THIRTEEN
As soon as she put the problems with Portugal behind her, Queen Isabella directed her attention to southern Spain. This region was a priority for two reasons. In the short term, she had to deal with a new aggressiveness from the neighboring Muslim Emirate of Granada, at a time when border defenses were weak, splintered, and unreliable. And in the longer term, she needed a strong position on the Mediterranean Coast in order to protect Castile and Aragon against the growing threat from the Ottoman Turks.
The first step was to secure Castile’s border with the Islamic world. Queen Isabella had to find ways to make peace among the squabbling nobles living in the Christian-controlled portion of Andalusia, which had been wracked for years with civil unrest because of King Enrique’s lax administration of lands that were distant from his home in Segovia. It was particularly important to quell domestic disturbances in Seville, the biggest city and most important river port in the south, because new hostilities were breaking out on the frontier.
Just across the border was the last surviving Muslim realm in Iberia, the Kingdom of Granada, now controlled by the warlike Nasrid dynasty. This heavily armed emirate stretched about 250 miles along the Mediterranean coast, reaching about 93 miles inland; formidable castles defended its perimeter. The kingdom’s biggest city and crown jewel was Granada, located in the mountainous heartland, but the Nasrids also controlled the important Mediterranean seaports of Málaga, Marbella, and Almería, which gave them ready access to reinforcements from overseas and a continuing source of supplies.
From these secure bases, the Granadans were able to send lightning-strike raids out into the Castilian lands to capture Christians to enslave them, to sell them for ransom, or to use them as laborers or in sex trafficking. “Taking advantage of the disturbance and revolts sweeping through Castile at this time, [they] sent yearly expeditions there during the reign of Enrique IV, until his death in 1474,” wrote the historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad Al-Maqqari.1
In 1474, the year King Enrique died, a new leader came to power in Granada. Abu al-Hasan Ali was more belligerent than his recent predecessors. He built up the Muslim army and its capacity for offensive action, with the help and support of his equally strong-willed primary wife, Fatima, who was also his cousin. The sultan’s militancy worried even his own countrymen. One Arab chronicler called Abu al-Hasan “magnanimous and valiant, a lover of wars, and the dangers and horrors of them.”2 It was a time of glorious Islamic expansion, and no doubt he wanted to emulate the successes being achieved by the Ottoman Turks in the east, confident that God was on his side as well as theirs.
Abu al-Hasan grew steadily bolder and more determined. “He put great dread into the Christians, who had never been so harried by the Muslims,” according to Arab historians. He did not seize land but instead concentrated on raids that brought “rich spoils of booty and captives.”3 In April 1478 he staged a huge military parade to put his troops and armaments on display. This new aggressiveness, coming as it did at a time when the Ottoman Empire was expanding in the Balkans, was worrisome to the Castilians, who feared that the Nasrids would ally themselves with the Turks and allow them to use their Mediterranean ports for an invasion of Spain. It could be a repeat of 711, of 1086, and of 1195, when Muslim rulers in Andalusia had gained reinforcements from other Muslim lands.
The Christians, however, were not just innocent victims. They, too, led raiding parties into Muslim areas and had engaged, in fits and starts, in aggressive advances that had allowed them to conquer vast tracts of land that had been home to Muslim families for hundreds of years. The Christians saw each victory as reclaiming what had been theirs; the Muslims saw each defeat as theft of their own homeland. Isabella was as convinced as Abu al-Hasan that her viewpoint was correct and that the entire south of Spain belonged by right to her, allowing her to rationalize and justify the need for a military response to any provocation.
Abu al-Hasan now saw Isabella’s rise to power as a welcome sign of Castilian vulnerability. Soon after the princess became queen and just around the time the Portuguese invaders surged into Castile, he made his ominous vow that he would no longer make the vassalage payments that Granada had been giving Castile to maintain their uneasy truce. Arab sources reported that he delivered this message in specifically threatening words. He said the days of Granadan tribute to Castile were over: “The sovereigns who paid tribute to the Christians are dead, and in Granada the only thing we are minting is… iron and lances to use against our enemies.”4 The Italian scholar Peter Martyr, who lived at Isabella’s court, said he was told that Abu al-Hasan made that threat while menacingly fingering the point of a sharp metal lance.
The result was satisfying to Granada. The Christians made no immediate response and appeared to be accepting peace on those terms. Inside the Castilian court, however, the signal had been received. “The King and Queen were disturbed by this message,” Peter Martyr wrote.5 But there was little Isabella could do about it, engaged as she was in wars on two of her other borders and trying to establish peace within the kingdom. But she realized that she was working against the clock, that she faced not just a newly militant Granada but also the likelihood that the emirate would be bolstered by Muslim allies from North Africa, Egypt, or Turkey. And in fact, as Isabella feared, the Muslims of Andalusia soon approached the Muslims of North Africa for assistance and reinforcement. And then they turned to the Turks as well.
In the middle of 1477, to closely evaluate the situation, Queen Isabella traveled to Seville for the first time and stayed there for more than a year. She found the city in bad shape. The royal palace, the Alcázar, was in crumbling disrepair. Street crime was rampant; it was too dangerous to venture outside at night. Two of Andalusia’s leading noble families, those of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia and the Marquess of Cádiz, were literally at swordpoint with each other. Disagreements of all kinds simmered under the surface of public discourse, ready to boil over into violence. But she did her usual things to bring justice to the region—presiding for hours on end over judicial procedures to resolve disputes, allowing people to air their grievances, and trying to bring adversaries into a semblance of harmony. Her customary brand of stern justice brought wrongdoers to heel. She even had some success in beginning a rapprochement between the families of the duke and the marquess. She spent about three more months in the second most important city of Andalusia, Córdoba, before heading back to Castile, where a number of other issues were awaiting her attention. Trying to buy time, she signed a three-year truce with Abu al-Hasan in 1478, and she did not press her demand for tribute money.6
Back in Castile in 1480, after finalizing the peace treaty with Portugal, Isabella barely had time to catch her breath before receiving what Isabella’s Spanish chronicler Palencia called the “terrifying news” of the successful Ottoman attack on Otranto. The Spaniards learned with horror that the Turks had conducted a successful surprise raid on the town, and that although the people of Otranto had not put up the “least resistance to the enemy,” many had nevertheless been slaughtered. The long-dreaded attack had given the Turks a foothold on the Italian peninsula, from which they could ravage the interior and prepare to seize Rome. The seriousness of the attack could not be underestimated. Its goal was “extinguishing the Catholic religion,” Palencia wrote.7
The speed of Otranto’s fall made it painfully obvious how easily the Turks could do the same thing on the Iberian peninsula, particularly if they used a beachhead like Málaga, Almería, or Marbella and found allies among the Muslims of Andalusia. It was becoming clear that if the Turks came in this way, it would be impossible to fend them off. And since war was inevitable, the threatening beachhead had to be eliminated before it began. From this point on, Isabella and Ferdinand seemed to be looking for an excuse to fight. Soon an opportunity presented itself, in the form of another surprise attack, this time from Granada.
