Al-Andalus and 1492: the Plate Tectonics of History

WE HAVE BEEN in swift passage through the work of Al-Andalus, so surprising in its variety and accomplishment. The more time spent with the texts and the historians of the period, the more we come to admire the uncommon energies, exploratory zeal, and systematic rigor of the men and women of the time. Hardly a worthy human endeavor was left aside: we have visited their music and poetry, philosophy and mathematics, medicine and astronomy, agriculture, governance, gardening, and the arts of love.

Our look into such work has not allowed us to linger as we might. If we had such time together, we might look into the work of the eleventh-century Córdoban Ibn Hazm. When the caliphate disintegrated, he was forced into exile and occasional imprisonment. But he was a man of his times: highly educated, a sometime vizier, a religious scholar, student of law, and poet. He had the privilege of being, until the age of 14, raised in the harem, where his studies seemed to have enlivened him considerably. The women taught him poetry, composition, and the Koran. And so, later on in life, he thought himself the right man to write a book called The Dove’s Neck Ring. It is an essay on love, which takes as its starting point the idea that those in love reunite parts of a soul divided at creation, so that love is a concord of life in this world that re-creates a sublime and original unity. It is a notion that speaks to the power and fatefulness of love, and its unpredictability. Ibn Hazm wants to give us love as it is, in men and women he has known. He writes openly that women’s desires are equal to those of men, and even that women may have prophetic abilities. He wants to show how our lives play out in love, in our gestures and longings, work and concealment, signs and language; in our dreams, by our secrets, with song, in bed. The book even has a chapter charmingly entitled “On Falling in Love While Asleep,” which goes to show that none of us is ever safe.

We should, before we take our leave of Al-Andalus, touch on the transformative current of mysticism that ran through the centuries of the period. Mysticism, in a sentence, is the principle that a man or woman with the right initiative may in this life come into unity with the divine. In Judaism, this principle took form in the Kabbalah, a study that came into prominence in Al-Andalus in the work of Moses de Leon, another far-rambling scholar who finally settled in Ávila. He is the author of the Zohar, the rich book which established the Kabbalah, a method by which the inner reality of the Torah may be studied. The student, using the framework offered in the Zohar, may work his way through levels of meaning in the scripture, each level more sacred than the next, so as to reach an enveloping reality from which all life is derived. The resulting knowledge allows the student to be of secret help on earth and a force for harmony everywhere. Of course, the search for such knowledge requires such inner capacity that it is not recommended that the study begin before age 40. Be that as it may, Moses de Leon’s Zohar (that he wrote, or he conjured, or had revealed to him) is of course supposed to be based on much more ancient texts of the second century and be reflective of secret practices of antiquity. But some scholars think that the wily Moses de Leon dreamed up the whole art in Al-Andalus. This is a period when dreams were given life and released into the world. Whatever the case, it is in Al-Andalus that the Kabbalah was given definitively to the world.

And we cannot touch upon mysticism in Al-Andalus without bringing to center stage the work of the Sufis, an influential and extraordinary group. Poets, scholars, paupers, scientists, doctors, beggars, historians, jokesters, hidden and public men and women, this group created in Al-Andalus and throughout the Middle East one of the most distinguished records of accomplishment in the world. The Sufis hold that in this life, we may seek to purify the heart, perfect the mind, and learn the purpose of all life. Such work can only be undertaken because of love, by means of love, for the purposes of love. If a student makes real inner progress, then the honor of her conduct and her fidelity to learning leads inevitably to a luminescent, uncommon understanding; from such understanding, she has her practical chance to serve life, in love, with rare prescience. The distinguished historian L.P. Harvey has suggested that Granada itself owes its origin to the Sufis, and the Albayzín and the wider city have been the site of many Sufi schools. We shall have in this writing further occasion to learn of the work of the Sufis, after we visit the walls of tiles that are among the most uncanny beauties of all Granada.

