The Conquistadors (2 page)

Nevertheless, disunity amongst themselves was overlaid by the unity of faith. They might resent, in their pride, the growing power of the Pope, but they were ardent soldiers of Christ, their priests assuming greater and greater power in the affairs of state and also in martial matters, even leading them into battle. Minstrels immortalised the heroic deeds of their knights. Great bardic poems like the
Poema del Cid
exercised an extraordinary moral influence, so that chivalry was raised to a peak of romantic heroism.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn-out crusade had pushed the Moors back into the southern stronghold of Granada, and the petty states of Christian Spain had coalesced into the three kingdoms of Portugal, Castile and Leon, and Aragon, with the little kingdom of Navarre still land-locked and independent within the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. We are now at the threshold of an era in which Spain was to emerge as a nation, and which was to give her, almost reluctantly, the New World and a great colonial empire.

The pioneers of this golden age of discovery were the Portuguese. The capture of the Moorish city of Ceuta in 1415 started them on their long and expensive quest for a route to the spice islands of the Moluccas. From the Tagus ship after ship sailed out into the Atlantic, probing an ocean that was believed by many to pour its waters over the lip of the world in a roaring cascade.

Their close contact with the Moors gave the seafarers not only the means of navigation, but a new type of vessel, the caravel. The descendants of this vessel can be seen in the Tagus to this day, the broad-beamed, shallow-draft wine ships known as
fragatas.
The caravel, with its lateen sails derived from the Arab dhow, was the first ocean-going vessel capable of making to windward without the use of oars. This was the key to Portuguese discovery, and the man who used it was the son of King John I of Portugal and a daughter of England's John of Gaunt – Henry the Navigator.

This extraordinary prince, who became obsessed with the desire to explore beyond the confines of existing maps and charts, set up his court at Sagres on a remote headland in the extreme south-west corner of his kingdom. This headland is the one we now know as Cape St Vincent, a low-cliffed promontory running out into the sea, the one place on the whole of that rugged coast where you look south, as well as west, across the Atlantic. It was a position from which the imagination of every seaman could easily be stirred. Anyone who has sailed his own boat past that jutting point of land, running hard under full sail before the
prevailing north wind of summer – the Portuguese trades – will understand how, in the days of predominantly square-rigged ships, the sailors' attention would inevitably be rivetted to discovery southward.

Here, in what amounted to a naval operations centre, Henry gathered together cartographers, astronomers, books and charts. Here he briefed his navigators, sending them down the coast of Africa in repeated attempts to probe beyond the reefs of Cape Bojador, from which point all previous voyagers had been swept into oblivion by the combination, deadly to square-riggers, of the north-east trades and the north equatorial drift. His attempts went unrewarded for fourteen years. In 1434, however, one of his most daring navigators, Gil Eannes, sailed seaward to the tip of this fifteen-mile barrier of reefs and then beat back in his caravel, against the wind, to the flat sand coast of the Sahara. Bojador, which had been the southern limit of the Atlantic for a thousand years, was finally conquered, and after that Henry's captains probed rapidly south along the African coast. Existing maps, which dated back to the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa almost six hundred years before Christ, all showed the continent much fore-shortened. By 1458 the Portuguese had reached the Rio Grande, reporting the coast running away to the south-east, so that at the time of Henry's death, in 1460, it seemed as though they were on the verge of success. But a year later they probed the Bight of Biafra and found the coast of Africa continuing south. It was a bitter disappointment.

Thereafter Portuguese interest in African coastal exploration declined. But a country, so dedicated and so geared to mercantile expansion, does not suddenly cease all exploration because its hopes have been dashed. Having failed in one direction, they would undoubtedly have probed in another. They had the ships, the men and the experience. The question that has fascinated students of maritime history ever since is, where did their ships go after 1461? Whereas, before, they had been prepared to publish their knowledge, now, like the Phoenician traders, their policy became one of absolute secrecy. The death penalty was introduced for revealing information about their voyages, and as late as 1503 the Basque cartographer, Juan de la Cosa, who three years earlier had drawn his
mappemunde,
was only released from arrest after he had falsified two charts for dispatch to Spain.

