“In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” And Isabella banished the Jews.
On March 31, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand issued the royal edict that forced Jews to convert and be baptized or leave Spain.
Born in April 1451, this remarkable queen was the daughter of Castille’s King Juan. She came of age in a Europe with one foot in the medieval age and one in the blooming Renaissance. The modern nation called Spain did not yet exist at Isabella’s birth and her adolescence came during the Moorish occupation of Granada, the southernmost region of Spain and the last bastion of Islamic power on the Iberian peninsula. In Isabella’s century, there was only one goal, one holy quest —la Reconquista and the removal of the “heathens.”
After her father’s death, the convent-educated Isabella was brought to the court of her older half-brother, King Enrique IV, a notoriously open homosexual and childless. Named heir to Castille’s throne, she set out to find a husband herself, and settled on a match with her second cousin, Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon.
Younger than Isabella by a year, the prince was in modern parlance, “a hunk.” The tall, blue-eyed beauty Isabella and the muscular Ferdinand would have been People magazine’s dream Royals.
In 1469, the 18-year-old Isabella wed 17-year-old Ferdinand, with an assist from a papal dispensation that allowed the marriage despite their close blood ties. Rodrigo Borgia, the most infamous of that notorious family, had arranged for the “Bull of Dispensation” that enabled the cousins to marry and he was rewarded with a dukedom for his eldest son. Father of Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo Borgia was elevated as Pope Alexander in fateful 1492.
As part of their unprecedented “pre-nup,” Isabella held equal authority –an astonishing role for a woman in those times. Their shared power was expressed in an official motto, Tanto monta, monta tanto –Isabel como Fernando. (“It comes to the same thing, Isabel is the same as Fernando.”)
Supported by Spain’s powerful clerics, Ferdinand and Isabella aimed to unite Spain. Late in 1491, with an army that bridged the medieval world of armored knights and lancers with the new era’s first artillery weapons, they surrounded Granada. A force of some eighty thousand men, including ten thousand knights, began the siege that would complete la Reconquista in January 1492.
But ridding Spain of the Moors was only part of their holy war. In their quest for a kingdom free of heathens and heresy, los reyes catolicos viewed Jews and other “unbelievers” as another threat. In 1478, they had brought the Inquisition –the “Holy Office”– back to Spain, urged on by clerics who claimed that many of the Spanish Jews who had converted —conversos— secretly continued practicing their religion, posing a grave threat to Christianity. The notorious court that imprisoned, tortured or killed those suspected of heresy was led by Isabella’s confessor, Tomas de Torquemada, a descendant of a converso himself whose name became synonymous with the Spanish Inquisition’s worst excesses.
Torquemada wrote the royal edict of March 31, 1492 that ordered the Jews from Spain, unless they were baptized. Over time, some thirteen thousand people were found guilty of carrying out secret Jewish practices, often making their confessions after torture. During this time, at least 2,000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition. Thousands of others were imprisoned or had their properties confiscated. The number of Jews expelled from Spain is uncertain, and old estimates ranged from 200,000 to as many as 800,000. Contemporary historians argue that such numbers were exaggerated by centuries of English propaganda aimed at Spain and Roman Catholicism –the so-called “Black Legend.”
Some of those expelled Jews found a welcome, although an expensive one, in Rome where Pope Alexander received them, as long as they could meet his price for sanctioning their conversions.
To Isabella, the Inquisition was a useful political tool as well, consolidating the power of the “Catholic monarchs.” As James Reston, Jr. wrote in Dogs of God, “Of particular interest to Ferdinand was the provision in the pope’s bull which authorized the crown to fine the culprits and confiscate their holdings, and to deposit the sizable proceeds into the hard-pressed royal treasury.”
In other words, the Spanish Inquisition and the banishment of the Jews financed the war against the Moors. It would also help underwrite the voyages of Columbus and Spain’s New World empire.
(This material is adapted from America’s Hidden History