We should note that the Christian mystics who rose to prominence in Spain—two examples are Saint Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, both of the sixteenth century—drew upon the mystical work of Al-Andalus in their search to say what they understood of their own spiritual experience. Take, for example, the famous seven mansions of Saint Teresa of Ávila, which we encounter in her mystical essay The Interior Castle. In that book, she describes the soul as made of crystal (or diamond) and having seven rooms that we may visit as we search for God. The conception seems to derive from two directly related Sufi texts, the Maqamat of Abu’l Hasan al-Nuri, which has the same journey through the same seven dwellings, also concentric, and the mystical seven valleys of Faridudin Attar’s famous Parliament of the Birds, so magnetic a text that even Chaucer took a crack at writing a book of the same title and theme. It all bespeaks the cross-pollination of religious writing and experience, and Saint Teresa, one of the most famous Christian mystics of Spain, was of Jewish ancestry. It is as if, in the mysticism of Al-Andalus, we witness a convivencia of souls.

Saint John of the Cross, a monk, poet, and mystic, was a close associate of Saint Teresa. He, also, was from a Jewish family who had converted to Christianity. In a life of wandering, in which he was persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured by his fellow Christians, he managed to write some of the most compelling mystical poetry in Spanish. His poetry draws on Sufi imagery and on the Hebrew Song of Songs—more spiritual convivencia. It is intensely erotic and addresses the chance that we may (as the Sufis also held) die consciously in this life and move by love into unity with the beloved. The ecstasy of two devoted lovers, in his powerful verse, is at once a resurgence of soul—a departure from oneself into another and a better world.

As to the influence of mystical and religious texts on Christian writing, in 1919, the renowned Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios set off a firestorm by showing how Arabic texts, especially the miraj—the ascent of Mohammad to heaven from Jerusalem—were almost certainly a source for Dante when he organized The Divine Comedy. And it turns out that Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, spent two years in Al-Andalus, in the court of Alphonso the Wise, the very place where texts about the miraj were translated. It is certain Lattini read them. Today, after nearly one hundred years of polemic, Dante scholarship has come round to the idea that a number of important Arabic texts were available to Dante when he composed his Christian epic.

And one last word on mysticism: I pray that some scholar some day may tell us what on earth happened during the visit of one luminous gentleman to Al-Andalus: Francis of Assisi, who was there in the years 1213–15. One of the most bold and independent of saints was present in the country which, more than any other in Europe of the period, was awash in heady currents of mystical insight and practice. What might he have learned?

And if we may, before we leave our brief account of the spiritual and practical genius of Al-Andalus, let us touch on one last domain: color. Contemporary accounts of the life of the period mention the brilliant colors of clothing seen on the streets, so that against the whitewashed houses figures moved brilliantly, like flowers in the wind. It is yet another example of the Andalusian genius of collecting and refining the best of their cultural heritage, whatever the region or language where it was found, and whatever the religion of the people in possession of such knowledge. So from knowledge gathered from Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources, they learned how to dye cotton, flax, palm fiber, hemp, wool, and leather. On the Iberian peninsula, they lived in the fine slanting light of the Mediterranean and put on clothes of indigo, gold, tropical green, crimson, lapis lazuli, all using both mineral and vegetable dyes. Most valuable of all was the uncanny byssus, a silken material obtained from a mollusk, close in appearance to the pearl oyster, but found off the coast of Tunisia and southern Iberia. The filaments are golden, unforgettably soft, and were woven into garments so precious that they were forbidden to leave the country. Seen in full sunlight, the cloth changed color subtly but continuously, its lusters in strange harmony with the weather and the angle and intensity of the light. It is a fabric that could stand in for Al-Andalus itself, which offered over the centuries so rare and various a range of beauties in response to the changing lights of time and chance and opportunity.

