical statesman, whose loyalty proved none the less valuable that it
had been inspired by a cautious regard to the interests of himself and
his house, he was also a liberal patron of education and philanthropy,
and an accomplished soldier and courtier.
“There was never a war in Spain during his time,” we are told, “in which
he did not personally take part, or at least have his troops engaged”;
nor did he disdain the amours, that with conspiracies and duelling
formed the fashionable life of Henry IV.’s Court. When that
impressionable monarch succumbed to the charms of the Portuguese
lady-in-waiting, Doña Guiomar, the name of Gonsález de Mendoza, then
Bishop of Calahorra, was linked with that of the favourite’s cousin; and
the chronicles record that two of his sons in later years intermarried,
through their father’s influence, with connections of the royal family.
Illegitimacy carried with it little stain amongst a people whose
standard of life was as low as their ideals were often high; and the
Church, sharing deeply as we have seen in the national life, paid the
penalty of this intimacy in a blinding of her own eyes to the distance
many of her sons had wandered from their Master’s footsteps. Queen
Isabel, whose personal purity was a standing witness to the high code of
morality in which she believed, was yet daughter enough of her age to
accept Cardinal Mendoza at his popular value. He had been her protector
and advisor through many of her difficulties, showing himself subtle and
far-seeing in politics, as well as the kindly friend a man of mature
years will often prove to young ambitions. Ferdinand and Isabel owed him
much, and they paid their debt by a trust and reverence that gained him
honour in Spain only second to that accorded to themselves.
Peter Martyr, in a letter to the Cardinal, addresses him as, “You,
without whom the King and Queen never take the smallest step, whether
engaged actively in war or enjoying peace, and without whose advice they
arrive at no important conclusion.” It is the language of eulogy, but it
touches truth at bottom; and the strength of Isabel’s affection for her
chief councillor may be gauged by her deference to his will, on those
occasions that it happened to clash with her own. When, in 1485, she
would have carried the royal jurisdiction with her to Alcalá de Henares,
superseding temporarily with her prerogative all local justice, as
elsewhere on her progress, the Cardinal declined to admit her claims
within the boundaries of his diocese of Toledo. To all her
expostulations he returned an obstinate refusal, till Isabel, seeing
that the matter must end either in an open breach or her own surrender,
yielded the point. It was a concession she would have made to few of her
subjects.
[Illustration:
THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN, DON PEDRO GONSÁLEZ DE MENDOZA
FROM “HISTORIA DE LA VILLA Y CORTE DE MADRID” BY AMADOR DE LOS RIOS
]
Very different was her attitude when a criminal of Trujillo, on being
hailed for his misdeeds before the royal judges, protested that he had
received the tonsure and therefore he should be tried in the
ecclesiastical courts. To this plea, a trick to which men who had no
intention of taking orders resorted, that they might escape the rigours
of the secular law, the judges paid no heed; whereupon some priests,
relations of the accused, took up arms in his favour. “The Faith,” they
declared, “was in danger of perdition,” and having roused the mob by
inflammatory speeches, they attacked the house of the corregidor and the
local prison. The criminal was released; but the triumph of
ecclesiastical privilege was short-lived; for, some companies of
men-at-arms appearing on the scenes in response to the corregidor’s
appeal to the Queen, the principal lay rioters were hung. The clerical
offenders, saved by their cloth from a like fate, spent the rest of
their days in exile, meditating on the long arm of royal justice.
Equally firm was the position maintained by Ferdinand and Isabel in
their dealings with the Roman See. From one aspect they were sincerely
loyal and devoted to their “Holy Father in Christ,” seeking his sanction
for all those actions where orthodoxy demanded papal consent; and
informing him, in sure confidence of his blessing, of every success they
enjoyed in their struggle with infidels and heretics. The very nature of
the war of Granada earned for them a reputation in Europe as special
champions of the Faith; and, though the honour was prompted rather by
his needs than their deserts, no title could have been more fitting than
“Los Reyes Católicos,” “The Catholic Kings,” bestowed on them by
Alexander VI. in 1494.
Yet, from another point of view, these same “Catholic Kings” were as
staunch opponents of papal encroachments as any imperial Frederick II.
or Henry VIII. of England. It might be said that their disputes with the
Holy Father savoured rather of the spoilt than the rebellious child.
Conscious of their merits as perpetual crusaders and chasteners of the
unorthodox, they preferred, instead of making war on the general
principle of Roman interference in ecclesiastical matters, to demand
exemption as their special right,—the right of those who, with their
ancestors, had won back the soil of their native land in conflict with a
heathen race.
Their hand was none the less iron that it was discreetly gloved. When in
1491 an appeal to Rome was admitted by the Court of Chancery at
Valladolid, in a case falling by law solely within the royal
jurisdiction, Isabel in her indignation did not hesitate to remove all
the judges who had consented to this step, appointing others in their
place.
Still more drastic was the action taken by Ferdinand and herself in
1482, when the question of the extent of Roman patronage came
prominently to the fore. Sixtus IV., anxious to provide for a host of
needy relatives, had appointed a Cardinal-nephew to the rich see of
Cuenca, then vacant. Quite unprepared for the indignation with which
this announcement was received in Spain, he was soon disillusioned by
the sovereigns, who utterly refused to acknowledge his protégé,
declaring that it had always been the custom to appoint natives of the
country;—and this, not only as a reward for the services rendered by
Spain to Christendom, but as a national safeguard, since the majority of
the sees carried with them the control of fortresses and strongholds.
Sixtus replied by alleging his unlimited right to provide incumbents to
all and every church in Christendom. In vain ambassadors passed to and
fro suggesting compromise. The dispute had reached an impasse that no
arguments could remove, when Ferdinand and Isabel, by commanding all
their subjects at Rome to leave the Papal dominions without delay,
removed the matter to an altogether different plane. Spaniards in the
Holy City were less afraid of Papal anger than of the threat that their
goods at home would be sequestered, if they failed to obey the royal
edict; and Sixtus, witnessing the preparations for their departure,
realized the seriousness of the issue. A loss of revenue, a Spanish
appeal to a General Council that might depose him, these and many other
possible results of his obstinacy floated before his mind; and it was an
embassy of conciliation that he next despatched from Rome.
The sovereigns, who were at Medina del Campo, at first received the
overture with unbending pride, bidding the ambassador depart as they saw
no reason why he should be admitted to their presence. When at length,
by the mediation of the Cardinal of Spain, negotiations were once more
entertained, the Pope agreed to withdraw his nephew’s claims and to
appoint one of the Queen’s chaplains. Henceforth he conceded to the
sovereigns the right to petition in favour of candidates, whom they
might deem suitable for the episcopate, reserving for himself the actual
nomination.
This decision was equivalent to a triumph for the Crown; but it proved
only the first of a series of battles, and the instructions issued to
Spanish ambassadors at Rome throughout the reign continually pressed the
royal prerogative in ecclesiastical matters. In the case of presentment
to livings, of which patronage the Pope was peculiarly jealous,
Ferdinand and Isabel were often able to achieve their purpose
indirectly, by laying an embargo on the rents of the nominee to whom
they objected, until he saw his way to complying with their views.
If, in matters of practical administration, the sovereigns accepted
their duty of obedience, like certain brides, with reservations, they
did not let their enthusiasm for Catholic dogma blind their eyes to the
scandals of the Roman Court, and more especially to the evil reputation
it acquired during the pontificate of Alexander VI., the notorious
Rodrigo Borgia. Conscious of the harm his example wrought in the Church,
they sent private ambassadors to petition him that he would send away
his children from Rome, “purify his life, reform his house, and cease to
allow the sale of benefices and ecclesiastical offices.”
That their motive was a genuine desire to raise the prevalent low
standard of morality may be gathered from their rigorous policy of
ecclesiastical reform at home. Hitherto all efforts in this direction
had proved abortive; and the instructions issued by Alonso Carrillo,
Archbishop of Toledo, at the Council of Aranda in 1473 show how
deep-seated was the evil. Open immorality of life and more venial
habits, such as dicing and the wearing of gaily-coloured clothes are
amongst the ordinary offences scheduled; but even the standard
recommended for the future scarcely touched a high level. Bishops were
not to take money in return for conferring ordination, nor to accept as
fitting candidates those unable to speak Latin, the language of the
Church. Priests must celebrate Mass at least four times a year and
bishops three, while both were strongly urged not to lead a riotous or
military life. The latter charge, as emanating from Don Alonso Carrillo,
has its humorous aspect, but criticism was disarmed by the grave
addition, unless it should be to take service with kings or princes of
the blood.
The character of the episcopate, in whose hands these measures of reform
were left, fully explains the failure that attended them. An Alonso
Carrillo could not be expected to quench military tendencies; an Alonso
Fonseca, the giver of banquets, to suppress luxury; a Pedro Gonsález de
Mendoza to inveigh heavily against broken vows of celibacy. This Queen
Isabel realized, and with the exception of Cardinal Mendoza, her
advisers in spiritual matters were men of a very different type.
“He is a gentle-natured priest, somewhat narrow of mind perhaps, but a
sound theologian without bitterness or passion.” Thus wrote Peter Martyr
of Fra Fernando de Talavera, Isabel’s confessor, who exercised so large
an influence over her mind throughout the earlier part of her reign. The
story of his introduction to his duties is characteristic of both man
and Queen. At their first confessional, the Friar, seating himself on a
low stool, bade his companion kneel before him; but she, unwilling to
lower her dignity, reminded him gently that it was the custom for her
confessors also to kneel.
“Señora,” replied Fra Fernando, “this is the tribunal of God, and
therefore must you kneel and I be seated.”
“He is the confessor whom I have long sought,” was the Queen’s comment
on this interview, the acknowledgment of her readiness to bow before the
spiritual director she could respect. To some minds his answer might
have savoured of arrogance; but the friar’s personal humility forbade
such an interpretation; and when, on the surrender of Granada in 1492,
he was appointed as first Archbishop of that city, he accepted the
office with a shrinking reluctance that was wholly sincere.
He took away with him to his southern diocese much of the saner and
kindlier influences at work on Isabel’s soul; for, though she continued
to rely on his advice both in religious and worldly affairs, yet other
and less tolerant directors were helping to shape her conscience.
The name of her new confessor, Ximenes de Cisneros, is famous in Spanish
history,—the name of one of the world’s chosen few, who solely by their
natural gifts climb from poverty and obscurity to pluck her richest
fruits. His success is the more arresting that, by the irony of fate, he
cared nothing for the world or her rewards. Literary fame had stretched
before him as chaplain of the cathedral church of Sigüenza, and he
deliberately turned his back on it to exchange the free life of the
chapter for the monk’s cell. Here he donned the Franciscan habit; not as
the cloak for idleness and evil customs it had become with many of the
Order but as the rough garment of humility and self-abnegation that
Saint Francis had offered to his followers of old.
The Franciscan community was split at this time into two distinct
sections: the Conventuals, wealthy, influential, and prosperous, who in
the decadence of their life had ceased even to realize the loss of their
ideals; and the Observants, those who observed the old rules with an
austerity and fire that burned all the more brightly for their brothers’
failings. Between these two was war; and it was natural that Cisneros
should be found in the camp of the ascetics, natural also that even in
this retreat his talent should be discovered, and his gift for preaching
and organization win him uncoveted renown.
[Illustration:
XIMINES DE CISNEROS
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
He was already fifty-five years old at the time of the fall of Granada
when Cardinal Mendoza, consulted by the Queen as to her new confessor,
remembered his own light-hearted days as Bishop of Sigüenza and a
certain austere but brilliant chaplain of his cathedral, who had turned
his back on the world for the sake of his religious ideals. The portrait
caught Isabel’s fancy; and Cisneros was duly summoned to Court and named
her confessor, an appointment that filled him with even more dismay than
the frivolous courtiers.
“Behold!” says Peter Martyr, “an Augustine in his piercing intellect, a
Jerome in his self-inflicted penances, an Ambrose in his zeal for the
Faith.”
It was a combination to leave its mark on the spiritual life of those
around him; the more that the admiration which his character inspired in
the Queen was soon to widen his sphere of action. At the beginning of
the year 1495 Pedro Gonsález de Mendoza died. The Queen had visited him
during the last days of his illness and consulted him as to a fitting
successor in the Primacy; on which the old Cardinal frankly advised her
not to give the office to any man of great family or wealth, lest he
should be tempted to use it for his own ends. Instead he suggested the
humble Franciscan friar, whose life to both their minds represented the
highest earthly fulfilment of Christianity. Isabel joyfully agreed,
refusing to yield to Ferdinand’s wish that the honour should go to his
own illegitimate son, Alfonso, Archbishop of Saragossa.
Knowing her confessor’s character, she sent secretly to Rome for the
bull of nomination. When it arrived, she handed it to him; but Cisneros,
reading the opening address, “To our venerable brother, Fra Ximenes de
Cisneros, Archbishop-elect of Toledo,” pushed it away, saying “Señora,
this cannot be meant for me.”
He quitted the royal presence abruptly and hastened from Madrid,
replying to all appeals and arguments that he did not feel himself
worthy to enter on so high an office. It was not till some six months
later, on the receipt of another bull from Rome, commanding him to
accept the archbishopric without delay, that the friar withdrew his
opposition.
Never had the Spanish Church witnessed a more curious transformation.
The humble Observant had become an ecclesiastical prince, the holder of
the see in Christendom coveted, according to contemporaries, next to
Rome itself. Henceforth his annual revenue would amount to over 80,000
ducats a year, the value of the patronage at his disposal far exceed
that sum, his military retainers would make a small army, his judicial
rights over his diocese were to be those of a viceroy.
Warned by the Pope that it befitted the Primate of Castile to maintain a
certain state and dignity, Cisneros grimly adopted the splendour of his
predecessor’s régime, tolerating as a necessary evil the rich furniture
and food, the household of young nobles, and the velvet and silk of his
outward clothing, that to many a priest of the day would have filled the
foreground of the picture. Some indeed believed that the Archbishop had
shed the fine ideals of the monk; and once in his presence a Franciscan
boldly preached to this effect. Cisneros listened in silence; but after
the service was over took his critic apart and, drawing aside the
gorgeous vestment in which he was clothed, showed beneath it the friar’s
rough woollen shirt. This, with the frugal dishes, that were his own
portion from his loaded tables, and the hard straw mattress that shamed
his canopied bed, were the realities of Ximenes’s material life in the
midst of all his glory.
His indifference to the soft things of this world was equalled by his
contempt of popularity; and the revenues that had bought for other
archbishops of Toledo influence and fame amongst the wealthy and
well-born of the kingdom now went to ameliorate the lives of the poor
and to enrich hospitals and schools. From the first, also, he had set
his face against patronage bestowed for any reason except the personal
merit of the candidate in question.
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a brother of the Cardinal, had been appointed
Adelantado of Cazorla, a military office in the diocese of Toledo.
Fearful, lest he should now be deprived of it, he obtained a
recommendation from the Queen, but Cisneros would not look at it.
“Archbishops of Toledo,” he declared, “should administer their patronage
freely and not on any recommendation. My Sovereign Lord and Lady, whom I
deeply respect, can dismiss me to the cell from which they fetched me,
but they cannot force me to act against my conscience and the laws of
the Church.”
Isabel received the report of this interview with the serenity that
ordinary court flatterers found so baffling; while Cisneros, on his
part, satisfied on enquiry as to Diego Hurtado’s character and
capability, consented to ratify his nomination.
The work of reform, undertaken by Queen and confessor, proceeded with
renewed energy after the latter’s appointment as Primate. With regard to
the secular clergy, the sovereigns had from the beginning of their reign
endeavoured to leaven the worldly character of the episcopate by
conferring vacant bishoprics on men of the lower nobility or middle
class, who were distinguished for their mental or moral qualities. Nor
did they leave to the lax arm of the ecclesiastical courts the
administration of the numerous laws and edicts designed to check the
widespread immorality of the lesser clergy; and it was royal officials
who “fined, scourged, or banished” the women kept by priests in defiance
of their vow of celibacy.
This policy of amendment and repression met with Cisneros’s full
approval; but the reform in which as a friar he was most interested was
that of the monastic orders. In 1493 the sovereigns had obtained a papal
brief, authorizing them to appoint “visitors,” who should inspect the
various Religious Houses, correct the errors that they found, and punish
evildoers.
From this tour the Conventual section of the Franciscans did not emerge
scatheless; and the indignation, aroused amongst its members, at the
penalties inflicted and changes introduced was so great that an appeal
against the Archbishop’s tyranny was finally lodged at Rome. Four
hundred friars, it was declared, rather than submit to the new order of
things had been driven to turn Mahometan and seek refuge in Africa. Such
a tale might well have inspired the conviction that the drastic measures
of the Queen and her adviser were fully justified; but in Alexander VI.
it only prompted a heartfelt sympathy with the Conventuals; and in
January, 1496, he dispatched a bull, forbidding further reform until he
was satisfied as to its necessity. Isabel replied by sending special
ambassadors to plead her side of the case; a transaction in which they
succeeded so admirably that the Pope withdrew his opposition.
In the meanwhile she and Cisneros had continued with unwavering energy
the task they had begun. Her own share was no sinecure; for, taking her
needlework or her spinning, she would visit the convents and, seated
amongst the nuns, strive by her personal influence to win them back to a
sense of their duties, and the devotion that could alone inspire their
calling. According to his biographer, success also attended the harsher
treatment meted out to the Franciscans by Cisneros, till at length “few
monasteries remained where the rules of the Observants were not kept, to
the great satisfaction of the Archbishop and edification of the people.”
The reform of the morals and customs of the Spanish Church was now well
in train; but it formed only a part, and the smaller part, of the
sovereigns’ general scheme for the promotion and safeguard of the
Catholic Faith within their realms. If the foundations of a building are
insecure, the beauty and strength of its walls will soon prove
valueless; and Ferdinand and Isabel, regarding “right belief” as the
foundation of “right action,” and identifying “right belief” with
“acceptance of the doctrines and practice of the Holy Catholic Faith,”
were led by logical reasoning to establish the monstrous tyranny of the
Inquisition. There can be few things so pitiless as logic when carried
to its extreme, and few so faulty when the conclusions concern the soul;
perhaps because it is in this sphere that human intelligence most often
fails to test the truth of its premises. Heresy was to the mediæval mind
“the unpardonable sin”; the heretic in the language of the day, “a
venomous reptile requiring to be exterminated, lest he should spread
contagion by his very breath.” And in Spain this unpardonable sin was
more diffused and difficult to eradicate than amongst her neighbours;
for, through the centuries of reconquest, her population had been
exposed to constant intercourse with races of alien creed, endowed
moreover with the subtlety of mind that is the heritage of the Oriental.
However high the barriers built by racial prejudice, so long as
Christian, Jew, and Moor stood side by side on Spanish soil, a certain
amalgamation and interchange of ideas were inevitable. The Church,
jealous for the safety of the Catholic Faith, made the construction and
maintenance of barriers her lifework, and issued frequent canons
prohibiting mixed marriages as well as the friendly intercourse arising
from shared feasts and common dwellings. This proved unavailing; and
finally Jews and Moors were segregated in special quarters, called
“Juderías” and “Morerías,” and compelled to wear a dress or a badge,
that would distinguish them from their Christian neighbours when they
walked abroad.
Such legislation was to have far-reaching results, little foreseen by
those who framed it, though the immediate effect was highly
satisfactory. Some there were amongst the subject races, who preferred
to keep their own religion and suffer ignominy, rather than accept the
Faith they had learned to hate; but the majority, faced by a choice
between conversion and the scorn, disabilities, and even danger, that
became the daily portion of the professed Jew or Mahometan, chose the
easier path. At first the movement was gradual; but an outburst of
Christian fanaticism and racial prejudice towards the close of the
fourteenth century, led to a general massacre of the Jews, throughout
all the large cities of Spain, and this in turn to a wholesale
conversion of the survivors.
The “Conversos,” or “New Christians,” as they were often called in
contradistinction to the “Old Christians” of unblemished Catholicism,
were to introduce another jarring element into the already complicated
society of Spain. Welcomed by the Church as “brands plucked from the
burning,” they took full advantage of the opportunity to enter offices
and professions hitherto closed, as well as to continue unmolested in
the commerce and business they had formerly carried on under sufferance.
Since conversion affected neither their natural industry, nor their
racial capacity for making money, the New Christians soon developed the
wealth and power that have followed the footsteps of the Jew in all ages
and countries, where he has been free to pursue them. From the
collection of rents and taxes to the control of the King’s treasury,
they invaded every corner of the financial and economic life of Spain,
wringing from the carelessness of the Spaniard and their own foresight
the wealth that was one of the causes of their future ruin.
The Jew has always believed himself “the chosen of God,” and regarded
Gentiles with a scorn akin to that felt by the Greeks of old for their
“barbarian” neighbours. He might under pressure forsake his religion,
but his inborn sense of racial superiority remained; and the envy
excited in “Old Christians” by the accumulated honours of “the New” was
often fanned to the white heat of passion by the arrogance with which
these honours were borne.
An additional barrier was religious distrust that, removed in theory by
conversion and baptism, existed still in a more insidious form. Enforced
conversion is rarely sincere; and though some of the New Christians
out-heroded Herod in their hatred and denunciations of the religion they
had abandoned, the majority were content with a nominal or lukewarm
profession of the Catholic Faith. Old habits and customs cling; and the
Conversos, while attending Mass and other services of the Church, would
often observe in private the Jewish sabbath, and practise the rites and
ceremonies of their forefathers.
This laxity tended to increase during the reigns of weak or tolerant
kings, such as John II. and Henry IV. of Castile; while the anger it
excited amongst the mass of the people became proportionately more
violent as they watched their unorthodox neighbours “wax and grow fat.”
The growing spirit of fanaticism left its trail in riots instigated by
the “Old Christians” against “the New” in Toledo, Segovia, Ciudad Real,
Cordova, and Seville; rebels made use of it to threaten the unorthodox
Henry IV., and at length, in the Concord of Medina del Campo of 1465, a
resolution was passed, advocating that power should be given to the
archbishops and bishops of the kingdom to imprison, fine, and punish
“evil Christians and those whose faith was suspect.”
The Concord failed, but the desire for the castigation of heresy did not
die with the resolutions. When, in 1477, Ferdinand and Isabel came to
Seville, they were approached by a body of leading laymen and clergy,
who petitioned that “as Catholic Princes they would punish this
detestable sin, because if they left it ... unchecked, it would grow so
rapidly that great harm would befall the Holy Catholic Faith.”
Commissioners were appointed to hold an inquiry; and these gave their
opinion that the evil was so widespread that nothing but the
establishment of the Inquisition would have power to eradicate it.
“So rampant was this heresy,” says the Curate of Los Palacios, “that
lawyers almost preached the law of Moses”; while in another place he
adds: “These heretics and cursed Jews fled both Christian doctrines and
customs, avoiding when they could the baptism of their children, or, if
they must have them baptized immediately washing away the sign in their
own homes.”
Ferdinand and Isabel had in 1474 resisted an attempt of Sixtus IV. to
plant the papal Inquisition in Spain, by endowing his legate with
inquisitorial powers; their motive being not so much humanity as their
strong dislike of Roman interference in ecclesiastical matters, to which
attention has already been drawn. Now that an Inquisition of some kind
appeared a necessity, their whole endeavour was directed to obtaining a
bull that would secure for them the control of the new institution. For
this Sixtus was most unwilling; but their obstinacy, as on another
occasion, proved greater than his, and in November, 1478, he issued a
bull, authorizing the sovereigns to appoint as inquisitors three bishops
or other suitable men, with the right to remove them at pleasure.
The way lay clear; but Ferdinand and Isabel did not take advantage of it
till 1480, when a scheme of Cardinal Mendoza to combat heretical beliefs
by instruction and persuasion had been proclaimed by its author totally
unavailing. Seville was the first seat of the Holy Office, but its
sphere was soon extended to Cordova, and then to the other towns of
Andalusia and Castile; while, in 1485, Aragon also fell under its iron
yoke.
The dread assizes would be opened, on the arrival of the inquisitors, by
the publication of an “Edict of Grace,” granting to those conscious of
heresy a period of from thirty to forty days, during which they could,
without fear of death, make full confession of their errors and, after
due penance, be reconciled with the Mother Church. This term of
indulgence expired, the real work of the Inquisition would begin, and
the suspected heretic be summoned before the judges to clear himself of
the charges brought against him, the justice of the day holding him
guilty until he had proved his innocence.
The situation of the accused [says Lea] was helpless. Standing up
alone before the stern admonitions of the trained and pitiless judge;
brooding in his cell, cut off from all external communication, during
weeks or months of interval between his audiences; apparently
forgotten, but living in constant uncertainty of being at any moment
summoned to appear; torturing his mind as to the impression which his
utterances might have made, or the deductions drawn from his
admissions or denials ... it required an exceptionally resolute
temperament to endure the prolonged strain, with the knowledge that
the opponent in the deadly game always had in reserve the terrible
resource of the torture chamber.[4]
Footnote 4:
Lea, _History of Spanish Inquisition_, ii., p. 483.
Death, imprisonment for life, scourging, a loss of property, and public
ignominy: these were the main penalties inflicted. Since the object of
the Inquisition was to impress the populace with a terror of heresy and
its consequences, care was taken that the _Auto-de-Fe_, or “Act of
Faith,” regarded by many as a manifestation of the last Judgment, should
be as widely seen as possible. Amid the jeers or horror of the
spectators, and the low chanting of attendant priests the condemned
marched from their prison to their death, clad in “sanbenitos” or the
coarse woollen garment of the penitent. Across their breasts and
shoulders were embroidered, for those who were reconciled to the Faith,
crosses; for the obstinate heretic, flames and devils, symbols of the
everlasting torment that awaited his soul, when earthly judges had
finished their task.
The “Conversos,” terrified by the storm that had at last broken over
their heads, sought shelter where they could. Some took advantage of the
Edicts of Grace, and, caught in the toils of the demand that their
confession must be “full,” or it would avail them nothing, accused in
their panic neighbours and even relations, that their own repentance
might seem the more sincere. Others, leaving their lands and houses to
pay toll for their unorthodoxy, fled to Portugal, Italy, or France.
Pulgar tells us that the number of houses deserted in Seville, Cordova,
and the other cities of Andalusia amounted to over four thousand.
And although [he adds] through the exodus of this race, a great part
of the land was depopulated, and word was brought to the Queen that
trade was diminishing, yet she, esteeming little the loss of her
revenues and as of great value the purity of her dominions, declared
that, putting aside her own interests, she would seek to cleanse the
land from this sin of heresy; because she believed that thus she
fulfilled God’s service and her own. And the supplications that were
made to her on this matter could not turn her from her purpose....
According to Bernaldez, the single tribunal of Seville, during the first
eight years of its office, committed to the flames seven hundred
persons, and condemned five thousand more to perpetual imprisonment or
rigorous penance. So fierce was the persecution that even the dead were
not spared; the bones of those suspected of heresy were exhumed and
publicly burnt, their children forbidden to hold any office or benefice,
and their property seized and employed to meet the heavy expenses of the
Inquisition.
