Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [66]
However, while historians’ preoccupation with the persecution of the Jews in the fifteenth century is understandable, it obscures the roots of the oppression suffered by the Muslim population in the following century. The Muslims were left out of the account, and to modern eyes it seems implausible that an attribution of blood taint—as Christ killers—could suddenly be applied to them in later years. It was well known that Islam had developed centuries after the death of Christ. Yet by a process of syllogistic argument Muslims too, stage by stage, acquired an ineradicable taint like the Jews. Did they not, so many Christians believed, worship the Antichrist, Mohammed, and had they not despoiled the Holy Land itself? Had the Jews not aided the Muslims and were Muslims not therefore as guilty as those who had actually killed him? So, while in the drive for purity of blood the main victims were Jews and Jewish converts, the Moors were usually yoked with them in the litanies of hatred.
THE POSITION OF GRANADA, THE LAST NON-CHRISTIAN ENCLAVE IN the peninsula after the mid–thirteenth century, was in a permanent state of flux. Granada could become an ally or an enemy of the Christian realms with bewildering speed, as one faction or another took control either in the Christian kingdoms or in Granada itself. In Granada power shifted back and forth from one part of the royal family to another. One ruler, Mohammed IX “the Left-Handed,” took the throne on no fewer than four separate occasions. However, despite the instability of Granadine politics, the military might of the last Moorish state grew during the fifteenth century. While Castile, in particular, had begun to develop gunpowder weapons and a siege train with cannon and bombards, the Granadines concentrated on building a profusion of small fortified towns and peel towers. These could be used as bases for a type of highly mobile border warfare that was becoming increasingly prevalent along the frontier.
Two styles of campaigning began to emerge from the 1400s. The Castilians with their superiority in weapons, money, and manpower could usually take even a strongly fortified citadel after a long siege. But not always. In 1407 the three great guns of Infante Ferdinand, son of King John II of Castile, had successfully breached the walls of the Granadine town of Zahara, and moved on to nearby Setenil. Here the guns were set up and battered the town day and night to such an extent that within a few weeks the Castilians had run out of stones to fire. Each knight and man-at-arms was thereafter given a daily quota of rocks to find to keep the guns from falling silent. But as autumn passed, the citizens continued to hold out, repairing the damage by night. By the end of October, Ferdinand had still not brought the city to the point of surrender and he did not want to be trapped over the winter in enemy territory, where the Granadine light cavalry (jinetes) could cut off his supply train. So the Christian besiegers withdrew in some disorder, to the taunts of the defenders on the walls.52
The Granadine method of war depended on speed and mobility—classic border raiding. The jinetes had adapted the loose riding style of North Africa (which Géricault would later, to great effect, depict for the salons of nineteenth-century France). The horsemen rode small and lightly built stallions, bred for sure-footedness over rough and stony ground, and wore only light armor, usually chain mail or, at most,