PEACE AND CROSSFIRE OF THE CONVIVENCIA

The history of Al-Andalus is now more open to us than ever before, as a result of the labors of scholars, principally the work of the last forty years. There were many superb scholars who wrote previously, but the more recent work, seen as a whole, is extraordinary. To the lay reader, it is like watching the excavation of buried treasure, lost under layers of confusion, ideology, propaganda, ignorance, religious animosity, indifference, and hot debate. But treasure it is, and with every further investigation, the facts of convivencia become more intricate and complex. Two things are clear: the convivencia was no utopia and was subject to breakdown, violence, rivalries, suspicion, and stalemate, and second, its accomplishments were magnificent, undeniable, and transformative of European life. As to Al-Andalus itself, we are still learning how interfaith relations played out in political, professional, and domestic life. One way to gain the flavor of it is to consider a spectrum of facts through the region, and throughout the centuries of Al-Andalus. Consider, for example, the partnership in diplomacy during the reign of Abd Rahman III: a Muslim, he appointed a Christian ambassador to the courts of Byzantium and Syria and to the court of Otto I of Germany, and he appointed, as well, a Jewish ambassador, the formidable Hasday ibn Shaprut, to the Christian courts of Navarre and León. In the time of Shaprut, such was the willingness to exchange ideas and the facility with languages that we learn a Jewish scholar went so far as to expound the Talmud, in Arabic, to the caliph himself. And we have seen how, in the twelfth-century school of translators of the Christian Alphonso the Wise, the work was done by teams of men of all three faiths, working in Arabic, Latin, and Spanish. In commerce, Muslim traders, with silks and timber, saffron and paper, roamed all over the Mediterranean but traded also with the Christian north. Christian prelates complained that the young of their faith were too enthusiastically speaking Arabic. And they were criticized, as well, for fasting with Jews on the Jewish religious ceremony of the Day of Atonement. Be that as it may, anyone who could would seek out an Arab or a Jewish physician, such was their reputation during many of the centuries of Al-Andalus. Not only did they serve as physicians to caliphs and emirs, but we know of one Jewish doctor who tended to the privileged and powerful nuns in the cloister of Las Huelgas, owner of rich farmlands, refuge to royal widows, and center of local Christian power.

Historians have gathered, as they can, the facts of the ground from the nearly eight centuries of the commingling of faiths. There were interfaith marriages. In some settlements, the faiths lived together; in others, in separate sections of town. But they certainly traded together. Muslims cultivated vineyards, which were undoubtedly used to supply wine to Christians. And Muslims are known to have visited monasteries to sample the latest vintage, and even to be arrested with their Christian drinking partners for disturbing the peace after too enthusiastic a tippling together. Muslims might work for Christians as grooms or muleteers. Muslim women might visit churches, though they were advised against it because they might “fornicate with the clergy.” A Christian could come from a Jewish family. A Muslim might hail from a Christian family. And some families might have more than one faith in their ancestry. It is recorded that one Alphonso Fernández Samuel instructed that he be buried with the Torah beside his head, the Koran on his breast, and the Cross at his feet—a kind of one-coffin show of convivencia. Jewish prayers were intoned to the music of popular Muslim songs. In Murcia, gifted Muslim musicians and jugglers were invited to participate in Christian religious festivals. Muslims brought Christian food and customs into their religious festivals, where men and women celebrated together. They even liked the churros, a long fried sugary donut that the reader may buy today in the Albayzín, in say, Plaza Larga, any day of the week. Try it with a café con leche.