It will be seen that Isabel brought to the task of exterminating heresy
the same unshrinking thoroughness that marked her share in the
restoration of law and order, and the continuance of the Moorish war.
Nor was Ferdinand less zealous. It was in his name that most of the
business of the Inquisition was transacted, and his correspondence on
the subject shows that the minute interest he exhibited was prompted far
more by religious fervour than by financial greed or policy. Lea has
described him as “sincerely bigoted”; but though founders and patrons,
neither he nor Isabel was the moving spirit of the Holy Office.
[Illustration:
TORQUEMADA
AFTER A PAINTING ATTRIBUTED TO MIGUEL ZITTOZ, FROM “TORQUEMADA AND THE
SPANISH INQUISITION”
REPRODUCED BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR, MR. RAFAEL SABATINI
]
The appointment of Tomas de Torquemada as Inquisitor-General of Castile
in May, 1483, placed in control of the practical working of this
institution a judge, whose bigotry was untempered by ordinary humanity.
A Dominican of Jewish extraction, he was for a time the Queen’s
confessor and won her favour, like Fra Fernando de Talavera and
Cisneros, by his austerities and contempt of the world. From regard for
the dignity of his office he accepted an escort of fifty horse and two
hundred foot, and wealth, which he lavished freely on churches and
monasteries; but his personal asceticism remained unchanged. Till the
day of his death, he ate no flesh, nor would he consent to wear linen
next his skin, nor to sleep on any bed save a wooden plank; while he
sternly refused to a sister more financial help than would enable her to
enter a Dominican convent.
Under his presidency the Inquisition received what might be called a
constitution and laws; for in 1484 a “Supreme Council,” “La Suprema” as
it was afterwards known, was established; and “Instructions for the
governance of the Holy Office” were issued, informing judges and
officials of the exact nature and extent of their duties. They reveal,
as Rafael Sabatini remarks in his _Life of Torquemada_,
a spirit at once crafty and stupid, subtle and obvious, saintly and
diabolical, consistent in nothing,—not even in cruelty, for in its
warped and dreadful way it accounted itself merciful, and not only
represented but believed that its aims were charitable.
Ordinary conceptions of mercy were to Torquemada synonymous with
weakness; and an acquittal of an accused heretic by a subordinate would
be sufficient excuse in his eyes for a second trial. Was it not better
for an innocent man to perish, than for a guilty man to pass out again
into the world through negligence and sow eternal damnation amongst his
neighbours? The penitent condemned, when the Inquisition was first
introduced, to wear his sanbenito for twelve months as a sign of his
repentance, now found himself cut off for the rest of his life from all
true Catholics by this badge of his shame. The orthodox son of the
convicted dead, whose bones had been committed to the flames, saw
hanging up before him, whenever he entered his parish church, the
garment of infamy that kept alive the memory of his parent’s sin.
None were safe; for the indefinable sphere of the Holy Office and the
royal favour and protection it enjoyed enabled Torquemada to encroach
with safety on the rights of other courts, both civil and
ecclesiastical, and to add as he thought fit to the number of
inquisitorial ordinances and decrees. Proceedings were even taken
against two bishops of Jewish lineage, on account of the supposed
apostacy of their ancestors; with the result that one of them, Pedro de
Aranda, Bishop of Calahorra, found himself despoiled of his see and
revenues, while the other, the aged Juan Arias Davila, Bishop of
Segovia, died at Rome, after successfully pleading his cause there
before the Pope.
The complaints and appeals lodged against Torquemada’s unbridled tyranny
grew so loud that in 1494 Alexander VI. appointed four other
inquisitor-generals with equal power, in the hope that they would
exercise a restraining influence over their colleague’s actions. He,
however, continued his work with unshaken zeal, until in 1498, he died
tranquilly at the monastery he had founded at Avila, confident of a life
well spent in devotion to the Faith, and revered as a Saint by the rest
of his Order.
It is difficult to ascertain exactly how many heretics were burned
during his term of office; some historians placing the number at more
than 8000, and others at 2000, while 90,000 are declared to have been
subject to various forms of penance. Whatever the exact statistics, they
represent but a small section of the results of the Inquisition during
these years. Men die and are forgotten but the suspicion and treachery
that are born of terror, the spirit of pitiless fanaticism that springs
from licensed intolerance, the intellect bowed into subservience to an
iron yoke of uniformity,—these were to leave their mark for generations
and lessen the force of progress that Ferdinand and Isabel fostered so
strongly in other directions.
CHAPTER IX
THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS AND MUDEJARES
The Inquisition, which made life impossible for Spanish heretics, had no
direct power over unbaptized Jews, since it could not convict them of
apostasy in connection with a faith they had never professed. Some of
their race, indeed, were summoned before the Holy Office, accused of
subverting Christian neighbours to Judaism; but their pronounced
reluctance to share the privileges of their religion with Gentiles
prevented any widespread application of this charge.
Nevertheless it was obvious that in a land where their converted
brethren had been subject to torture, imprisonment, and death, they
themselves could not long hope to escape the fury of popular fanaticism.
Their wealth and their pride aroused envy and dislike so violent that
their very qualities and virtues appeared to Spanish prejudice as though
born of malignant design. The Curate of Los Palacios, enumerating the
posts of responsibility and the openings in the skilled labour-market to
which their talents and industry gave them access, declared that “they
sought only comfortable berths, where they could gain much money with
little toil”; as if the work of merchant, land-agent, weaver, tailor, or
silversmith, demanded less capacity than tilling the soil or laying
bricks.
Similarly, their unsurpassed knowledge of medicine and skill in surgery
were proclaimed, about the middle of the fifteenth century, by a
Franciscan friar of high reputation, to have been acquired solely from a
desire to harm their Christian neighbours. It was a suggestion to which
the close connection at that time between medicine, astrology, and the
black arts, lent some colour.
In 1480, Ferdinand and Isabel forbade Christian patients to be attended
by Jews; but it is significant that some years later the Spanish
Dominicans petitioned for a dispensation from this decree, on the plea
that doctors of their own creed were almost impossible to find. It was
to a Jew also that John II. of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, had turned
for advice, when overcome by blindness in his old age; with the result
that this physician successfully performed a double operation for
cataract.
Of all the professions and employments, however, to which the
unpopularity of the Jew may be traced, it was the office of money-lender
that most earned for him the hatred and suspicion of his fellow
citizens. The Church had from very early days condemned any lending of
money at interest as a form of usury; but since it was impossible to
carry on business or trade on a large scale without borrowed capital,
Christian financiers as well as needy spendthrifts were driven to have
recourse to a people, whose moral code permitted them to effect the loan
at a profit.
“That cunning race,” says the Curate of Los Palacios, “who battened on
usury exacted from the Christians, and of whom many, poor but a short
time before, became speedily rich.” Scarcity of coinage, the lack of
certain security for their bonds, and the secret favour they enjoyed
with many of the Spanish sovereigns, who, besides borrowing from them,
reaped a large revenue from the Jewish poll-tax, account for the high
rate of interest that they usually charged. At the beginning of the
fifteenth century this has been reckoned as from twenty per cent. in
Castile to thirty per cent. in Aragon.
The enactment that Jewish doctors should not attend Christians is
typical of the attitude of Ferdinand and Isabel towards this subject
race. Toleration and protection on a limited basis were at first a
matter of necessity, both on political and financial grounds; but the
lines of separation and segregation were tightened, and the “Ghetto” of
the Spanish Israelite became an unfortified camp, whose enemies only
awaited a favourable opportunity to sound the attack that would leave it
a ruin.
So long as the Moorish war lasted, Jewish taxes and Jewish financiers
contributed too largely to the expenditure and organization of the
various campaigns, for their supply and safety to be endangered; but the
conquest of the Infidel rang the knell of the Hebrew unbeliever. The
sovereigns’ hands were free; the Crescent lay trampled on the
battlefields of Granada; and the sword that had been suspended for so
many years over the Juderías at length fell.
Later history, weaving a popular tale round the crisis, informs us that
two of the richest Jews, aware of the danger in store, tried to avert it
by heavily bribing Ferdinand and Isabel. While the latter were
considering their offer, Torquemada appeared suddenly in the royal
presence. Holding up a crucifix, he exclaimed: “Lo! Here is the
Crucified, Whom Judas sold for thirty pieces of silver. Will you sell
Him again for thirty thousand?” Then, passionately declaring that he at
any rate would have no part in the transaction, he threw down the
crucifix and left the room.
The story is typical at least of the Inquisitor-General’s remorseless
fanaticism; and the edict issued on March 30, 1492, expressed the
triumph of his views. By it the Jews of Spain were allowed five months
in which to choose between baptism and exile. In the latter case, they
might sell their property or take with them to other lands as much of
their goods as they could carry; but, since the export of gold and
silver was strictly forbidden, this permission savoured more of mockery
than of indulgence.
Perhaps it was believed that, faced by the terror of expulsion, the Jews
would welcome baptism; but the men and women to whom the choice came
were descendants of those who in a previous time of danger had remained
staunch to their faith; while the sufferings of the New Christians at
the hands of the Inquisition were hardly an incentive to conversion.
The majority, therefore, trusting vainly, as the Curate of Los Palacios
points out with fanatical joy, that God would guide them through this
new wilderness, accepted exile with all its unknown horrors. The
shortness of the term of grace allotted to them, and the necessity of
selling or losing their property made real bargaining impossible.
They went about seeking purchasers and found none who were anxious to
buy; and they gave a house in exchange for an ass, and a vineyard for
a length of cloth or linen, because they might not take gold nor
silver.
Fearful lest their misery should soften popular hatred (and even
Bernaldez admits that none saw them leave their homes without pity),
Torquemada had forbidden the Christians to hold any intercourse with
Jews after August 1, 1492, or to allow them food or shelter as they
started on their exodus. He also took care that all the old calumnies of
devilish rites and of insults to Christian relics and objects of
veneration should be published abroad to impress the credulous. The
theft of the consecrated wafer for use in a sacrilegious plot, the
murder of a Christian child as a necessary portion of the Jewish rites,
the revival of these and many other such tales helped to keep fanaticism
at white heat.
In defiance of the law, many of the exiles hid money about their clothes
and persons; but those, who were not discovered and despoiled before
they left the country, spent most of it in attempts to buy the food and
protection they could not obtain from friendliness and compassion. The
rulers of the synagogues, who made arrangements for the future of the
community, were forced also to accept asylums where they could at the
owner’s price; and the weary masses, who crossed the Portuguese border,
paid to its king a _cruzado_ a head, for permission to spend six months
within his boundaries on their way to some permanent refuge. From there
many of them crossed to the north coast of Africa to join those of their
race, who had sailed direct from Spain to the kingdom of Fez; but so
frightful were the sufferings they endured that numbers in despair
returned home seeking baptism. Robbed and maltreated by the native
guards, whom they had paid to protect them, their wives and daughters
violated before their eyes, the unhappy exiles, in their feebleness and
poverty, found no favour in the sight of the Moorish King and were
driven from his capital.
A like inhumanity was shown to those who had made Navarre or Italy their
destination; and thus by the sword, pestilence, slavery, or starvation,
Christian vengeance on pride of race, wealth, and unbelief was exacted
to the uttermost farthing. Here is the witness of a son of one of the
exiles:
For some the Turks killed to take out the gold which they had
swallowed to hide it; some of them the hunger and plague consumed, and
some of them were cast naked by the captains on the isles of the sea;
and some of them were sold for men-servants and maid-servants in Genoa
and its villages, and some of them were cast into the sea.... For
there were, among those who were cast into the isles of the sea upon
Provence, a Jew and his old father fainting from hunger, begging
bread, for there was no one to break unto him in a strange country.
And the man went and sold his son for bread to restore the soul of the
old man. And it came to pass, when he returned to his old father, that
he found him fallen down dead, and he rent his clothes. And he
returned unto the baker to take his son, and the baker would not give
him back, and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry for his son, and
there was none to deliver.[5]
Footnote 5:
Lea, _History of the Spanish Inquisition_, i., Ch. III.
The statistics of the expulsion have been variously estimated; but the
latest and most trustworthy investigation reckons the number of those
baptized at 50,000, and of those who emigrated or died at 185,000,
though this may err on the side of exaggeration.
“Do you call this king a statesman, who impoverishes his land and
enriches mine?” asked the Sultan of Turkey, who, alone of European
sovereigns, held out a welcoming hand to the refugees.
It is probable Ferdinand and Isabel realized their political folly in
driving from their shores that most valuable of all national wealth,
talent, and industry. Fanaticism not policy had dictated their edict;
and to their determination that one faith alone should be held within
their dominions they were prepared to sacrifice even the economic
welfare that they had next at heart.
It seemed at first as if the “Mudejares,” or subject Moors, would escape
the general persecution. They had neither the strong racial
characteristics of the Jew, nor, though industrious and able workers,
the same capacity for fleecing their Christian neighbours; and thus
their conquerors came to regard them with contemptuous toleration rather
than antipathy. For eight years after the fall of Granada peace reigned
in that city, in spite of the difficulties attending the terms of
capitulation, to which Ferdinand and Isabel had been forced to agree in
their eagerness for a speedy surrender.
Such a treaty [says Prescott] depending for its observance on the good
faith and forbearance of the stronger party would not hold together a
year in any country of Christendom even at the present day, before
some flaw or pretext would be devised to evade it.
That it had been possible so long was chiefly due to the conciliatory
policy adopted by the military governor, the Count of Tendilla, and by
the Archbishop, Fra Fernando de Talavera. The latter had entered on his
office in a spirit of humility that was to serve him far better than any
self-assurance. Convinced of the inborn righteousness and appeal of the
Christian Faith, he believed that it had only to be understood to be
accepted; and, in order to bring himself mentally in touch with the
“Alfaquis,” or Doctors of the Mahometan law, he proceeded to learn
Arabic himself and to exhort his subordinate priests to do the same. By
his orders an Arabic vocabulary and grammar were written, while the
catechism and liturgy, with portions from the Gospels, were translated
into the same language.
The Moors of Granada had been subject to tyranny all their days, whether
under a Boabdil or an Abdallah “El Zagal,” and, though at first
suspicious of their conquerors, they soon began to respond to the
justice and sympathy that they encountered. Numbers, after discussions
and talks with “El Santo Alfaki,” “The Holy Priest” as they called Fra
Fernando, accepted baptism; while those who held to their old religion
learned to revere and trust him. Granada was in fact adapting herself
fast to the new conditions of life; and, when in 1499 Ferdinand and
Isabel visited the city, they expressed their appreciation of the peace
and order that they found there. So little wrath did they feel against
the Mahometans that, when two years before King Emmanuel of Portugal had
offered to his Moorish subjects a choice of baptism or expulsion, they
had welcomed the exiles as a valuable addition to their population,
taking them under their special protection.
Ximenes de Cisneros had accompanied the sovereigns to Granada; and by
misfortune when they left he remained to assist his fellow-Archbishop in
the task of conversion. Impatient of the slow process of religious
absorption that he found in progress, he mistook the friendliness of the
Mudejar for weakness and declared that only a little firmness was now
needed to induce the whole population to accept Christianity. As a
preliminary he summoned the leading “Alfaquis” to various conferences in
which he harangued them on the truths of Catholicism, endeavouring to
gain their agreement with his views, not only by eloquence but by
liberal gifts of rich stuffs and clothing that he guessed would appeal
to Oriental taste.
The result was so successful that Cisneros was confirmed in the
conviction that he was indeed on the right track, and the humble Fra
Fernando was deeply impressed. The majority of the “Alfaquis,” whether
intimidated by a consciousness of approaching storms, or moved by the
Primate’s arguments and gifts, accepted conversion, bringing with them
to the font those who looked to them for spiritual guidance. On a single
day three thousand candidates were said to have presented themselves for
baptism, a number so great that the ordinary individual ablution proved
impossible and the kneeling crowd had to be sprinkled with holy water
from a brush.
The stricter Mahometans protested angrily that the Archbishop’s methods
were a violation of the terms of surrender that had guaranteed them the
free exercise of their religion without any undue influence; whereupon
Cisneros, equally irritated at this opposition, seized and imprisoned
its ringleader, a certain Zegri Azaator. Strict confinement in fetters,
under the charge of a Castilian official called Leon, soon led the
prisoner to repent of his temerity and to express a desire for baptism,
with the rueful admission that if “this lion,” as he referred to his
gaoler, were let loose in Granada few would be able to resist his
arguments.
Such a remark could only add fuel to the Archbishop of Toledo’s already
ardent belief in the efficacy of strong measures; and from this time the
old toleration and confidence vanished for ever. The new spirit may be
seen in Cisneros’s scornful criticism of Fra Fernando’s scheme for
translating the scriptures completely into Arabic, as he had done with
the liturgy and catechism. “Will you,” he asked, “cast pearls before
swine? or can they in their ignorance fail to interpret the Word of God
to their own destruction?”
Determined that at any rate the Moors should not continue their
heretical studies, he began to make inquiries as to Arabic literature;
and, as a result of this inquisition, instituted _autos-de-fé_ of
illuminated manuscripts, priceless because they were often unique. Out
of the many thousand treasures of eastern lore that perished in the
flames, a few hundred treatises on medicine were alone saved to grace
the shelves of the Toledan library at Alcalá de Henares.
It was a sight to make cultured Moors weep with rage, but Cisneros was
soon no less unpopular with the poorer and more ignorant citizens. These
numbered in their ranks a fair proportion of Christian renegades, men
who for various causes had passed into the service of the Moors, and
with their allegiance changed their faith. It had been necessary to
insert special clauses for their protection in the terms of
capitulation; for the Christians regarded them with special loathing, as
guilty of treachery in its vilest form; and Cisneros, quibbling between
the spirit and the letter of the law, now asserted that the treaty did
not hold good where their children were concerned. As descendants of
persons who had once been baptized, these should be baptized also, and
for the same reason come under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.
One day he sent two of his officials to arrest the daughter of a
renegade who lived in the Albaycin, a quarter of the city whose
turbulence we have already noticed. The girl, screaming as they dragged
her from the house, that she would be compelled to become a Christian
against her will, attracted a large crowd from the surrounding streets;
and in the scuffle that followed one of the officials was killed by a
heavy stone thrown from a window above, while the other barely escaped
with his life.
Having thus drawn blood, the mob, in a dangerous mood, clamoured for the
death of the unpopular Archbishop, and seizing arms rushed to the
fortress of the Alcazaba where he resided. The Count of Tendilla, who
was in the Alhambra, came to his assistance and managed to disperse the
rioters; but the disaffection increased, and the situation grew every
hour more strained.
At this crisis, Fra Fernando de Talavera, unarmed and accompanied solely
by a cross-bearer, made his way where the throng of rioters was densest.
The effect was magical; for, almost in a moment, the prevailing anger
and suspicion vanished, and many of the ring-leaders crowding round the
old Archbishop humbly knelt to kiss his robe. The Count of Tendilla,
seeing a hope of reconciliation, came forward also with a few of his
men-at-arms, and throwing his scarlet cap upon the ground in sign of
peace, induced them, by the surrender of his wife and children as
hostages for his good faith, to lay down their arms and return to their
homes.
Accounts of the riot and its causes were hastily dispatched to the King
and Queen at Seville; and, Cisneros’s particular messenger being
delayed, their anger was at first directed against him; and Isabel
wrote, demanding an explanation of his provocative action. In response
Cisneros himself soon appeared at Court, and, undaunted by the failure
of his last efforts or the coldness with which he was received,
justified his conduct with much the same reasoning that Torquemada
upheld the righteousness of the Inquisition. The people of Granada, he
declared in conclusion, had forfeited the terms of capitulation by their
outburst of rebellion; and he urged that the sovereigns should not let
them go unpunished, and that they should push forward the Faith with
unswerving devotion by every means in their power.
His arguments, with their obvious flaw that he himself by an evasion of
the terms was mainly responsible for the rebellion in question, yet
carried conviction in an atmosphere, whose natural intolerance of
heretics and infidels had been considerably stimulated by the
persecution of the last twenty years—for it is a commonplace that
fanaticism breeds fanatics. The milder counsels of Fra Fernando de
Talavera and the Count of Tendilla were rejected; and a certain
patriotic sanction seemed given to the rigorous proceedings taken
against the rioters, when threatening letters were received from the
Sultan of Egypt, showing that the Mahometans of Granada had dared to
appeal to him for assistance.
Cisneros’s triumphant return to the southern capital was marked by the
baptism of from fifty to seventy thousand Moors within the city and its
environs. Outward peace reigned; but trouble was brewing in the
mountains of the Alpujarras to the south-east, where many of those who
were determined not to accept conversion had taken refuge to plan and
plot.
The sovereigns, alarmed at this news, dictated a letter of conciliation
to their secretary, and sent it to the disaffected area:
“Be it known unto you [they said] that, a report having reached our
ears that some declare it is our will that you should be compelled by
force to embrace Christianity, and, since it never was, nor is it our
will that any Moor should turn Christian under compulsion, we
therefore assure and promise you, on our royal word, that we have not
consented nor allowed this; and that we wish that the Moors, our
vassals, should remain secure and meet with all justice as our vassals
and servants.
Given in the City of Seville, in the twenty and sixth day of the month
of January.... I the King. I the Queen.”
The matter of the writing was fair enough, but the Moors might be
forgiven if they considered the royal word a somewhat dubious safeguard.
Ferdinand, despite his pacific protestations, was collecting an army;
and the rebels hastened to seize the nearest fortresses and to make
raids in the Vega beyond.
The Count of Tendilla, and Gonsalvo de Cordova, who happened at this
time to be in Granada, marched against them; and, although the enemy
flooded the deep furrows of the ploughland across which the troops must
ride until they floundered up to their horses’ girths, yet the
Christians succeeded in storming the important stronghold of Guejar. The
arrival of Ferdinand and his army led to the reduction of other
fortresses, conquests stained by sanguinary deeds of vengeance, as when
the Count of Lerin blew up with gunpowder a mosque, in which a number of
Moors had taken refuge with their wives and children.
The rebels, realizing at length the futility of resistance, sued for
peace; and by the mediation of Gonsalvo de Cordova conditions were
arranged, and Ferdinand departed to Seville. He and the Queen were now
convinced that Southern Spain would never be quiet or secure so long as
its inhabitants remained Mahometans, and were thus more closely allied
in sympathy with the tribes of Africa than with Castilians or Aragonese.
They therefore sent Franciscan missionaries to Baeza, Guadix, Almeria,
and the Alpujarras, arming them with the alternative weapons of
concessions or threats; a provision so efficacious that by the close of
the year the friars could boast of a wholesale conversion of their
flock.
In the meantime the disaffection that had died down or been smothered in
the south-east broke out with greater violence in Western Granada, where
the Berber race that inhabited Ronda and its mountainous environs
suddenly raised the standard of revolt.
Washington Irving, in his legend of _The Death of Don Alonso de
Aguilar_, has left a graphic account of the punitive expedition
commanded by that famous warrior. He took with him Don Pedro his son;
and, as they rode out of Cordova in March, 1504, the people, punning on
the family name so closely resembling the Spanish word for eagle, cried
aloud: “Behold the eagle teaching her young to fly! Long live the
valiant line of Aguilar!”
Many of the rebels, who knew his reputation, came and surrendered at his
approach; while the rest, under the leadership of a certain El Feri Ben
Estepar, retreated before him into the fastnesses of the Sierra Vermeja.
The Christians pursued hot after them, and coming one evening upon a
fortified camp, where the enemy had placed their women and children and
stored their possessions, the vanguard recklessly rushed to the assault.
The fierceness of their attack, backed up by the speedy reinforcement of
Don Alonso and the rest of his army, carried the position in the teeth
of far superior numbers; whereupon the besiegers, thinking their victory
assured, began to plunder. They were soon punished for their lack of
caution, since, through a spark falling on a keg of gunpowder, the whole
scene was momentarily lit up, and showed the weakness of the scattered
troops to the Moors, still hovering on the mountainside above. With a
shout of triumph these returned to renew the combat, and descending from
peak and ridge, drove their foes before them in hopeless confusion.
Don Alonso and some few hundred knights alone disdained to escape.
“Never,” cried the leader, “did the banner of the House of Aguilar
retreat one foot in the field of battle.” His young son was seriously
wounded, but would have struggled on still had not his father ordered
some of his men to carry him to a place of safety, saying: “Let us not
put everything to venture upon one hazard.... Live to comfort and honour
thy mother.” He himself remained fighting valiantly till wounded and
already exhausted, he met in personal combat with El Feri Ben Estepar,
and the latter’s dagger ended his life.
Thus fell Alonso de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry; one of
the most powerful grandees of Spain, for person, blood, estate, and
office. For forty years he had waged successful war upon the Moors; in
childhood, by his household and retainers; in manhood, by the prowess
of his arm and the wisdom and valour of his spirit; he had been
general of armies, viceroy of Andalusia, and the author of glorious
enterprises, in which kings were vanquished and mighty _alcaydes_ and
warriors laid low.
[Illustration:
TOMB OF FRANCISCO RAMIREZ (“EL ARTILLERO”)
FROM “HISTORIA DE LA VILLA Y CORTE DE MADRID” BY AMADOR DE LOS RIOS
]
The anger and sorrow that swept through Spain at the news of this
disaster can be imagined, the more that Don Alonso had found a fitting
companion in death in Francisco Ramirez de Madrid, the famous
artillery-captain of the Moorish war. As they saw these heroes, lying
surrounded by the corpses of unknown Christian knights and soldiers, the
very Moors were appalled at the extent of their own victory. What
direful vengeance would be exacted for lives so precious? they asked one
another; and all felt that only instant submission could save them from
extermination.
Ferdinand was never the man to let passion obscure his ultimate object;
and, in response to the rebels’ petition for mercy, he agreed to grant
an amnesty; but he insisted that they and the rest of their race must
choose between baptism and expulsion. In the latter case, he offered to
provide ships to convey the exiles to the African coast, on the payment
of ten doblas of gold per head,—a sum that, according to Bleda the
chronicler, few of them could hope to raise. The majority therefore
accepted baptism; and, with the conversion of the “Moriscos,” as these
new Christians were called, the Mahometan Faith vanished from the soil
of Granada.
One last crowning work was needed to complete the edifice of religious
unity; and that was the conversion of the “Mudejares,” descendants of
the Moorish villagers and artisans left on Spanish territory by the
receding waves of Islam. In February, 1502, their knell was also struck;
and a royal proclamation determined the baptism or exile of all males
over fourteen years or of females over twelve; so many restrictions as
to the wealth and destination of the exiles being imposed that the
choice was virtually narrowed to acceptance of the other alternative.
Plainly, the sovereigns did not intend to lose any more of their
prosperous and hard-working subjects.
The proclamation, evaded and even rescinded in Aragon, held good in
Castile; and Isabel, looking round on her dominions, could pride herself
on having attained her spiritual ideal. The Catholic Faith, and that
alone, was acknowledged in Castile.
CHAPTER X
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
The name of Christopher Columbus stands already on the roll of “Heroes
of the Nations.” “Hero of two nations” we should perhaps call him,—by
birth a son of Genoa, and by adoption of Castile to whom, in his own
words, “he gave a new world.”