During Christmas week of 1481, the Muslims of Granada invaded and attacked the mountain enclave of Zahara, located well within Castilian territory, on what Arab sources called a “stormy, rainy dark night.”8 Under the cover of these conditions, they audaciously clambered up the walls of the poorly guarded and ill-prepared fortress. “The Christians were terrorized and without any hope of rescue,” the chronicler Palencia wrote. They couldn’t resist the Muslim assault, and “a great number of them were killed by being slashed with swords, and the rest were captured and were marched to Granada.”9 Abu al-Hasan took possession of the town and left a garrison there to secure it. “He returned to Granada very satisfied and content with the good outcome of his venture,” Arab historians would write.10
But some older, wiser people in Granada, worried that the move had been rash, expressed concern about how Abu al-Hasan was governing the realm. Overtly provoking the Christians might lead to a bad outcome. Some in Granada began to see omens and portents of doom, troubling signs in nature that unsettled the superstitious.
Isabella and Ferdinand were in Medina del Campo when they heard about the fall of Zahara. They received this news with special dismay. Not only did the attack represent another in a long line of border skirmishes—it was also a blow to Spanish pride. Zahara had been conquered from Granada after a grief-filled siege by Ferdinand’s grandfather, Ferdinand of Antequera, in 1410. Now, in addition to these most recent deaths, some 150 people of Zahara had been marched into captivity and were being held in the impregnable town of Ronda. And, troublingly for Isabella and Ferdinand, Zahara was now permanently occupied.
From this new base, the Muslims made further incursions in the direction of Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, and Murcia, and nobody could stop them. Ferdinand and Isabella were too far away to intervene. Now the region was, in the words of the Countess of Yebes, “practically at the mercy of the infidel.”11 Nobody was safe.
A problem that had existed as a dull ache in the Spanish psyche had suddenly become a ringing migraine. Isabella and Ferdinand had launched their marriage with the vague intention of someday reclaiming Granada as part of Christendom, but now the situation had taken on an intense immediacy.
But what should they do? Achieving victory over the Muslim forces of Granada would require a herculean commitment by all the Spanish kingdoms, because Granada was formidably protected by hilltop fortresses everywhere, each almost impossible to successfully besiege. The Nasrids’ close proximity to their coreligionists in North Africa, meanwhile, made it likely that they would receive, in short order, succor and assistance. Reinforcements and relief were “so apparent, so certain and so close,” wrote the Aragonese chronicler Jerónimo Zurita, that the monarchs realized it would take “all the power and the force and the pushing” they could muster to “free that part of Spain and of the world of the subjugation and servitude from such enemies.”12
Not yet prepared to mount such an all-out effort, the Spanish sovereigns at first relied on defensive tactics to protect themselves while they organized for what they saw would be a battle to the death. Isabella and Ferdinand ordered the Castilian fortress cities ringing the Granadan kingdom to strengthen their own defenses and prepare for war. They also initiated a naval blockade that began to interfere with the shipment of goods and soldiers between North Africa and Granada’s port cities.
But before the sovereigns could complete their preparations for war, the Sevillian nobleman Rodrigo Ponce de León, the red-haired and hotheaded Marquess of Cádiz, the man who had been feuding with the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, decided to take matters into his own hands. An informant, a former slave who had been held in the dungeon there, told Ponce de León that the heavily walled town of Alhama, located in the rich agricultural heartland of the Kingdom of Granada, was poorly defended and might be a good target for a counterattack. On his own initiative, the Marquess of Cádiz decided to capture the town. He and his allies chose the date of February 27, 1482, and launched their attack at night, as the Muslims had done in Zahara. They rushed the town and took it, killing eight hundred Muslims and capturing three thousand, and planting a cross on the battlements of a high tower. And so the long-expected war began in a chaotic and unplanned fashion.
Now it was the Muslims who reacted with shock and horror, for they viewed Alhama as a critical link in the wall of defense ringing Granada. The city had been known as the “eyes” of Granada, because its watchtowers had alerted the citizens to Castilian forays into their lands. From their perspective, this too was a surprise attack. Moreover, the methods employed by the Castilians, who had been looking for revenge, inspired rage in the Muslims. “[The city’s] walls, streets and temples were left filled with corpses and bathed in blood,” Arab historians wrote.13 The Castilians threw the bodies of the dead over the town walls.
This was the first big victory in Isabella’s chapter of the Reconquest. Almost immediately she recognized its significance. But its methods had been brutal, and they paved the way for all-out war.
The Muslims quickly assembled an army to recover the town, and upon their arrival outside its walls, they were enraged and repulsed to discover wild dogs gnawing the decaying corpses of their countrymen. This was a double affront to Muslim sensibilities because they believe dogs to be unclean animals. The soldiers from Granada, determined to eject the Castilians from the fortress, besieged it for weeks. The Castilians were trapped inside, with limited water supplies, and began slowly dying of thirst. They managed to send out messengers first announcing their victory, then revealing their plight.
Isabella and Ferdinand were again in Medina del Campo for the winter, four hundred miles away, and Isabella was once again pregnant. But nevertheless they quickly prepared to lead a force to rescue the besieged Spaniards. The king left almost immediately, and the queen made plans to follow him to Córdoba within a few weeks. The wife of the Marquess of Cádiz, meanwhile, turned to her husband’s longtime rival, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, begging him to rush to the fray as well. The duke responded readily, setting aside his longtime enmity, and he was the first on the scene in defense of the Christians. The two men embraced when they saw each other on the field, and an important new alliance was formed, with long-lasting consequences.
As the Spanish reinforcements arrived, the Muslims besieging Alhama realized that they would soon be outnumbered and decided to withdraw. But they made it clear they intended to one day return and retake the town. In the meantime, they went on the attack throughout the south of Castile, taking whatever transient opportunities presented themselves to kill Castilians, claim land, and seize captives.
