While the Ragusans benefited from their special relationship with the Turks, the Genoese and Venetians were more cautious in building ties to the Ottoman court. The sultan was anxious not to turn them away, but they viewed the eastern Mediterranean as increasingly dangerous. Difficulties were compounded by occasional arguments between the Venetians and the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, who required ever larger amounts in taxes in order to prop up their regime. The Mamluks were also a regional threat. In 1424–6 they invaded Cyprus and carried away its king, Janus, along with 6,000 captives; a ransom of 200,000 ducats had to be paid before Janus was restored to the throne, and it is said that he never laughed again. In 1444 they besieged Rhodes. In 1460 they supported a claimant to the throne of Cyprus, sending eighty ships against the island, to the horror of Christendom, for no one could understand why James of Lusignan, a bastard, would wish to enlist Egyptian aid in a bid for a throne to which he was not entitled.1
As Ottoman and Mamluk pressure on these areas became intolerable, the Genoese and their rivals increasingly turned their attention towards the West, buying sugar in Sicily and Spain and grain in Sicily and Morocco. The mid-fifteenth century saw a veritable economic renaissance in Genoa, at first sight against all the odds: the city was still consumed by internal strife, but large segments of the population were able to benefit from trade and investment, and the city boomed. Especially attractive were shares in the new public bank, the Banco di San Giorgio, which eventually acquired dominion over Corsica.2 The loss of easy access by the Genoese to the alum mines of Phokaia in Asia Minor was compensated by the discovery in 1464 of alum mines on the doorstep of Rome itself, at Tolfa; Pope Pius II described the discovery as ‘our greatest victory against the Turk’. It reduced dependence on ‘the Turk’, and yet it did not reduce dependence on the Genoese, who switched their attention to central Italy, and built a new alum monopoly there. The technology of sugar production travelled westwards ahead of the merchants, and the eastern sugar industry began to decline.3 Sophisticated sugar-mills, or trappeti, were developed in Sicily. In Valencia, the furthest north sugar cane could be made to grow, businessmen from as far away as Germany set up plantations; the need for ceramic vessels used in processing raw sugar stimulated the local pottery industry as well, bringing further fame to Valencia in the form of its ‘Hispano-Moresque’ pottery that can be found in many modern museums.4 The drive to the west was so powerful that it continued through the Straits of Gibraltar, reaching Madeira in the 1420s, and then the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde islands and São Tomé – most of these were Portuguese acquisitions, but the capital and know-how came from the Genoese, while the first sugar-stocks in Madeira are said to have come from Sicily.5
Stopping-points on the way out to the Atlantic acquired new importance. Granada, though a Muslim state until 1492, became a centre of operations for Genoese, Florentine and Catalan businessmen, who regularly visited Almería and Málaga, buying silk, dried fruits and ceramics. It is hard to see how the Nasrid sultans of Granada could have maintained themselves in power (or built the Alhambra palaces) without the financial support they gained from the Christian merchants. They liked to think it was their fervent Islam that held Granada together, but foreign funds were no less important.6 Granada was further neutralized by the occasional success of the kings of Castile in imposing tribute payments on the sultans. Border warfare between the Castilians and the Granadans did not cease, though it took on the character of a long-running tournament, and was more successful in generating Spanish ballads about beautiful Moorish princesses than in winning territory.
