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By Root 1246 0

suggests Isabella, but the question could be asked in another way, and to that the answer is beyond question. Was the victory Castile’s, or Aragon’s? Castile led, and Isabella was the embodiment of the long tradition of Castilian political ideology. Ferdinand inherited the same tradition: John I of Castile had been greatgrandfather to both of them. Indeed, the very closeness of their genetic connection had posed a considerable problem. When they married they did so without the essential papal dispensation that allowed a union between cousins. They had relied on a document that had been forged. So it was not a matter of Isabella representing the values of Castile and Ferdinand those of Aragon. They were heirs to a common heritage.

But there was a distinction between them. Ferdinand had been born in Aragon, while Isabella was a child of Castile, born at Madrigal de las Altas Torres, close to Medina del Campo. She was also the king of Castile, direct inheritor of the long monarchical tradition of Castile and Leon, of Asturias and the near-legendary Visigothic kingdom. Moreover, the idea of home and birthplace, of the land that Spaniards call the patria chica (untranslatable, really, but the closest is perhaps “home ground”), was at the heart of the “Spain” that both of the Catholic Kings fought to restore. The concept of restitution, taking complete possession of a land stolen from “Spaniards” and from Christendom by the Muslims (and their allies, the Jews), existed regardless of the political realities of the Iberian peninsula.

The plans that Ferdinand and Isabella began to put in place during their few months of residence in the Alhambra in 1492 were founded in the ideas and aspirations of history. But they were also suffused with a new spirit of opportunity. The old accommodations and equivocations of the past were no longer necessary. They expected that the Muslims would convert en masse, as the Jews had done during the earlier part of the century. Isabella’s own confessor, Hernando de Talavera, was appointed archbishop of Granada, and he immediately began to implement plans to explain the truth and right of Christianity to leading Muslims in the city. Conversion had to be genuine and not forced if it were to be solid and sincere. However, the problems with this policy had already emerged in the case of the Jews. Those who had converted were, according to the Inquisition, likely to “relapse” into their old customs and habits of life. The existence of both practicing Jews and New Christian converts within Spain suggested the impediments in the godly path to conversion. The answer to so-called Judaizers, who undermined the New Christian faith of converts, was to remove these tempters from the soil of Spain.

The process began in Granada on March 31, 1492, when the victorious Ferdinand and Isabella decreed the definitive expulsion of Spain’s believing Jews. A forewarning of the monarchs’ attitude had been contained in the deed of capitulation signed with the Muslims of Granada in November 1491. This had envisaged the “transfer of the Jews of Granada to North Africa.” Two decrees, issued simultaneously in Castile and Aragon, were unambiguous:

The said Jews … of our kingdoms [are] to depart and never to return or come back to them … Jews … of whatever age they may be … with their sons and daughters, manservants and maidservants, Jewish familiars, those who are great as well as the lesser folk, of whatever age they may be, and they shall not dare to return to those places, nor to reside in them … under pain that they incur the penalty of death and the confiscation of all their possessions.

The grounds were that the Jews’ continued presence would corrupt the re-Christianized peninsula. The decree was finally promulgated in April 1492, and it did not apply to Christians of Jewish origin: the option of conversion remained open. In May, Ferdinand instructed the inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada not to impede any Jew who expressed a wish to become a Christian and return to Spain. Even after the expulsion was completed, Ferdinand