Isabella and Ferdinand convened in Córdoba, establishing the austere and foreboding fortress of the Alcazaba there as their military headquarters, and together they deliberated with the Andalusian nobility about how best to proceed. The queen was adamant that no retreat would be acceptable. She and the others took courage from the successful reconquest of Otranto, where circumstances had permitted Christian forces to eventually drive out the Turks, the chronicler Palencia recalled.14 The Spanish had sent seventy ships to the aid of the Neapolitans,15 who had combined with troops sent from Portugal and Hungary and rallied to expel the Turks. They were aided in their efforts by internal turmoil within the Ottoman Empire—Mehmed had unexpectedly died, setting off a succession battle, which induced the Ottoman forces to withdraw from southern Italy. Although Otranto was now largely depopulated, its recovery was an important symbol of Christians’ ability to rally in self-defense. Queen Isabella referred to Otranto pointedly as she urged her troops into battle.
The queen’s resolution and involvement were so great that she was engaged in a war council when she went into labor with her fourth child. She excused herself and gave birth to a daughter, the one they named María. Little María, named for the mother of Christ, was actually one of twins—as we have seen, the other infant died stillborn. The Castilians took that death as an omen—being as superstitious as the Muslims—and as a bad signal from the heavens. The court traveled in procession to Córdoba’s main cathedral, convening for a ceremony that mixed celebration, sorrow, and anguished spiritual reflection.16
The service was held in the glorious former mosque of Córdoba, with its lofty ceilings and an interior forest of stately columns; it had been converted to use as a cathedral after the city was taken in 1236, in an earlier phase of the Reconquest. The Muslim mosque had been built on the site of the former Visigothic church of St. Vincent, which in turn had displaced a Roman temple that once stood on the site. The mosque’s lovely columns had been constructed from structural elements stripped from the church and the temple.
The death of the second twin baby was indeed a bad omen, for much death and bloodshed was on its way. The success at Otranto turned out to have been a rare speedy victory for Christian forces. The reconquest of Granada would last ten long years, with terrible casualties and losses on both sides. The Castilians would require intense concentration to win, for the Granadans were great warriors and resolute in opposition to the Christians. For both sides, it was unrelenting agony. “The war was so wild and so cruel that there was no place in the realm that was not bloodied from it, from the deaths of the victors and the vanquished,” wrote the chronicler Zurita.17
The terrain was as difficult a challenge as the adversary’s military skill. Just to march from the north of the peninsula to the south, to reach the field of battle, was an extraordinary venture, requiring the Castilians to cross parched and arid plains, and to drag men, matériel, and cannons up and over steep mountains. The war would require painstaking mobilization and much financial sacrifice, for the kingdom’s entire resources would have to be focused on this one vast enterprise. The outcome was “in doubt until quite late in the 1480s,” writes the historian L. P. Harvey.18
Not until 1489 did Isabella become confident of success. In that year she commissioned the first of a series of artworks to memorialize each victory of the Reconquest. Initially choosing twenty events to be immortalized, she placed an order with the wood sculptorRodrigo Alemán for twenty relief carvings, designed to serve as the seat backs in the choir stall of the great Cathedral of Toledo, the most important church in Spain since Visigothic times. As the years wore on, she ordered twenty more seats because there had been twenty more significant battles or individual surrenders. The number of events deemed worthy of remembrance eventually totaled fifty-four. The relief carvings, a form of early military photojournalism, provide eyewitness records of tumultuous events that have otherwise slipped from historical memory. They are, writes the Spanish historian Juan de Mata Carriazo y Arroquia, “a work of immense historic and archaeological value.”19 Dying soldiers, grieving Muslims, devastated castles, and daring feats of heroism on both sides are depicted over and over in this remarkable series of tableaux.
The sovereigns spent much of the next ten years in their two Andalusian bases of Seville and Córdoba, orchestrating the campaign. Isabella was preoccupied with the war, Ferdinand less so, being frequently distracted by events in his own Kingdom of Aragon and by his continuing disputes with the French over the northern provinces. But each time his energy flagged, Isabella would exhort him to greater efforts. It became, as historian Peggy Liss describes it, “The Queen’s War.”20
The sovereigns were not initially ready for a war of this kind, however, and the first few years brought them nothing but disappointment. In the summer of 1482, King Ferdinand and the Marquess of Cádiz impulsively decided to attack Loja, a fortress redoubt on the mountainous western edge of the Kingdom of Granada. The Muslims sent a large army against them, both sides fought fiercely, and the Castilians were thrown back. One of the king’s key lieutenants, moreover, Don Rodrigo Téllez Girón, master of one of the three knightly orders, Calatrava, died when he was shot with a poisoned arrow. The Count of Haro and the Count of Tendilla were both badly wounded. “The Castilians withdrew in confusion, leaving behind, on the field of battle, artillery and siege equipment,” writes Harvey. “This was a disaster for King Ferdinand, who was forced to take the long road back to Córdoba to begin to build up his forces anew.”21 Queen Isabella, awaiting his arrival in Córdoba, was mortified by the loss and by the casualties inflicted on her troops. To both sovereigns, the defeat underscored the need for better strategic planning.
A second defeat then drove home the need to respect the strength, resilience, and ingenuity of their opponents. The king had been called away to Galicia to deal with problems of civil unrest there, and in his absence, and seeking to avenge their losses at Loja, the Castilians of Andalusia pulled together their own major foray against Granada. The cream of the Andalusian nobility convened for the venture, wearing resplendent coats of armor. Merchants leading packhorses trailed along in anticipation of a rich haul of booty. This force set off toward the seaport of Málaga, traveling through an area known as the Axarquía, a rich agricultural valley lined with steep mountains, confident in the strength of their numbers and in their fine and elegant armaments. They dreamed that their conquest of Málaga, Granada’s most important seaport, would be a quick and decisive blow against the Muslims. The Marquess of Cádiz, chastened by his prior wartime experiences, urged caution but was overruled.
But an army on the march, strung out so that the different parts can’t support one another, is always vulnerable to attack. The men rode through the countryside of Granada, burning crops and pillaging, then moved into the mountain passes north of Málaga. The people of Málaga could see the plumes of smoke rising from the places the Castilians had set on fire. Abu al-Hasan sent out two of his top commanders, who coordinated a very effective ambush. As the long, fragile column of Castilian soldiers entered the last valley leading to the coast, the Muslims were waiting on the high ground on each side of a place where the valley narrowed. From those positions, they attacked the Christian line of march.