This fragile stability was placed at risk in August 1415 when the Portuguese sent 100 ships against Ceuta and captured the city after a brief siege in which the king’s son Henry, later known as ‘the Navigator’, earned his spurs. It was a remarkable victory: the Portuguese showed little understanding of the complex currents in the Straits and their fleet was battered by summer storms, so that part of it was blown back towards Spain. This allowed the governor of Ceuta time to summon Moroccan reinforcements, though he then stupidly cancelled his request. The Portuguese dithered about whether to follow their original plans or whether to attack Gibraltar, on Granadan territory, instead; in many ways Gibraltar was the obvious choice, because it had been tossed back and forth between Fez and Granada, following a rebellion on the rock in 1410. But Ceuta was larger, far richer and stands in a less forbidding position, astride a narrow peninsula connecting the low eminence of Monte Hacho to the African continent. Its conquest astonished contemporary Europeans. No one could quite understand what was in the mind of the Portuguese court. The astonishment was compounded by the secrecy of the Portuguese: everyone knew they were building a fleet and hiring foreign ships, but it was widely assumed they planned to attack Granadan territory, despite Castilian insistence that attacks on Granada were reserved to Castile.7
Thus the Portuguese arrived in the Straits as an unwelcome fourth force alongside Marinid Morocco, Nasrid Granada and Castile. Even if the Portuguese aspired to the wealth of Ceuta, they failed to secure it: Muslim merchants avoided the city, which became an empty ghost town inhabited mainly by a Portuguese garrison and by convicts sent there as punishment. The Portuguese presumably hoped that their capture of Ceuta would open up access to the wheatfields of Atlantic Morocco, but the campaign had exactly the opposite effect. Ceuta became a millstone around the necks of the Portuguese. Yet they were too proud to relinquish it and even hoped to gain more Moroccan lands: in 1437 the Portuguese attempted to seize Tangier, and met with ignominious failure (much later, in 1471, they did occupy the town). Prince Henry’s brother Fernando was sent to Fez as a hostage, to be released after the Portuguese handed back Ceuta; Henry agreed and then, to his eternal shame, reneged on the agreement, so that his brother was left to die in prison.8 The long-term result was that Ceuta has remained in Portuguese and, since 1668, Spanish hands.9 Since the sixteenth century, when Luis de Camões wrote his great epic of Portuguese expansion, the Lusiads, the conquest of Ceuta has been seen as the first step towards Portuguese expansion along the coast of Africa:
A thousand swimming birds, spreading
Their concave pinions to the winds,
Parted the white, turbulent waves
To where Hercules set his pillars.10
Evidently, though, the Portuguese could not yet predict the opening of the trade route round Africa to India – the possibility of entering the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic was strenuously denied in Ptolemy’s Geography.
The Mediterranean, not the distant oceans, was the immediate target of Portuguese sailors.11 One of the features of the great restructuring that followed the Black Death was the emergence of new centres of business and new groups of traders; visitors to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, such as the Portuguese, became more frequent. Much of this trade was confined to short, regular routes, intensively exploited. The Portuguese, Basques, Cantabrians and Galicians plied their trade in salted fish as far as Valencia and Barcelona.12 There were some more ambitious long-distance voyages too: an English ship is recorded at Ibiza in 1412; in 1468 King Ferrante of Naples entered into a commercial pact with Edward IV of England.13 The most ambitious English expeditions were launched by merchants of Bristol. In 1457 Robert Sturmy sailed with three vessels for the Levant, but on the return voyage the Genoese attacked his ships off Malta, sinking two of them. When news of this attack reached England, there was a great outcry against the Genoese for blocking north European attempts to compete in the trade of the Mediterranean. The mayor of Southampton summarily arrested all the Genoese he could find.14 These were the violent beginnings of the ties between England and the Mediterranean that would transform the sea in later centuries.
It is no surprise that French ships attempted to create a niche for themselves in the spice trade to Alexandria, launching ships from ports on the Mediterranean.15 Jacques Cœur of Bourges, the son of a prosperous furrier, travelled from Narbonne to Alexandria and Damascus in 1432, and became fascinated by the trading opportunities in the Levant. He entered royal service, where his great talents were quickly recognized; he served King Charles VII as quartermaster, or argentier, responsible for the supply of goods, including luxuries, to the royal court; in the 1440s and 50s he began to fulfil his dream of building ties between France and both Egypt and North Africa. He operated at least four galleys, and, according to a contemporary writer, he was ‘the first of all the French of his time to equip and arm galleys that, loaded with woollen garments and other products of the workshops of France, travelled up and down the coasts of Africa and the East’.16 He began to see Aigues-Mortes, stuck in its stagnant pools near Montpellier, as the obvious base for an ambitious programme of shipbuilding; the city council of Barcelona was worried that he was diverting the spice trade there, and trying to establish a French royal monopoly. Indeed, it is not entirely clear whether the French galleys were owned by the king of France or his hugely ambitious argentier; perhaps it was a matter of little consequence, for the king and his financier shared the profits. Jacques Cœur’s network of agents was bolstered by attempts to gain favours from the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, permitting him to trade on preferential terms. He has been seen as a prototype mercantilist, well attuned to the political advantages of an active trading policy within the Mediterranean.17 His success brought envy, while his contacts with foreign powers as varied as the Mamluk sultan and René of Anjou, ruler of Provence, seemed to suggest he was conducting his own foreign policy. In 1451 his enemies turned against him; he was arrested on charges of peculation and treason, tortured and exiled. Although this trading network did not survive his arrest, the career of Jacques Cœur amply illustrates the new opportunities that ambitious businessmen were able to seize in the mid-fifteenth-century Mediterranean.