Those who would read of his voyages should turn to the pages of
Washington Irving, of Thacher, and of Filson Young; for it is chiefly in
his immediate connection with Castile and her Queen and not for his
actual work as mariner and discoverer that his life falls within the
scope of this biography.
Here is the man who has made the name of Spain ring with glory down the
centuries. Here, in the background, somewhat dimmed in the sight of
posterity through the radiance of a greater genius, is Isabel of
Castile, she whose tireless patriotism made it possible for Spain to
enter on the newly discovered heritage of wealth and empire. Between
pioneer and Queen there is the link not only of mere capacity but of
that greatness of vision and unfaltering determination to reach a
desired goal, that finds in obstacles an incentive to renewed efforts
rather than a check. It is a fitting harmony, not often granted in
history, that two such spirits should act in unison. Yet in truth the
proposed harmony threatened more than once to end if not in discord at
least in silence; and the discoverer was to gain the sanction of his
patroness to his schemes only after many vicissitudes and trials of his
patience.
The son of a Genoese wool-carder, the history of his youth and early
manhood is obscured by numberless conflicting statements and traditions,
a confusion only increased by the information volunteered by Columbus
himself. From the suburb of a busy commercial city, unknown and poor, he
passed to the seats of the mighty, and, in the light of his fame,
recalled half-effaced memories of the days he had put so far behind him,
an autobiography sometimes more in accordance with imagination than with
truth. Admirers added their embellishments, detractors their quota of
sneering comments, till the information so combined is almost more
baffling than complete silence.
[Illustration:
IMAGINARY PORTRAIT
THE AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
]
Even as to the date of his birth there is a divergence of opinion
amongst historians varying as widely as some twenty-six years; while
tradition has connected him with noble families of Italy and France, has
sent him to the University of Pavia, has made him one of an expedition
to place the House of Anjou on the throne of Naples, and has driven him
on his journeyings as far north as Iceland. Here, some say, he heard of
the voyages to Greenland and the Canadian coast of old Norse heroes of
the tenth and eleventh centuries; and that, when in the island of Porto
Santo many years later, the whispered tale of a shipwrecked mariner on
his death-bed gave him the data, on which he based his belief that land
existed beyond the Atlantic.
Of actual fact this much emerges, that, still a boy, probably about the
age of fourteen, he gave up his father’s trade to which he had been
apprenticed and turned to the sea for a livelihood. His voyages were not
confined to the Mediterranean but took him as far north as England and
to the south along the Guinea coast of Africa, till about the year 1476
they landed him either by chance or mischance on the shores of Portugal.
In Lisbon he found a wife and home, living in the house of his
mother-in-law, and earning a small income, it is supposed, by drawing
the maps and charts demanded by the most seafaring nation of the day. It
was a task that with such a temperament would be certain to draw dormant
theories of nautical enterprise from the realm of dreams to that of
possibilities; and from this time Columbus’s ambitions and hopes began
to take definite shape.
Amongst men of science, and indeed amongst the cultured people of Europe
generally, the idea that the earth was a sphere composed of land and
water had been long accepted; though theologians were still found who
declared that such a theory conflicted with the Gospels and statements
of the early Fathers of the Church and must therefore be false. If an
Antipodes existed, how could all the nations of the world see Christ at
His coming?
Another popular argument had been based on the assumption that the
ever-increasing warmth of the atmosphere, experienced by travellers as
they journeyed southwards, culminated in a zone of unendurable heat. The
ship that ventured too far in southern waters might find itself driven
forward by sudden winds or unknown currents into a belt of perpetual
flame and there perish miserably. That fear at least had been dispelled
by the enterprise of the very nation with whom Columbus had cast in his
fortunes.
Always, from the wide extent of their coast, interested in the sea and
its wonders, the Portuguese had received a special stimulus in the field
of discovery during the fifteenth century from the brother of their
King, the famous “Prince Henry the Navigator.” Under his orders, as he
sat in his castle at Sagres overlooking the great Atlantic, studying
charts and records of exploration by day, the course of the stars by
night, his captains had pursued their way, league by league, along the
West African coast. Ever as they went, new lands, rich in possibilities
of trade, were exposed, and old doubts and fears receded. Madeira and
the Canary Islands were added to the dominions of Portugal; Cape
Bojador, once believed the gateway to unknown horrors, was doubled; the
Cape Verde Islands and the Guinea coast explored.
Prince Henry the Navigator died; and in time his great-nephew, King John
II., son of Alfonso V., “El Africano,” sat on the throne of Portugal,
but the tide of maritime energy never slackened, and the west coast of
Africa began to assume in maps something of its real shape. Bartholomew
Columbus, brother of Christopher, was one of those who served in the
famous expedition of Bartholomew Diaz in 1487, which, tempest-tossed and
wholly at the mercy of the elements, unexpectedly doubled the “stormy
cape,” later to be called with symbolic appropriateness the “Cape of
Good Hope.”
This, while Christopher drew maps and charts in Lisbon, was yet of the
future; nor had ever-widening views on African discovery cast any light
across the broad Atlantic, the “sea of darkness” as mariners named it,
when, hugging the Portuguese and French shores, they journeyed
northwards to England and the Baltic. According to a certain Arabian
writer of mediæval times
the ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and
all beyond it is unknown. No one has been able to verify anything
concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation,
its great obscurity, its profound depth and frequent tempests, through
fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds.
Yet imagination did not fail to fill in the blank left by lack of
knowledge, and from the days of Plato, tradition had planted the Western
Ocean with mysterious lands. Here, some maintained, the lost continent
of Atlantis had sunk to rest, leaving on the surface of the water a
sluggish mire impassable for ships; here, beyond the Pillars of
Hercules, Ulysses had found his “Isles of the Blest,” the Irish Saint
Brandan discovered an earthly Paradise, and Gothic bishops, flying
before the Moors, built seven cities.
Such tales stood on the ground of conjecture alone; but, where the mind
is set on a project, conjecture will often assume a fictitious value.
Columbus had decided, with that finality of purpose that is the
hall-mark of genius, that he would sail to the west across the “sea of
darkness”; and he gravely accepted all that would make his schemes less
fearful in popular estimation. He himself had an underlying conviction
that, the earth being round, a passage across its surface must be
possible either from west to east or east to west. A study of the
voyages of Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller of the thirteenth
century, had excited his fancy with its descriptions of the territories
of the Great Khan and the island of Cipango, where gold and jewels, rich
stuffs, spices, and perfumes, were the ordinary possession and barter of
its inhabitants. To open up those lands of the Orient to easy commerce
with Western Europe would be a task to bring the man who accomplished it
not only wealth but that still more desirable reward, power.
Columbus’s idea of India, or “the Indies” as the territories of the far
East were called in Europe, was distinctly hazy; but his own desires and
his acceptance of the views of an eminent Arabian cosmographer, whose
calculations had greatly reduced the circumference of the earth,
inclined him to the belief that after a short stretch of ocean he would
almost certainly land amid the wonders of Cathay and Cipango. Such a
theory was not without biblical confirmation; since the Prophet Esdras
had plainly stated that God commanded “that the waters should be
gathered into the seventh part of the earth,” thus limiting the sea
within the bounds of navigable channels.
To pure romance, scripture, and science, were added sailors’ tales of
strange debris cast by the sea on the Azores, the westernmost point of
African discovery: bits of wood carved but not with metal, canoes made
of hollowed barks of trees, corpses even, whose faces bore no European
nor negro semblance. All such evidence was carefully collected and, we
may be sure, lost none of its significance in the telling, when Columbus
rehearsed his project before King John and his Court, begging that
monarch to grant him the necessary ships, and to promise him, in the
event of success, the office of Admiral over all the lands he might
discover, with a viceroy’s share of the spoils and power.
Perhaps King John considered this demand exorbitant, or else the scheme
too hare-brained; it is more likely that he believed he had struck a
mine of wealth in Western Africa and saw no reason, so long as that
source of profit remained unexhausted, to risk ships and lives in a
problematical voyage elsewhere. According to one tradition, he and his
councillors obtained Columbus’s plans under pledge of secrecy, and then
to test their worth hastily dispatched an expedition, whose mariners,
quailing before their task, soon returned to pronounce the design
impossible. Whether this be true or false, it is certain that, after
long delays, the committee especially appointed by King John to inquire
into the matter, unanimously decided against Columbus’s schemes.
“I went to take refuge in Portugal,” wrote Christopher himself some
years later, relieving his bitterness by what was probably exaggeration
as to the length of his sojourn, “since the King of that country was
more versed in discovery than any other; but he put to shame his sight,
his hearing, and all his faculties, for in fourteen years I could not
make him understand what I said.”
From Portugal Columbus passed to Spain in 1485. His wife, it is
believed, had died some little time before; and it is likely he was
thankful to leave a country whose associations were by this time mainly
sad. He took with him his son Diego and settled in Seville, where he
succeeded in interesting in his project one of the great territorial
lords of the neighbourhood, the Duke of Medina-Celi.
At a first glance it is perhaps curious that Columbus did not find in
some rich Castilian noble the patron he required, without being forced
to sue the Crown in vain for so many years. It would have been a small
matter for the Cardinal of Spain, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the Duke
of Medina-Celi, or the Marquis of Cadiz to equip him with a squadron
twice the size of that with which he finally achieved his purpose; but
it is not too much to say that such an arrangement would have entirely
altered the character of the expedition.
Columbus was a visionary in that he relied on the eye of faith rather
than of knowledge; but his visions did not put to sleep the natural
shrewdness of an Italian of his class, especially in a matter where his
personal interests were so deeply involved. It was not his policy to sow
a crop whose harvest he could not to some extent control; and the clue
to his object in seeking royal patronage is given in a letter written in
1500, where he says,
Although I know but little, I do not think that anyone considers me so
foolish as not to realize that even if the Indies were mine, I would
not be able to sustain them without the aid of some Prince.
The discoverer might have succeeded in signing contracts favourable to
himself with cardinal, duke, or marquis; but he could not guard against
later royal encroachments turning his gains to so much waste paper. It
was not only greatness of conception but a strong business instinct that
made him a suppliant of the Castilian Queen.
In response to the Duke of Medina-Celi’s letter, recommending Columbus
to her attention, Isabel commanded his appearance at the Court at
Cordova; and thither in 1486 came Christopher to lodge in the house of
the Castilian treasurer, Alonso de Quintanilla. We can picture him at
this time from the descriptions of contemporaries,—an impressive figure,
well above the middle height, with his long face tanned and freckled by
exposure to sun and storm, his eyes a vivid blue, his hair ruddy that
was soon to be bleached by cares.
The Queen, we are told, “did not consider the undertaking very certain.”
Here spoke her habitual caution, prompted by a life in which the demands
on her assistance perpetually outran not her interest but her resources;
yet it is evident from the first the project caught her fancy, while in
Ferdinand it merely aroused a cold distrust. The country was scarcely
pacified from the anarchy of civil war and foreign invasion; national
credit and patriotism were strained to the uttermost in what, it had
become evident, must be a prolonged struggle against the Moors; the
French were threatening his own loved kingdom of Aragon, and he could
spare neither time nor money to regain command of the eastern Pyrenees;
insidious heresy was sapping the Catholic Faith, and wide care and
organization would be required for its suppression. Was this the moment
to take up chimerical schemes for reaching China or discovering lands
that every man of common-sense or culture had long believed to be
fabulous?
His arguments, somewhat to this effect, can be imagined, uttered with a
dry, logical force, not without its appeal to Isabel’s own logical
brain. She could see it all from his point of view, her reason accept
his conclusion; and yet deep in her nature was a power that
differentiated her statesmanship from his, and that in a crisis prompted
her, in the teeth of the logic that ordinarily governed her actions, to
run what has been happily called a “divine risk.”
If Ferdinand lacked the visionary instinct that made Isabel recognize
the Genoese sailor, not as adventurer or fool, but as a possible genius,
it must be confessed that in his case faith would have made greater
demands. Castile and Aragon were united into a single Spain, but it is
reading history from a modern outlook to suppose the individual
sympathies of King and Queen Spanish rather than distinctively Aragonese
and Castilian.
Throughout past centuries, as we have remarked before, the magnet of
Aragonese attraction had been the Mediterranean; and Ferdinand was no
less under its spell than his uncle, Alfonso V., the conqueror of
Naples. It required an effort to turn his mental gaze westwards; whereas
Isabel, heiress of Castilian hopes and ambitions, was imbued with the
spirit of rivalry with Portugal and looked on the “sea of darkness” not
with bored aloofness but with awed speculation. It might well seem that
its secrets held no immediate prospects for Aragon; they were pregnant
with possibilities of empire and wealth for the sister kingdom with her
Galician and Andalusian seaboard. It is thus that both by character and
race Isabel and not her husband was destined to be Columbus’s true
patron, and that looking back over years of probation he could write
later:
In all men there was disbelief; but to the Queen, my lady, God gave
the spirit of understanding and great courage, and made her heiress of
all as a dear and much-loved daughter.
Yet even Isabel did not understand at once; or, if she did, caution and
her intense preoccupation with the Moorish war delayed and hindered the
practical fulfilment of her sympathy. Juntas of learned men met at her
summons, and with academic coldness discussed and condemned the
discoverer’s project. Those who did not make a mock of it declared that
it savoured of heresy; while others, according to Columbus, to hide
their ignorance invented hindrances and obstacles. A few courtiers, and
notably the Marquis of Moya and his wife Beatriz de Bobadilla, Isabel’s
most trusted servants, remained his staunch friends, but the real friend
of Columbus in these years of anxiety, when he vainly followed the Court
from Cordova to the frontier, and from siege to siege, was, in the words
of Thacher, “Columbus himself.”
This was the one man who insisted and persisted ... the man with a
single thought, a powerful soul committed to one supreme purpose....
Whether he was inspired, elected, foreordained, it matters not. He
thought he was all these things and the result was due to his own
conception of himself.
[Illustration:
A CARAVEL UNDER SAIL
FROM COLUMBUS’S FIRST LETTER
]
In spite of his condemnation by learned men, Isabel had not forgotten
him, and a quarterly salary of 3000 maravedis, small though it was, and
messages, that she would herself examine his claims when she had time,
kept them in touch; but such things could not satisfy an explorer,
fretting to be once more on the broad seas. In 1491 he renewed his
application for assistance.
The Court was then at Santa Fé, pressing Boabdil to his last surrender,
and before the conquest of Moslem Granada, the attraction of unknown
islands paled. For the second time a committee of the learned declared
the proposed journey impracticable and contrary to the opinions of Saint
Augustine and the early Fathers; though Alessandro Geraldino, tutor of
the royal Infantas, ventured to urge in Cardinal Mendoza’s ear, that
Saint Augustine, no doubt a good theologian, might yet prove a bad
geographer.
Disgusted at his failure and the years he had wasted, Columbus with his
son Diego turned his back on Santa Fé. His journey took him near the
little seaside town of Palos, where at the Franciscan convent of La
Rabida he sought food and shelter for the night. Its prior, Fra Juan
Perez, once the Queen’s confessor, was delighted to have first-hand news
from the seat of war, and eagerly welcomed his guest; with the result
that all Christopher’s disappointed hopes came pouring out in a stream
of eloquence that soon made a convert of his listener.
A secret letter from the prior to the Queen, full of respectful
expostulations, her quick response that Columbus should return at once
to Court, her gift of 20,000 maravedis to provide him with suitable
clothing and a mule,—and Juan Perez could write with fervent joy:
Our Lord has listened to the prayers of His servant. The wise and
virtuous Isabel, touched by the grace of Heaven, gave a favourable
hearing to the words of this poor monk. All has turned out well.
“All has turned out well!” Face to face, Queen and would-be-discoverer
could realize how much their minds were in tune; even more now than in
the early days of his project; for, to the material benefits he hoped to
reap, Columbus, inspired perhaps by the crusading character of the
Moorish war, had added the burning desire to carry the light of the
Catholic Faith across “the sea of darkness.” This was no mere pose.
Religion to the sailor as to the Queen was an intrinsic part of daily
life, something vital and overshadowing that in the hour of triumph
intensified glory, in days of depression or danger spread protecting
wings. In the foreword of his journal addressed to the sovereigns, he
shows very clearly that he regarded himself not only as pioneer but
missionary:
Your Highnesses, as Catholic sovereigns and princes, loving the Holy
Christian Faith and the spreading of it, and enemies of the sect of
Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, decided to send me,
Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said
princes and peoples and lands, and learn of their disposition and of
everything, and of the measures that could be taken for their
conversion to our Holy Faith.
Behind and beyond “the spreading of the Catholic Faith” in the far East
was another design of still bolder conception, the employment of the
wealth to be found in Cathay and the territories of the great Khan
towards the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. The latter was the crowning
enthusiasm of every earnest Christian in mediæval times, and Christopher
believing himself “inspired, elected, foreordained,” held amongst his
cherished visions the glory of a final crusade, to which he should have
contributed the war fund.
Upheld by his inborn sense of power, he had returned to Court far more a
conqueror, ready to grant conditions, than a petitioner oft-refused and
eager to snatch the least morsel of favour. The Crown in its clemency
was now, after its long apathy, willing to confer on him titles and
privileges;—all in moderation of course, for Ferdinand and Isabel were
never unnecessarily lavish; but Christopher, valuing himself and his
task by the measure of his faith in the future, laughed at their
moderation. Either he was great enough to succeed and thus prove worthy
of a great reward, or he would fail and his pretensions and demands fade
away with his dreams. The sovereigns, skilled in striking bargains,
might argue and cajole. The Genoese, though his fate trembled in the
balance, never wavered, until at last in April, 1492, caution yielded to
greatness, and the terms that he demanded were signed and sealed.
Columbus and his heirs were to have the hereditary title of Admiral of
all the islands and continents that he might discover, and should for
ever hold the office of Viceroy and Governor-General over them. He and
his heirs should receive one-tenth of all the wealth, whether metals,
jewels, or spices, that should be acquired from these territories; and
he and they should have a perpetual right of providing one-eighth of the
expenses of every expedition sent to the West, receiving a corresponding
profit from the results. These with extensive judicial and
administrative privileges formed the basis of the document, in return
for which Columbus promised to sail into the unknown and claim it in the
name of Castile and her sovereign.
The actual cost of the expedition was, in comparison to the stakes at
issue, trifling; in all less than a thousand pounds of English money, of
which the Crown contributed some £850, Columbus himself the rest. Three
ships formed his fleet; two provided under compulsion by the town of
Palos as punishment for some public offence, and as reluctantly manned
by its inhabitants who looked on the proposed voyage with horror.
Columbus’s own flagship, the _Santa Maria_, was a vessel of some hundred
tons burden, by modern standards ill-fitted for aught but coasting work;
while the _Pinta_ and the _Niña_, commanded by Martin Alonso Pinzon and
his brother Vicente Yañez, noted navigators of the neighbourhood, were
mere merchant “caravels” of half its size.
The story of this first voyage to the New World has been often told: the
distrust and grumbling of the crew which, beginning before they left
Palos on that morning of the 3d of August, 1492, grew ever in volume as
they journeyed westwards, leaving the friendly Azores far in their rear;
the complaints that the wind steadily driving from the east would never
change and thus make any hope of return impossible; the extraordinary
variations of the compass and the expanse of sea traversed, far in
excess of the Admiral’s calculations, so that, puzzled and anxious at
heart himself, he must yet keep a cheerful face and, lying skilfully,
hold panic at bay by scientific falsehoods and carefully doctored
charts. The many cries of “land! land!” heralding nought save clouds
lying low on the horizon; the ever-doomed hopes aroused by birds and
floating grass; and then the Sargasso Sea with its leagues of golden
gulf-weed lapping against the ship’s side. Was this the impassable ocean
where Atlantis had sunk to rest? Were they indeed destined to die here
for their folly?
Then, when patience and hope were alike exhausted, and only the
Admiral’s faith rose triumphant above the general pessimism,
unmistakable signs of land appeared at last; and, on the 12th of October
the Spanish squadron came to anchor before the little island of
Guanahani, one of the Bahamas.
The details of the landing, the astonishment of the natives, “naked as
when their mothers gave them birth,” at the sight of mail- and silk-clad
warriors and the sound of cannons; the account of various expeditions
made to other islands and of the fort built in Española;—these like the
actual voyages may be read at length in the pages of Washington Irving.
It is with the triumphant home-coming of the hero not with his
adventures that we are here concerned.
Attention you two most wise and venerable men and hear of a new
discovery [wrote Peter Martyr to the Archbishop of Granada and Count
of Tendilla]. You remember Columbus the Ligurian, who persisted, when
in the camps with the sovereigns, that one could pass over by way of
the Western Antipodes to a new hemisphere of the globe.... He is
returned safe and declares he has found wonderful things.
Wonderful things indeed! Brown-skinned Indians, green and scarlet
parrots, golden nuggets and ornaments, cotton fibre and strange roots
and seeds; these that he brought with him were but proofs and trophies
of the still more wonderful adventures he hastened to relate before the
sovereigns and their Court. In his disembarkation at Palos on the 15th
of March, 1493, and still more in his “solemn and very beautiful
reception” by the sovereigns at Barcelona graphically described by the
historian Las Casas, he was to reap at last the meed of honour and
enthusiasm so long denied him. Kneeling before his King and Queen to
kiss the hands that afterwards raised him in gracious condescension to
sit with royalty upon the dais, flattered and fêted by courtiers who had
before patronized or mocked, riding through the crowded streets by
Ferdinand’s side amid cries of admiration and applause;—in these moments
he reached the climax of worldly glory.
Long years stretched before him, when circumstances, his own failings,
and the envy and spite of others, were to rob him of ease, popularity,
and even royal confidence; but for the time being he was “Don,”
“Admiral,” the honoured of Kings, the most discussed and admired man in
Spain, perhaps in all Europe. In one country at least, the kingdom of
Portugal, the result of his voyage was a subject for poignant regret;
and Ferdinand and Isabel, having obtained from Alexander VI. papal
recognition of their right to the newly discovered territories, were
driven to demand a series of bulls, that would provide them with a
definition of their empire, lest Portuguese rivals, too slow to
forestall them in the discovery, should now rob them of their gains.
By a bull of May 4, 1493, an imaginary line was drawn through the north
and south poles, cutting the Atlantic at one hundred leagues distance
from the Cape Verde Islands and Azores. To the east of this line was
henceforth to stretch the zone of Portuguese dominion, to the west that
of Castile. Later, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed by the Spanish
sovereigns and King John in June, 1494, the boundary was fixed at three
hundred and seventy instead of one hundred leagues distance; and there
for the moment national rivalry was checked.
In the meanwhile Columbus, having organized a second expedition, had on
September 23, 1493, set sail once more for the west. Very different in
size and character was his new fleet from the former vessels of Palos
with their pressed crews; for more than twice the number of men required
for his fourteen caravels had applied for leave to sail with him, and
not a few of those refused had chosen to embark as stowaways rather than
be left behind. It was a case of unbalanced enthusiasm succeeding to
unbalanced hostility, and, as often happens, the second state was to
prove more dangerous than the first.
Not patriotism, nor a healthy love of adventure, nor even a cool-headed
trading instinct, animated the majority of that idle, quarrelsome throng
who were destined to turn the lands their discoverer at first believed
the “Earthly Paradise” into a hell of human misery and wrong. It was
lust of gold, no hardly-won reward of toil and sweat, but the fabulous
wealth of Cipango and Cathay, to be picked in nuggets out of the flowing
river, found in the turned surface of the earth, wrung by brutality if
necessary from unwilling natives, that brought a wastrel nobility
disgusted with orderly government at home, to serve under the standard
of a man whom they secretly despised as an ill-bred foreigner. Not all
were of this type. Amid the fourteen crews were some earnest souls,
inspired like their Admiral by a sense of responsibility; but the
prevailing element was selfish, vicious, and insubordinate.
For this Columbus himself was partly to blame. Blinded to the limits of
his achievement by his faith in the glory and wealth yet to come, and,
anxious at all costs to maintain the support of the Spanish sovereigns,
his eloquence had painted a highly-coloured picture very likely to
deceive those who listened. The small quantity of gold so far obtained
was merged in the glittering accounts given by natives of kingdoms to
the south, where precious metals were to be had for the asking. These,
like Amazon islands and lands whose tribes had tails, proved ever beyond
the distant horizon, vanishing at the Spanish approach. As they melted
into thin air so also did Christopher’s inflated reputation; and those
who had looked on him as a kind of magician, able to conjure up vast
quantities of gold, saw him instead only as a lying adventurer, who had
lured them from civilization and luxury on a false plea.
“Why hast thou taken us out into the wilderness to die?” It is the cry
that from the time of Moses onwards has assailed the ears of the pioneer
enthusiast. The wilderness may prove a paradise; but in that it falls
short of human desires it will be condemned and despised. Not all the
glory of sunshine and colour, of rich soil, luxurious vegetation, and
flowing river, speaking to honest toilers of a possible kingdom of God
on earth, can compensate with an idle rabble for shattered dreams of
gold mines, of jewels, and of spices.
Murmurings, complaints, secret disobedience, open defiance: these were
the fruits of Columbus’s autocracy. When he landed for the second time
in Española, he found the fort which he had left well-stored with
provisions and ammunition burnt to the ground, its garrison dead, the
Indians, once his trusted allies, fleeing before him afraid into the
woods. Inquiry elicited an all too circumstantial tale of Spanish
profligacy, cruelty, and carelessness, once his governing hand had been
removed. Then had come retribution in the form of an avenging massacre
by a warlike tribe from the interior of the island. The Indians of the
coast denied their participation, even swore on oath that they had
helped the garrison to the best of their ability; and Columbus, anxious
to believe them, tried to restore the old relations. Mutual suspicion,
however, had come to reign. His followers, angry at the fate of their
countrymen, accepted it as a legitimate excuse for intimidating and
oppressing all natives. The hospitality and gifts once so generously
lavished were now withheld or, proving totally inadequate to meet
ever-growing Spanish necessities, were replaced by an enforced tribute,
until the link of willing service was forged into an iron chain of
bondage.
Some form of submission of native to European, of the weaker many to the
stronger and more civilized few, was an inevitable solution of the
racial problem. That it developed into absolute slavery was due, partly
to the custom of the day, partly to the difficulties in which Columbus
and his colonists soon found themselves involved. They had laid the
foundations of the system in the New World when they carried off their
first ten Indians in triumph to parade them through the streets of
Barcelona, though the individuals in question could boast of generous
treatment and a baptism with royal sponsors.
The principle of personal liberty abandoned, Columbus could declare, not
without truth, that as slaves the natives would have a better chance of
learning the doctrines of the Catholic Faith than in their own wild
freedom. Even on the grounds of mercy and good government he could at
first justify his attitude; since he and his followers contented
themselves for the most part with seizing “Caribs,” a fierce cannibal
tribe that preyed upon their weaker neighbours.
Among the people who are not cannibals [he wrote home] we shall gain
great credit by their seeing that we can seize and take captive those
from whom they are accustomed to receive injuries, and of whom they
are in such terror that they are frightened by one man alone.
Alas for either pious or kindly intentions! Not these but economic
considerations were really to sink the scales. Columbus had promised to
find precious metals in abundance, and yet seven years after his
discovery Bernaldez, the Curate of Los Palacios, made a note that the
expenses of the various expeditions still continued to exceed the
profits.