Loaded down as they were, and ill prepared for the ferocity of the Muslim attack, the Castilians were trapped and slaughtered. Thousands were killed. Some soldiers stumbled into a rocky ravine in the dark, where they were picked off one by one by skilled marksmen. The Marquess of Cádiz, who had opposed the expedition, narrowly survived, but many of his relatives died. His brothers Diego and Beltrán were killed, as were two of his nephews. More than eight hundred horsemen were killed, and fifteen hundred were taken prisoner. The Count of Cifuentes was captured. Castilian soldiers were found stumbling around, dazed. Some were reportedly so demoralized that they allowed Muslim women to lead them into captivity.
It was a total victory for the Muslims. This successful enterprise “put much dread into the Christians and much spirit into the Muslims,” Arab sources exulted.22 For the Christians, it was another complete and humiliating rout. The queen was in Madrid when the bad news arrived. If the loss at Loja had taught the need for good planning, the crushing defeat at Axarquía showed the risk of hubris. The Muslims were proving to be valiant and resourceful soldiers who knew the local terrain and used all their advantages in what they were coming to view as a struggle to preserve their homes and way of life.
From this point on, the king and queen began to work more and more effectively as a team. Ferdinand led the troops into battle, while Isabella handled the provisioning and supplies and made sure camp hospitals were ready to receive the injured, tend them, and return them to battle. For both, raising money for expenses was a constant challenge. Ferdinand was more frequently the person at hand for each victory; Isabella was waiting and watching nearby, noting with meticulous attention to detail episodes in which the troops had not achieved all she had hoped or maximized each opportunity that presented itself.
And in consequence, they conquered Granada in a bit over a decade, “partly through force, partly through surrender, partly through prudence, and partly through gold and silver.” With the latter they bribed local government administrators, who accepted the payments and immigrated to North Africa or the Ottoman Empire, leaving the residents in the citadels to fend for themselves.23 The Castilians also used a process of slow starvation, as they cut off supply ships from arriving and destroyed crops and harvests.
For the Muslims, the two important early victories should have taught the lessons that they could defeat the Castilians as long as they used their resources wisely, bided their time, seized opportunities that arose, and presented a unified front. Both Ferdinand and Isabella had weaknesses that could be exploited. Ferdinand sometimes rushed headlong into danger; Isabella hated to see people on either side die unnecessarily, a characteristic at odds with the imperative ruthlessness of war. Moreover, the long supply lines left the Castilians at a marked disadvantage. Having to carry food and munitions made them vulnerable every time they moved from one place to another.
But the Muslim victories did not have the beneficial effects that they should have had. Instead, the Granadans began fighting among themselves, for they had their own problems at home.
Abu al-Hasan, the fierce sultan who had provoked the war with his threats, now found his personal life interfering with his own effectiveness. His regime had been well ordered and militarily successful as long as he stayed focused on the work at hand. His primary wife, Fatima, had been his lover, friend, supporter, and adviser. But polygamy presents a number of thorny logistical and romantic challenges, and such complexities brought Abu al-Hasan low when he began showing preference for a pretty young Christian woman in his harem. The “two very beautiful women in his harem that he loved more than the others,” according to Arab sources, became embroiled in a deadly competition. The more powerful of the two wives was Fatima, who was Abu al-Hasan’s cousin and mother of the prince Abu Abd Allah, known to Spaniards as Boabdil. The other was Isabel de Solís, the daughter of the mayor of Martos, a town near Jaén, who had been captured in a Muslim raid some years before; she had converted to Islam and went under the name Zoraya. The king had become badly smitten with Zoraya, and together they had two children whom he favored over the others. But the sultana, mother of the prince Boabdil, “not only hated to death the mother of the children, but also tried to kill her and kill them.”24
This nasty family spat soon spread. Fatima was the daughter of a former sultan and had many influential friends, and she urged her son Boabdil to try to unseat his father. Abu al-Hasan’s reputation suffered. Where he had formerly been viewed as a mighty warrior in defense of Islam, he now came to be seen as “hard and cruel,” according to the Arab sources, and his son Boabdil came to be perceived as the courtly one, “affable and graciously mannered.”25
So instead of being free to crush the Spanish forces in these years while they were still getting organized, Abu al-Hasan had to return to Granada to try to put down what Arab historians called “a terrible rebellion that split open the souls of the Granadans.”26According to the Arab chronicler Nubdhat Al-Asr, the family strife broke into the open on the very day of the Muslim victory at Loja. Fatima soon led her sons, including Boabdil, to the town of Guadix, “where they were hailed by the people as rulers, and then they were acclaimed in Granada itself.”27
The internal dissensions broke into physical fighting. The people of Granada took sides against each other. Some supported Abu al-Hasan, who was backed by his competent brother Abdalah El Zagal, a respected military veteran. Others supported Abu al-Hasan’s son Boabdil. The young man was eager to prove his mettle on the battlefield to show up his father and uncle, a poor decision that would eventually spell his ruin.
In 1483 King Ferdinand took to the battlefield again. Up until now the tides of war had run against the Castilians. But a simple twist of fate changed the balance of power. Seeking a victory that would inspire universal admiration, Boabdil decided to lead an attack on the town of Lucena, well inside Castile. The battle quickly devolved into fierce hand-to-hand combat. Queen Isabella’s commissioned carving of this scene depicts a crush of horses and human beings struggling for survival in the fields outside a fortress, brandishing medieval weaponry—swords, crossbows, and pikes. Several of Granada’s most celebrated military leaders were killed in the battle, including Boabdil’s father-in-law, the bold mayor who had led the defense of Loja. In the tableau, he crashes to the ground, nobly and with dignity, in a posture reminiscent of the famous Dying Gaul of Greek art. During the battle, the prince’s exhausted horse fell into a river, and Boabdil, fearful that he would be killed, surrendered and was taken prisoner by the Castilians.
This was a major turn of events. With Boabdil’s fortuitous capture, the most valuable of all possible war prizes had fallen into the hands of the dumbfounded Castilians. But what was the most strategic way to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity?