All the traffic through the Straits of Gibraltar had to work its way past the great rock itself. Castilian adventurers were determined to recover the town, which had been briefly held by their compatriots in the fourteenth century. In 1436 the count of Niebla was drowned with forty companions while retreating from a failed attack on Gibraltar; his remains were ignominiously displayed in a wicker basket, or barcina, which still gives its name to one of Gibraltar’s gateways. Finally, the duke of Medina Sidonia captured the rock in 1462, taking advantage of the absence of its leading citizens, who had gone to pay homage to the sultan in Granada. Enormously powerful nobles, operating their own war fleet, the dukes of Medina Sidonia took the view that they could do what they wished with the rock, including replacing its inhabitants with a new population. In 1474, 4,350 conversos, New Christians of Jewish origin, settled in Gibraltar; they hoped to escape the tribulations they had experienced in their native Córdoba, and they offered to maintain the town garrison from their own resources. However, the duke soon became convinced that the conversos would offer the town to the king and queen, who were regarded as sympathetic to conversos. He had been planning an expedition against Portuguese Ceuta (such was his love for his Christian neighbours), but he diverted his flotilla against Gibraltar instead, which he easily recovered. This time it was the conversos who were forced to leave. The rock remained in the hands of the Medina Sidonia family until 1501, when Queen Isabella of Castile insisted that so important a strategic position had to lie under royal control.18
Castile had only a limited Mediterranean coast, mainly consisting of the old Muslim kingdom of Murcia, conquered in the thirteenth century. During the fifteenth century, both Castile and Aragon experienced periods of intense internal strife, culminating, during the 1470s, in a struggle between Isabella and the king of Portugal for control of the Castilian Crown. By then, Isabella was married to Ferdinand II, king of Aragon and Sicily. The Crown of Aragon, like Castile, had only recently emerged from a period of civil war. Alfonso V of Aragon, who died in Naples in 1458, regarded his south Italian kingdom as disposable property and bequeathed it to his illegitimate son Ferrante; all the other lands – those on the Spanish mainland, the Balearic islands, Sardinia and Sicily – passed to Alfonso’s brother John, who was already king of Navarre by marriage. He refused to cede Navarre to his popular heir Charles, prince of Viana, whose supporters within Navarre and then within Catalonia held him up as their hero, all the more so when he died in suspicious circumstances, possibly poisoned. Civil war in Navarre was the prelude to civil war in Catalonia. The causes of this conflict lay in social tensions within town and country that were rooted in the great economic transformations that resulted from the Black Death.19
In Barcelona, the popular factions, known as the Busca, demanded lower taxes, participation in the city government, tighter limits on the fees charged by lawyers and physicians, and restrictions on the importation of foreign cloths and on the use of foreign ships.20 Their message (which appealed to the cash-strapped monarchy) was summed up in the single word redreç, best translated as ‘economic recovery’. The Busca gained power on the City Council, but proved unable to solve the problems of Barcelona. By the time of Alfonso V, the Busca was constantly jockeying for power with the Biga, which was a loose party of old patrician families; at the outbreak of the Catalan civil war in 1462, the city was still a divided community. Majorca too was a divided society. During the fifteenth century, there were repeated political explosions, expressed in the rivalry between the inhabitants of the capital and the forenses (‘outsiders’) who inhabited the rest of the island. While Alfonso was absent from his Spanish lands conflict became very intense; Majorca City was placed under siege by the forenses. In addition, plague continued to afflict the island throughout the second half of the fifteenth century (in 1467, 1481 and 1493).21
Yet the picture is not as bleak as all this suggests. In Majorca, wealthy patrons were commissioning impressive works of art. This was the period in which the citizens of Majorca, Valencia, Barcelona and Perpignan erected impressive llotjas, or loggias, which acted as seats of the commercial tribunal known as the Consulate of the Sea, and in which all sorts of commercial business was conducted – the registering of insurance contracts for overseas voyages, the sale of bonds, the exchange of currency.22 The llotja in Majorca, erected in the 1430s, was the work of the eminent Catalan architect Guillem Sagrera, who also designed Alfonso’s great hall in the massive fortress of Castelnuovo in Naples, carrying the late Gothic styles of Spain across the Mediterranean. His breathtaking design for the llotja, with its soaring columns, was partly followed when Pere Compte erected the no less impressive llotja in Valencia between 1483 and 1498. A remarkable Latin inscription running around the top of the inside walls of the llotja in Valencia states:
I am an illustrious house built in fifteen years. Fellow-citizens, rejoice and see how good a thing is business, when it does not give rise to lies in speaking, when it keeps faith with one’s neighbour and does not deceive him, when it does not dedicate money to usury. The merchant who acts in this way will prosper galore and eventually will enjoy eternal life.