“Since everything passed through the Admiral’s hands,” he adds, “there
was much murmuring against him, and he made greater hindrances and
delays than he ought in sending back gold to the King.”
Gold there was little in these early years of exploration; and demands
for precious metals at home were echoed by demands in his own colony for
horses, cattle, and sheep to stock the new settlement. In this dilemma
the Admiral fell back on the wealth of human life, for which he could
reap a handsome profit in the labour-markets of the Old World besides
pacifying some of the grumbling in the New. It was no longer the
conversion of the heathen nor the civilization of cannibals, that took
the first place in his thoughts, but a momentary respite from increasing
financial strain.
A gift of an Indian apiece to each of his greedy crew; a gang of some
five hundred captives of either sex shipped to Europe, huddled together
“with no more care taken of them than of animals destined for the
slaughter-house.”
These, or tales of a like nature, came to the Queen’s ears. “By what
right does the Admiral give away my vassals?” she demanded indignantly,
and ordered the Indians to be released and re-shipped to their own land.
It must be remembered to her credit [says Filson Young, referring to
her attitude towards this question,] that in after years, when slavery
and an intolerable bloody and brutish oppression had turned the
Paradise of Española into a shambles, she fought almost single-handed
and with an ethical sense far in advance of her day against the system
of slavery practiced in Spain upon the inhabitants of the New World.
Ferdinand cared little for the sufferings of Indians, but their sale
would not bring him the profits he had been led to expect from his new
dominions, and he was therefore more than willing to listen to the many
complaints of tyranny, favouritism, and deceit, brought against the
Governor by those returning from the West. Here the crowning offence had
been in reality the employment of all able-bodied Europeans, priests as
well as laymen, in the construction of a city in Española to which
Columbus gave the name of “Isabella,” “in remembrance,” says Las Casas,
“of the Queen Doña Isabel whom he above all held in great reverence; and
he was more desirous of serving and pleasing her than any other person
in the world.”
“Columbus,” wrote Peter Martyr, “has begun the building of a city and
the planting of our seeds and the raising of cattle.” His words call up
a picture of peaceful and slow-rewarded toil, little to the taste of the
majority pressed to take their share, their natural dislike of manual
labour stimulated by the ennervating climate and habits of
self-indulgence. The crops grew apace, but so also did fever and
disease; and for all that went wrong the people held their foreign
Admiral responsible.
Indeed there was often sufficient foundation to make the reports brought
home plausible. Columbus was a born leader of men in action, where a
strong personality will always dominate; but he had few gifts as a
governor, and least of all that invaluable instinct for selecting
trustworthy subordinates. His choice of officials was often betrayed;
his government, as a rule too kindly towards the cut-throat ruffians he
commanded, on occasions varied by excessive severity. Whatever its
quality he reaped odium, not only amongst the colonists, but with their
relations and friends in Castile.
Enough was obviously at fault to require inspection; and in 1500, when
Columbus who had sailed from Spain on a third voyage in 1498 was
occupied in exploring fresh islands, Francisco de Bobadilla, an official
of the royal household, arrived in Española, charged with the duty of
inquiring into the Admiral’s conduct. His high-handed action, in
immediately arresting Columbus and his brothers Bartholomew and Diego on
their return to headquarters, is one of the most dramatic episodes in
history; and its appeal was felt throughout the length and breadth of
Spain.
Villejo, the officer in command of the prisoners on the voyage home,
offered to remove the fetters in which they had been sent on board, but
Columbus sternly refused. He would wear them, he declared, until he
knelt before his sovereigns, keep them by him till his dying day.
Crippled by gout, his hair whitened by care, he disembarked at Cadiz,
the irons clanking on his wrists and ankles; and at the sight horror and
shame spread from cottage and shop to castle and palace. Was this the
discoverer’s reward for a New World?
“Be assured that your imprisonment weighed heavily upon us,” wrote the
sovereigns some years later, still mindful of the shock the news had
given them; and when Columbus knelt before his Queen the sobs of pent-up
bitterness with which he recounted his troubles awoke answering tears of
regret and understanding in her eyes. “After they had listened to him,”
says Oviedo, “they consoled him with much kindliness and spake such
words that he remained somewhat comforted.”
Confidence was temporarily restored, but the Admiral’s hour of glory and
triumph had passed never to return. His bad treatment was acknowledged,
but so also was his bad government; for though he might not have
deliberately tyrannized and deceived, yet he had failed to keep order or
fulfil his promises. The Queen was growing old, and, broken by
ill-health and private griefs, took less share than she was wont in
public business. Ferdinand had never liked the Genoese sailor; moreover
he was no longer necessary to royal schemes and that to the astute King
was ever sufficient excuse for discarding a tool.
Columbus sailed for the fourth time to the lands of his discovery in
1502; but it was to find that Nicholas de Ovando, another royal protégé,
had succeeded Bobadilla in command at Española, while treachery and
ill-luck dogged his own efforts. Bitterness and suspicion had begun to
eat like a canker in his mind, and his letters are full of querulous
reproaches that the bargain he had made was ill-kept and his due share
of the commercial profits denied him. In 1504, he returned home
suffering in body and spirit, but no longer to meet with the sympathy
for which he craved. Three weeks after he arrived at Seville Isabel died
and her will, that contained a special petition for the kindly treatment
of the natives, made no mention of his name.
Writing to his son Diego the Admiral says:
The principal thing is affectionately and with great devotion to
commend the soul of the Queen, Our Lady, to God. Her life was always
catholic and holy and ready for all things of His holy service, and
for this reason it may be believed that she is in His holy glory and
beyond the desires of this rough and wearisome world.
In these words lie the confession of his own disillusionment. His world,
once so fair a place of material visions and dreams, had proved in its
essence wearisome; and, clad in the Franciscan habit of renunciation, he
himself, on the 20th of May, 1506, passed thankfully into the rest of
God’s “holy glory.”
“His life,” says Filson Young, “flickered out in the completest
obscurity.” No Peter Martyr eulogized his memory in letters to his
courtly patrons. No grateful country of adoption bestowed on him a
gorgeous funeral. Even the lands he had discovered were destined to
receive their name from another, the Florentine sailor Amerigo Vespucci,
whom he himself had helped on the road to fame.
Posterity is the audience that can alone judge truly the drama of
history, and in the thunder of its applause Columbus has long come to
his own.
“The world,” says Thacher, “did not observe his final exit from the
stage. Yet he was a great character, one of the greatest ever passing
before the eyes of men.”
CHAPTER XI
ISABEL AND HER CHILDREN
If it is true that the trappings of the monk often conceal the wearer’s
individuality, it might be added that so also do royal robes. The
contemporary historian is apt to portray his King or Queen garbed in a
cloak of politics, morality, or pageantry, according to his special
enthusiasm; and, unless to his task he brings also the biographer’s
instinct for personality, his likeness though regal and exemplary will
leave the spectator cold. He has forgotten that the abiding measure of
our interest in others is the very humanity he has neglected or tried to
excel.
In the case of “Isabel of Castile” the conventional atmosphere of a
Court is intensified by her own determination to play a royal part. She
rarely forgot that she was Queen. On one occasion the Admiral of
Castile, Ferdinand’s uncle, had ventured to address the King as nephew;
whereupon she, overhearing, reproved him sharply.
“My Lord, the King has no kindred or friends but servants or subjects!”
A petty snub! Unless in judging it we recall the Court of Henry IV.,
where Isabel had seen her brother mocked and bullied by insolent nobles,
amongst them a former Admiral of Castile.
Her lifework in building up the reputation of the monarchy must be
carried out in detail as well as on the broad lines of governmental
reform, and the dignity and magnificence of royalty formed part of the
scheme, that aimed at the exaltation of the Crown, not only in the eyes
of Europe but still more of Spain itself. The Castilian grandee might be
losing his official status, the Admiral be no longer essential to the
Fleet, the Constable to the Army, the Duke or Marquis to the Royal
Council; but in the throne-room and ante-chambers of the palace
etiquette more and more demanded their presence. Silken chains were
binding the unruly in a peaceful servitude.
Pulgar, the historian, commenting on Isabel’s insistence on the outward
forms of state, declared that “it pleased her to be served by grandees
and nobles,” while in another place he mentions her retinue of the
daughters of great families “such that we do not read in the Chronicles
that any Queen had before her.”
A household maintained on this scale and with corresponding luxury was a
costly item in royal expenses and, considering the chronic deficiencies
of the Treasury, was perhaps excessive. Yet Ferdinand and Isabel were
both by nature simple and abstemious in their tastes, and wont in other
matters, as we have seen in the case of Columbus, to err rather on the
side of economy than extravagance.
“A King must outshine his subjects,” says Pulgar with a conviction born
of his intimate knowledge of Spanish character. The easy familiarity of
the Emperor Maximilian, “Max the Penniless,” and his son might be
appreciated in Germany and Flanders; the private thrift of a Louis XI.,
or lack of ostentation of a Lorenzo de Medici respected in France or
Florence; but the Castilian nature demanded magnificence and aloofness
in its rulers. Even a Ximenes de Cisneros had been unable to shake off
the outward glory of his office when he accepted the Archbishopric of
Toledo; and Ferdinand and Isabel, children of their race, were fully
alive to the appeal of surroundings suitable to their rank.
Of the impression made by their magnificence on foreigners we can gather
from the diary of a certain Roger Machado who, in the capacity of
king-at-arms, accompanied an English embassy to the Spanish Court at
Medina del Campo in 1488. “People speak,” he says, “of the honour done
to Ambassadors in England; but it is not to be compared to the honour
which is done to Ambassadors in the kingdom of Castile.”
The torchlight procession that accompanied them from their lodgings to
their evening reception at the palace; the majesty and condescension of
the sovereigns; the speeches, dances, bull-fights, tourneys; each in
turn arouses his admiration; but it is in his account of the costumes
and jewellery that his diary really reaches its apogee of enthusiasm.
The King is “dressed in a rich robe of cloth-of-gold, woven entirely of
gold, and furred with a rich trimming of fine sable.” The Queen has “a
rich robe of the same woven cloth-of-gold ... and over the said robe a
riding-hood of black velvet, all slashed in large holes so as to show
under the said velvet the cloth-of-gold in which she is dressed.” She
wears “crosswise over her left side ... a short cloak of fine crimson
satin furred with ermine, very handsome in appearance and very
brilliant.”
[Illustration:
ISABEL OF CASTILE
CARVED WOODEN STATUE FROM THE CATHEDRAL AT GRANADA
FROM “A QUEEN OF QUEENS” BY CHRISTOPHER HARE, PUBLISHED BY MESSRS.
HARPER
]
Roger Machado, had he lived to-day, would surely have made his fortune
as journalist of some fashion-weekly; but even his facile pen finds it
difficult to express adequately the splendour of the Queen’s
jewellery,—her necklace of gold and jewelled roses,—the ribbon at her
breast adorned with diamonds, rubies, and pearls,—the pouch of her white
leather girdle set “with a large balass ruby the size of a tennis-ball
between five rich diamonds and other stones the size of a bean.”
“Truly, as I believe,” he comments, “and also as I heard it said at the
time, I estimate the dress she then wore at the value of 200,000 crowns
of gold”; while on another occasion he declares her dress so rich that
“there is no man who can well imagine what could be the value of it.”
At a somewhat similar reception of a French embassy, tales of the
Queen’s magnificence evidently spread through Spain; and Fra Fernando de
Talavera, Archbishop of Granada, though no longer her official
Father-Confessor, felt bound to write and remonstrate. Isabel was,
however, able to offer a good defence, declaring that neither the
dresses of herself nor her ladies had been new,—indeed her own “made of
silk and with three bands of gold as plainly as possible,” she had worn
before in Aragon in the presence of these same Frenchmen. If some of the
men’s garments were costly, it had not been by her orders, rather she
had done her uttermost to discountenance it.
She might have mentioned also how, in the critical stages of the Moorish
war, she had pledged the crown jewels to merchants of Barcelona, thus
showing that for all her appreciation of the luxuries of dress, they did
not rank for a second in her thoughts with more important
considerations.
Her magnificence like her severity was calculated and the same might be
said of her liberality. She had seen money wasted on ne’er-do-wells and
was fully determined that no man, merely because he was powerful or
plausible, should prey on her revenues; while for the regular type of
Court-flatterer hunting for sinecures her contempt amounted to aversion.
Galindez Carvajal tells us in his chronicle that she and Ferdinand kept
a book in which they wrote down the names of those at Court whom they
thought most capable and worthy of reward, consulting it whenever an
office fell vacant, and that they did not hesitate to prefer prudent men
of the middle-class to the highly-born incompetent. Their actual gifts,
though scarcely lavish, were sufficient to cause satisfaction, and Lucio
Marineo declares that “when between the King and Queen there was
discussion as to the fitting reward of any particular service, she on
her part always gave more than the sum on which the two had determined.”
Ferdinand was not unlike his contemporary, Henry VII. of England,
according to Ayala, the Spanish Ambassador’s description of that
monarch: “If gold once enters his strong boxes it never comes out again.
He pays in depreciated coin.”
Against this criticism may be set Machiavelli’s praise: “If the present
King of Spain had desired to be thought liberal, he would not have been
able to contrive, nor would he have succeeded in so many undertakings.”
It is pleasant to turn from calculated policy to uncalculated
enthusiasm; and this may be truly said of Isabel’s love of her faith.
Both she and the King were strict in the outward observances of
catholicism, and every morning would find Ferdinand at Mass before he
broke his fast, while we are told that on Maundy Thursday his servants
would seek out twelve of the poorest of his subjects and that he would
serve them at supper and wash their feet. Isabel herself would recite
the hours every day like a priest; and, for all the whirl of ceremonies
and duties in which she found herself involved, she would make time for
special devotions so that it seemed to those about her that her life was
“contemplative rather than active.”
Her marked individuality, and the respect she inspired in Ferdinand, had
completely changed the character of the Court from the old licentious
days of Henry IV.; priests of the type of Ximenes and Fra Fernando de
Talavera thronged her ante-chambers; and courtiers, when they saw her
coming, would walk with eyes cast down in the hope of establishing a
reputation for sanctity.
Their hypocrisy can have brought them little. The Queen might be a saint
in her private life; but those who think saints necessarily fools stand
convicted of folly themselves. She was too shrewd a judge of character
to desire to change her Court into a convent, and her letters to Fra
Fernando de Talavera, while breathing affection and admiration yet
venture occasionally to question the suitability to herself and her
surroundings of his standard of asceticism.
It is my wish that not only in matters of importance but in all that
concern these kingdoms you should give me your advice; ... and this I
do most earnestly beg, that you will not cease from writing your
opinion on the ground that these things do not concern you since you
are no longer here; for well I know that although absent your counsel
will be worth more to me than that of another present.
She then goes on to thank him for the reproofs he had administered on
the score of the too-great gaiety at Court and to assure him that in
explaining certain matters she is not seeking to free herself from
blame.
As for the French people supping with the ladies at table, that is a
thing they are accustomed to do. They do not get the custom from us;
but, when their great guests dine with sovereigns, the others in their
train dine at tables in the hall with the ladies and gentlemen; and
there are no separate tables for ladies. The Burgundians, the English,
and the Portuguese also follow this custom; and we on similar
occasions to this.... I say this that you may see there was no
innovation in what we did, nor did we think we were doing anything
wrong in it.... But if it be found wrong after the inquiry I will
make, it will be better to discontinue it in future.... As for the
bull-fights, I feel with you, though perhaps not quite so strongly.
But after I had consented to them, I had the fullest determination
never to attend them again in my life nor to be where they were held.
One of Queen Isabel’s biographers on the contrary tells us that the
Queen admired this national pastime for the skill and courage it
demanded, a statement it is difficult to reconcile with the avowed
distaste in her own letter. Perhaps her enthusiasm was evoked after the
adoption of her device to place false horns, turned points inwards, on
the horns of the bull, that the frequent loss of human life might be
prevented. It was hardly a suggestion to win her popularity with her
subjects, whose enjoyment of a spectacle was always proportionate to its
risks. Isabel herself did not lack the true sporting instinct, for the
chroniclers record a bear-hunt in the woods near Madrid, where one of
the most ferocious of the beasts fell a trophy to her javelin.
Courage, the natural heritage of her race, her will and pride exalted
almost to a fetish; and Pulgar tells us that “even in the hour of
childbirth she disguised her sufferings and forced herself neither to
show nor utter the pain that in that hour women are wont to feel and
manifest.”
Her reserve was deep, in all that concerned her innermost thoughts
almost like a curtain veiling some sanctuary, that she felt would be
profaned by other eyes, but now and then torn back for the moment by the
stress of some sudden emotion. Her agony of mind was obvious after the
attempted murder of Ferdinand in Barcelona in August, 1492. The
assassin, a madman who believed the King’s death would result in his own
accession to the throne, had hurled himself on his victim from behind,
as he was descending the palace stairway, inflicting a deep wound in his
neck. This, though not fatal, was aggravated by fever, and for many days
the King’s life hung in the balance.
And on the seventh day [wrote the Queen to Fra Fernando] the fever
reached its climax, so that we were then in fear greater than all that
through which we had previously passed; and this lasted a day and a
night of which I will not say that which Saint Gregory said in the
Office for Holy Saturday, more than that it was a night of hell; so
that you may believe, Father, never was the like seen amongst the
people at any time, for officials ceased their work, and none paused
to speak with another. All was pilgrimages, processions, and
almsgiving, and more hearing of confessions than ever in Holy Week.
Ferdinand was popular in Barcelona, and the Council of Justice there
condemned his assassin to a death of ghastly torment, of which tearing
the flesh with red-hot pincers formed but a part. One is thankful that
Isabel issued a special command ordering the man to be beheaded before
this barbarous sentence was enacted.
Her love for Ferdinand was the strongest of her personal affections,
growing rather than diminishing as the years passed, so that, dying, she
sought that she should not be parted from him for long.
Let my body be interred in the monastery of San Francisco, which is in
the Alhambra of the city of Granada, ... but I desire and command
that, if the King, My Lord, should choose a sepulchre in any church or
monastery in any other part or place of these my kingdoms, my body be
translated thither and buried beside the body of His Highness.
Her wish is fulfilled, and the Catholic sovereigns lie side by side in
the Royal Chapel of Granada; but the love she gave in such ungrudging
measure was never fully returned. Isabel was fair in her youth, not
beautiful perhaps, but graceful and dignified, with soft
chestnut-coloured hair, and blue-green eyes that looked out candidly
upon the world; and to Ferdinand, arriving in disguise at Valladolid,
his blood set on fire by romance and excitement, she had seemed a bride
very worthy of his chivalrous care. Later he learned to respect and
admire her both as his wife and Queen, to love her even after his
fashion; but he was temperamentally cold and self-centred, and the age
set no high standard of fidelity. The chronicles record that he had four
illegitimate children by different mothers, of whom one, Alfonso, became
Archbishop of Saragossa; and Isabel was destined to suffer bitterly from
a jealousy intensified by her pride and strength of will.
[Illustration:
TOMB OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL
FROM NERVO’S “ISABELLE LA CATHOLIQUE”
]
Her private life was not, however, unhappy, at least in those years when
her own children were growing up around her, and she could find time
amid the many cares of state to superintend their education and build
dream kingdoms round their future. Her ambitions and Ferdinand’s were
alike centred on their only son, Prince John, whose birth in Seville on
June 30, 1478, we have mentioned in an earlier chapter.
“My angel” Isabel would playfully call the boy, alluding to his fair
skin and halo of curls; and she spared no pains in moulding his
character that he might one day satisfy her ideal of kingship. The
retinue that attended the little Prince of Asturias was in miniature a
counterpart of the elaborate household of officials and servants that
surrounded his father and mother; and, while from this environment he
imbibed a sense of the grandeur and aloofness of his position, he also
learned early the lesson of regal responsibility.
As president of a miniature Council of State, he listened to frequent
discussions of the economic and political problems of the day by men
chosen for their ability and experience; but it must not be imagined
that such strong diet was alone provided for his mental digestion. Youth
cries out for the companionship of youth; and Isabel, recognizing the
wisdom of this decree of nature, established a class of ten boys, five
older and five of his own age, against whose wits the heir to the throne
might sharpen his intellect in healthy competition.
His love of music, inheritance from his grandfather, John II. of
Castile, was encouraged and developed; and often in the evenings the
choir boys of the Royal Chapel would assemble in his room, and he and
they sing together; or on other occasions he would summon his musicians
and play on the organ, or on one of the stringed instruments of the day.
Musical proficiency was a sure road to his interest and regard.
In his position as heir to the Spanish dominions, it was natural that
Prince John’s life should stand more in the limelight of publicity than
his sisters’: but their education was in fact scarcely less considered
and planned than his. The Queen had always possessed an intense
admiration for classical learning; and it was one of Ferdinand’s regrets
that civil war had called him from the schoolroom to the camp, when he
could do little more than read and write. He never understood Latin, the
common language of cultured Europe; but Isabel made time to study its
grammar and composition with Beatriz de Galindo, a famous teacher of her
own sex, on whom the Court had bestowed the appropriate nickname “La
Latina.”
This course of education the Queen pursued with her usual thoroughness
and determination; and, if she did not achieve the true scholar’s
facility in translation and speech, she was at any rate able to
understand the orations of foreign ambassadors, and to interpret to her
husband the letters of the young Italian diplomat, Peter Martyr, who
took so lively an interest in her student’s career.
I am very anxious to know how your Highness is progressing with the
Latin [he wrote on one occasion]. I say this, Señora, because a
certain style of Latin is too difficult to be mastered by those who
are much occupied with other matters. Nevertheless my belief in your
powers of intelligence is so great that, if you really make up your
mind to do it, I am convinced you will succeed as you have done with
other languages.
The courtier here permits himself to eulogize; but the compliment if
insincere was yet grounded in sincerity. Peter Martyr found in his royal
mistress a correspondent ready to grant his letters their due meed of
appreciation, a patroness moreover eager to plant the fruits of the
classical renaissance in the somewhat arid soil of Castile.
Two other Italians of note at that time in the world of scholarship,
Antonio and Alessandro Geraldino, were appointed as tutors to the young
princesses; and from their instructions Isabel’s daughters emerged
fitting contemporaries of the famous D’Este sisters of Ferrara. It is
said that Joanna, the second of the Castilian Infantas, astonished the
Flemish Court by immediately replying to the Latin oration of some
learned scholar in the same tongue; while the youngest, Catherine, won
from the great Erasmus the comment, whether intended as praise or
otherwise, that she was “egregiously learned.”
Castilian chroniclers, when recording with pride the intelligence and
learning of Isabel and her daughters, make a point of showing that such
ability did not entirely quench more feminine tastes. The Queen’s visits
to the unruly convents of her kingdom in company with her needle and her
spinning-wheel have been already mentioned; while many were the gifts of
elaborate vestments and altar-cloths that she and her ladies worked for
the new Cathedral of Granada, and the other churches and religious
houses founded during her reign. That her share in such employment was
no mere occasional easy stitch we may perhaps assume when we learn from
Father Florez that “her husband never wore a shirt she herself had not
woven and worked.” Ferdinand’s chivalry was hardly of the type that
would suffer rough or badly-fitting clothes for sentimental reasons.
[Illustration:
AVILA, TOMB OF PRINCE JOHN, SON OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
“With such a mother,” adds Florez, “the daughters could hardly be idle.
They learned to sew, to spin, and to embroider.”
Well-brought-up mediæval princesses, indeed, could have little in common
with the daughters of kings in fairy-tale romances, condemned to
luxurious sloth in high-walled gardens or battlemented towers. From
their earliest days they must prepare to play their part in the future
destiny of the nation, to tread the matrimonial measure not according to
their fancy but at the parental wish; and then, their marriage achieved,
to unite with the rôle of wife and mother the arduous task of political
agent, maintaining friendly relations, often at the price of
nerve-racking strain, between their old home and their new.
To Ferdinand his children were veritable “olive-branches,” emblems and
instruments of the web of peace that his diplomacy was slowly spreading
over Europe till France his old enemy should stand defenceless before
his network of alliances. The foreign policy of Spain developed
naturally under his guidance on Aragonese lines; yet Castile, though
absorbed into his anti-French hostility against the traditional
friendship of centuries, never entirely disregarded her own ambitions.
The conquest of Granada and the discovery of the New World had been
mainly Castilian triumphs, the one the extension of her border
southwards, the other a successful stage in her rivalry with Portugal on
the high seas.
Yet a third Castilian ambition was the maintenance of the _status quo_
with Portugal at home, an end by no means permanently achieved by the
Treaty of Lisbon in 1479. By its terms Joanna “La Beltraneja” had
entered a convent at Coimbra and taken vows that were to separate her
for ever from the world; but she was too valuable a puppet in the hands
of her mother’s people to be allowed to remain long in such seclusion.
More than once she quitted her cloister for the palace at Lisbon, posing
according to her own signature as “I the Queen,” though the Portuguese
preferred to recognize her by the less provocative title of “the
Excellent Lady.”[6]
Footnote 6:
She died in Lisbon in 1530 in her sixty-ninth year.
Without once more committing themselves in an open manner to her claims
as “Queen of Castile,” they could employ her name in projects of
alliance with Navarre and elsewhere to the indignation and discomfiture
of Ferdinand and Isabel. The latter during the earlier part of their
reign were too fully occupied in their war against the Moors to show
practical resentment at this infringement of their treaty. Realizing
that a conquest of Portugal was beyond their powers, they turned to
diplomacy; and in April, 1490, betrothed their eldest daughter Isabel to
Alfonso, son and heir of John II., and grandson of the Queen’s old
suitor, Alfonso V.
[Illustration:
AVILA, THE CATHEDRAL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HAUSER AND MENET
]
Isabel was their favourite child,—her gentle, sweet-tempered yet
somewhat melancholy nature so recalling her invalid grandmother, that
the Queen in private would teasingly address her as “Mother.” It would
not be a far journey to the Court of Lisbon; and nothing but rejoicing
filled her parents’ hearts at the gorgeous festivities in Seville, which
were the background of her formal betrothal. Not only had peace been
established on a firm foundation, but one more link was forged in the
chain between the Houses of Portugal and Castile, that might at some
future date unite all Spain under a single sovereign.
In the autumn of 1490 the young Princess departed to her new home; but
contrary to the general expectations she was to reap sorrow rather than
joy. A few months of happiness with her bridegroom, whose memory she
never ceased to cherish, and the Castilian Infanta was left a widow. She
returned to her parents, seeking only a sanctuary, where she might
indulge in her grief; and it was with genuine horror, on King John of
Portugal’s death in 1495, that she repudiated the offer made for her
hand by his cousin and successor, the new King, Emmanuel. To Ferdinand
and Isabel the proposed match was both politically and personally
agreeable. Their daughter was too young to let a single sorrow eat away
her joy of life; while Emmanuel’s obvious anxiety to please and win her
augured well for their future domestic peace. They therefore pressed his
suit, hoping once more to consummate the union so dear to Castilian
ambitions, but at first quite without avail.