Muslims and Christians were in business together, in one case owning an inn in a Jewish quarter of the town of Borja. A Muslim and a Jew might come together in an enterprise to lend money, a kind of interfaith private banking. And if we consider the irrepressible energies of commerce in Al-Andalus, and the remarkable scope of talents offered, we can easily imagine any one worker wanting to sell his products to anyone who might have an interest, whatever their faith. Are we really to believe that the baker and the blacksmith, the silk weaver and the paper merchant, the carpenter and the spice peddler, the vendor of vegetables and the maker of painted ceramics or metal pots, all working in the rambunctious markets throughout Iberia, sought to restrict their clients exclusively to those of their own faith? It is absurd to think so. Commerce, the daily and necessary trading that all of us count on, is a unifier, a leveler, a maker of community and understanding. It is what we do together. A crowded market, singing with energy, is a thing of practical and cultural genius. The roles of buyer and seller have no faith but the faith that in a market, we have the chance to offer our work and knowledge to one another, the faith that our lives can be of mutual enrichment. The regulated commerce of Al-Andalus, with its market inspectors of weights and measures, regulations for cooked food and thread count in textiles, and supervision of craft guilds, provided so superb a model that it was adopted by Christian municipal governments in later centuries. Even today in the Albayzín’s Plaza Larga, over the beautiful gate called the Arco de las Pesas, you can see upon the walls the measures and weights overseen by the inspectors. From this careful, efficient regulation come the Arabic roots of so many market terms: almacén (large market, warehouse), almotacén (market inspector), alcaicería (silk market), and almoneda (auction sale). And supporting all this rough-and-tumble commerce was the strictly regulated currency, the famous gold dinar and dirhams, with their fixed weights of gold. It served as the currency for Iberia and the Maghreb (the North African coastline), used by Christians in the north, Muslims and Christians, and by everyone in Al-Andalus.

Let us close this rambling exploration of the minutiae of the convivencia with a quote from a writer known as the Blessed Ramon Llull, a Catalan of the thirteenth century. As a young man, his principal interest seems to have been amorous escapades with women of beauty and knowledge. One day, writing a love poem, he had a vision of Jesus and embarked thereafter on a program of self-education whose ferocity can hardly be believed. A Christian, he studied Arabic for nine years. He translated a book of the seminal Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali. He studied the Zohar at length, and to his study of that complex Jewish mysticism he joined a long study among the Sufi poets, whom he credits outright as the inspiration for one of his books about the nature of love. He traveled about Europe trying to convince popes and the powerful to begin schools of Eastern languages in Europe. He was captivated by the science of calculation and tried to devise a thinking machine, whose use would let anyone work with key theological concepts, all arranged in a system of logic with rules of calculation that used algebraic formulas and relied upon combinatorial diagrams. It was meant to be a virtual, practical science of the sacred that a man or woman could use to guide decisions and approach the truth. And on the way to such exalted domains, the Lullian art could solve any other problem that came round the bend. His first work on this calculator of the soul is wonderfully titled On the Brief Art of Finding Truth. If the reader wants to drink deeply of the heady brew of Al-Andalus, she should seek out this arcane labor of a man of genius. Ramon Llull went on to write more than two hundred forty books—translations, poetry, books on medicine, mystical treatises. In his spare time, he was a Franciscan monk who traveled extensively in North Africa seeking conversions. Reading his work, we naturally enough ask: conversion to what, exactly?

One of his books is called The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men. It concerns a gentile who is a philosopher yet has no belief or knowledge of God. He is facing death, is disconsolate, and sets himself to wander in a beautiful forest, where he meets three wise men: a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim. They are friends and offer to teach the Gentile the facts of faith and the glory of God. They are ably assisted in this work by a very beautiful woman whom they find drinking from a clear spring in the forest. She, as we might have expected, turns out to be Intelligence, and she helps them use Llull’s theological art in a course of instruction. At the end of the course, the Gentile is to choose one of the three faiths for his own. So do the three wise men argue eloquently and powerfully for their own faith, and after a few hundred pages, the Gentile, having given the closest attention to all three, comes to his moment when he must choose which faith he would take as his own. And he does not choose. And the three wise men, at the end of a long and exhausting exchange, say goodbye to one another in an extraordinary passage that has to be read as a whole to be believed. Here it is:

While the wise man was speaking these words and many others, the three of them arrived at the place where they had first met by the city gates; and there they took leave of one another most amiably and politely, and each asked forgiveness of the other for any disrespectful word he might have spoken against his religion. Each forgave the other, and when they were about to part, one wise man said, “Do you think we have nothing to gain from what happened to us in the forest? Would you like to meet once a day and, by the five trees and the ten conditions signified by their flowers, discuss according to the manner The Lady of Intelligence showed us, and have our discussions last until all three of us have only one faith, one religion, and until we can find some way to honor and serve one another, so that we can be in agreement? For war, turmoil, ill will, injury, and shame prevent man from agreeing on one belief.