At first sight it does not seem that this was an age when the lands of the Crown of Aragon could ‘prosper galore’.23 Banking failures in the 1380s dampened financial initiatives, and Italian capital, largely discouraged in earlier decades, began to dominate the trade of the Spanish seaboard.24 The Barcelona business elite tired of trade, with all its dangers, and increasingly preferred to invest in bonds with reasonably safe returns; this was stimulated further when a new public bank, the Taula de Canvi (‘table of exchange’), was established in the llotja of Barcelona, hard by the waterfront, in 1401. On top of this, the king’s financial demands, made in order to sustain Alfonso’s Mediterranean campaigns, drained funds out of his Spanish lands. And yet there was also good news. The commercial networks of the Crown of Aragon did not disintegrate; if anything, they experienced new vitality. Ships set out for the eastern Mediterranean from Barcelona nearly every year between 1404 and 1464, and most of them were Catalan, not foreign. In 1411 eleven Catalan ships sailed to the Levant, in 1432 seven, in 1453 eight. The numbers may appear small, but these were vessels sent to collect high-value items such as spices, which were traded in small quantities. Having built up their Levant trade with care over many decades, the Catalans took third place in the great Levant trade behind the Venetians and the Genoese; they traded in Beirut and maintained a consulate in Damascus.25 There were also regular departures (mainly by foreign ships) for Flanders and England.26
These were the prestige routes followed by the great galleys, but there was an especially lively trade in the sturdy round cogs that carried grain, dried fruits, oil, salt and slaves. Records survive of nearly 2,000 voyages from Barcelona between 1428 and 1493, about a quarter to Sicily, about 15 per cent to Sardinia and over 10 per cent to southern Italy – in other words, to the Italian possessions of the Crown of Aragon. Rhodes was visited by large numbers of Catalan ships too (129 in this period), for it was not simply the fortress of the Knights; it also served as the hub of a distribution network that gave access to Turkey, Egypt and Syria.27 Catalan control of the textile trade of southern Italy owed much to the patronage of King Alfonso. After he captured Naples in 1442, he expelled the Florentine merchants who had dominated the city’s business under the Angevin kings. The Catalans leaped at the opportunity to replace their rivals. By 1457 Aragonese Naples teemed with Catalan merchants, who exceeded all others in numbers.28 They were so successful in flooding the south of Italy with cheap woollen cloths that King Ferrante of Naples, even though he was the nephew of the current king of Aragon, tried to ban their import in 1465.29
There were other subtle but important changes in the character of Catalan trade during the fifteenth century. Well-integrated local trade networks became increasingly important; ships generally travelled less far, seeking out supplies in convenient destinations close at hand. There was a constant traffic between the little town of Tossa (with perhaps 300 inhabitants) and Barcelona, carrying large amounts of timber from the Catalan forests to Barcelona.30 An even more important source of wood was Matarò, whose church contained a remarkable model of a round ship, or nau, now preserved in Rotterdam; it provides unique testimony to the shipbuilding skills of the Catalans in the fifteenth century.31 Another active line of trade, humble but important, was the transport of fish. Tax records for 1434 show how salted sardines were carried in vast numbers from the Bay of Biscay to Barcelona during Lent; Barcelonans were also eager consumers of hake, tuna and eels. Along the Spanish coasts came oil, honey, wood, metals, leather, skins, dyestuffs – a whole range of local products which provided the basis for economic recovery after the assaults of the plague.32
The ten years after 1462 saw the trade of Barcelona crippled by the Catalan civil war, but after 1472 recovery was surprisingly fast.33 During the 1470s, consuls were nominated to look after Catalan affairs in ports large and small all over the Mediterranean, including Dubrovnik and Venice in the Adriatic, Trapani, Syracuse and Malta in the kingdom of Sicily. German and Savoyard merchants came to Barcelona.34 Opportunities once again abounded. Majorca, too, remained surprisingly buoyant, despite internal crises. Ships fanned out from Majorca towards North Africa, Barcelona, Valencia, Naples, Sardinia, and even occasionally as far as Rhodes and Alexandria. Out of nearly 400 voyages between Majorca and North Africa recorded in the first half of the fifteenth century, 80 per cent of the ships were Majorcan. As in previous centuries, Majorca was a focal point for Catalan trade with North Africa, a highly desirable market because of its access to gold supplies. In Majorca, the Jewish businessman Astruch Xibili did lively business as an insurance broker for trade with the Spanish mainland, southern France and North Africa.35 Here, as in Barcelona, maritime insurance was taken increasingly seriously, reflecting the realities of the time: Muslim piracy aimed at Christian shipping, conflicts between Christian states, upheavals within towns. Yet what is striking is the resilience, indeed optimism, of those who did business across the sea in this period.