King Ferdinand urgently consulted his advisers, who were divided about what to do. Some wanted the young prince to be kept captive, others to release him so he could return home to continue to foment rebellion. Queen Isabella cast the deciding vote. “The advice, which was most astute and fatal for the Muslims,” was followed by the king of Castile, Arab sources wrote. They noted with amazement that Ferdinand subsequently treated Boabdil with elaborate respect, speaking to him “very honorably and with much love, and would not allow him to kiss his hand, but instead embraced him and called him his friend.”28
Here King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella again demonstrated their unique ability to bend or win other people to their will. Boabdil had been treated badly by his father, but Ferdinand treated the spoiled young prince with exquisite politeness. To secure his release, Boabdil’s mother Fatima sent “a great treasure” in ransom money to Ferdinand, which he accepted. For himself, Boabdil pledged his vassalage to Isabella and Ferdinand and promised to make large tribute payments to them yearly. He also agreed to return three hundred captive Christians.29
News of the prince’s capture and ransoming was received in Granada with both joy and misgivings. The charming young prince returned home, but his people now wondered about his loyalty to them and their cause. His father, meanwhile, was contemptuous that his son had accepted vassalage to save his life. Internal warfare again broke out on all sides.
But Abu al-Hasan was ailing and soon became ill enough to have to step aside as ruler, passing the throne to his brother, the respected El Zagal. Abu al-Hasan left Granada and went into retirement, taking with him his young wife and their children, and he died soon thereafter. Zoraya soon took back her childhood name, Isabel, converted back to Christianity, and changed her sons’ names to Ferdinand of Granada, to honor King Ferdinand, and Juan of Granada, to honor the prince. Within a few years, the three of them were living in comfort at Queen Isabella’s court, participating in Christian religious services.
Abu al-Hasan’s death, however, left El Zagal and his nephew Boabdil in unmediated competition with each other in Granada. This succession crisis weakened the emirate. With its leadership in continuing disarray, new developments from then on favored the Christians rather than the Muslims. Isabella achieved a steady string of successes, although many of the advances came at a steep cost, both in money and in lives.
In June 1484 the Castilians conquered the town of Alora. Alemán’s woodcarving of that event shows that the Spanish were growing more adept at the art of war. The walls of the fortress are depicted as having been badly damaged by cannon bombardment. Heavy artillery was becoming a more important part of their offensive tactics. Once the walls collapsed, all the defenders could do was surrender. The carving commemorates the moment when the commander of the fortress kneels in submission to Ferdinand, presenting him with the key to the town. The Muslims appear dazed, while the Spaniards look somber.
Ferdinand and Isabella spent that winter in Seville, planning their next steps. The following summer they struck and took the towns of Coín and Cártama, and then turned to one of Granada’s most difficult targets, Ronda, which sits on a mesa surrounded by sheer cliffs on all sides. Here a clever trick led to victory. Ferdinand made a feint toward the port city of Málaga, which caused the Granadans to rush their available soldiers in that direction to protect that vital link to the outside world. Meanwhile, however, the Marquess of Cádiz doubled back to Ronda and put the town under siege before the garrison could be reinforced. The Castilians besieged and bombarded Ronda and cut off its water supply.
The battle of attrition lasted two weeks. Ronda “was defended by many of the most valiant Muslims in the kingdom, and all the Moors were brave warriors,” wrote Zurita. The fighting went on night and day, but finally “moved by the begging and crying of the women and the little children who wanted to surrender,” the Muslims asked for peace terms.30 The Castilians took the town on May 22, 1485.
This victory was particularly significant to Isabella, because capturing Ronda freed some four hundred Christian slaves who were being held there. Among them were some of the people who had been seized at Zahara. They were weak and starving and needed to be nursed back to health. Queen Isabella ordered the heavy chains they had worn to be placed in carts and hauled to Toledo, to hang on the exterior walls of her Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, as a reminder to worshipers of the hardships Christians had suffered.
The residents of Ronda were allowed to remain in their homes. Municipal leaders were required to take an oath of loyalty to Castile, to pay the same taxes they had paid to the Nasrid dynasty, and to fight on behalf of Castile if asked to do so. King Ferdinand promised not to interfere with their practice of Islam and allowed them to settle disagreements under sharia law.
From there the Castilians marched to the port city of Marbella, which promptly surrendered. In fact, the city’s top officials contacted King Ferdinand before he arrived, asking to be given the choice of becoming vassals of the Spanish sovereigns or departing to “any place they wish,” on ships to be provided by Ferdinand.31 Alemán’s woodcarving of the surrender of Marbella shows a Muslim soldier who has changed sides and is providing assistance and advice to the Castilians as they approach the city gates.
With Ronda and Marbella both secured, the sovereigns decided they could at last head home for a while. Isabella and Ferdinand spent the winter in Castile, in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid. Princess Catherine, the future Catherine of Aragon, was born there on January 16, 1486. Queen Isabella remained off the campaign trail for a while, suffering from a postpartum infection, but Ferdinand set out on an expedition to Granada on his own on May 13, leaving at dawn. He apparently had no particular plan of attack, instead advancing as quickly as possible and intending to look for promising targets of opportunity. Isabella wasn’t sure where he was at times, once writing to him “at the siege wherever you have gone.”32
Ferdinand marched down toward Andalusia. He crossed the Las Yeguas River near Córdoba, where he paused to receive the supplies that were being shipped to him from all over the peninsula. The Marquess of Cádiz arrived as well, bringing additional reinforcements. Here Ferdinand was informed that Boabdil had reconciled with El Zagal, despite his pledge of loyalty and fealty to Isabella and Ferdinand, and was now planning how best to make war on the Christians. El Zagal and Boabdil had resolved their differences by dividing up the cities of Granada between themselves.
At night Ferdinand gathered his nobles to consult about where to direct their effort. On the advice of the Marquess of Cádiz, they decided to make another attempt against Loja, the town they had failed to capture four years earlier and that now was being defended by Boabdil himself. In preparation, the Spaniards besieged and took the nearby towns of Íllora, Moclín, Montefrío, and Colomera. The Spanish nobility participated in this effort in force, as well as some newcomers from England and France. A man they called Lord Scales made a particularly jaunty appearance on his arrival with a contingent of English troops.
While Ferdinand was away from her, Queen Isabella wrote to him with painstaking care for his pride, with exaggerated courtesy and respect. She suggested at one point that Boabdil could have possession of the citadels of Baza and Guadix, properties that were held by El Zagal, in exchange for his surrender of Loja, but then ostentatiously appeared to catch and excuse herself: “Pardon me, your wife, because I speak about things I do not know.”33
The artillery attack on Loja began on Sunday, May 28. Ferdinand was ferocious in his assault, wrote Peter Martyr, who was there. The bombardment was fierce but did not last long. The chronicler Hernando del Pulgar said the bombardment lasted one day and two nights before Boabdil surrendered the fortress.