We must tell you [wrote the Queen to her ambassador in England] that
the Princess, our daughter, is very determined not to marry; on which
account we are obliged to give the Infanta, Doña Maria, to the King of
Portugal.
Emmanuel, however, preferred the elder sister to the younger; and Maria
was destined to wait for her bridegroom till a more formidable barrier
than mere disinclination had removed her rival. In the meanwhile, when
the Portuguese alliance still hung in the balance, proposals for other
marriages, no less fateful for Spain, were occupying the sovereigns’
attention. Where should they find a fitting bride for their son and
heir?
[Illustration:
ISABEL, QUEEN OF PORTUGAL, ELDEST DAUGHTER OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO
]
Since the days, when still almost in his cradle, he had been suggested
as a husband for Joanna “La Beltraneja,” both gossip and statesmanship
had been busy weaving his matrimonial fate. The threads were often
broken abruptly; but one design ran clear through all, the circumvention
of the growing power of France.
We have already noticed Louis XI.’s desire to establish his influence
over Navarre, as shown in his support of Eleanor, Countess of Foix, and
her French husband, and in the marriage of his sister Madeleine with
their son Gaston.[7] His hopes were realized by Eleanor’s accession to
the throne on the death of her father, John II. of Aragon in 1479,
though she did not live to enjoy for more than a few weeks the
sovereignty she had purchased at the price of a sister’s blood. She was
succeeded by her grandson, Francis Phœbus, and he on his death in 1483
by his sister, Catherine.
Footnote 7:
See page 43.
Ferdinand and Isabel at once suggested the marriage of this eligible
heiress of thirteen with their five-year-old son; but her mother
Madeleine of Valois, infinitely preferred to ally her child with one of
her own race; and Catherine carried her inheritance to the French House
of Albret. Spain was for the moment foiled; but a wedding many years
later, its more than doubtful claims on Navarre enforced by arms, was
yet to gain for Ferdinand the southern half of the mountain kingdom,
whose double outlook across the Pyrenees had been the source of so much
crime and bloodshed.
Another alliance proposed for Prince John was with Anne of Brittany,
heiress of a duchy, whose independence had always threatened the peace
of France. It would have been a fitting revenge for French interference
in Navarre and Aragon; but here again Spain was forestalled; and Anne of
Beaujeu, regent of France on the death of her father Louis XI.,
succeeded in marrying her younger brother, Charles VIII., to Anne of
Brittany thus linking to the French Crown the most important of its
great provincial dependencies.
As it happened, this marriage was to set free a bride for the Spanish
Infante, Margaret of Hapsburg, daughter of Maximilian, King of the
Romans, a Princess betrothed in her early youth to the Dauphin Charles
and even sent to France for her education, but now repudiated in favour
of a more advantageous match. Maximilian was by no means a proud man,
but even his careless nature burned with resentment at his daughter’s
return home under such circumstances; and he welcomed the idea of her
union with a son of Ferdinand the Catholic, France’s antagonist for so
many years. To make this Hapsburg-Aragonese friendship the more obvious
and complete, the wedding became a double one; and Philip, Archduke of
Austria and Count of Flanders, Maximilian’s son and heir, took as his
bride the Spanish sovereigns’ second daughter, Joanna.
With many misgivings Isabel bade the latter good-bye and consigned her
to the grand fleet in the harbour of Lerida that was to convey her to
the Netherlands and bring back from thence the Prince of Asturias’
betrothed. The Infanta Joanna, in spite of her careful training, had
shown at times an alarming lack of mental balance. She could be clever
and witty, but also morose or, if roused, recklessly passionate in her
speech. From a home, where the air breathed decorum and self-control,
she now went to a pleasure-loving Court presided over by a fickle
Adonis. Would she cling tenaciously to the orthodox views in which she
had been bred amid surroundings palpably lax and cynical? Would she know
how to keep her jealousy in leash, if Philip “the Fair,” as in all
probability, proved faithless? Would she hold her head high and steer
her course with dignity amid the many political pitfalls, that would be
laid for her in a strange land?
The Queen could only sigh in answer to these questions. Joanna in many
ways resembled her grandmother and namesake, the Admiral’s daughter,
Joanna Enriquez, and that passionate temperament would in a moment of
crisis be its own councillor. Advice and warning were of little avail.
The Spanish bride in her ship of state sailed away northwards; and
Isabel watched the clouds gather with gloomy forebodings. Weeks passed,
and she was tortured with anxiety till at length news came that,
although the fleet had been compelled to shelter in English harbours and
several of the vessels had been lost, yet her daughter was safe in
Flanders and soon to be married at Lille.
Early in March, 1497, Margaret of Austria after an equally adventurous
voyage, whose dangers induced her to compose light-heartedly her own
epitaph, landed in Spain and was welcomed with all the state and
ceremony befitting a future Queen.
How this matrimonial venture, introducing into the close air of the
Spanish Court a Paris-bred gaiety and insouciance, would have stood the
test of time we cannot tell. The Prince and his bride were young; and,
if her contempt of convention scandalized the Castilian grandee, he
could blame her youth and build hopeful arguments on feminine
adaptability. Thus the brief honeymoon, a triumphal progress from one
large town of the kingdom to another, was a period of unmixed rejoicing
in Spain. All promised well. Even the Princess Isabel had put aside her
long mourning and consented at last to share the throne of Portugal with
her patient suitor, demanding however with the fanaticism of her race,
so strangely in contrast with her natural sweetness, that Emmanuel’s
wedding-gift to her should be the expulsion of the Jews from the land to
which she went.
The glory of the Faith! The glory of Spain! Were they in truth achieved?
the Queen must have asked herself, as she and Ferdinand attended their
daughter’s second wedding in the border town of Alcantara.
Fortune’s wheel never stands still in this world [says Bernaldez
sorrowfully]. It gives and it takes away; it exalts and it humbles; to
the poor and miserable it grants long years of which in their
weariness they would fain be quit; while to the wealthy, to Princes,
to Kings, and great lords,—to all for whom according to human
understanding life is a boon, it decrees naught but death.
In the very midst of the wedding rejoicings came the news that the
Prince of Asturias, never robust, had fallen ill of a fever in
Salamanca; and Ferdinand, hurrying as fast as he could to his bedside,
only arrived when the end was all too certain. On October 4, 1497, at
the age of nineteen, Prince John died. Apart from the private grief of
his parents for a son, whose character had held the promise of all that
is best in manhood, his death was a national calamity; and for weeks the
shadow of mourning hung alike over cottage and castle.
I never heard [says Commines] of so solemn and so universal a mourning
for any Prince in Europe. I have since been informed by ambassadors
that all the tradesmen put themselves into black clothes and shut up
their shops for forty days together; the nobility and gentry covered
their mules with black cloth down to their very knees, so that there
was nothing of them to be seen but their eyes; and set up black
banners on all the gates of the cities.
Even the hope that an heir at least would be left to their Prince was
destroyed when the young widow, nerve-stricken at her sudden loss, gave
birth a few months later to a still-born daughter.
[Illustration:
AVILA FROM BEYOND THE CITY WALLS
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
The succession to the throne now devolved on the young Queen Isabel of
Portugal; and early in 1498 she and her husband appeared in Toledo to
receive the homage of the Castilian Cortes. The Aragonese Cortes however
utterly declined to follow this example, declaring that they owed
allegiance to Ferdinand and his male heirs alone; their obstinacy
producing a public tension only relieved when in August, 1498, the young
Queen gave birth to a son, whom all were willing to acknowledge.
The longed-for Prince, heir of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal was born at
last; the highest ideals of Spanish unity seemed on the eve of
fulfilment; but, almost within the hour that gave him life, his mother
died; and the Infante Miguel, weak and fragile, was not destined to
reach his second year.
Three deaths within three years and those the most precious in the land!
The first keen blade of sorrow that transfixed the Queen’s soul [says
Bernaldez] was the death of the Prince; the second the death of Doña
Isabel her eldest daughter, Queen of Portugal; the third the death of
her grandson Don Miguel, for in him she had found consolation. From
this time the life of the famous and very virtuous Queen Isabel,
protector of Castile, was without pleasure; and her days and her
health were alike shortened.
CHAPTER XII
THE ITALIAN WARS
1494–1504
A cloud of grief hung over Spain, but abroad her sun was rising. The
union of Castile and Aragon, the Conquest of the Moors, the campaign
against heresy, the discovery of unknown islands in the West—all these
had brought her prominently before the eyes of Europe; while yet another
harvest of glory still remained for Ferdinand’s diplomacy to reap on
foreign shores.
In the early years of his rivalry with France the Pyrenees had formed
his battleground, but for all his efforts, political or military, he had
never succeeded in regaining Roussillon or Cerdagne nor in undermining
French influence in Navarre. Diplomacy is a game where the practised
hand will always be at an immense advantage; and Louis XI. proved more
than a match for the young Aragonese opponent who was to succeed him
eventually as the craftiest statesman in Europe.
_Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare_ is said to be the only paternal
sermon to which the Dauphin Charles was ever subjected; but since Louis
XI.’s craven fear of his son denied the boy all but the most rudimentary
education, there was little likelihood that he would be able to make use
of so subtle a maxim. Ill-developed in brain as in body, his weak but
obstinate nature nourished its vanity on schemes requiring the strength
of a Hannibal or an Alexander for their realization. His father had with
tireless energy extended the boundaries of France north, east, and
south; employing the weapons of force, bribery, and lies, as the moment
demanded. His success, save on moral grounds, might have prompted the
continuation of his policy; but Charles chafed not at its immorality
only its apparent pettiness of scope. To make peace with his neighbours,
if necessary, by the surrender of lately-won possessions; and then,
freed from Christian molestation, to lead an army in person that should
add the kingdom of Jerusalem to French dominions—this was the fantasy
that floated ever before his eyes.
A crusade! Mediæval Europe had heard that project discussed for many
centuries. It had seen warriors take the Cross for reasons true and
false, had watched their victories and their failures, and, by the end
of the fifteenth century, was sufficiently disillusioned to smile in
private when the idea was mentioned. The recovery of the Holy Sepulchre
was a good excuse for governments to impose extra taxes, or for Venice
to induce the weak-minded to wage her trade-wars in the Levant. If the
Turk, as he threatened, grew stronger it might indeed become a matter of
serious politics; but in the meantime, save in Spain or Bohemia,
religious fervour stood at a discount.
Yet European statesmen were ready enough to twist the young French
monarch’s desire for high-sounding glory to their own advantage.
Ludovico, “Il Moro,” virtual ruler of Milan for his nephew Duke Gian
Galeazzo Sforza, saw in an alliance with Charles VIII. a way of
extricating himself from political troubles that were likely to
overthrow the balance of power in Italy, and with it his own dominion.
“This Ludovico was clever,” says Philip de Commines who knew him, “but
very nervous and cringing when he was afraid; a man without faith if he
thought it to his advantage to break his word.”
At the time when Charles VIII., grown to years of manhood if not
discretion, was centring his hopes on Jerusalem, Ludovico Sforza lived
in a perpetual state of fear. Of old in alliance with the Aragonese
House of Naples and the Medici at Florence, he had regarded with calm
eyes the hostility of Venice on the eastern border of his duchy and the
growing ambitions of the Papacy in Romagna. These five Powers,—Milan,
Naples, Rome, and the republics of Venice and Florence, had controlled
the peninsula, and in Machiavelli’s words made it their object “first
that no armed foreigner should be allowed to invade Italy, second, that
no one of their own number should be suffered to extend his territory.”
Slowly the balance thus established had been shaken, and mutual
suspicion began to darken the relations between Naples and Milan. King
Ferrante’s grand-daughter Isabella was wife of the rightful Duke, Gian
Galeazzo, and in her letters home made piteous complaints of his uncle’s
tyranny. Her husband was fully old enough to reign but was kept instead
a prisoner at Pavia, his natural delicacy of constitution aggravated by
this restraint. She herself was relegated to a merely secondary
position; and her relations, who had intended her to act as their
political agent, not unnaturally resented the forced seclusion in which
she lived.
The usurper on his side, noting the coldness of Ferrante and his son
Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, was haunted by a perpetual nightmare of his
own downfall through Neapolitan intervention. Such a revolution would
please Venice, who liked nothing better than to see her ambitious
neighbour involved in trouble, while little help could be expected from
the selfish Papacy, or from Florence which, torn by factions since the
death of the wise Lorenzo de Medici in 1492, was too weak to prove
either a formidable foe or ally.
In his need of support Ludovico looked beyond the Alps, and instantly
his quick brain suggested the rôle which Charles VIII. might play. It
was little more than half a century since the last representative of the
Angevin claims on Naples had been defeated and driven away from that
southern kingdom by his Aragonese rival, Alfonso V.[8] Since that date
the House of Anjou had been incorporated with the French Crown, and thus
Charles stood heir to its Italian ambitions; Naples but a stepping-stone
on the road to his conquest of Jerusalem.
Footnote 8:
See page 25.
If you will be ruled by me [declared Ludovico enthusiastically] I will
assist in making you greater than Charlemagne; for, when you have
conquered the Kingdom of Naples, we will easily drive the Turk out of
the Empire of Constantinople.
Such glib assurance awoke no answering belief amongst the older and more
experienced of the French King’s councillors; but Charles was in the
mood of Rehoboam and welcomed only the advice of the young and reckless,
which confirmed his own strong desire to undertake the invasion.
Commines, shaking his head over the many difficulties to be encountered,
concludes that Providence must certainly have guided and protected the
expedition, “for,” he adds, “the wisdom of the contrivers of this scheme
contributed but little.”
The first step was for Charles to secure the goodwill of his neighbours;
and, having decked out the glory of a crusade against the Turks in its
brightest colours, he proceeded to buy the complaisance of England,
Flanders, and Spain towards his project by various concessions and
gifts. In the case of Spain the price demanded was the surrender of
Roussillon and Cerdagne; and it is said that superstition as well as his
anxiety for a settlement gained the French King’s final consent to this
bargain. Two friars, whether bribed by Ferdinand or no, declared that
Louis XI. had sinned grievously in ever taking possession of these
provinces, seeing that his rival, though he had failed to redeem the
mortgage on them, had spent his funds instead on a holy war against the
Moors. Charles, they urged, must make instant restoration or run the
risk, when he died, that his soul should dwell for ever in Purgatory.
By the Treaty of Barcelona (January, 1493) Roussillon and Cerdagne
passed back therefore into Spanish hands, and Ferdinand with many
compliments and protestations of friendship agreed to an alliance with
France against all enemies and to assist him in his crusade on the
understanding that such terms should not affect his relations with the
Holy See. His allegiance to the “Vicar of Christ” must stand before all
other claims.
Satisfied that he might now proceed on his road to fame without the
interference of the great Powers of Europe, Charles crossed the Alps
early in September, 1494. His forces, which comprised not only the
chivalry of France eager to prove its metal but also companies of Swiss
and German mercenaries armed with pike, halberd, and arquebus, were
further strengthened by a formidable array of artillery, mounted on
carriages drawn by horses. These could be moved almost as fast as the
infantry; and Italy, accustomed to the old-fashioned heavy guns dragged
across the country by teams of oxen, heard the report of the invader’s
superior ordnance with amazement, even with incredulity.
In Naples, the idea of a new Angevin expedition had at first aroused
laughter, and only the old King Ferrante had treated it as a serious
issue. In January, 1494, he died, and his son Alfonso II., realizing at
last that Ludovico’s threats were no mere cry of “wolf!” leagued himself
with the Pope and Florence to protect the frontiers of Romagna and
Tuscany.
The campaign that followed is perhaps the most amazing in the history of
European warfare. In September, Charles was at Asti, indulging as
Ludovico’s guest in festivities and excesses scarcely in keeping with
the ideal of a Christian crusader. Pleasure thus delayed him a month;
but from November, when he entered Florence, master of her principal
fortresses and acclaimed as a conquering hero by the populace, his
triumphant progress southwards was almost unimpeded. January, 1495,
found him in Rome, at peace with the Pope on the strength of a
hastily-constructed agreement, and by February, he had reached the
northern boundary of the kingdom of Naples.
The abdication of Alfonso in favour of his son Ferrante II.; the
latter’s retreat from San Germano, where he had intended to make a
determined stand against the enemy; and finally a revolution in the town
of Naples itself to overthrow its Aragonese defenders—these completed
the downfall of what might truly be called a “House of Cards.” Ferrante,
declaring that the sins of his fathers and not his own had been visited
on his head, fled to Sicily; and on February 22d, Charles, clad in
imperial purple and holding a golden sceptre in his hand, entered the
capital in triumph and was duly crowned as “King of Naples and Jerusalem
and Emperor of the East.”
Almost without the loss of a soldier and in less than six months he had
achieved his stepping-stone. Alexander VI., referring to the campaign,
remarked sarcastically that the French needed only a child’s wooden
spurs to urge on their horses, and chalk to mark their lodgings for the
night. For all their previous scoffing the armies of Italy had melted
away like mist before the despised “Barbarians,” or else had fled in
terror at the first encounter.
Contemporary historians are ready enough with their explanations. The
wars in the peninsula, says the Florentine Guicciardini, had been waged
hitherto chiefly in the study or on paper; and his fellow-citizen,
Machiavelli, elaborates this theory. The luxury, the civilization, and
the culture, that made the cities of Italy the admiration and the desire
of the rest of Europe, had produced an enervating atmosphere in which
the healthy virtues of patriotism and hardihood withered away. States
grew to rely for their defence not on their own subjects but on
mercenary armies enrolled by _Condottieri_ generals; and these, actuated
by no motive save to secure their pay for as many weeks as possible,
converted war from a grim struggle for existence into an intricate but
nearly bloodless pastime.
They spared no effort to relieve themselves and their men from fatigue
and danger, not killing one another in battle, but making prisoners
who were afterwards released without ransom. They would attack no town
by night, nor would those within make sorties against their besieging
foe. Their camps were without rampart or trench. They fought no winter
campaigns.
Little wonder if men used to a warfare of courtesies shrank appalled
from a ferocity that, once aroused, spared neither young nor old, women
nor invalids. In the early stages of the invasion the Duke of Orleans
had defeated Federigo, brother of King Alfonso of Naples, at Rapallo;
and the town, daring to resist the conquerors, had been put to the sack
with all the brutality attending a general massacre. Its fate had a
paralysing effect on future attempts to hinder the French advance,
especially in Naples, where devotion to the reigning House of Aragon was
never more than half-hearted.
Ferrante I. and his son, Alfonso II., had been typical Italian despots,
ruling by fear rather than by love, and to satisfy their own caprice
rather than to win their land prosperity or glory. Ferrante II. was
gentle and well-intentioned but too little known to be popular. Thus the
Neapolitans, cynically assured that the sovereign did not exist for whom
it was worth while to risk their lives, threw open their gates to the
French and joyfully acclaimed them as long-hoped for saviours.
In a century that witnessed the perseverance and daring of the Moorish
struggle, the campaign of Charles VIII. stands out like a monstrous
caricature of triumph. Founded in vanity, its success had startled
Europe, but was to prove as evanescent as it was cheaply won. The fault
lay to a large extent with the conquerors.
At our first entrance into Italy [says Commines sadly] we were
regarded like saints, and everybody thought us people of the greatest
goodness and sincerity in the world; but that opinion lasted not long
for our own disorders and the false reports of our enemies quickly
convinced them of the contrary.
The Frenchman and the Swiss or German mercenary, conscious of their easy
victory, fell into the trap of regarding the Italians as cowards whom it
was scarcely worth while to conciliate; and Charles on his part, too
little of the statesman to secure what he had won, abandoned himself to
idle pleasure. Tyranny and licence worked hand in hand to teach the
Neapolitans that a change of dynasty may not be always for the better,
and as they groaned under the taxation and insolence of foreign
officials they began to remember Ferrante in his exile in Sicily.
Elsewhere in Italy there were also signs of reaction. Ludovico “Il Moro”
had swept his Aragonese rivals from his path; and death, not without his
assistance if there was any truth in rumour, had removed the young Duke
Gian Galeazzo; but it was now the all-conquering French who filled him
with dismay. Before the Sforza had established their rule in Milan, the
Visconti, had reigned there, and Louis, Duke of Orleans, cousin of
Charles VIII. and a near heir to the throne, was a descendant of the
Visconti in the female line.[9] Since the French had found how easy it
was to invade Italy, what should prevent them from claiming not only
Naples but Milan?
Footnote 9:
Louis, Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XII. of France, was grandson
of Valentina Visconti, sister of Duke Filippo Maria.
Ludovico, in terror for his duchy, was now as eager to drive out the
invaders as formerly to welcome them, and soon persuaded Venice and the
Papacy to join him in an alliance for this purpose. Outside Italy,
Maximilian, who had been elected Holy Roman Emperor on the death of his
father in 1493, was also alarmed at the signal triumph of the House of
Valois; but since his promises usually outran their fulfilment the real
organization of an effective opposition devolved on Spain.
Ferdinand, in spite of the outward amity signed and sealed at Barcelona,
had worked secretly from the first to prevent the success of Charles
VIII.’s ambitions. Roussillon and Cerdagne once secured, he had no
inducement to keep his bargain; and, when the French King on the eve of
the invasion sent to remind him of his promise to help in the crusade,
the elder statesman, though apparently enthusiastic, proceeded craftily
to withdraw his support. Charles had placed the idea of ultimate war
against the Turks well in the foreground of his public programme, with
merely a casual allusion to his designs on Italy; and this enabled
Ferdinand, while acclaiming war on the Infidel as the one ambition of
his life, to denounce the rest of the proposal with mingled surprise and
horror.
His ambassador, Don Alonso de Silva, begged the French King in moving
terms to desist from an expedition that could only prove the scandal of
Christianity; but still more forcible was his argument that, since
Naples was a fief of the Church, any attack made on that kingdom would
at once absolve his master from his alliance with France. The allegiance
of Ferdinand to the Holy See had been an item of too frequent recurrence
in the Treaty of Barcelona for Charles to miss the point; and, as he
turned from De Silva in fury, he realized that he had been badly duped.
One of the greatest strokes of good fortune for a man [says
Guicciardini] is to have an opportunity of showing that in the things
he does for his own interest he is moved by the thought of the public
good. This is what shed glory on the enterprises of the Catholic King.
What he did for his own security and aggrandizement often looked as if
it were done for the advancement of the Christian Faith or the defence
of the Church.
Ferdinand may appear a consummate scoundrel to modern minds, but in his
own day it can be seen that he was not without admirers.
From grief at an injury offered to a Papal fief, his opposition to
France on the Pope’s behalf grew so rapidly that Alexander VI. was
induced in 1494, not only to grant to him and his Queen, as we have
already noticed, the title of “Catholic Kings,” but to concede to them
as part of their revenue two-ninths of the Spanish tithes and rights of
sovereignty over most of the North African coast. Nor was this cordial
relationship affected by the peace with France, into which Alexander was
temporarily driven when Charles VIII. hammered at the gates of Rome; for
hardly had this second Charlemagne and his army vanished southwards than
the plots for his undoing were redoubled.
In March, 1495, the “League of Venice” made it patent to Europe that the
Empire, Spain, Rome, Milan, and Venice had pledged themselves to unite
for the mutual preservation of their dominions. Secret stipulations
explained that this end would be secured by Ferdinand dispatching an
army to Sicily to help Ferrante II. in recovering his kingdom, the
Venetian fleet meanwhile, attacking the Neapolitan coast-towns in French
hands. Spanish and Imperial forces would also assault France on her
southern and eastern boundaries; while Ludovico Sforza employed the
mercenary levies of Milan in holding the passes of the Alps against any
further inroad of “Barbarians.”
To Charles, idling at Naples, the menace of the League came like a
thunderclap. As timid now as formerly self-confident, he cast Jerusalem
from his thoughts, and in May, 1495, turned his face homewards at the
head of some ten thousand men. The rest of his army remained to guard
his newly acquired kingdom, with the Count of Montpensier as Viceroy and
Stuart d’Aubigny, a Scotch soldier of repute, as Governor-General of
Calabria.
At Fornovo, in Milanese territory, the retreating invaders were attacked
by Ludovico’s troops in combination with the Venetians, but succeeded in
repulsing them and making their way safely across the frontier. Much of
their baggage, however, fell into Italian hands, and the Allies loudly
proclaimed their victory. Fortune, hitherto so indulgent, was tired of
her incapable protégé, and at her frown his dominion quickly crumbled
away. As he quitted Neapolitan territory Ferrante II., supported by a
Spanish army under Gonsalvo de Cordova, left Sicily for the mainland,
and though at first held at bay by D’Aubigny, had regained the greater
part of his inheritance before a year had passed. In July, 1496, Naples
“the fickle” opened her gates to him; while later in the same month the
Viceroy, Montpensier, whose frantic appeals to his master for
reinforcements had been ignored, was driven to capitulate at Atella.
“Of the expedition of Charles VIII.,” says a French historian, “no more
trace remained than of the exploits of Amadis de Gaula.”
Judging by merely tangible results, or rather by the lack of them, it
may appear at first sight that in a biography of Isabel of Castile, this
campaign has received unmerited attention. The French meteor had come
and gone; and the balance of power in Italy, although badly shaken, was
restored to its equilibrium. Individual rulers had passed from the
board; but Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples once more checked
and counter-checked each other’s moves. How could this temporary
disarrangement be said to have concerned Spain, save to afford a passing
triumph for Ferdinand’s diplomacy?
Yet in truth this same expedition was pregnant with results not only for
Spain but the whole of Western Christendom, results so far-reaching that
the history of modern Europe is often said to have begun at this date.
Mediæval Italy had rallied for a moment, but she had none the less
received her death-blow, the very incompetence and folly of her
conqueror revealing her mortal weakness. Never again, till centuries had
passed would her sunny fields and pleasant cities be free from foreign
menace; never again would her native rulers be left to plot and plan her
future undisturbed. Her beauty, her culture, her luxury had aroused the
lust of younger and hardier nations; and against their strength she
could offer no adequate defence.
Ludovico Sforza had boasted too soon, when he depicted a map of Italy,
with himself broom in hand sweeping the other Powers before him where he
would. In April, 1498, Charles VIII. of France died and was succeeded by
his cousin, Louis, Duke of Orleans, who at once styled himself King of
Naples and Duke of Milan. The assumption of these titles foretold his
invasion of Italy, whenever a favourable opportunity should occur, a
hint of which other Powers were not slow to take advantage. Venice, at
the price of a small stretch of Lombard territory for her mainland
empire, agreed to Ludovico’s ruin, with a shortsightedness that aroused
Peter Martyr’s shrewd comment to a Venetian friend: “The King of France,
after he has dined with the Duke of Milan, will sup with you.”
The Pope, anxious to found a kingdom in Romagna for his family, also put
away former anti-French prejudices, and granted a divorce, much desired
by Louis XII., in return for a bride and the title “Duke of Valentinois”
for his son, Cæsar Borgia.