Portugal, by concentrating her efforts on maritime expansion, became virtually dissociated from the mainstream of events on the Iberian Peninsula. This left the two other large kingdoms of Castile and Aragon free to develop into a separate national power. These two kingdoms were very dissimilar in character. Castile, with Leon, ran from the Biscay coast of the Basques, south across the mountains and west-flowing rivers of central Spain, through all the land that her soldiers had won from the Moors, to the fortified stronghold of Islamic Granada. The long history of war caused all towns to be fortresses, their citizens to be trained in arms. Those who had settled newly conquered land, frontiersmen who faced the full brunt of retaliation, had been granted extraordinary privileges. Thus town and
country were inhabited by free men living under their own democratic laws, governed by their own elected officers; this at a time when almost all the rest of Europe was feudal, the mass of the people existing in a state of serfdom. Aragon, on the other hand, became a mercantile kingdom when the union with Catalonia, and later the conquest of Valencia, gave her control of all the east-facing Mediterranean ports. Where Castile was supported by the armies of her militia and her nobility, Aragon relied on her sailors and her ships. With them she conquered the Balearic Isles, Sardinia, even Sicily.

On October 19, 1469, Ferdinand, the eighteen-year-old king of Sicily and heir to the Aragon throne, married Isabella, nineteen-year-old sister of Castile's king Henry IV. The importance of this match was evident ten years later when, with the death of Ferdinand's father, Aragon and Castile were joined in the persons of this energetic, well-matched pair. Spain was born. But not without a struggle.
With the death of the almost imbecile King Henry IV, the position of Castile was lower than it had been at any time since the collapse of the Visigoth kingdom. Portugal's King Alfonso supported the claims of Joanna, Henry's daughter. The thirteen-year-old Joanna was betrothed to prince John of Portugal and the pair proclaimed sovereigns of Castile. The War of Succession had begun.

In the low ebb of the kingdom's fortunes, Ferdinand and Isabella could barely muster 500 horse. Two months later, however, they had gathered together an army of over 40,000. But it was mainly composed of ill-disciplined militia from the towns. Defeated at Toro, Ferdinand fell back on guerilla tactics, sending light cavalry from Estremadura and Andalusia to wreak havoc in the undefended valleys of Portugal itself. Another battle at Toro resulted in a crushing defeat of Alfonso and his Portuguese. Nevertheless, the war lasted four and a half years and by the end of it Ferdinand and Isabella had taken the measure of each other's qualities, their fortitude and resilience in the face of adversity. They were ready to face their main task, the final eviction of the infidels and the unification of their country. But first it was essential to reorganize their own kingdom.

The power of the nobility had always been the most disruptive force in Castile; indeed, the kingdom's name originated from the multiplicity of their castle strongholds. In the long struggle against the Moors the higher echelons of the nobility, the
ricos hombres,
provided the bulk of the sovereign's armies from the retainers on their estates. These forces were led by the lesser nobility, the
hidalgos,
and by the
caballeros,
the knights who constituted the cavalry and were an essential counterpart of the vicious and highly successful Arab light horse. The towns and their militia were primarily defensive. Not surprisingly, considering the costs and the risks they bore, the nobility shared the spoils of war with their sovereign. As a result, their estates became ever larger, and through the years all sections of the nobility grew in power and riches. They were exempt from taxation, a privileged class living largely above the law; they could not be imprisoned for debt or subjected to torture, and could even renounce allegiance to their sovereign and serve his enemies. Thus, whenever the central authority was undermined by a weak king, the country split up into innumerable small states.