One city in the lands of the Crown of Aragon was a veritable boom town: Valencia. The eminent British historian John Elliott has written that ‘for Valencia the fifteenth century was something of a golden age’, an appropriate term if one takes into account its gold coinage, which remained ‘as steady as a gyroscope’ during the fifteenth century.36 The city was the favoured residence of Alfonso V before he abandoned Spain for Italy, and this is reflected in the large number of works of art produced within the city and in ambitious building programmes. Valencia played an important part in the development of commercial institutions. Inside the magnificent llotja the Consuls of the Sea, who had the status of royal judges, met to determine cases in maritime and commercial law. They were to be drawn from ‘the most able, the most competent and the most experienced’ members of the merchant community, and they were to issue their judgments speedily and without pompous ceremonies, impartially doing justice to both the rich and the poor. However, they preferred out-of-court settlements, for the aim was to promote harmony in the community rather than to encourage confrontation.37 The Valencian consulate became particularly famous because its highly comprehensive law-code was printed in the city in 1494, and was widely diffused.
The code addressed age-old problems in maritime law:
If any property or merchandise is damaged by rats while aboard a vessel, and the patron had failed to provide a cat to protect it from rats, he shall pay the damage; however, it was not explained what will happen if there were cats aboard the vessel while it was being loaded, but during the journey these cats died and the rats damaged the cargo before the vessel reached a port where the patron of the vessel could purchase additional cats. If the patron of the vessel purchases and puts aboard cats at the first port of call where such cats can be purchased, he cannot be held responsible for the damages since this did not happen owing to any negligence on his part.38
During a storm, the master of a vessel was required to call together the merchants on board his ship if he was convinced it would sink unless some of the cargo was jettisoned. He was to proclaim:
‘Sirs, merchants, if we do not lighten the load we will find ourselves in danger and expose all on board, plus the cargo and other merchandise and possessions, to a total loss. If you, gentleman merchants, consent that we reduce the load we have aboard, we will be able with the aid of God to save all the people on board as well as most of the cargo …’ It is obviously more sensible to get rid of some of the cargo than to sacrifice human life, the vessel and all the cargo.39
The fundamental principle that shines through the often meticulous legislation of the Consulate of the Sea is that responsibilities must be recognized and that all parties to an agreement must be protected. Thus if the ship’s master tells a prospective passenger that he is leaving at a later date than in fact happens, the full fare will have to be returned, along with compensation for consequential damages. Passengers also had their responsibilities, not least the observance of these customs and regulations.40 Since Valencia exported high-quality ceramics (including dinner sets for King Edward IV of England and the Medici of Florence), it is no surprise that careful attention was paid to the hiring of skilled stevedores who knew how to load pottery on board. If they did a good job, and there were still some breakages, the merchants and not the shipowner were liable.41 Sailors were guaranteed meat on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a stew on the other days; each evening they were to receive ship’s biscuit with cheese, onions, sardines or other fish. There was a wine ration too, and this could be provided from wine manufactured on board from raisins or even figs (steeped in water, to produce a sweet mud-coloured brew).42
Valencia benefited from the difficulties in Barcelona – the banking crises, the political strife between Biga and Busca, and, above all, the frequent attempts by the Barcelona patriciate to exclude foreign bankers from the city.43 It also benefited from its more advantageous position along the trade routes linking northern Italy to the Atlantic.44 Genoese and Florentine galleys would head down past Ibiza, bypassing Barcelona. Calling in at Valencia, they could load the up-market agricultural produce that was a speciality of the still substantial Muslim population of the Valencian horta, or countryside: dried fruits, sugar and rice, much favoured at the English court, where rice was mixed with minced chicken and sugar in a white concoction known as blancmange.45 Foreign capital dominated Valencia, stimulating the economy and increasing its advantage over the more xenophobic Barcelona. There were lively communities of Genoese, Milanese, Venetians, Tuscans, Flemings and Germans who used Valencia as their base in the western Mediterranean.46 The Milanese imported armaments and other metal goods. Merchants from Languedoc took an interest in the large quantities of wool that were brought down from the Castilian plateau, a trade partly conducted by the Jews of Toledo.47 Muslim merchants from Valencia traded with the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.48 King Ferdinand’s greedy attempts to extract higher taxes from the city slowed growth at the end of the fifteenth century.49 Still, the balance sheet for the Crown of Aragon is remarkably positive, even more so if recovery in the Italian possessions is taken into account: Sicily, rich in wheat and sugar, Sardinia, rich in wheat and salt.50 The Catalan-Aragonese commonwealth flourished, and benefited from the radical restructuring of the economy that followed the Black Death.