Each of the three wise men approved of what the wise man had said, and they decided on a time and place for their discussions, as well as how they should honor and serve one another, and how they should dispute; and that when they had agreed on and chosen one faith, they would go forth into the world giving glory and praise to the name of our Lord God. Each of the three wise men went home and remained faithful to his promise.

Seven hundred years later, reading this, we feel the incorrigible sweetness of it. These are three men who have been engaged for hundreds of pages in a far-reaching debate about the virtues of their own religions. The claim here is that such debate, the open search for truth, can be an occasion for honor; it can itself be a work of knowledge, peaceful and respectful, that we pursue together.

It is a vision of a better world. The convivencia was a dangerous experiment. It proceeded by fits and starts, setbacks and abominations, strange alliances, unexpected advances, and practical ingenuities. Its achievements, only recently come into focus, were without precedent in Europe. It is a schoolroom where we might learn, we who even now are failing disastrously to live together at a time with much more dangerous weapons and with billions of lives at stake. And we might start by learning from its fate, when in the fifteenth century, Al-Andalus, with all its accumulated knowledge and accomplishments, met King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. The two monarchs brought to the Iberian peninsula a will to power, a formidable union, a sense of messianic destiny, and, in 1480, their own specially designed government agency: the Holy Inquisition.

HATRED ADMINISTRATIVE AND METICULOUS; ARM-WRESTLING THE POPE

Let us visit Toledo, the city of the legendary thirteenth-century school of translators of Alphonso the Wise. The year is 1486, on a Sunday in early February. The Inquisition has identified some seven hundred and fifty Christians from converso families—men and women who have converted from Judaism—who are suspected of backsliding, of maintaining Jewish beliefs or practices of any kind in their daily life. This is the scene, as recorded by a historian of the day, and quoted often in the most authoritative of modern histories of the Inquisition:

On Sunday the twelfth of February of 1486 all the reconciled [of seven parishes] went in procession. They were about 750 in number, men and women. The men were all together, wearing nothing on their heads or feet . . . They bore unlit candles in their hands. The women were in a group, without any covering on their bodies, their faces and feet bare like those of the men, and with the same unlit candles. In the group of men were many of prominence and high honor. In the terrible cold and the dishonor and disgrace they suffered since such a crowd turned out to watch them (many people from other districts had come to see them), they went along sobbing and howling, and tearing out their hair, more for the dishonor they received than for their offenses against God. In this way they went in tribulation through all the city where the procession of Corpus Christi goes, until they arrived at the cathedral. At the entrance to the cathedral were two chaplains, who made the sign of the cross over each one’s forehead, saying, “Receive the sign of the cross, which you denied, and being deceived, lost.” Then they went through the church until they arrived at a scaffolding put up by the new door, and on it were the official Inquisitors. Nearby was another scaffolding where they said Mass and preached to them. After this a notary rose and began to call out each one by name, saying, “Is so-and-so here?” And that person raised his candle and said, “Yes.” Then the notary read aloud publicly all the ways he had judaized. The same thing was done with the women. When all this was over they announced publicly to them their penance, and ordered them to go in procession for six Fridays, scourging their naked backs with cords of hemp, going without covering for their feet or heads. And they were to fast on each of the six Fridays. And they were ordered also to never, for all their lives, hold public offices such as alcalde, alguacil, regidor, jurado, or be messengers or public scribes, and those of them who held those offices were to lose them. And they were not ever to be able to work as moneychangers, shopkeepers, spice sellers, or hold any official position whatever. And they could not wear silk, nor clothes colored such as scarlet, nor any gold, silver, pearls, or jewels. And they were unworthy to be witnesses. It was ordered then that if they relapsed into the same error once more, and did again what had been attributed to them, they would be condemned to burn. And when this was finished at two o’clock in the afternoon, they all went away.