The way for French ambition was thus paved; and Ludovico “Il Moro,” with
a retributive justice not often so clearly shown, fell a victim to the
storm he had originally evoked; and, captured by his rival in April,
1500, was sent to end his days in the dungeons of Loches. Less deserved
but equally irrevocable was the disappearance of the bastard line of
Aragon in Naples. Ferrante II. had died in September, 1496; and his
uncle and successor, Federigo, menaced by Louis XII., sought assistance
from his relations in Spain without avail. Ferdinand was playing a
deeper game than to preserve the throne of those whom he secretly
regarded as having cheated him out of a rightful inheritance. Only
political and financial embarrassments had caused his father, John II.,
to acquiesce in Alfonso V.’s will, leaving Naples to an illegitimate
son; and Ferdinand, with a united Spain behind him, and an army trained
for ten long years in the wars of Granada, saw no reason to continue
this policy. His support of Ferrante II. had been a temporary expedient
to rid Southern Italy of Charles VIII.; but now he boldly approached the
French King with a wholly selfish scheme of spoliation that finally took
shape in the Partition Treaty of Granada of November, 1500. Federigo had
foolishly given an opening to his enemies, when in despair at his
isolation he appealed to the Turks to come to his aid; and the Pope was
thus enabled to denounce him as a traitor to the Christian Faith and to
demand his instant abdication.
[Illustration:
A KING-AT-ARMS
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
]
His kingdom, divided into two by a somewhat vague boundary line, was
partitioned by France and Spain, Louis receiving the northern portion
with the town of Naples, Ferdinand the provinces of Calabria and Apulia.
The unfortunate Federigo after a feeble effort to oppose this
settlement, yielded to superior force, and retired to honourable
captivity in France with the title “Duke of Anjou.”
Machiavelli’s contempt for Louis XII.’s share in the treaty was
unbounded. “The French do not understand statecraft,” was his answer to
Cardinal d’Amboise, who on one occasion had suggested sneeringly that
the Italians did not understand war; and there is little doubt that the
Florentine considered his own race the more blest. That a King who might
have controlled the peninsula should deliberately choose to share his
supremacy with a powerful rival was of all acts the most stupid; and
stupid indeed it was to prove; though it may be questioned if, in the
face of Ferdinand’s opposition, Louis could have conquered Naples at
all.
Where war in Southern Italy was concerned, Spain had in many ways the
advantage over France, above all in her extensive eastern seaboard and
her possession of the island of Sicily, which afforded a convenient base
of operations for landing reinforcements and provisions. Louis would
have needed to maintain an enormous army had he endeavoured to keep
Naples entirely free of Spanish aggression; but his alternative policy
of sharing the kingdom bordered quite as close on the impossible.
Differences of opinion respecting the imaginary boundary (that had left
the ownership of some of the middle provinces undefined); quarrels as to
the right of collecting the tolls paid on the cattle and sheep passing
from their summer quarters in the Abruzzi to the sheltered valleys of
the Capitanata, their winter home; feuds between those Neapolitan
barons, who had originally supported the Angevin cause, and their
opponents, the former Allies of the Aragonese House—these were matters
so productive of strife that any efforts to establish a permanent peace
between France and Spain were obviously doomed to failure. Thus, by
1502, the royal thieves had fallen out; and war, occasionally suspended
by truces and negotiations, devastated Naples for the next two years.
Its course is hardly a highway in Castilian history, though its battles
were waged and its victories secured mainly by Castilian soldiers. The
ambitions by which it was dictated were purely Aragonese; and the final
success of Spanish arms in 1504, that drove the French from Naples, was
the crowning triumph of Ferdinand’s career. Yet, in as much as the issue
so vitally affected the future of Spain, drawing her definitely into a
struggle for the supremacy of Europe, and pitting her against France in
a national duel that was to outlast both Ferdinand and Louis, the
campaign demands some mention here.
Its actual conduct recalls, not only through its deeds of chivalry and
daring but in the character of its warfare, the struggle in Granada;
and, if Spain owed her success largely to her advantageous position, she
was also indebted to the thorough training her soldiers had received in
guerilla tactics. The mountainous districts of the kingdom of Naples
were peculiarly suited to the quick movements of light-armed horse; but
Gonsalvo de Cordova, Ferdinand’s Commander-in-chief, though recognizing
and using to the full this knowledge, did not disdain to learn what his
enemies could teach him in other branches of military art; and his
infantry, patiently drilled on the Swiss method, was soon to prove the
equal of any body of troops in Europe.
The real laurels of victory belong indeed to Gonsalvo de Cordova; for,
though the French army could boast heroes of chivalry, such as Bayard
the “knight without fear or stain,” and generals of skill and courage,
such as D’Aubigny, it had no soldier who could in any way approach the
genius of the “Great Captain.” Gonsalvo had been bred in a school of
war, which gave individual talent full scope, and like his elder
brother, Alonso de Aguilar, he had been early singled out by Isabel for
praise and advancement.
[Illustration:
SPANISH MAN-AT-ARMS, FIFTEENTH CENTURY
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
]
To the light-hearted chivalry of the courtier, he united the prudence
and foresight of a practised statesman, and the patience and equable
temperament of the born ruler of men. In the fire before Granada which
destroyed the Queen’s tent, he had been prompt to put at her disposal
his wife’s wardrobe; an act of courtesy that caused Isabel to remark she
was afraid he and his family had suffered more loss than herself. This
and similar deeds of courtesy made him a pattern of manners in his own
day, but like the English Sir Walter Raleigh he was no mere
carpet-knight in search of royal favour. He was devoid of personal fear,
yet, when large issues depended on his orders, he never let his courage
degenerate into recklessness, after the manner of the average Castilian
commander, and perhaps his greatest military gift was his power of
judging whether the occasion required caution or a daring onslaught.
Never was a leader more intrepid in attack, more cool in the hour of
retreat, or less easily drawn from a good position by feint or scoff.
“A general,” he once remarked, “must obtain the victory at any price,
right or wrong. Afterwards he will be able to make tenfold compensation
to those whom he has injured.”
This specious reasoning is characteristic both of the man and the age in
which he lived; and Gonsalvo, like many of his contemporaries, was a
strange combination of sincerity and unscrupulous dealing. After the
campaign against Charles VIII., in which he had assisted Ferrante II. to
win back his kingdom, the Spanish General had been rewarded by a lavish
grant of Neapolitan territory. When, however, war broke out once more,
and Gonsalvo found he must lead his troops against his former Allies,
his code of honour prompted him to inform them of his regret at this
necessity and to offer the restoration of their gifts before embarking
on hostile measures. At the surrender of Taranto in 1502, on the other
hand, having promised on oath that the young Duke of Calabria,
Federigo’s eldest son, should be free to go where he liked, he
nevertheless arrested the boy and sent him a prisoner to Spain. It has
been argued that, in the latter case, he had received sudden orders from
Ferdinand not on any account to let the Duke escape; but the excuse, if
true is after all a sorry shelter for his bad faith.
More pleasing, in a country where generals were wont to sell their
services to the highest bidder and yield to bribery with little
hesitation, was Gonsalvo’s persistent loyalty to his sovereign.
Ferdinand was not an easy master to satisfy, for neither his thoughts
nor actions were ordinarily generous, and his cold distrustful nature
was slow to respond to either enthusiasm or anxiety. During the war of
Granada, the task of dispatching an adequate supply of soldiers and
ammunition to the seat of war had fallen, as we have seen, to Isabel;
but with increasing ill-health and worry such affairs had slipped from
her fingers, and preparations for the Neapolitan campaigns were left to
other hands.
In vain Gonsalvo begged for reinforcements and the necessary money to
pay those companies already under his command. Ferdinand had a shrewd
conviction that his general was capable, when in straits, of making two
men perform the work of four, and doled out his assistance with
niggardly craft. Nor did the brilliant achievements of his young
Commander-in-chief, in the teeth of difficulties he himself had often
aggravated arouse his gratitude or admiration.
“He who is the cause of another’s greatness,” says Machiavelli, “is
himself undone”; and Ferdinand looked with suspicion on a subject so
successful and popular that his possible disloyalty might prove a source
of danger to the Crown. His own reputation as the champion cheat of
Europe was perhaps unassailable; but it carried with it this penalty: he
lived in mortal terror that he would one day be cheated.
In extenuation of his parsimony, the contrast between his wide ambitions
and small treasury must be remembered. Ferdinand, like Elizabeth of
England, was forced to imitate the careful housekeeper in making a
little go a long way; and habitual economy is a virtue that often
borders on vice. Not yet were the gold and silver of South America and
Mexico pouring in a rich flood into the royal coffers; while every day
fresh schemes of government, fresh wars and discoveries abroad, and the
weaving of fresh strands of alliance demanded monetary support, as well
as the King’s minute and unswerving attention.
Were Spain to pause for a moment in the race, letting Portugal outstrip
her in the Western seas, or France suborn her brilliant generals and
entice away her allies, she must inevitably fall behind into the second
rank of nations. Thus Ferdinand, straining ever after a prize, whose
very magnitude was to prove his country’s ultimate ruin, spun his web of
diplomacy in and out amongst the Powers of Europe, never neglecting any
opportunity that would draw him nearer his goal.
In the case of Portugal, fate seemed to have willed by the death, first
of Prince Alfonso and then of the young Queen Isabel, that no Aragonese
Infanta should draw closer the union of the two nations; but in 1500 the
spell of tragedy was broken by the marriage of Maria, the sovereign’s
third daughter, with the widower King Emmanuel.
One child alone remained with Ferdinand and Isabel, Catherine their
youngest; and in the following year she also fulfilled her destiny and
carried her father’s olive-branch to a northern home. Born in December,
1485, she had been betrothed almost from her infancy to Arthur, Prince
of Wales, Henry VII.’s eldest son; and Roger Machado, on his visit to
the Spanish Court, did not in his amazement at jewels and fine clothes
neglect to mention his future Queen, and how beautiful he had thought
her, held up in her mother’s arms to watch a tilting-match.
So firmly settled was the alliance, grounded on mutual hatred of England
and Aragon for France, that already at the early age of three the little
Infanta was styled “Princess of Wales”; but the intervening years before
the union could be realized did not on this account pass her over in
silence. The correspondence of the time is filled with frequent disputes
between the Catholic sovereigns and Henry VII. as to the exact financial
value of their respective offspring; and the discussion ranged from
Catherine’s marriage portion and the size of her household to the
comeliness of the ladies-in-waiting, who would accompany her;—the latter
a point on which the English King laid great stress.
At length, however, all was satisfactorily settled; and Henry, having
welcomed the bride, could write to her parents that
although they could not see the gentle face of their beloved daughter,
they might be sure that she had found a second father, who would ever
watch over her happiness, and never permit her to want anything he
could procure her.
A few short months and Arthur’s death had left the little Spanish
Princess, then not seventeen years old, a widow in a strange land; while
fatherly kindness wrangled furiously over the cost of her maintenance
and the disposition of her dowry. It was well for the immediate fortunes
of Catherine of Aragon that she soon found a husband in Arthur’s younger
brother Prince Henry, though perhaps, could she have read the future,
she would have preferred to decline the honour.
De Puebla, the Spanish Ambassador entrusted by Ferdinand with the
greater part of the marriage negotiations, had also tried his hand
during the years that he resided in England, at enticing the King of
Scotland into the anti-French web. The friendship between France and
Scotland was of ancient date; but De Puebla felt that the offer of a
royal bride from the Spanish Court would make a deep impression on King
James’s susceptible vanity, and since, at the date when this idea
occurred to him, all the Spanish Infantas were either married or
betrothed, he suggested instead Doña Juana, one of Ferdinand’s
illegitimate daughters, concealing as he believed with considerable
statesmanship the fact of the bar sinister. Ferdinand, when he heard of
it, was most contemptuous. Such a deception, he wrote, could not
possibly be maintained and therefore was not worth the lie. Let De
Puebla, on the other hand, hold out false hopes if he could of one of
the real Princesses, and by this bait induce the Scottish monarch to
quarrel with France. Even moderate success in this strategy would prove
of considerable value.
James IV. did not marry a Spanish Princess but Catherine of Aragon’s
sister-in-law Margaret Tudor; and what harm he might inflict on Spain
and her Allies in French interests was a mere pin-prick to the stab
administered by Ferdinand’s immediate family. On the death of Prince
Miguel in July, 1500, Joanna, Archduchess of Austria, became heiress to
the throne of Castile and Aragon; and, though there was cause for
rejoicing that a son had been born to her early in the same year and
thus the succession was assured, yet the situation arising from the new
importance of her position tended every day to grow more critical.
Joanna and her husband had been from the first an ill-matched pair, his
light careless nature acting like a spark to fire the mine of her sullen
temper and quick jealousy; and his faithlessness and her lack of
self-control combined to keep the Flemish Court in a perpetual flame of
scandal.
Had they been merely private individuals, the evil effects of their
passions might have spread no further than the street or town in which
they lived; but unfortunately Joanna had gone to Flanders not merely as
a bride but as an agent to influence her husband’s policy in her
father’s favour, and the odium and exasperation her behaviour aroused
reacted to the detriment of Spain. Philip had nothing in common with the
Castilian race. Their pride irritated him, their deep religious feeling
awoke his incredulity, their sense of reverence and gravity a flippant
scorn and boredom, that his selfishness found it difficult to disguise.
Personal tastes inclined him rather to the volatile, easy-mannered
Frenchman; and, as domestic differences increased, so also did his
dislike for the Aragonese and sympathy with their enemies.
“The French rule everything,” wrote Fuensalida, the Spanish Ambassador
at the Archduke’s Court despairingly. “They alone surround him and
entice him from feast to feast, from mistress to mistress.”
[Illustration:
TILTING ARMOUR OF PHILIP THE FAIR
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
]
Fuensalida suggested that Philip and his wife should be induced to visit
Castile as soon as possible, before the evil habits into which the
Archduke had fallen took permanent hold of him; and Ferdinand and Isabel
warmly seconded this idea. Their son-in-law’s behaviour had been
scandalous; but their daughter’s conduct caused them if anything more
uneasiness. At times full of loving memories of her old home, so that
she confessed “she could not think of her mother and how far she was
separated from her for ever without shedding tears,” Joanna, on other
occasions, was taciturn or even defiant when approached by special
emissaries from Spain. Their questions she met by silence, their
allusions to her parents or to the religious enthusiasm that had stirred
her youth, by indifference. It seemed that jealousy and wounded pride
could in a moment slip like a dark curtain across her mind and blot out
all save a brooding fury at her wrongs.
The mental balance, once a flaw has shaken its equilibrium, is of all
scales the most difficult to adjust; and Isabel’s hopes that a personal
supervision of her daughter would effect a cure were doomed to
disappointment. Philip and Joanna came to Spain in 1502; but their
presence was an unwilling acknowledgment that custom required their
recognition as Prince and Princess of Castile by the national Cortes.
That business concluded, the Archduke was fully determined to return to
his own land, if possible as he had come by way of France, for the
reception he had been accorded in Paris made him eager to renew its
delights.
It was his ambition that his son, Charles, heir not only of his Austrian
archduchy and county of Flanders but of all the wide dominions of Spain,
should marry Claude, the infant daughter of Louis XII., a scheme of
alliance by which he himself would be enabled to pose as the arbiter of
European politics, adjudicating between the two great rival nations with
whom he had formed connections. Ferdinand might be pardoned if he
regarded the Archduke somewhat dubiously in the proposed rôle; and
indeed quarrels over the terms of the Partition Treaty and the
subsequent war in Naples were soon to wreck the would-be arbitrator’s
hopes. Yet, even before this failure was assured, mutual suspicion had
thrown a restraint over the intercourse of father-in-law and son-in-law,
and had even poisoned the relations between Isabel and her daughter.
Joanna was well aware of her husband’s intention of leaving Spain at the
first possible moment; but she herself was expecting a child and knew
the long journey would be beyond her powers. The thought that Philip
would leave her behind, intensified by the fear that he would do so with
keener pleasure than regret, assumed in her disordered brain the
monstrous proportions of a plot to keep her a prisoner in Castile. In
vain she entreated him to stay until she should be well enough to
accompany him; the Archduke, his ambition once satisfied by the homage
of the Cortes of Toledo and of Saragossa, impatiently counted the days
until he could cross the French border, and all the Catholic sovereigns’
efforts to entertain him failed dismally.
In December, 1502, he left Madrid; and Joanna, at his going, sank into a
mood of sullen despondency from which even the birth of her son,
Ferdinand, in March of the following year, could not rouse her. At
length she received a letter from Philip suggesting her return to
Flanders; but war had broken out between France and Spain, making the
journey, if not impossible, at least fraught with danger.
Ferdinand was with his army in Roussillon, and Isabel who was ill in
Segovia sent imploring messages to her daughter at Medina del Campo,
begging her to do nothing rash. Joanna was however obsessed by the
notion that she was the victim of a plot, and in her passionate desire
to escape from Spain was deaf to warnings and petitions. One evening,
lightly clad and followed by her scared attendants, she started on foot
from the castle and was only prevented from leaving the city by the
Bishop of Burgos, who had been placed by the Queen in charge of her
household and who gave orders that the gates should be closed. The
Archduchess commanded that they should be opened, and even descended to
prayers and entreaties, when she found her authority was of no avail; to
all the Bishop’s persuasions that she should return home she replied by
an uncompromising refusal. Through the long night, in the darkness and
the cold, she maintained her vigil; and when messengers arrived from
Segovia the next day, begging her in her mother’s name to resist from
her project, she would only consent to move into a poor hovel hard by
the gates.
On the second evening, Isabel, who had dragged herself from her sick-bed
at the tale of her daughter’s mad folly, appeared in Medina del Campo;
but Joanna at first greeted her with reproaches and anger, “speaking”
wrote the Queen in her account of the interview to Fuensalida, “so
disrespectfully and so little as a child should address her mother, that
if I had not seen the state of mind she was in, I would not have
suffered it for a moment.”
[Illustration:
JOANNA “THE MAD,” DAUGHTER OF QUEEN ISABEL
FROM “HISTORIA DE LA VILLA Y CORTE DE MADRID” BY AMADOR DE LOS RIOS
]
In the end Joanna’s stubborn obstinacy was conquered, and she returned
to the castle; but after such a scene few could doubt that she was at
any rate temporarily insane; and the Queen, conscious that her own days
were drawing to a close, trembled at the thought of her country’s
future, delivered to the moods of such a ruler.
“Cursed fruit of the tree that bore her; ill-fated seed of the land that
gave her birth, was this daughter for her mother,” wrote Peter Martyr
bitterly; and Isabel’s star, which had risen in such splendour out of
the murk of Henry IV.’s misgovernment, was destined to sink amid the
shame of Joanna’s folly.
In the spring of 1504 the Archduchess sailed to Flanders; and Queen
Isabel, guessing the scandals that would follow her footsteps when her
own restraining influence was removed, said good-bye to her with a sick
heart. Feeble in body, so that every task seemed an effort, she herself
turned more and more from worldly matters to the prayers and meditations
that drew her ever closer in touch with the land of her desire towards
which she was hastening. Yet neither her kingdom nor people were far
from her thoughts.
In 1503, when Ferdinand had gone north to protect the border counties
from what was rumoured to be an enormous invading army, her old martial
spirit had revived; and she busied herself in Segovia, as in the old
days, in collecting troops and despatching them to the seat of war. With
the news of Spanish victories her conscience smote her. The flying
French! These also were a Christian race, fighting for their own land.
Recoiling from the thought of such a slaughter, she wrote to Ferdinand,
praying him to stay his hand; and, whether moved by her wish or his own
foresight, he contented himself with driving his foes across the border.
Soon afterwards Louis XII. agreed to an armistice that freed the
Pyrenean provinces from war.
Triumph in the north of Spain was followed by the news of Gonsalvo de
Cordova’s victories in Naples; but joy at these successes was
counterbalanced by the serious state of the Queen’s health. She and
Ferdinand had fallen ill of fever in Medina del Campo in the summer of
1504; and, while his constitution rallied from the attack, anxiety for
him and her own weakness aggravated her symptoms, and it was feared that
these would end in dropsy.
“We sit sorrowful in the palace all the day long,” wrote Peter Martyr
early in the autumn, “tremulously waiting the hour when religion and
virtue shall quit the earth with her.”
Isabel herself knew the end was not far off, and bade those about her
restrain their tears. When she heard of the processions and pilgrimages
made throughout the kingdom in the hope of restoring her to health she
asked that her subjects should pray “not for the safety of her life but
the salvation of her soul.”
On the 12th of October she signed her will, commanding in it that her
body should be taken to Granada, and there buried without ostentation in
a humble tomb. The money that would have provided an elaborate funeral
was to be spent on dowries for twelve poor girls and the ransom of
Christian captives in Africa.
The poverty of the Castilian treasury, in contrast to its heavy
expenses, evidently weighed on her mind; and she gave orders that the
number of officials in the royal household should be reduced, and gifts
of lands and revenues, that had been alienated by the Crown without
sufficient cause, revoked. Her jewels she left to Ferdinand, that
“seeing them,” she said, “he may be reminded of the singular love I
always bore him while living, and that now I am waiting for him in a
better world.”
The future government of the kingdom was her special care; and in her
will, and its codicil added in November, while acknowledging Joanna as
her successor, she begged both her and Philip “to be always obedient
subjects to the King, and never disobey his orders.” This injunction was
amplified by the command that if Joanna should be absent from Spain, “or
although present ... unable to reign and govern,” Ferdinand should act
as regent, until his grandson Charles was of an age to undertake this
task for himself.
Such were the most important clauses of the document, by which Isabel
strove to safeguard her loved Castile from the dangers threatening her.
In others, she insisted that Gibraltar, which she had acquired for the
Crown should never be alienated from it; that her daughter and
son-in-law should not appoint foreigners to any office or post of trust,
that the tax of the _alcabala_,[10] if found illegal on inquiry, should
be abolished; that a new and more accurate code of laws should be
compiled; and that steps should be taken to secure the kindly treatment
of natives in the New World. It will be seen that Isabel in her last
days was still the ruler, holding in her now feeble hands all the
threads of national government, but clear in mind to recognize and
command the issues.
Footnote 10:
See page 394.
[Illustration:
CODICIL TO ISABEL’S WILL, WITH HER SIGNATURE
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
On November 26th[11] the end so long expected came; and, having received
the Sacraments and commended her soul to God, the Queen, clad in a
Franciscan robe, passed peacefully away.
Footnote 11:
Peter Martyr says November 22d.
My hand [says Peter Martyr] falls powerless by my side for very
sorrow. The world has lost its noblest ornament ... for she was the
mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent, and an avenging
sword to the wicked.
It has pleased Our Lord [wrote Ferdinand to the chief citizens of
Madrid] to take to Himself the Most Serene Queen Doña Isabel, my very
dear and well-beloved wife; and although her loss is for me the
greatest heaviness that this world held in store ... yet, seeing that
her death was as holy and catholic as her life, we may believe that
Our Lord has received her into His glory, that is a greater and more
lasting kingdom than any here on earth.
The day after her death, the coffin with its funeral cortège left Medina
del Campo for Granada, amid a hurricane of wind and rain such as the
land had rarely witnessed. Peter Martyr, who was one of the escort,
declared that the Heavens opened, pouring down torrents that drove the
horsemen to shelter in the ditches by the wayside, while the mules sank
exhausted and terrified in the road. Never for a moment was there a
gleam of either sun or star, until on December 25th, as the funeral
procession entered Granada, the clouds lifted for the first time.
There in the city of her triumph, in the Franciscan monastery of the
Alhambra, the very heart of the kingdom she had won for Christianity,
Isabel of Castile was laid to rest.
CHAPTER XIII
CASTILIAN LITERATURE
“Isabel’s death,” says Butler Clarke, “marks the beginning of a period
of anarchy.”
The peace that she had done so much to promote and that her presence had
insured was threatened by the incapacity of her successor, and by the
restless rivalry of the Archduke Philip and his father-in-law. Prescott
describes Isabel as “Ferdinand’s good genius,” and her loss was to make
obvious to the Castilians his less attractive side,—the suspicion, and
want of faith and generosity, that during their joint rule her more
kingly qualities had tended to disguise. The old feeling against him as
a foreigner, which his personal valour in the Moorish war had partly
obliterated, now reappeared and was intensified by disgust at his prompt
remarriage. Ferdinand was not in the least sentimental, and thus failed
to take into account the large part played by sentiment in national
history. The fact that he regretted Isabel’s death would have struck him
as a foolish reason for missing any advantage that unfortunate
occurrence might afford, and he re-entered the matrimonial market with
great promptitude.
He was now fifty-three and the bride selected by him a girl of eighteen,
Germaine de Foix, a daughter of the Count of Narbonne, who with her
brother Gaston represented the younger branch of the House of Navarre.
Such a union was naturally attractive to Aragonese ambitions, ever
watchful to establish dynastic links with that northern kingdom, though
at the moment as it happened the Navarrese connection was of merely
secondary importance. Germaine de Foix was a niece of Louis XII., and by
his marriage with her (October, 1505) Ferdinand succeeded in breaking
the dangerous combination of France and Flanders that might otherwise
have proved his ruin.
By no arguments on his part, however subtle, could he evade Joanna’s
right of succession to the Castilian throne; yet in her state of mental
weakness its acknowledgment handed over the practical control of public
affairs to her King-Consort; and with the Archduke Philip established as
a hostile element in Castile, and Louis XII. an enemy hovering on the
Pyrenees, Aragon and her King would have fared ill indeed.
[Illustration:
FERDINAND OF ARAGON
CARVED WOODEN STATUE FROM CATHEDRAL AT MALAGA
]
Ferdinand’s marriage relieved the immediate tension of such a
possibility; but its achievement courted even greater national disaster.
The birth of a son could only mean the destruction of the union between
Castile and Aragon, on which the foundations of Spanish empire had been
laid; while by the terms of the marriage treaty Ferdinand also risked
the dismemberment of his own dominions. Louis XII. was willing to cede
as dowry for his niece the rights over Naples which he had failed to
maintain by force of arms; but the price he demanded in return was the
restoration of that half of the Kingdom which was guaranteed to him by
the original Partition Treaty, should Germaine and the Spanish monarch
have no heirs.
This bargain made and cemented by large quantities of Spanish gold to
indemnify Louis for the expenses to which he had been put during the
Neapolitan wars, the French King proceeded to forbid the Archduke and
Joanna a passage through France, until they had arrived at some amicable
understanding with Ferdinand as to the future government of their
kingdom. Philip, seeing himself outwitted, sulkily complied, and, in the
Treaty of Salamanca (signed in November, 1505) agreed that he, his wife,
and father-in-law should “jointly govern and administer Castile,”
Ferdinand receiving one half of the public revenues.
The peace thus extorted by circumstances was never intended to be kept;
and, from the moment that the new King and Queen of Castile put foot in
their land, they did their uttermost to encourage the growing opposition
to Aragonese interference. Ferdinand, thwarted and ignored by his
son-in-law and deserted by the Castilians, at length departed in dudgeon
to visit the kingdom that Gonsalvo de Cordova had won for him in Naples;
but it was not destined that the work to which he and Isabel had given
the greater part of their lives should come to nought. In the autumn of
1506 the Archduke Philip died at Burgos; and Joanna, sunk in one of her
moods of morbid lethargy, referred those of her subjects, who would have
persuaded her to rule for herself, to Ferdinand’s authority.