Isabella’s public role during the battle at Loja had been ostentatiously religious. She had spent her days and nights in prayer and fasting, asking God for victory and fretting about the fate of her husband and the other soldiers. She rejoined the army soon after the Castilians gained control of the city.
Boabdil was back in their hands once again. Again he asked to be freed, and again Isabella and Ferdinand agreed, even though he had earlier pledged vassalage to them and then reneged. By this point it was clear that Boabdil was more valuable to the sovereigns when he was in Granada fomenting trouble than when he was in their custody. And now, in exchange for his freedom, Boabdil reached a secret agreement with Queen Isabella, very similar to the one she had proposed to King Ferdinand. She promised to support him in a plan for a coup against his uncle.
The shifts in fortune so evident in Loja put Isabella in a reflective mood, and she wrote to Ferdinand on May 30: “May it please the Lord to continue the victory that Our Lady has given” in delivering that town to them, she wrote, calling it “a marvelous thing.” Nevertheless, the loss of life disturbed her. “The Moors died defending [Loja], and our people also did so,” she wrote. “… The deaths weigh heavily on me.”34
But there could be no hesitation. The sovereigns pushed ahead toward Íllora, Moclín, and Montefrío, which all surrendered. The queen herself entered Moclín with six-year-old Princess Juana to accept its surrender, according to Alemán’s choir stall woodcarving. Isabella and her daughter are shown, accompanied by Cardinal Mendoza and what appear to be several young pages. The woman and child, riding on horseback, enter a chaotic and frightening scene. The carving shows the tower ablaze as a result of mortar fire that caused an explosion. The mortar fire had ignited the Muslims’ gunpowder depot, according to the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar.35
Returning to Córdoba, the queen prepared a grand victory reception for King Ferdinand, who arrived four days later. With this event, the campaign of 1486 ended.
Isabella and Ferdinand spent that winter in Salamanca and then, when winter ended and the new campaign season began, went back to their military headquarters in Córdoba. With the spring came Boabdil’s promised coup. On April 7, 1487, Ferdinand left to besiege Vélez-Málaga, a town near the crucial port of Málaga. After a pitched battle there, the Muslims surrendered on April 27. El Zagal had set out with troops from Granada to defend the town, but soon after he left, Boabdil took control of the capital. This was a huge blow to El Zagal, and, seeing no point either in trying to defend Vélez-Málaga or in returning to Granada, he and his followers headed instead for the town of Guadix. Now Granada’s troops were permanently divided into two separate contingents that would no longer be working together.
Boabdil had been able to oust his uncle because of the secret pact with Queen Isabella. He had written to her explaining that he had an opportunity to unseat El Zagal, but needed troops, arms, and provisions to do it. Isabella had sent her childhood friend, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, to render that support. Together they locked El Zagal out of Granada, and Boabdil was declared king. On April 29, Boabdil wrote to Queen Isabella announcing his triumph against his uncle and reaffirming the obedience he had sworn to her in Loja. He had also reached an agreement with her, as she had suggested, that “he would turn over Granada, when he could, in exchange for places in the eastern part of the kingdom, which was then loyal to El Zagal.”36 At this point, according to the historian L. P. Harvey, he was almost certainly a “secret ally” of Isabella and Ferdinand. 37
Ferdinand and Isabella next proceeded to a rich target, the seaport city and fortress of Málaga. They understood that it would be the most important battle of the war, because the seaport was the vital link between the Muslims of Granada and Muslims elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It was also probably the most difficult single target, as it consisted of three separate fortresses. If they were to win it, then victory over the inland city of Granada would be a virtual certainty. Ferdinand had arrived on May 6, while Isabella got there two weeks later. Her arrival, coming as it did among reports of a plague epidemic, demonstrated her personal resolve to take the port city. The sovereigns established a tent encampment outside its gates.
First they tried to negotiate for Málaga’s surrender, something that they had managed to achieve with a number of other Moorish towns. They warned that if the Muslims did not submit, they would be enslaved. Given that El Zagal had moved away from the front, Ferdinand and Isabella were able to argue that the garrison was unlikely to get much support from other Muslims in Granada. But the defenders adamantly rejected the offer of a negotiated settlement. So Ferdinand and Isabella began a tight blockade and siege to starve the inhabitants into submission.
The bombardment began; the city was besieged for three long months. Food ran low, and the residents began to starve. Morale also flagged among the Castilian troops, and some deserted. Málaga’s Muslim commander threatened to kill the six hundred Christian prisoners inside the city if the Castilians did not withdraw. Ferdinand responded that he “would kill every Muslim in Spain” if the Christian slaves were injured.38 At last the city surrendered, but the ferocity of the battle had hardened the sovereigns’ hearts, and they were punitive toward the inhabitants.
All the surviving residents of Málaga became the property of the king and queen. Women slaves were given to Christian noblewomen. The pope was given one hundred slaves; Cardinal Mendoza received seventy. The Jews of Málaga were allowed to keep their property but were forcibly relocated until their ransom, some 10,000 gold castellanos, could be paid. Chief judge and rabbi Abraham Senior, Isabella’s childhood friend from Segovia, raised the money for the ransom of the Jews and paid it. No one stepped forward to pay the ransoms of the Muslims. Of about 5,000 people captured, about 4,400 ended up sold into slavery.39 The mosques were turned into churches. The six hundred Christian captives, as sick and wizened in appearance as the slaves in Ronda, were freed, fed, and nursed back to health.
With the collapse of Málaga, western Granada now belonged entirely to the Castilians, and only a handful of major Granadan towns remained under Nasrid control. Guadix, Baza, and the capital, Granada, were important towns and cities in the interior of the kingdom; Almería was Granada’s last major seaport.
In 1488, after spending some time in Ferdinand’s realms, Isabella and Ferdinand captured the towns of Vera, Vélez-Blanco, and Vélez-Rubio. That year the urgency of their cause increased, because word came that the Turks were on the move once again, this time with a land army of some 100,000 soldiers and a fleet of 505 galleys.