This procession went through the middle of Toledo, the city that had been the very university of all Europe. It was a city, not long before this scene, graced by the presence of some of the most beautiful synagogues, churches, and mosques in Spain. In this context, the procession described takes the breath away from any reader: some of the most distinguished citizens of the city, all of them Christians converted from Judaism, men and women, stripped and paraded in bitter cold before their neighbors. They are humiliated, sentenced to further humiliations, deprived of current and future work, forbidden certain clothes and adornments, and informed they would be burned alive for a second offense.

What, pray tell, had they done to merit such punishment?

It is a question that goes to the heart of the Spanish Inquisition, and it is easy to answer: they had done nothing whatever.

We can understand this by looking at the origins of the Inquisition in Spain. First, a review of the facts. The Inquisition, as organized originally by the papacy in 1231, was under the control of the Vatican. The Inquisition’s power was established in a papal bull, which is an official declaration carrying the full weight of the papacy. The bull endorsing the use of torture came in 1252. Ferdinand and Isabel, beginning their own Inquisition in 1480, did something unprecedented: they set out to make the Inquisition a personal, special, strategic royal project. In a bull of 1478, Pope Sixtus IV had given them the crucial authority: Ferdinand and Isabel could appoint all the inquisitors themselves. Now they dominated an institution with uncommon potential that could be shaped into a potent ministry of power and control. The monarchs oversaw the rules of this special new court. They appointed the inquisitors, they set their salaries, and they coordinated their work with the military. It was an extraordinary move, given that the Inquisition was, of course, a strictly Catholic institution meant to identify and punish heresy. But Ferdinand and Isabel, with canny political willfulness, had remade this Catholic Inquisition in their own image. The first burnings were in 1481, and the monarchs, beginning with their supervision of the first inquisitors, had a new and well-funded base of power whose writ extended throughout Spain. It extended, most importantly, into regions where royal power was otherwise weak or suspect.

The system worked like this: anyone could denounce a family member, a neighbor, or any other citizen to the Inquisition. Once denounced, the accused might hear at night the knock on the door that meant immediate arrest. It is a knock that echoes through centuries. The accused would be taken straightaway to a secret prison. He was not allowed any money, paper, or visitors. He was not told the charges against him. The accusers’ names were kept secret. The Inquisition demanded a confession, and the accused was shown the devices of torture that awaited those who refused to acknowledge their crimes. But of course those arrested, knowing neither their accuser nor the charges against them, had no way of knowing what they were expected to confess. After three demands for confession, the accused was read a list of charges (carefully edited to conceal the witnesses’ identity) and required to answer on the spot.

Yet this sudden and mysterious imprisonment was only part of the process. For after the arrest was made, all the goods of the accused were seized. A thorough inventory was compiled posthaste, from gold and coins right down to items of kitchenware. Values were assigned. A notary examined and verified the figures. And then the costs of imprisonment of the accused were paid from his own assets. As the time in prison accumulated, the goods of the accused would be sold at public auction. Sometimes an entire family would be imprisoned during this period. But even if they were not, the families might starve to death or be thrown into the street to beg, since the family was now without income and all its goods were being sold off. No provision was made to support the family of the accused until 1561.

If the accused had not confessed satisfactorily, and the accusation was grave, then the tribunal turned to torture, infrequently but systematically. Anyone of any age could be tortured. The inquisitors, specialists in human torment, had looked carefully into the wretched cabinet of savagery and chosen three tortures. In all of them, the accused was stripped down. In the first, the rack, he or she was tied down and stretched into progressive agonies. The second was the strapado: with wrists tied behind the back with a rope suspended from the ceiling on a pulley, the accused was hoisted high with weights on the feet, then dropped suddenly. The pressure ruined muscle and nerve and pulled shoulder joints from sockets. The third was called the water torture, and its details are well-known, since with shame I note that in the administration of President George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, the practice was officially adopted in military interrogations in the United States of America, where it is known as waterboarding. I do not know whether President Bush decided with special excitement that his administration should adopt a medieval torture that had the professional blessing of the Spanish Inquisition. Perhaps he felt it gave him more historical gravitas and luster. Whatever the case, during the Inquisition, this torture, like the others, was attended by a whole battery of officials: inquisitors, a notary, a secretary to record what was said, the torturers themselves, and occasionally a physician. If there was a confession, then it had to be repeated in prison the next day. If it was not, the torture began again.