From July, 1507, when Ferdinand returned to Spain, till his death in
January, 1516, he governed Castile as regent; while the loss of the only
child born to him of his union with Germaine de Foix preserved his
dominions intact for “Joanna the Mad” and her eldest-born, the future
Emperor Charles V. Naples, it is true, by the terms of his second
marriage treaty should have been once more divided with the French
Crown; but the Catholic King was to reap the reward of loyalty to the
Holy See, and received a papal dispensation from the fulfilment of his
inconvenient pledge.
Victories on the North African coast against Barbary pirates and the
conquest of Southern Navarre closed his days in a halo of glory; and he
passed to his final resting-place beside Isabel in the Royal Chapel at
Granada regretted even by the Castilians and mourned by the Aragonese as
their “last King.” Henceforth Spain was to be one and undivided.
“No reproach attaches to him,” says Guicciardini of Ferdinand, “save his
lack of generosity and faithlessness to his word.” Peter Martyr declares
that “contrary to the belief of all men he died poor.” Like Henry VII.
of England he had been quick to lay hands on wealth, doling it out to
others with the grudging reluctance of the miser; but the exhausted
treasury he left showed that his main inspiration had been economy not
avarice. His ambitions had been expensive, and Spain was to pay heavily
both in money and the more precious coin of human life; but the fact
that she could afford to enter the great national struggle with France
at all marks the economic transformation that had taken place since the
days of Henry IV. of Castile. She had passed from industrial infancy to
prosperity and an assured commercial position; her population had
increased; peace at home had given her financial security; while as the
depôt for European trade with the New World vistas of profit opened
before her.
The Catholic sovereigns were not blind to this great future, and the
legislation of their reign dealt largely with measures for fostering
national industries. If such protection was often misguided it was like
the over-anxious care of a mother, that may be as dangerous to a child’s
welfare as the opposite vice of neglect. Each age has its theories of
political economy and looks back with superior contempt on the failings
of its predecessors. To twentieth-century eyes the economic outlook of
the fifteenth is often exasperatingly foolish; yet in the days of
Ferdinand and Isabel it appeared the height of wisdom, and efforts to
put it into practice were eagerly demanded by the Cortes. Industry, it
was felt, must be wrapped in the cotton-wool of a myriad restrictions;
it must be artificially nourished and subjected to constant supervision
and interference, or it would die of exposure to the rough-and-tumble of
competition. That industrial death might be sometimes due to sheer
weariness of life in intolerable fetters was a diagnosis of which no
mediæval economist would ever have dreamt; and Ferdinand and Isabel
firmly believed that their paternal legislation must prove a panacea for
every public ill.
[Illustration:
GRANADA CATHEDRAL, ROYAL CHAPEL, TOMB OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
Low prices demanded a cheap labour-market, therefore the obvious step
was to fix a maximum wage for the worker, that he might not hope to
exceed however worthy of his hire. Cheap labour must live, therefore a
maximum price must be placed on corn that the wage-earner might be
enabled to buy bread. Were grain grown for neighbourly love not a
profit, this solution of an almost universal difficulty might have
succeeded; but agriculture was never popular in Castile, and such
arbitrary dealings tended to depress it still further.
Farmers turned for their profit to the production of wine or oil, or
with a still keener eye to business devoted their energies to sheep or
cattle breeding. This was the staple industry of rural districts, so
extensive and flourishing that in the fourteenth century it had
established a kind of trades-union, or _mesta_ to look after its
interests and secure it privileges. During the winter months the cattle
fed at will on the wide tablelands of Castile; but with the coming of
summer their owners drove them to pasture in mountain districts such as
Leon and Galicia. It was on these journeys to and fro that agriculture
and grazing came into conflict; for where the herds had passed they left
a wilderness. Legislation indeed forbade the trampling down of vineyards
and of meadows of corn or hay, but compensation for these damages was
difficult to obtain from a corporation so powerful that it had won for
itself a large measure of royal protection. Tolls paid on the migratory
cattle formed a considerable part of the public revenue; and kings of
Castile had thus been persuaded to foster a trade so lucrative to their
own pockets, granting graziers not only immunity from certain imposts
but also special rights with regard to wood-cutting and the freedom of
the regular cattle-tracks from any enclosure or limitation. Ferdinand
and Isabel renewed these privileges and in 1500 placed a member of the
Royal Council at the head of the _mesta_, bringing that important body
under their immediate control.
If the laws of the maximum and the protection of rival industries hit
agriculture hard, so also did the _alcabala_, a tax of ten per cent. on
the sale-price of all goods. Originally imposed as a temporary means of
raising money, it had become one of the main sources of the sovereigns’
revenues, and, while it burdened every commercial transaction, laid a
triple charge on corn in the form first of grain and then of meal and
bread.
The _alcabala_ has been described by a modern historian as “one of the
most successful means ever devised by a government for shackling the
industry and enterprise of its subjects”; and Queen Isabel herself seems
to have realized its blighting nature, for, in 1494, she agreed, on
Ximenes’s advice, to commute it in the case of certain towns for a fixed
sum to be levied by the municipality. Even so, the question of its
legality still troubled her conscience; but the request in her will that
a special committee should collect evidence and decide the matter justly
was, like her kindly thought for the Indians of the New World,
afterwards disregarded.
Perhaps it may be asked how, under such adverse circumstances
agriculture survived at all; yet at the beginning of the sixteenth
century Castile was not only growing sufficient corn for her own needs
but even exporting it to the rest of the peninsula. The explanation lies
in a comparison not with the gigantic production of modern times, but
with the preceding age, when the scorching breath of anarchy had
withered the fields. The government of Queen Isabel’s reign, if it
favoured the more popular cattle-trade, at least protected the farmer
and labourer from pillage; while, by forbidding the tolls which, during
Henry IV.’s misrule, territorial lords had levied at will at every
river-ford and turn of the road, it gave a sudden freedom to the
circulation of corn as well as of other merchandise. Even more effective
was the abolition in 1480 of the export duty on grain, cattle, and goods
passing from Castile to Aragon, whereby the cornfields of Murcia were
enabled to compete with its grazing lands, until at length a series of
bad harvests restored the old predominance of the live-stock industry.
The real decline of agriculture, like that of industry, was to set in at
the close of the sixteenth century under Isabel’s great-grandson. The
reign of the Catholic sovereigns and the early years of Charles V. stand
out as a golden age of commercial prosperity. The production of wool and
silk increased almost tenfold; the fairs drew foreign merchants from
every part of Europe; while Flemish and Italian artisans, attracted by
an offer of ten years’ freedom from taxation, settled in the large towns
to pursue and teach their handicrafts.
[Illustration:
BURGOS CATHEDRAL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
The numberless _pragmaticas_, or royal proclamations and ordinances,
issued at this time show how vigilant was Ferdinand and Isabel’s
interest in all that concerned the welfare of their land. In 1486 the
cloth-workers of Murcia complained that their trade was being killed by
external competition; their looms stood idle, and whereas 50,000 sheep
had been needed in old days to provide them with wool, now only some
8000 grazed in their meadows. The response to their petition was a
command that for two years no woollen fabrics should enter Murcia; while
the import of silk thread from Naples, that threatened the silk industry
of Granada, was similarly forbidden. These are only two instances of
measures that ranged from awarding bounties to owners of ships of six
hundred tons and upwards by way of encouraging navigation to minute
instructions as to shoes, hats, embroideries, and armour.
Much of this scheme of protection was well-considered and beneficial.
Since merchant ships were liable to be impressed in time of war, the
navy, once almost negligible, throve rapidly on the royal preference
shown to large vessels, and also owing to a law commanding that no goods
should be shipped in a foreign craft while there was a Spanish boat in
the harbour. The small merchantmen suffered of course; but the squadron
that the sovereigns dispatched to Flanders with the Infanta Joanna in
1496 presented the proud array of one hundred and thirty vessels
containing some two thousand souls.
Legislation usually has its dark side; and the sovereigns’ efforts to
establish the commercial progress of their land on a sound basis were
vitiated by the theory which they shared with their age that precious
metals are not merely a convenient medium of exchange but an object of
value in themselves. The lust of gold had been the curse that Columbus
carried with him to the New World to corrupt his earthly paradise,
blinding the settlers to the true wealth of its soil. It was to be the
curse also of Spain, where the glitter of bars and ingots was to draw
men away from the humbler yet necessary occupation of a life in the
fields to adventure their fortunes across the ocean, or to overcrowd the
streets of Seville, the home market of the Western Continent.
“Gold” and “ever more gold” was the popular cry; and Ferdinand and
Isabel, in their eagerness that their new discovery should not enrich
other nations, passed stringent laws forbidding the export of precious
metals. The Spanish merchant, at the home frontier or harbour, must
state from what locality he came, where he was going, and for how long,
and how much coin he had with him;—his answers being written down and
signed in the presence of three witnesses, that any subterfuge might
afterwards be confuted. The foreign merchant had not even this
indulgence. In exchange for what he imported from his own country he
must take back neither coin nor bullion, however small the quantity, but
exports in the form of goods manufactured in Spain; and these by a
proclamation of 1494 might not include brocades nor embroideries woven
or worked with gold thread.
Thus by excessive care what might have been a lucrative industry was
ruined; the more that sumptuary laws prohibited the wearing of rich
stuffs in Spain itself save by a limited part of the population. A
desire for splendid clothing, like the love of beauty, is imprinted deep
in human hearts, and “fine feathers” are the usual accompaniment of
commercial prosperity; but Ferdinand and Isabel regarded with horror
what they considered as the growing extravagance of the lower classes.
The latter were intended to work, not to flaunt fine stuffs in the faces
of the aristocracy; and the silk-trade, its growth watered by
protection, was stunted by restrictions on its sales.
On the splendour of Isabel and her Court we have already remarked; but
it is significant that, at Tordesillas in 1520, the Commons nevertheless
looked back to the reign of the Catholic sovereigns as a time of
economy, complaining to the young Emperor that the daily expenses of his
household were ten times as great as those of his grandparents.
Ferdinand and his Queen were gorgeous in their dress and ceremony; but
it was the considered maintenance of their ideal of dignity not the
careless extravagance of those who spend what others have earned, and
therefore fail to realize its true value.
They did not let themselves be imprisoned behind the bars of pomp
[wrote the Royal Council to Charles, soon after Ferdinand’s death] for
it seemed to them that there was greater security in the good
reputation of their government than in the magnificence of their
household.
It has been urged as an instance of parsimony in contrast to their
personal expenditure that the Catholic sovereigns, in spite of their
professed love of learning, did not with the exception of the College at
Avila found or endow any school or college; and had the education of
their land depended solely on the support of the royal treasury such
criticism would be just. It will be seen however that, given the
momentum of royal encouragement, private enterprise, often almost as
well endowed as sovereignty and with far less claims upon its purse, was
quite capable of acting “Alma Mater” to the would-be scholars of Spain.
The civil wars of Henry IV.’s reign had, it is true, developed muscle
and sword-play rather than the literary mind; but the blows suffered by
culture at the hands of anarchy, though heavy, had not proved mortal.
Men were still alive who recalled the artistic traditions of the Court
of John II., Isabel’s father, and rejoiced to see their revival under
his daughter. It was not only that Isabel herself, by her own studies
and the careful education of her children, set an example which an
obsequious Court must necessarily follow; but her whole attitude to life
expressed her belief in the importance of this learning that the average
young noble would otherwise have held in little esteem.
In 1474 the art of printing was introduced into Spain; and before the
end of the century presses were set up in Valencia, Saragossa,
Barcelona, Seville, Salamanca, Toledo, and all the large cities of the
two kingdoms. The Queen, quick to realize the power this invention might
become, granted freedom from taxation to German and Italian printers of
repute; just as she had encouraged the advent of picked engineers and
artisans that the best brains of Europe, whatever the line of their
development, might be at her disposal. Spanish books, classics, and
classical translations were published; while, in contrast to the heavy
tariffs usually levied on imports, foreign books were allowed free
entrance into the home markets.
Isabel’s own library displayed a catholic taste in literature; the
collection ranging from devotional works and treatises on philosophy,
grammar, and medicine, to manuscript copies or translations of Latin,
Greek, and Italian authors, such as Plutarch, Livy, Virgil, Aristotle,
and Boccaccio; together with national chronicles, and collections of
contemporary poems.
When she and Ferdinand built the Church of San Juan de los Reyes, as a
thanksgiving for their victory over the Portuguese at Toro, they also
endowed the Convent attached to it with a library; while they took a
deep interest in the foundation of the University of Alcalá de Henares,
of which Ximenes de Cisneros laid the foundation stone in 1500, the
building being finally open to students eight years later. Queen Isabel
was then dead; but the glory of Alcalá may be said to radiate from her
reign, which had seen a man of Cisneros’s intelligence appointed to the
Archbishopric of Toledo, to use its wealthy revenues not like Alfonso
Carrillo of old for violence or alchemy but for the furtherance of
education and knowledge. Cisneros had been in Italy, and his scheme of
endowment showed that for all his austerity he had not remained wholly
uninfluenced by the spirit of the classical renaissance. Of the
forty-two professorships at Alcalá, six were devoted to the study of
Latin grammar, four to ancient languages, and four to rhetoric and
philosophy.
[Illustration:
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
The Archbishop had once denounced the idea of an Arabic version of the
Scriptures to Fra Fernando de Talavera as “pearls cast before swine”;
but though he condemned the languages of his own day as a medium for
Holy Writ, maintaining that ordinary people would through ignorance
misinterpret truths to their souls’ damnation, yet the crowning work of
his life was to be an edition of the Bible in the principal languages of
the ancient world. Under his criticism and supervision the first
Polyglot Bible was printed in 1517 a few months before his death; the
Old Testament being printed in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Chaldean; the
New Testament in Greek and the Vulgate of Saint Jerome. The errors of
such a mighty work in that unscientific age were naturally many; but the
mere fact of its production shows that the literary spirit was keenly
alive. It was a triumph for Alcalá; and the name of the new university
soon became famous in Europe.
Other educational institutions were also founded in this reign at
Siguenza, Valladolid, Toledo, Santiago, and Avila; mainly through the
enterprise of wealthy Churchmen; the College of Santa Cruz at
Valladolid, like Alcalá de Henares, owing its origin to an Archbishop of
Toledo, though to Ximenes’s predecessor, Cardinal Mendoza. Well-endowed
professorships and the report of the growing enthusiasm in Spain for
classical knowledge drew scholars of repute from Italy, some by direct
invitation to lecture and teach, others in the train of nobles anxious
by their patronage to display their literary taste.
The Lombard, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, whose name we have so often
mentioned, accompanied the Count of Tendilla on his return from an
embassy at Rome, and was at once requested by the Queen to open a school
for the young Castilian aristocracy, which was prone, in his own words,
“to regard the pursuit of letters as a hindrance to the profession of
arms that it alone thought worthy of consideration.”
[Illustration:
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
Martyr preferred to follow the fortunes of the Christian army in Granada
to their conclusion, probably judging that until the Cross had triumphed
he would receive little attention; but on the establishment of peace he
began to lecture in Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain, “Mother
of the Liberal Arts,” as Lucio Marineo fondly called her. He also opened
schools in Valladolid, Saragossa, and other important cities. The young
Duke of Villahermosa, Ferdinand’s nephew, and the Duke of Guimaraens,
Isabel’s cousin, set an example by their attendance to other youths of
high birth, till Peter Martyr’s house was thronged with students,
convinced that classical and philosophical knowledge would enhance their
military laurels rather than detract from them.
Martyr’s own Latin style, as shown in his copious letters to illustrious
contemporaries, and in his account of the New World, was for the most
part crude; but what it lacked in elegance was counterbalanced by vigour
and the accuracy and insight of his information. He is thus a valuable
authority for Isabel’s reign, like his fellow-countryman the Sicilian
Lucio Marineo, whose encyclopedic work _De Memorabilibus Hispaniæ_
throws considerable light on the Spanish history of his day. Marineo was
introduced to the Castilian Court in 1484 by the Admiral, Don Fadrique
Enriquez, and from that date till 1496 held the post of Professor of
Latin Poetry and Eloquence in the University of Salamanca. So great was
the enthusiasm inspired by his lectures that they were attended not only
by the ordinary student but by archbishops and bishops, and many of the
leading nobles and ladies of the Court.
Less remembered now, but famous then, was the Portuguese, Arias Barbosa,
who founded the study of Greek in Salamanca. He had been educated in
Italy, the reputation of whose universities was still to lure young
Spaniards from the rival institutions of their own land. It was indeed a
happy influence, for numbers of the most promising students returned
home to widen the outlook of Castilian scholarship by the light of
foreign methods and research.
Of these the greatest was undoubtedly Antonio de Lebrija, who has been
called the “most cultivated and original of all the Spanish humanists of
his time.” An Andalusian by birth, he had been sent at nineteen to the
University of Bologna, and, after ten years’ study in Italy, settled
down first in Seville, and then at Salamanca and Alcalá to teach and
publish what he had acquired. One of the editors of the _Polyglot
Bible_, he left works not only on theology but on law, archæology,
history, natural science, and geography. Perhaps those of most lasting
value to his countrymen were his Latin dictionary published in 1492, and
his Spanish and Latin grammars.
[Illustration:
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
[Illustration:
COINS, CATHOLIC KINGS
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
His daughter Francisca also maintained the literary reputation of the
family as professor of rhetoric at Alcalá. In an age, when the love of
letters had been inspired largely by a cultured Queen, it was natural
that the sexes should share their enthusiasm; and Isabel’s tutor,
Beatriz de Galindo “La Latina,” and other ladies famous for their
classical knowledge, lectured publicly at Salamanca and elsewhere to
large audiences.
“Learning” had become a fashion, as in the time of John II.; and the
literature of the day bore the stamp of the courtly atmosphere in which
it had been bred. The old rough-hewn ballads with their popular appeal
had yielded to polished lyrics, often purposely obscure in meaning, and
filled with classical allusions and conceits; the epics of national
heroes, such as “King Rodrigo” and “the Cid,” to sober chronicles of
contemporary events or to imaginative fiction, the more highly eulogized
as it increased in extravagance.
In the pompous and long-winded speeches introduced into historical
scenes after the manner of Livy, in the Dantesque allegory and amatory
verses addressed by Spanish “Petrarchs” to their “Lauras,” may be seen
the outcome of the literary demand for translations of Latin authors,
and the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. At the same time the
union of the two kingdoms under Ferdinand and Isabel secured for the
Castilian tongue its final triumph over those of Catalonia and Valencia;
though the stately and vigorous conqueror acquired in the struggle
something of the romantic spirit and spontaneous gaiety, with which
Provençal troubadours had endowed its rivals.
Spanish literature [it has been said] takes its root in French and
Italian soil ... yet it may be claimed for Spain ... that she used her
models without compromising her originality, absorbing here, annexing
there, and finally dominating her first masters.
Her era of literary fame was to dawn under the Emperor Charles V., and
reach its zenith with his son; but tokens of the coming glory may be
traced to a much earlier date when, amid the florid weeds of imitation
or pedantry, there yet bloomed occasional flowers of genuine beauty and
sweetness. Such are the _Coplas de Manrique_, stanzas written on the
death of his father by the brilliant young soldier Jorge Manrique, a
partisan of Queen Isabel in her early struggles. Longfellow has rendered
them into English verse with a charm, that, if it does not attain to the
imperishable grandeur of the original, yet in its quick sympathy bridges
the centuries.
[Illustration:
COINS, FERDINAND
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
[Illustration:
COINS, FERDINAND
FROM LAFUENTE’S “HISTORIA GENERAL DE ESPAÑA,” VOL. VII.
]
Behold of what delusive worth
The bubbles we pursue on earth,
The shapes we chase;
Amid a world of treachery;
They vanish ere death shuts the eye,
And leave no trace.
Time steals them from us,—chances strange,
Disastrous accidents, and change,
That come to all;
Even in the most exalted state,
Relentless sweeps the stroke of fate;
The strongest fall.
Who is the champion? Who the strong?
Pontiff and priest, and sceptred throng?
On these shall fall
As heavily the hand of Death,
As when it stays the shepherd’s breath
Beside his stall....
Tourney and joust, that charmed the eye,
And scarf and gorgeous panoply,
And nodding plume,—
What were they but a pageant scene?
What but the garlands, gay and green,
That deck the tomb?...
His soul to Him, Who gave it, rose;
God lead it to its long repose,
Its glories rest!
And though the warrior’s sun has set,
Its light shall linger round us yet,
Bright, radiant, blest.
These are a few of the forty-two stanzas, in which with almost flawless
simplicity of style Manrique mourns in his own personal loss the sorrow
and regret of all the human race. He begins with the vanity of life; he
ends with a plea for resignation; not an Omar Khayyam’s bitter surrender
to inevitable destiny but a confident trust in a God who is both Creator
and Saviour.
Other verses of Manrique are to be found in the various _cancioneros_,
or collections of Castilian poetry and song, that were gathered together
in the course of the fifteenth century; but none deserve nor have reaped
the same applause. In 1511, a _Cancionero General_ was printed at
Valencia, that may be taken as typical of Queen Isabel’s reign and those
of her father and brother. It declared its contents as “many and divers
works of all, or of the most notable troubadours of Spain”; and it is
indeed a varied collection of devotional hymns, moral discussions,
love-songs, ballads, riddles, _villancicos_ or poems supposed to be of
rustic origin, and _invenciones_ or rhymes concocted by the chivalry of
Castile to explain the devices on their shields.
In all there are over eleven hundred pieces; but few, especially of
those that represent the close of the century, have the note of
distinction. The true spirit of song is sometimes there, rising with
sudden power and conviction in scattered lines or stanzas; but for the
most part imprisoned in a maze of forms and unrealities that leave our
emotions and our imaginations cold. The butterfly is still enwrapped in
the chrysalis.
Spanish prose, during the reign of the Catholic Sovereigns, was in the
same transitional stage as poetry. The promise of good things was
working to its fulfilment, but the harvest would be reaped in another
age. In the national chronicles, the oldest form of prose literature,
this change may be seen at work. The narratives of the reign of Henry
IV., covering the earlier years of Isabel’s life, are mere annals,
sometimes more or less impartial as in the case of “Enriquez del
Castillo,” or else frankly partisan, like the pages that bear the name
of Alonso de Palencia.[12] Their value lies either in their picturesque
style, or in the descriptions of scenes, at which the authors themselves
were present.
Footnote 12:
This chronicle is probably a rough extract of part of Mosen Diego de
Valera’s _Memorial de Hazanas_,—taken in its turn from Palencia’s _Las
Decadas de Las Cosas de mi Tiempo_, which was originally written in
Latin.
The same may be said of Andres Bernaldez’s _Historia de Los Reyes
Católicos_, one of the most valuable authorities for the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabel. Bernaldez, parish priest of Los Palacios near
Seville, was no ambitious historian; and it is not his lack of bias nor
his well-balanced judgment that has won him the thanks of posterity, but
rather the simplicity with which he recounts events that he himself had
witnessed or that had touched him nearly. We are grateful that he had
the kindly thought of memorizing his impressions of the war in Granada,
and of recalling the deeds of the hero Columbus, who once stopped in his
house; but the work of sifting the grain of his information from the
chaff is left to his readers.
In Hernando de Pulgar, author of the _Cronica de los Reyes Católicos_,
on the other hand, we find what might be called the historical
consciousness in embryo. The beginning of this work which relates to a
period before 1482 when he became official historiographer and secretary
to the Queen is often wildly inaccurate; but the latter portion which is
much more careful shows an attempt to produce a chronological summary
that should give to each event its due importance. If the style is
sometimes heavy, its very prolixity provides a wealth of circumstantial
detail; and though his admiration for the sovereigns, and in especial
for the Queen, have laid him open to the charge of flattery, the tone of
his chronicle is in the main neither illiberal nor fulsome.
It is to a later reign and Zurita’s _Anales de Aragon_ that we must turn
for the first piece of real historical work founded on a study of
original documents and contemporary foreign sources; but in descriptive
power Hernando de Pulgar remains infinitely Zurita’s superior. Besides
his _Cronica de Los Reyes Católicos_, he wrote also _Claros Varones_, a
series of biographical sketches of illustrious people of his own day.
They are carefully drawn portraits, by many critics considered his best
work; but their realism is impaired by his tendency to blur the fine
edges of appreciation with over-enthusiastic praise.
It is the courtier’s temptation, which the trend of the Castilian
literature of his time towards exaggeration would do little to mitigate.
Fantasy not realism was the popular demand amongst the cultured in their
leisure hours; and those, for whom the ballads were too rough and the
chronicles too heavy, fed with delight on “Romances of Chivalry” as
insipid in style as their adventures were far removed from real life.
Cervantes, in the story of his mad Knight, Don Quixote, was to kill
these monsters of imagination with his satire, but in condemning the
whole brood as fit material for a bonfire he spared their original
model, _Amadis de Gaula_. The latter is found by the Priest and the
Barber, Master Nicholas, on the shelves of the old Knight’s library.
This, as I have heard say [exclaimed the Priest], was the first book
of chivalry printed in Spain, and all the rest have had their
foundation and rise from it; therefore I think, as head of so
pernicious a sect, we ought to condemn him to the fire without mercy.
Not so, Sir [answered the Barber], for I have heard also that it is
the best of all books of this kind; and therefore as being singular in
his art he ought to be spared.
With this judgment the Priest at once concurred.
The exact source from which _Amadis de Gaula_ emerged is buried in
mystery. It bears the stamp of French influence; but, in the form it
appeared in Spain during the fifteenth century, was a translation by
Ordoñez de Montalvo of the work of a Portuguese Knight who fought at the
battle of Aljubarrota. Gaula, the kingdom of Amadis’s birth is
Wales;—the time—“not many years after the passion of Our Redeemer”; but
neither geography nor chronology is of much importance to the romance
that relates the wanderings of an imaginary Prince, his love for
“Oriana, the true and peerless lady,” daughter of an imaginary King of
England, and his encounters with other Knights and various magicians and
giants; until at length a happy marriage brings his trials to a
temporary conclusion.
The immense popularity that this book enjoyed led to innumerable
imitations; one of them, the story of “Esplandion” a supposed son of
Amadis, by Montalvo himself; but all reproduced and exaggerated the
faults of the earlier book, without achieving the charm of style that
here and there illuminated its pages. The heroes of these romances are
indeed a dreary company, differing only, as it has been said, “in the
size of the giants they slay and in the degree of improbability of their
colourless adventures and loves.”
A variation of this type of literature were the “Visionary Romances,” of
which the _Carcel de Amor_ or _Prison of Love_ is perhaps the best
example. This was the work of a fifteenth-century poet, Diego de San
Pedro, who describes how in a vision he saw “savage Desire” lead an
unhappy Knight in chains to torture him in the Castle of Love. This
victim’s release brings allegory to an end, and introduces a wearisome
round of adventures much in the style of the ordinary romance. The
_Carcel de Amor_ was printed in 1492, and delighted the Court of
Ferdinand and Isabel; but Cervantes’s Priest and Barber, had they found
it, would have undoubtedly pitched it through the library window to
increase the bonfire in the courtyard below.