At the succession of Ferdinand and Isabella, the nobility were all-powerful, their estates larger and richer than ever before. There was one organization, however, outside their control. This was the Holy Brotherhood of the cities, the
Santa Hermandad,
a sort of police force formed for the maintenance of civil order. Its concern was the prevention of ordinary crime, but as the abuses of the nobility were such that their own or their retainers' actions often contravened the ordinary criminal code, Isabella's re-establishment and expansion of the Hermandad met with great opposition. However, she had her way, and with a new code of laws, the
Ordenanças Reales,
agreed in 1485, a court of two alcaldes in every town of thirty families to administer it, and a mounted and well-equipped police to enforce it, the bandits and warlords that had produced such chaos throughout the country were rapidly suppressed. The Hermandad was a potent instrument in the hands of a determined sovereign. It worked because it was a disciplined, highly trained force that could be deployed in strength and immediately in any part of the kingdom.

One by one, the great families, whose long-standing feuds had fostered anarchy, were banished to their estates, the lands and castles they had annexed returned to the crown. The whole legal system was overhauled, the power of the privy council, which had been packed by the nobility and clergy, was curtailed, the position of the
alcaldes de corte,
the high court, strengthened, the supreme court of appeal permanently established at Valladolid. Merit became the path to preferment and the nobility were curbed from aping royalty and from building new castles. Moreover, the right of the crown to nominate its own nationals to vacant sees was re-established, and Isabella was able to promote men of learning and piety to positions of ecclesiastical power. Nevertheless, it was this outstandingly able woman who opened her realm to one of the greatest abuses of history.

The man who brought the Inquisition to Spain was her confessor, Tomás de Torquemada. The Jews were very numerous and they were believed to have assisted the Moorish invasion; certainly they were accepted by the Moors. Great travellers, physicians, writers, scientists, they contributed more than any other race to the culture and knowledge of the period. But they were born moneylenders, and as such they were hated. Their riches made them envied, and as the Moorish power declined, they were subjected to increasing persecution. Conversion to Christianity became ever more expedient, and consequently ever more open to the charge of apostacy. Fanatical churchmen, particularly the Dominicans, called for the introduction of the Holy Office. And since failure to satisfy such an enquiry involved confiscation of property, Ferdinand was not unagreeable. On November 1, 1478, the Pope issued a bull authorising the appointment of inquisitors.

What started in 1231 as a counter to the revival of Manichaean doctrines in parts of France and Italy, its object conversion rather than punishment, had already become a much wider and more insidious instrument. In Spain it was to reach its epitome of evil. The first edict issued by the court required all to aid, not only in the apprehension, but also in the accusation of any persons suspected of heresy. In the inflamed mood of the times, those arrested on hearsay, and such flimsy evidence as the wearing of better or cleaner clothes on the Jewish sabbath, or merely the drinking of something prepared in a special way or the eating of meat that had been slaughtered with their own hands, were so numerous that the inquisitors moved their court to the great fortress of Triana. The anonymity of accusers, even of witnesses, was so carefully preserved that only the most garbled version of the charge was ever shown to the victim. Counsel was allowed, but he could not confer with his client. Each variation in the evidence of witnesses was
made the subject of a new charge. The proceedings were secret. There was no appeal. Torture was common-place. To us of the twentieth century this is all horribly familiar, but nothing we have experienced quite matches the ghastly setpiece finale of the
auto de fe.
This was the ultimate penalty – death by burning. Europe was then only just emerging from the Dark Ages. It was a period not notable for its sensibility. But the act of faith, with its priests and its elaborate ceremony, was something more than a public execution; it was the nearest the then known world had come to religious sacrifice since the Phoenicians slaughtered their first-born in worship of Baal. During the eighteen years that Torquemada was Inquisitor-General of Castile and Aragon more than ten thousand people are said to have died in this way. The effect upon an impressionable, superstitious and backward people must have been extreme. And yet, the conquistadors, most of whom must have witnessed an
auto de fe,
professed horror when confronted by another race practising human sacrifice in the name of religion.

The years 1481 – 1492 were largely occupied by the war against Granada, and some account of this is necessary, since the behaviour of Ferdinand and his captains set the pattern for colonial conquest.