There was one oddity in the success of Valencia: the lack of practising Jews. A unique feature of the fifteenth-century Iberian kingdoms, by comparison with other western European states, was the presence in each of them of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Within Spain, day-to-day relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims were sometimes cordial, with Christians attending Muslim and Jewish weddings, and Muslims and Christians setting up joint workshops in Valencia. But by the late fourteenth century convivencia had been replaced by an atmosphere of mistrust. The spread of the Black Death was blamed on the Jews, leading to violent attacks on Jewish quarters in Barcelona and elsewhere.51 One effect of the plague was the emergence of a new middle class, whose members sometimes looked upon the Jews as business rivals. In the late fourteenth century, Ferran Martínez, archdeacon of Ecija in southern Spain, preached with intense passion against the Jews, attempting to demolish synagogues and to despoil them of their scrolls and books. The Castilian Crown proved unable to restrain the forces he unleashed, and in 1391 popular riots in the archdeacon’s support began in Seville and then spread northwards and eastwards into the lands of the Crown of Aragon, accompanied by slaughter of the Jews and mass conversions.
The infection spread across the western Mediterranean, leading to attacks on the Jews in Aragonese Sicily during 1392.52 In Valencia City the Jewish quarter ceased to exist, for only about 200 professing Jews survived the killing or conversion of the remaining 2,500 Jews of the city. The shock was as great in Barcelona, where Jews had lived since the eighth century. The Jewish quarter or Call, in the north-west corner of the old city, was invaded and devastated. In Majorca a rural protest against the lieutenant-governor grew out of control: failing to break into Bellver Castle outside Majorca City, the peasants turned on the Call, which they invaded, murdering many of those they found. Further pressure came from above when King Ferdinand I of Aragon and Pope Benedict XIII organized a public disputation between Jews and Christians at Tortosa in 1413–14. This was not a debate between equals but an opportunity to bully many Jewish leaders into conversion.53 The numbers professing Judaism within the lands of the Crown of Aragon shrank, though among the converts there were many who maintained their ancestral religion behind closed doors. Secrecy was to become even more important by the 1480s, with the re-establishment of the Inquisition within the Spanish kingdoms. Jewish life in the Crown of Aragon seemed to be drawing to an end, not as a result of a mass expulsion but because of intolerable pressures within Iberia.
The mass conversions of 1391 and 1413–14 seemed to suggest that, under pressure, most Jews would convert. After Ferdinand II acceded to the throne of Aragon in 1479, he gradually reverted to the tough policies of his grandfather and namesake. In order to address the issue of converted Jews who kept up their old religious practices (often known as ‘Marranos’), he revived the Aragonese Inquisition, and extended it across Spain, where it was seen as a tool of royal interference even by Old Christian families.54 The Dominican friars who manned the Inquisition convinced Ferdinand that its job would never be done unless converts and Jews were totally separated, by the removal of all professing Jews from Spain.55 Ferdinand’s great hope was that most of the Jews would convert rather than depart (he had no antipathy to people of Jewish descent and favoured sincere conversos). Yet the decrees led to a mass migration. Very many Jews – perhaps 75,000 – abandoned Spain, though the great majority, by now, were Jews from Castile, given the disappearance of so many Catalan and Aragonese communities after the convulsions of 1391. Still, it was from the ports of the Crown of Aragon that many Spanish Jews from both Aragon and Castile set out in search of refuge.