Very different was the _Celestina_, first printed in Burgos in 1499, and
now generally believed to be the work of a lawyer, Fernando de Rojas.
Here are no shadowy Knights condemned to struggle through endless pages
with imaginary beasts; but men and women at war with sin and moved by
passions that are as eternal as human life itself. The author describes
it as a “Tragicomedia,” since it begins in comedy and ends in tragedy.
It is the tale of a certain youth, Calisto, who, rejected by the
heroine, Melibea, bribes an old woman, Celestina, to act as go-between;
until at length through her evil persuasions virtue yields to his
advances. The rest of the book works out the Nemesis; Calisto being
surprised and slain at a secret meeting with his mistress, Celestina
murdered for her ill-gotten money by her associates, while Melibea
herself commits suicide. The whole is related in dialogue, often witty
and even brilliant; but marred for the taste of a later age by gross and
indecent passages.
The _Celestina_ has been classed both as novel and play, and might
indeed be claimed as the forerunner of both these more modern Spanish
developments. It is cast in the form of acts; but their number
(twenty-one) and the extreme length of many of the speeches make it
improbable that it was ever acted. Nevertheless its popularity, besides
raising a host of imitations more or less worthless, insured it a
lasting influence on Castilian literature; and the seventeenth century
witnessed its adaptation to the stage.
Other dialogues, with less plot but considerable dramatic spirit, are
the _Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_, and the _Dialogue between Love and an Old
Man_ by Rodrigo Cota. The former of these represents a conversation
between two shepherds, satirizing the reign of Henry IV.; the latter the
disillusionment of an old man who, having allowed himself to be tricked
by Love whom he believed he had cast out of his life for ever, finds
that Love is mocking him and that he has lost the power to charm.
Whether these pieces were acted or no is not certain; but they bear
enough resemblance to the _Representaciones_ of Juan del Enzina, which
certainly were produced, to make it probable that they were. Juan de
Enzina was born about the year 1468, and under the patronage of the Duke
of Alva appeared at Ferdinand and Isabel’s Court, where he became famous
as poet and musician. Amongst his works are twelve “Églogas,” or
pastoral poems, six secular in their tone and six religious, the latter
being intended to celebrate the great church festivals.
The secular _Representaciones_ deal with simple incidents and show no
real sense of dramatic composition; but with the other six they may be
looked on as a connecting link between the old religious “Mysteries” and
“Miracle Plays” of the early Middle Ages and the coming Spanish drama.
Their author indeed stands out as “Father” of his art in Spain, for a
learned authority of the reign of Philip IV. has placed it on record
that “in 1492, companies began to represent publicly in Castile plays by
Juan del Enzina.”
If the literature of Spain during the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries may be described by the general term “transitional,” marking
its development from crudity of ideas and false technique towards a slow
unfolding of its true genius, painting at the same date was still in its
infancy; while architecture and the lesser arts of sculpture,
metal-work, and pottery had already reached their period of greatest
glory.
Schools of painting existed, it is true, at Toledo and in Andalusia; but
the three chief artists of the Court of Isabel came from Flanders; and
most of the pictures of the time exhibit a strong Flemish influence,
which can be recognized in their rich and elaborate colouring, clearly
defined outlines, and the tall gaunt figures so dear to northern taste.
Of Spanish painters, the names of Fernando Gallegos “the Galician,” of
Juan Sanchez de Castro a disciple of the “Escuela Flamenca,” and of
Antonio Rincon and his son Fernando, stand out with some prominence; but
it is doubtful if several of the pictures formerly attributed to
Antonio, including a Madonna with Ferdinand and Isabel kneeling in the
foreground, are really his work.
In architecture at this time the evidence of foreign influence is also
strong. On the one hand are Gothic Churches like San Juan de Los Reyes
at Toledo or amongst secular buildings, the massive castle of Medina del
Campo; on the other, in contrast to these northern designs, Renaissance
works with their classic-Italian stamp, such as the Hospital of Santa
Cruz at Toledo or the College of the same name at Valladolid. Yet a
third element is the Moresque, founded on Mahometan models, such as the
horseshoe arch of the Puerta del Perdón of the old Mosque at Seville
overlaid with the emblems of Christian worship. The characteristics of
North, South, and East, are distinct; yet moulded, as during the
previous centuries, by the race that borrowed them to express ideals
peculiarly its own.
“Let us build such a vast and splendid temple,” said the founders of
Seville Cathedral in 1401, “that succeeding generations of men will say
that we were mad.”
It is the arrogant self-assertion of a people absolutely convinced, from
king to peasant, of their divine mission to astonish and subdue the
world in the name of the Catholic Faith and Holy Church. The triumphant
close of their long crusade intensified this spiritual pride; and
Spanish architecture and sculpture ran riot in a wealth of ornament and
detail, that cannot but arrest though it often wearies the eye.
Such was the “plateresque” or “silversmith” method of elaborate
decoration, seen at its best at Avila in the beautiful Renaissance tomb
of Prince John, which though ornate is yet refined and pure, at its most
florid in the façade of the Convent of San Pablo at Valladolid. Under
its blighting spell the strong simplicity of an earlier age withered;
and Gothic and Renaissance styles alike were to perish through the false
standard of merit applied to them by a decadent school.
[Illustration:
FAÇADE OF SAN PABLO AT VALLADOLID
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
]
The first impression emerging from a survey of Queen Isabel’s reign is
the thought of the transformation those thirty years had wrought in the
character of her land. It is not too much to say that in this time Spain
had passed from mediævalism to take her place in a modern world. She had
conquered not only her foes abroad but anarchy at home. She had evolved
a working-system of government and discovered a New World. She had
trampled out heresy; and thus provided a solution of the religious
problem at a time when most of the other nations of Europe were only
beginning to recognise its difficulties.
Not all these changes were for the best. On the heavy price paid in
blood and terror for the realization of the ideal “One people, one
Faith” we have already remarked. We can see it with clear eyes now; but
at the time the sense of orthodoxy above their fellows, that arose from
persecuting zeal, gave to the Spanish nation a special power; and Isabel
“the Catholic” was the heroine of her own age above all for the bigotry
that permitted the fires and tortures of the Inquisition.
A woman ... [says Martin Hume] whose saintly devotion to her Faith
blinded her eyes to human things, and whose anxiety to please the God
of Mercy made her merciless to those she thought His enemies.
With this verdict, a condemnation yet a plea for understanding, Isabel,
“the persecutor” must pass before the modern judgment-bar. In her
personal relations, both as wife and mother, and in her capacity as
Queen on the other hand she deserves our unstinted admiration.
The reign of Ferdinand and Isabel [says Mariéjol] may be summarized in
a few words. They had enjoyed great power and they had employed it to
the utmost advantage both for themselves and the Spanish nation. Royal
authority had been in their hands an instrument of prosperity.
Influence abroad,—peace at home,—these were the first fruits of the
absolute monarchy.
If criticism maintains that this benevolent government degenerated into
despotism during the sixteenth century, while Spain became the tool and
purse of imperial ambitions, it should be remembered that neither
Castilian Queen nor Aragonese King could have fought the evils they
found successfully with any other weapon than their own supremacy, nor
is it fair to hold them responsible for the tyranny of their successors.
Ferdinand indeed may be blamed for yielding to the lure of an Italian
kingdom; but even his astuteness could not have foreseen the successive
deaths that finally secured the Spanish Crown for a Hapsburg and an
Emperor.
These were the tricks of Fortune, who according to Machiavelli is “the
mistress of one-half our actions.” The other half is in human reckoning;
and Isabel in her sincerity and strength shaped the destiny of Castile
as far as in her lay with the instinct of a true ruler.
“It appeared the hand of God was with her,” says the historian, Florez,
“because she was very fortunate in those things that she undertook.”
APPENDIX I
HOUSE OF TRASTAMARA IN CASTILE AND ARAGON
John I. of Castile = Eleanor of Aragon
|
+--------------------+-------------------+
| |
Henry III. = Catherine, dau. Ferdinand
of Castile of John of Gaunt k. of Aragon,
| |
| +--------------------------+---------+
| | |
John II. = Mary John II.
1406–1454 Joanna (2) = of Aragon = (1) Blanche,
| Enriquez | 1458–1479 | Queen of
| | | | Navarre
| | +--+-------+---+-------+
+------------------+----------+---+ +-----------+ | | |
| | | | | | |
Henry IV. Alfonso Isabel = Ferdinand Charles Blanche Eleanor
of Castile d. 1468 of Castile | of Aragon of Viana m. Henry IV. m. Gaston,
1454–1474 1474–1504 | 1479–1516 d. 1461 of Castile, Count of Foix
m. (1) Blanche | d. 1464 d. 1479 |
of Navarre; +---------------+---+---------+------------+--------------+ +----+----------+
(2) Joanna of | | | | | | |
Portugal Isabel John Joanna Maria Catherine Gaston John Vicomte
m. (1) Alfonso d. 1497 m. Philip, m. Emmanuel m. (1) Prince m. Madeleine de Narbonne
Joanna of Portugal; m. Margaret Archduke of Portugal Arthur of Wales; of Valois m. sister of
“La Beltraneja” (2) Emmanuel, k. of Austria of Austria (2) Henry VIII. d. 1470 Louis XII.
of Portugal | of England | |
| +---------------+ +-------------+ +-----+------+
| | | | | | |
Miguel Charles I. of Spain Ferdinand Francis Catherine Gaston Germaine
d. 1500 Emperor Charles V. Phœbus m. Jean de
1479–1483 d’Albret Foix
1483–1517
APPENDIX II
PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES FOR THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ISABEL OF CASTILE
A. CONTEMPORARY.
BERNALDEZ (ANDRÉS) (Curate of Los Palacios), _Historia de Los Reyes_.
CARVAJAL (GALINDEZ), _Anales Breves_.
CASTILLO (ENRIQUEZ DEL), _Crónica del Rey Enrique_ IV.
MARTYR (PETER), _Opus Epistolarum_.
PULGAR (HERNANDO DE), _Crónica de Los Reyes Católicos_.
—— _Claros Varones_.
SICULO (LUCIO MARINEO), _Sumario de la ... Vida ... de Los Católicos
Reyes_.
ZURITA, _Anales de Aragon_, vols. v. and vi.
B. LATER AUTHORITIES.
ALTAMIRA, _Historia de España_, vol. ii.
BERGENROTH, _Calendar of State Papers_, vol. i.
BUTLER CLARKE, “The Catholic Kings,” (_Cambridge Modern History_, vol.
i.).
—— _Spanish Literature_.
CLEMENCIN, _Elogio de La Reina Isabel_.
FLORES, _Reinas Católicas_.
HUME (MARTIN), _Queens of Old Spain_.
IRVING (WASHINGTON), _Conquest of Granada_.
—— _Life of Christopher Columbus_.
LAFUENTE, _Historia de España_, vols. vi. and vii.
LEA, _History of the Inquisition in Spain_. 4 v.
MARIÉJOL, _L’Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle_.
PRESCOTT, _History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella_.
SABATINI (RAFAEL), _Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition_.
THACHER (JOHN BOYD), _Christopher Columbus_. 3 v.
TICKNOR, _History of Spanish Literature_, v. i.
YOUNG (FILSON), _Life of Christopher Columbus_. 2 v.
SOME ADDITIONAL AUTHORITIES CONSULTED.
Volumes xiv., xxxix., lxxxviii., and others of the _Documentos
Inéditos_.
Volume lxii. and others of the _Boletin de La Real Academia_.
AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, _Historia de Madrid_.
ARMSTRONG (E.), Introduction to _Spain, Her Greatness and Decay_, by
MARTIN HUME.
BERWICK and ALBA, _Correspondencia de Fuensalida_.
COLMENARES, _Historia de Segovia_.
_Diary of Roger Machado._
FITZMAURICE-KELLY, _History of Spanish Literature_.
MARIÉJOL, _Pierre Martyr d’Anghera: Sa vie et ses œuvres_.
_Memoirs of Philip de Commines._
[Illustration: MAP OF SPAIN SHOWING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE VARIOUS
KINGDOMS IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
INDEX
A
Abraham “El Gerbi,” 211, 213
Aguilar, Alonso de, 177, 180, 182, 281–3
Ajarquia, 176, 181
_Alcabala_, 384, 394, 395
Alcalá de Henares, University of, 402
Alexander VI. (Rodrigo Borgia), 85, 236, 239, 248, 261, 306, 353, 354,
360, 363
Alfonso V. of Aragon, 24, 25, 35, 115–119, 350
Alfonso of Castile, brother of Isabel, 22, 35, 46, 52, 56, 60, 64, 65
Alfonso II. of Naples, 350, 353, 354, 356
Alfonso V. of Portugal, 52, 70, 96, _et seq._; 107, _et seq._
Alfonso, son of John II. of Portugal, 223, 337
Alfonso, Archbishop of Saragossa, 244, 330
Alhama, 165, 170
Aliator, 176, 181, 182
Aljubarrota, Battle of, 30
Almeria, 161, 204, 216, 220, 280
Alpujarras, The, 278, 280
Alvaro, Don, of Portugal, 212
Amadis de Gaula, 414
Anne of Beaujeu, 340
Anne of Brittany, 340
Aranda, Council of, 239
Aranda, Pedro de, 261
Architecture, Castilian, 419–420
Arras, Cardinal of, 73, 81
Arthur, Prince of Wales, 373, 374
Atella, capitulation of, 362
“Audiences” in Seville, 136
_Auto-de-Fe_, 256
Ayora, Gonsalvo de, 192
Azaator, Zegri, 274
B
Baeza, 216, 217, 219, 220, 223, 280
Bahamas, discovery of, 304
Barbosa, Arias, 406
Barcelona, 38, 39, 40, 50, 75, 305, 328, 352
Bernaldez, Andres, Curate of Los Palacios, 168, 263, 412
Berri, Charles, Duke of (later of Guienne), 72, 81, 83
Biscay, Province of, 100, 101, 112, 117
Blanche of Navarre, 26
Blanche, dau. of John II. of Aragon, 27, 28, 43, 44
Boabdil, 172, 181, _et seq._; 198, 203, _et seq._; 208, 221–223, 227,
_et seq._
Bobadilla, Beatriz de (Marchioness of Moya), 62, 74, 84, 85, 212, 213,
298
Bobadilla, Francisco de, 314
Borgia, Cæsar, 364. (_See_ also Alexander VI.)
Burgos, 54, 55, 60, 103, 106;
Bishop of, 72, 74
C
Cabrera, Andres de (later Marquis of Moya), 83, 86, 112, 114, 298
Cadiz, Marquis of, 136, 139, 140, 165 _et seq._; 175, 177, 180, 183,
200, 201, 209, 212, 216
_Cancionero General_, 410
_Carcel de Amor_, 415
Cardenas, Alonso de, 153, 176;
Gutierre de, 88, 217, 229
Carrillo, Archbishop, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 68, 76, 78, 79, 80, 85, 89,
90, 94, 96, 100, 105, 108, 109, 111, 232, 239, 240
Castillo, Enriquez del, 87, 411
Catherine of Aragon, 334, 372, 374
Celestina, 416
Charles of Austria, son of Archduke Philip, 378, 384, 390, 396, 408
Charles, The Bold, 116, 117
Charles VIII. of France, 186, 340, 347, 348, 351, _et seq._; 363
Charles of Viana, 26, 36, _et seq._
Church, Castilian, 13, _et seq._; 104, 231, _et seq._; 249, 250
Cid Haya, 216, 220, 223
Cifuentes, Count of, 177, 180
Cisneros, Ximenes de, 242, _et seq._; 273, _et seq._; 402, 403
Claude, dau. of Louis XII., 378
Columbus, Bartholomew, 289, 315
Columbus, Christopher, early life, 286;
nautical theories, 291;
appears at Spanish Court, 295;
character, 294, 298, 300, 302, 314;
appearance, 295;
prepares to leave Spain, 299;
first voyage, 303, 305;
reception at Barcelona, 305;
second voyage, 307;
views on slavery, 310;
third voyage, 314;
arrest, 315;
fourth voyage, 316;
devotion to Queen Isabel, 298, 313, 317;
death, 317
Columbus, Diego, 294, 299, 317
Commines, Philip de, 48
Conversos, The, 251, 252, 253
_Coplas de Manrique_, 408
_Coplas de Mingo Revulgo_, 417
Cordova, Gonsalvo de, 189, 206, 280, 361, 367, 371
Cortes, the Castilian, 18
Cota, Rodrigo, 417
Cueva, Beltran de La (Count of Ledesma, Duke of Alburquerque), 32, 33,
45, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 62, 64, 89, 151
D
D’Aubigny, Stuart, 361
Davila, Juan Arias, 261
De Puebla, 374
Diaz, Bartholomew, 289
E
Edict of Grace, 255
Egypt, Sultan of, 219, 278
Eleanor, dau. of John II. of Aragon, 43, 44, 359
Emmanuel of Portugal, 273, 338, 343, 372
Enriquez, Fadrique, Admiral of Castile, 36, 58, 59, 60, 74
Enzina, Juan del, 417, 418
Escalas, Conde de, 205, 206, 207
Española, 305, 309, 313, 314, 316
Estella, 49, 51
Estepar, El Feri Ben, 281, 282
F
Fadrique (the younger), 155
Federigo of Naples, 355, 364, 370
Ferdinand of Aragon (The Catholic) character, 2, 69, 174, 210, 324,
325, 330, 332, 370, 371, 387, 391;
appearance, 89;
diplomacy, 346, 352, 358, 359, 364, 372, 375;
birth, 26;
becomes heir to throne of Aragon, 40;
alliance with Isabel, 35, 69, 77, _et seq._;
meeting with Isabel, 208;
reconciliation with Henry IV., 86;
becomes King of Aragon, 118;
attempted assassination of, 328;
military measures, 102, 103, 166, _et seq._; 112, 168, 175, 191, 196,
201, 216, 219, 280, 379;
attitude to Jews, 264, 265, 271;
to _Mudejares_, 283;
to the Inquisition, 249, 255, 258;
to Roman See, 235, 239, 254;
to his children, 335;
to Columbus, 296, 297, 313;
foreign policy of, 335;
receives submission of Boabdil, 229;
second marriage, 388;
regent of Castile, 390;
estimate of his work, 422
Ferdinand, son of Archduke Philip, 379
Ferrante I. of Naples, 36, 349, 350, 353, 356
Ferrante II., 354, 356, 361, 364, 369
Fez, King of, 221, 229
Florence, 349, 350, 353
Foix, Catherine de, 339
Foix, Gaston de, 43, 75
Foix, Gaston de (the younger), 43
Foix, Germaine de, 388, 390
Fonseca, Alonso de, 30, 240
Fornovo, battle of, 361
Francis Phœbus of Navarre, 111, 339
Fuenterrabia, meeting of, 48
G
Galicia, settlement of, 133
Galindo, Beatriz de, 332, 407
Genoa, 25
Geraldino, Alessandro, 299, 333
Giron, Pedro, Master of Calatrava, 36, 60, 62, 63
Granada, City of, 215, 224, 227, _et seq._;
Kingdom of, 160, 188;
partition Treaty of, 365, 366
Guadix, 173, 206, 216, 220, 221, 223, 224, 280
Guejar, 280
Guiomar, Doña, 31, 233
Guipuzcoa, 100, 106, 112, 117
Guzman, Ramir Nuñez de, 155, 156
H
Hamet, “El Zegri,” 199, 200, 201, 202, 206, 210, 211, 213, 214
Haro, Count of, 101, 129
Henry IV. of Castile (Prince of Asturias), 23, 27, 28;
(King), 24, 36, 39, 44, 54, 55, 56, 70, 71, 80, _et seq._; 158, 160,
253
Henry VII. of England, 373
Henry, “The Navigator,” of Portugal, 289
I
Inquisition in Castile, 249, 253–261
Isabel of Castile, character, 1, 4, 5, 131, 233, 319, 324, 327, 328,
336;
love of her Faith, 325;
attitude to her confessors, 241, 242, 243, 326, 327, 329;
love of learning, 332, 333, 400 _et seq._;
devotion to Ferdinand, 329;
her magnificence, 321, 323, 399;
her justice, 130, 135, 136, _et seq._; 155;
birth, 22;
childhood, 34, 46, 52, 67;
suggested alliances, 35, 39, 53, 62, 68, 70, 72, 73;
marriage with Ferdinand, 69, 74, 76, 77, _et seq._;
joins her brother Alfonso, 65;
reconciliation with Henry IV., 84, 85, 86;
accession, 88, 91, 92;
appeals to Archbishop Carrillo, 100;
celebrates battle of Toro, 109;
quells riot in Segovia, 112, _et seq._;
visits Seville, 115, 136;
disputes with Ferdinand, 186;
legislation and reforms of, 147, 150, 153, 392, _et seq._;
military measures of, 106, 168, 187, _et seq._; 192, 194, _et seq._;
218;
visits camps, 207, 211, 226;
entry into Granada, 230;
attitude to the Castilian Church, 234, 235, 236, 247, 248;
to the Inquisition, 249, 254, 255, 258;
to the Jews, 264, 265, 271;
to the _Mudejares_, 273, 279, 280, 284;
to the Roman See, 235–239, 254;
to Columbus, 285, 295, 297, 298, 303, 315;
to slavery, 312–313;
to her children, 331, 334, 377, 380, 381;
her will, 383;
her death, 384;
survey of her reign, 421.
Isabel, mother of Isabel of Castile, 33, 34
Isabel, dau. of Isabel of Castile, 82, 207, 223, 337, 338, 343, 344,
345
Isabella, the city, 313
Ismail, Sultan, 162
J
James IV. of Scotland, 374, 375
Jews, 6, 250, 252, 263, _et seq._
Joanna, “La Beltraneja,” 45, 46, 81–83, 93, 94, 99, 119, 120, 336
Joanna of Portugal, wife of Henry IV., 30, 31, 32, 33, 44, 45, 52
Joanna of Aragon, dau. of Isabel of Castile, 334, 341, 342, 375, _et
seq._; 390
Joanna (Queen of Aragon), 26, 27, 40, 41, 42, 75
John II. of Aragon, 24, 25, 26, 28, 36, 40, 101, 364
John II. of Castile, 22, 23, 27
John II. of Portugal, 107, 108, 118, 289, 292, 307, 338
John, son of Ferdinand and Isabel, 115, 216, 223, 331, 332, 339, 344
L
Lebrija, Antonio de, 406
Lerin, Count of, 280
Lisbon, Treaty of, 118, 336
Literature, Castilian, 407, _et seq._
Loja, 175, 176, 201, 205
Lopera, battle of, 200
Louis XI. of France, 42, 43, 47, _et seq._; 81, 100, 106, 110, 115,
116, 117, 118, 186, 339, 346, 347
Louis XII. of France (Duke of Orleans), 355, 357;
(King), 363, 365, 388, 389
Lucena, 181
Ludovico, “Il Moro,” 348, _et seq._; 364
M
Machado, Roger, 321, 323, 373
Madeleine, sister of Louis XI., 43, 339
Madrigal, Cortes of, 124
Malaga, 173, 204, 208, 209, _et seq._
Margaret of Austria, 340–344
Maria, dau. of Ferdinand and Isabel, 338, 372
Marineo, Lucio, 405
Marriage-settlement of Ferdinand and Isabel, 79
Martyr, Peter, 195, 219, 385, 404–405
Mary of Burgundy, 83, 117
Maximilian, King of the Romans, 340, 358
Medina-Celi, Duke of, 295
Medina del Campo, Concord of, 56, 253;
Junta of, 57
Medina-Sidonia, Duke of, 136, 140, 168, 189, 190
Mendoza, family of, 52, 76, 82, 84, 89;
Diego Hurtado de, 246;
Pedro Gonsalez de (Bishop of Calahorra), 62;
(Bishop of Siguenza), 67;
(Cardinal of Spain), 84, 89, 90, 108, 150, 154, 187, 229, 232, 233,
234, 240, 243, 244, 255, 299, 404
Merlo, Diego de, 165, 169
Miguel, grandson of Ferdinand, 345
Military Orders, 10, _et seq._, 152, 154
Moclin, 207
Montalvo, Alfonso Diaz de, 146
Montpensier, Count of, 361, 362
_Moriscos_, the, 284
_Mudejares_, the, 15, 196, 271, _et seq._
_Muladies_, the, 170
Muley Abul Hacen, 162, 163, 164, 167, 169, _et seq._, 198, 202, 203
N
Naples, 349, 350, 354, 356, 357, 361, 362, 364, 365, 366
Naples, Joanna II. of, 25
Navarre, 37, 40, 339, 388
O
Olito, Treaty of, 47
Olmedo, battle of, 64
_Ordenanzas Reales_, 146
Ovando, Nicholas de, 316
P
Painting, Castilian, 418–419
Palencia, Alonso de, 411
Paredes, Count of, 105, 153
Passage of Arms, 33
Paul II. Pope, 79, 85
Perez, Fra Juan, 299, 300
Philip, Archduke of Austria, 341, 375, 379, 389, 390
Pinzon, The Brothers, 303
Pius II., Bull of Pope, 78, 81
Plasencia, Count of (Duke of Arévalo), 93, 96, 98, 110
_Polyglot-Bible_, 403, 406
Printing, introduction of, 401
Pulgar, Hernando de (“He of the Exploits”), 225, 226;
(Author), 412, 413
Q
Quintanilla, Alonso de, 295
R
Ramirez, Francisco, 192, 283
Rapallo, sack of, 356
Rojas, Fernando de, 416
Ronda, 201, 202, 281
Royal Council, the, 142, 143
Roussillon and Cerdagne, 47, 75, 82, 111, 186, 346, 351, 352, 379
S
Salamanca, Treaty of, 389
_Sanbenito_, 256
Santa Cruz, College of, 404
Santa Fé, 226, 227
Santa Hermandad, La, 123, _et seq._; 131, 132
Santiago, Mastership of. _See_ Military Orders
Segovia, 19, 65, 112
Sforza, Gian Galeazzo, 348, 349, 357
Silva, Alonso de, 359
Sixtus IV., Pope, 85, 117, 118, 237, 254
_Suprema, La_, 259
T
Talavera, Fra Fernando de, 119, 151, 241, 272, 277, 278, 305, 323, 326
Tendilla, Count of, 272, 276, 278, 305, 404
Toledo, Cortes of, 141, _et seq._
Tordesillas, Treaty of, 307
Toro, battle of, 108;
citadel of, 102
Toros de Guisandos, 67
Torquemada, Thomas de, 258, 261, 266
V
Velez-Malaga, 161, 204, 208, 209
Venegas, Cacim, 171, 180
Venice, League of, 360
Vespucci, Amerigo, 317
Villahermosa, Alfonso, Duke of, 103, 125, 175
Villena, Marquis of (Juan Pacheco), 28, 29, 30, 36, 53, 56, 61, 62, 63,
67, 70, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87;
(the younger), 87, 93, 94, 96, 98, 100, 105, 111
Y
Yañez, Alvar, 135
Z
“Zagal, Abdallah, El,” 173, 181, 201, 203, 209, 215, 216, 220, 221
Zahara, 163, 164, 200
Zamora, 98, 107
Zoraya, 171, 172
Zurita, 413
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