Baza was the next major siege. The Castilian troops arrived in June 1489. It became a long, hard slog. They made little progress and considered departing. King Ferdinand sent messengers to the queen, who was in Jaén, asking her advice, and she insisted that the Castilians stand their ground, saying that she would find a way to provide whatever was needed to win the victory. She urged her troops to take courage from the Castilians’ growing record of success, and to have confidence that they were doing God’s bidding. “It is the same enemies and now they are weaker,” she told her husband and his troops. She promised, moreover, to keep God on their side by offering perpetual prayers for their support. This message cheered and roused the troops. “Therefore we fix our foot,” Peter Martyr concluded, meaning that they would not back down and would not withdraw from the siege.40
By 1489 the Castilian troops encamped around Baza had become a cohesive fighting force, and the comity and high morale among them were evident to everyone. The soldiers came from all different parts of Spain—from Asturias, from Galicia, from the Basque country, and from Extremadura—and joined with the Castilians and Aragonese. All spoke different dialects but nevertheless got along surprisingly well, united in a sense of combined public purpose. They were becoming a nation, organized under a religious banner. “It is incredible to believe that among so many idioms of various nations, different manners, various disciplines of eighty thousand foot and fifteen thousand horse there should be the greatest concord” in the camp, Martyr told Milanese Cardinal Giovanni Arcimboldo. “So great is the reverence of the Royal Majesty that to this day, no tumult has arisen to disturb anything; there are no thefts, no highwaymen on the roads; no private quarrels. But if by chance any arise, the rest are deterred by severe reprimands to the authors.”41
The military discipline reminded the humanist scholar of the ancient Greeks. “Yet all anonymous, shut up in one camp, so practice warfare, so obey the orders of the chiefs and prefects, that you would suppose them all brought up in one house with one language and the same discipline,” he wrote. “You would believe our camp to be a city founded on Plato’s Republic.”42
In the fall of 1489, Queen Isabella moved from Jaén to the nearby town of Ubeda, close enough to keep an eye on events in Baza. In November, she decided to go to Baza itself, as she had in Málaga, to boost morale. Her presence caused the Moors’ resistance to crumble. She arrived in a stately procession, accompanied by her eldest child, nineteen-year-old Princess Isabel. With Queen Isabella present, the town leaders and residents felt confident that the terms of surrender would be merciful and would be observed. Soon they reached an agreement with her that allowed the elite to take their possessions and depart, while the townspeople were left to live according to their customs.
The agreement they reached gave the Muslim soldiers of Baza money in exchange for helping the Castilians attack El Zagal’s remaining strongholds. Sidi Yahya, the principal leader in Baza, left for Guadix, where El Zagal was living, and convinced him that resistance was futile. By December 22, El Zagal had surrendered the port city of Almería, and he gave up Guadix on December 30. He sold all his personal property in Andalusia for 20,000 castellanos and departed to a new home in North Africa. Arab sources said he did it to spite his nephew Boabdil. According to Nubdhat Al-Asr:
Many people assert that [El Zagal] and his commanders sold these villages and districts ruled by them to the ruler of Castile, and that they received a price for them. All this was with a view to taking revenge on the son of his brother… and on his commanders who stayed in Granada, with just the city under their government and with benefit of a truce from the enemy. By his action, he wanted to cut Granada off, so as to destroy it in the way that the rest of the country had been destroyed.43
The surrender of Almería had great strategic importance: it meant that the entire southern coastline was closed off from Granada and that the Nasrid dynasty had lost its last outlet to the sea and the possibility of reinforcement. King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, andPrincess Isabel all participated in the official surrender of the city. Alemán’s woodcarving shows a bearded man with a turban, probably El Zagal, approaching King Ferdinand, almost on his knees, to kiss the king’s feet. Meanwhile, over the door, a Muslim raises his hands in either greeting or lamentation.44
This series of episodes in 1489, and specifically the siege at Baza and Isabella’s role in its surrender, left a lasting mark, among other things, on the games we play today. Chess was enormously popular in Spain at the time, and soon after this battle the Queen became the single most powerful piece on the chessboard, able to move great distances in all directions; her mission is to protect and defend the key piece on the board, the King. Some versions of chess had had a Queen figure before Isabella’s birth, but it was at this time that the game, originally invented in India, underwent a complete metamorphosis and the Queen became a dominant figure. The changes in the game were chronicled in a popular book on the new rules of chess, published in Salamanca about 1496, written by Ramírez de Lucena. He described the game now as “queen’s chess,” and her new powers allowed her to “advance as far as she liked, as long as her path was clear.”45 Queen Isabella had memorialized herself as a powerful player in the game of war.
Isabella and Ferdinand’s most recent victories had been crucial to completing the Reconquest. By 1490 the Nasrid dynasty was finished, but the war was not yet over. In 1490 and 1491 the sovereigns began their siege of Granada’s capital. The Muslims hoped that when winter came, the Spaniards would depart to escape the harsh cold, but these hopes were dashed when the Granadans saw them building a permanent garrison town outside Granada, which they named Santa Fe, or Holy Faith. But the Granadans hung on, hoping against hope. Starvation set in, and conditions inside the city became desperate.
The final year of the campaign, 1491, was a year of perpetual skirmishes as the Muslims found ways to strike at their attackers. The exact role played by Boabdil, now the emir of Granada, is unclear. He had promised to give Granada to Isabella and Ferdinand, but now that the end was near, he seemed immobilized. A group of leading Granadan noblemen, clerics, and dignitaries met with him and pointed out the emirate’s dismal situation, its food shortages, and the deaths of its strongest warriors, leaving no one else to fight. And there was no help on the horizon. “Our brethren the Muslims who live across the sea in the Magrib have already been approached, and none of them has come to help or risen to our assistance,” this delegation said.46
Boabdil told them to discuss the problem among themselves and to suggest what should be done. The city elders decided to send an emissary to the Spanish sovereigns to ask for a negotiated settlement, and Boabdil agreed. Many scholars now believe that Boabdil had already reached a secret agreement with the Castilians but feared he would be killed if his subjects knew. By pushing the problem onto others’ shoulders, they shared responsibility for the opening of peace talks.
By this time, too, Boabdil appears to have been primarily looking out for his own interests. In his negotiations with the Castilians, who were represented by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, a fluent speaker of Arabic, Boabdil asked for personal reassurances: “Tell me what certainty can [I] have that the king and the queen will let my lord the king have the Alpujarras, which is the first clause in our negotiations, and that they will treat him as a relative as promised?”47
“The obligation, and the [grant of] lands will last, Mr. Governor, sir, for so long as His Excellency remains in the services of their highnesses,” Gonzalo was said to have answered.48 In other words, Boabdil was required to accept a permanent state of vassalage to Isabella and Ferdinand.