The refugees were sometimes treated quite well and sometimes execrably: there is no reason to disbelieve stories of shiploads of Jews who were thrown into the sea by captains and crews.56 The sultan of Morocco did not want them, so the nearest Muslim land was a poor option. Although many of the ships that carried them were Genoese, Genoa was unwelcoming, for it had never encouraged Jewish settlement within the city: the Jews who landed there were confined to a spit of land full of discarded rocks and debris; facing a harsh winter many were tempted to convert.57 It made more sense to head for new homes in southern Italy, where Ferdinand’s cousin Ferrante welcomed them with open arms, ensuring that his officials checked each immigrant to see what that person’s special skills were as a craftsman or merchant, and insisting that the Jews should be treated humanamente. A few months later Ferrante welcomed a second surge of Jewish immigrants from Aragonese Sicily, from which they had also been expelled, despite the objections of the city council of Palermo, which feared for the economic effects.58 Ferdinand remained passionate about expelling Jews as he conquered new lands across the sea – banishing them from Oran in 1509 and from Naples in 1510.59
More important than their number is the impact the exiles had on the wider Mediterranean world. They moved through southern Italy and then, as they were expelled from there, they fanned out: some went a little way north, reaching the courts of friendly princes in Ferrara and Mantua; others penetrated the Ottoman lands, where the sultan could not believe his good fortune in acquiring their skills as textile-workers, merchants and physicians. A sixteenth-century French agent at the Ottoman court wrote that the Jews
have among them workmen of all artes and handicrafts most excellent, and specially of the Maranes of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.60
The Ottomans, ruling over vast areas where Muslims were a minority, were easy in their minds about the presence of the Jews in their domains, subject to the usual limitations imposed by dhimmi status. Salonika (Thessalonika) became a particular focus of settlement.
Many of the exiles saw the expulsion from Spain as a sign that the tribulations of Israel were not about to increase but that they would soon end, with the redemption of the Jews under the leadership of the Messiah. In this spirit, some headed for the land of their distant ancestors, settling in Safed in the hills of Galilee, where they were also eager to set up weaving workshops and other enterprises. At the same time they immersed themselves in kabbalistic texts and produced liturgical poetry which was widely diffused across the Mediterranean and beyond. One of their rabbis, Jacob Berab, had made his way from Maqueda, near Toledo, to Fez, then to Egypt and finally to Safed, where he dreamed of re-establishing the ancient Jewish council of sages, the Sanhedrin, as a prelude to the Messianic Age.61 As the exiles travelled eastwards, they carried with them memories of Spain or, in Hebrew, Sepharad. Many of these Sephardic Jews continued for centuries to speak fifteenth-century Spanish, which they spread within the Jewish communities of the Ottoman lands and North Africa – the language often called ‘Ladino’, though it acquired vocabulary from other languages as well, such as Turkish. The widespread adoption of Ladino among the Mediterranean Jews was part of an act of cultural imperialism that also saw the Sephardim impose their liturgy and practices on the Jews of Greece, North Africa and much of Italy. For the Sephardim insisted that they were descended from the Jewish equivalent of hidalgos, and that they were the aristocracy of the Jewish people who had lived in Spain in splendour. Had not the prophet Obadiah referred to ‘the exile of Jerusalem that is in Sepharad’?