The final settlement, according to Harvey, was really dependent “on a private and secret understanding” between Boabdil and the Spanish sovereigns. And so the surrender of Granada was secured.
The public agreement, which was widely circulated, gave the Muslims of Andalusia the right to stay in their homes, keep their possessions, operate under their own sharia system of law, and leave for North Africa at the expense of Castile, as long as they left within three years. Muslims were to be allowed to keep their own faith without being compelled to convert to Christianity. The Muslims had to free their Christian slaves at the time of surrender. Christians were forbidden to enter mosques.
Two specific provisions applied to the Jews living in the Nasrid empire. They were not permitted to collect any taxes or hold any power over Muslims. And the rights that had been granted to the Muslims would apply to Jews residing in Granada for the next three years only, after which, if they did not become Christian, they would have to move to North Africa.
Under the agreement, the Alhambra was to be handed over on January 6, the Christian holiday known as Epiphany, to commemorate the day the Magi arrived bearing gifts for the infant Christ. But Boabdil suggested they speed up the transfer because the residents of Granada were becoming agitated about losing their homeland. They advanced the date, and Boabdil got a “suitable written receipt,” in Harvey’s words, confirming the deal had been concluded.49
And so, at the beginning of 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand at long last took the capital of Granada. On January 2, Boabdil ceremonially handed over the keys to the city, and the two sovereigns, accompanied by fourteen-year-old Prince Juan, passed through the gates. Zurita recalled it as a day of “incredible fiesta and happiness.”50 They entered with surprising serenity, considering the circumstances. Boabdil had sent his son to them as a hostage to ensure a peaceful transfer of the city into Castilian hands. When the city was secured, the boy was returned to his family.51 Crosses and Castilian flags were planted at the highest points of the fortresses, while priests sang hymns and celebrated mass.
Boabdil, who had just traded away his birthright, departed over a bridge that came to be known as the Bridge of Sighs, with his once-proud mother at his heels, reportedly carping at him for his failure to hold it for his descendants. El Zagal had already left for North Africa; Boabdil followed soon thereafter. The Spanish sovereigns clearly wanted him to leave, regardless of the assurances they had given him at the time of the surrender, and he was unhappy living under Spanish domination. He is believed to have died inFez. What happened to these men’s harems is unknown.
Taking possession of the city was a momentous experience for Ferdinand and Isabella and their children. The beautiful Alhambra of Granada, the Moorish-built palace of the Nasrid dynasty, struck the sovereigns as lovely, and they wandered its byways and gardens with awe and appreciation, wondering about the flowing designs of Arabic script. Its walls were inscribed with Arabic poetry and holy writ. One inscription, which Isabella noted, was repeated over and over: ONLY GOD IS THE VICTOR, or ONLY GOD IS ALL POWERFUL.52
Inside the palace, whose immense size awed the visitors, were visible signs of the Muslim domination of the peninsula. At the entrance, an eyewitness said, they discovered seventeen Castilian standards, each representing a specific victory against Christian forces, including one that was more than 150 years old.53 And this fairytale palace, they learned, had been built with Christian slave labor.
Another discovery also jarred the sensibilities of the Castilians. A group of nearby caves had been used as prisons, and many of the captives had been allowed to starve to death during the siege. The German traveler Jerónimo (Hieronymus) Münzer, who went there a few years later, said he was told that only 1,500 of the 7,000 Christian slaves were found alive when Isabella and Ferdinand arrived. They emerged, emaciated and filthy.
About 750 of these captives were at death’s door. As they left the dungeons, they sang songs about Jesus as their savior, and they threw themselves on the ground before the feet of Isabella and Ferdinand, crying and shouting prayers of thanksgiving. It took two large carts to haul away the chains with which they had been bound.
Most had managed to retain their Christian faith despite the difficult circumstances. Isabella asked one wizened captive who had been held for forty-four years whether his faith had sustained him: “What would you have thought in the first year of your captivity if you had been told that Jesus Christ had not been born to be your redeemer?” The man answered, “I would have died of the pain.”54
Nine Christian captives—two Lombards and seven Castilians—had turned away from Christianity and become Muslim. That was heresy and apostasy and could not be permitted, so the king ordered them killed. They were beaten and then burned at the stake, the common penalty for heresy.
The victory over Granada won acclaim for Isabella and Ferdinand throughout Europe, because it was the first significant triumph against Islam in hundreds of years, and to many Europeans, it was partial payback for the loss of Constantinople. “Perpetual peace resulted from the conquest of Granada,” wrote Zurita. “It was famed and celebrated through all the realms of Christendom, and it extended to the farthest and most remote lands of the Turk and Sultan.… It was an end to a war so continuous and cruel, that had lasted for centuries, with a nation so barbaric and fierce, such an enemy and an infidel.”55
Ferdinand moved quickly to make sure he was given full credit for the achievement. “We desire you to know that it has pleased our Lord to give complete victory to the King and destruction to the Kingdom of Granada and to the foes of Our Catholic faith and after many labours, costs, deaths and much shedding of our subjects’ blood, on second January of this year of Grace 1492,” he wrote exultantly that very day in a letter to the rulers of Venice. “… Henceforth you have here a Catholic land.”56
In addition to Alemán’s fifty-four choir stall carvings commemorating the war, another set of artworks memorialized it as well. They are part of the altarpiece of the Royal Chapel of Granada. They consisted of painted wood carvings of the surrender, fashioned within living memory of that early day in January 1492. One carving shows Isabella and Ferdinand entering Granada on horseback; her clothes cover her entire body, with only her face uncovered. She made it a custom to dress in the local style of her citizens, and here she appears to have dressed in a garment similar to a burka, though wearing a broad-brimmed hat. She even wore drapes under the hat to cover her neck.
In a second carving, Boabdil approaches the king and queen to hand them the keys of Granada. A long line of Christian captives straggle out of the fortress behind him. A third panel shows Muslim men submitting to baptism in a fountain. A fourth shows heavily draped Muslim women being baptized, their mournful eyes visible under the heavy veils.
Clearly, assimilation of this new province into Spain was not going to be painless. But a new institution of religious supervision and control had already been established by the Spanish sovereigns, and it was ready to be deployed against the Muslims as well.