The year 1492 also saw the final extinction of Muslim rule in Spain, when, on 2 January, Boabdil, king of Granada, surrendered his city to Ferdinand and Isabella after a long and painful war, which helped to confirm Isabella’s dubious claim to the throne of Castile. The surrender treaty preserved the right of the Muslims to stay in their former kingdom; if they did wish to leave, their shipping costs would be covered by the king and queen. They were expelled from Granada and all the Castilian lands only in 1502, following an uprising in the Granadan Sierra three years earlier. Yet nothing similar happened in the lands of the Crown of Aragon, whose Muslim population was concentrated in the kingdom of Valencia and in southern Aragon. Maybe a third of the population of the Valencian kingdom was Muslim in the fifteenth century, diminishing as Christian settlement advanced and as Muslim families converted to the dominant faith. The famous water tribunal which still meets every Thursday outside Valencia Cathedral to adjudicate the distribution of water in the fields outside the city perpetuates some of the principles and methods of the Muslim farmers of the late Middle Ages.62 But isolation from the Muslim world and the loss of their elite meant that the Muslims of Aragon and Valencia struggled to maintain their knowledge of Islam or, in some areas, of the Arabic language.63 Ferdinand was a canny ruler who realized that the expulsion of the Muslims would lead to depopulation and economic chaos in kingdoms whose prosperity had already been placed at risk by the civil war under his father. It was only in 1525, nine years after he died, that an attempt was made to convert every Spanish Muslim to Christianity, and it was only from 1609 onwards that the ‘Moriscos’, as they became known, were ruthlessly expelled en masse from Spain.64
Within Castile and Granada, Ferdinand possessed near-equal status with his wife Isabella, though she was only queen consort in Aragon. But after her death in 1504, Ferdinand was denied the regency of Castile by the Cortes for several years, prompting him to turn his attention more decisively towards the Mediterranean, and the revival of his uncle Alfonso’s Mediterranean empire. His concern became the fortunes of the Crown of Aragon, and he assumed that Castile and Aragon would once again go their separate ways after his death. With the help of the ‘Great Captain’, the brilliant military commander Fernando González de Córdoba, he restored direct Aragonese rule over Naples in 1503, after a short struggle with the French, who had returned to Italy under King Louis XII, less with the intention of crushing the Turks than in the hope of anchoring down Louis’s claim to the duchy of Milan.65 As with Alfonso, Naples was not an end in itself: Ferdinand, whose politics often had a strong Messianic flavour, aspired to lead a crusade for the defeat of the Turks and for the recovery of Jerusalem, and a few expeditions headed eastwards, such as a flotilla sent under the Great Captain’s command to Kephalonia – not, admittedly, very far from the heel of Italy.66 These daydreams were further stimulated by the insistence of an eccentric Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, that he would find enough gold in the Indies to pay for everything Ferdinand’s heart desired.67
Ferdinand preferred to see his Catalan subjects sailing the Mediterranean rather than the Atlantic, and here he was inspired by the same idea that his uncle Alfonso had developed, of a Catalan Common Market encompassing Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Majorca and newly won possessions in North Africa. In 1497, the duke of Medina Sidonia had already shown how easy it was to capture Melilla on the coast of Morocco; it remains Spanish to this day. With the help of the powerful cleric Cardinal Cisneros, Ferdinand added Oran to his possessions in 1509. Riding a mule and brandishing a silver cross, the aged cardinal processed in front of the Spanish army, urging the men to fight for Christ. His ardour had not been dimmed by the conquest of Granada, where in his contempt for Islam he made great bonfires of Arabic books, happily depriving humanity of vast amounts of knowledge. The fall of Oran was followed by the capture of Bougie and Tripoli in 1510.68 The presence of Spanish garrisons along the coast of North Africa as far east as Libya strengthened the grip of Christendom on the western and central Mediterranean, but also drew the fire of a variety of Muslim foes intent on recovering the cities held by Spain. While Ferdinand was delighted to score points in the holy war he was fighting against Islam, there was a practical dimension to his African ambitions. Control of the coastline of the Maghrib would offer protection to Catalan and other shipping bound for the East, not because European shipping made use of routes along the African coast, but because a Spanish presence deterred Muslim piracy.
Ferdinand demonstrated how important the Mediterranean was in his thinking when, after Isabella’s death, he spent several months in Naples setting the war-damaged south Italian kingdom back on its feet. He took a new wife, the capable and cultured Pyrenean princess Germaine of Foix, in the hope of producing a male heir to the lands of the Crown of Aragon.69 Yet all his grandiose policies were compromised by the extinction of the male line. The son of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Infante Juan, predeceased his parents. Nor did Germaine of Foix produce a surviving heir. Thus both Castile and Aragon passed through Ferdinand’s demented daughter Juana to his grandson, the Habsburg prince Charles of Ghent.70 Under Charles power within Spain shifted decisively away from Aragon and back towards Castile. With the opening of the New World trade routes, Castile, and especially Seville, boomed, while the Catalan networks in the Mediterranean settled into torpor. Traditional Aragonese interests continued to be prosecuted in Italy, but Castilians increasingly took charge of the Mediterranean empire once ruled from Barcelona and Valencia.71