If the accused did not die under torture or die in prison, he still could be sentenced to burn at the stake for heresy. If condemned to die, the victims were informed the night before, which made appeal rather difficult. They went to the auto-da-fé—the public ceremony to announce judgments and punishments—wearing a yellow garment called a sanbenito, painted with crosses, flames, and devils. They wore also the corozo, a pointed hat that is a prominent feature today in Spain in the promenades of men during the celebration, if that is the word, of Semana Santa—Holy Week in the Christian calendar. The condemned, after their exhibition, condemnation, and sentencing, were then, as was said, “relaxed” to their executioners. It is one of the most detestable uses ever made of a verb, even though our language has been, over the centuries, recruited often enough into the service of hatred. Those condemned in absentia were burned in effigy. Those condemned who had already died had their corpses dug up and burnt.

The lesser punishments were to do penance, which could be a fine, banishment, service in the galleys, or wearing the sanbenito, with all its florid images of judgment and punishment. It was a public sign of shame and ignominy, and a penitent might be forced to wear it a short time, or for life, though that sentence could be commuted. After the time was up, the sanbenito was hung in the church to mark the disgrace of the family. For the more severe sentence of reconciliation, the prisoner got a long prison sentence, banishment, forced galley service, or flogging; in addition, the prisoner and his family usually had all their wealth confiscated. Galley service, of course, supplied the military with men who could be worked to death, or who succumbed to the disease rampant in the ships. As to flogging, the sentences were often between one and two hundred lashes. Men and women, young and old, received this sentence. They were stripped to the waist, mounted on a donkey, and whipped through the streets. During the course of this punishment, those in the street were able to scorn the sufferers, hurl stones at them, and shout execrations.

I recount all this because, as famous as is the Inquisition, its methods and rules are still not widely known. In the popular imagination, we recall grisly stories of heretics tied to stakes and having gobbets of flesh ripped from them with tongs heated in a fire, before the victims were burned to death. But this grandstanding of the executioners is, I suggest, not the real key to understanding the Inquisition. What this rare institution offered is a finely calculated formula for hatred that any society, anywhere, might use for its own purposes. The formula worked because of its closely fitted, potent assembly of elements. Taken together, they are: anonymous denunciation, secret prisons, confinement without charge, seizure of wealth, family disgrace, torture, popular ceremonies of punishment and humiliation, and public execution. To this list we must add one more, the absolutely crucial piece: sponsorship and control by the highest power in the land. For the Spanish Inquisition had this essential component: it was the creation of Ferdinand and Isabel.

We come, then, to one of the hinges upon which turned the history of Spain. In 1482, only a little more than one year after the first burnings, Pope Sixtus IV, upon receiving a series of reports of Ferdinand and Isabel’s Inquisition, understood what was happening. And he had had enough. He issued another bull, one of the most extraordinary ever to come forth from the Vatican. We read it even today with admiration. For the pope was forcibly taking back the Inquisition, which had been, after all, his to begin with. He was on to Ferdinand and Isabel, and he told them the truth:

. . . the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and salvation of souls, but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example and causing disgust to many.

Pope Sixtus had a solution which a modern-day civil-rights activist would recognize. Bishops, who were responsible to Rome (rather than to Ferdinand and Isabel) had to oversee the inquisitors. The accused had to be informed of all charges against him. All accusers had to be clearly identified. The accused must be allowed a legal defender. Episcopal prisons only must be used. And any sentence handed down could be appealed directly to Rome.

Pope Sixtus had issued in clear and forceful terms a bull designed to correct the practices of the Inquisition that made it a source of terror and a demonic instrument of royal power. The bull all but severed the insidious connection between the Inquisition and Ferdinand and Isabel. It meant that the Vatican could control the institution and stop the monarchs from using it as a political tool. It is open to question whether the Inquisition would have become, instead, an instrument of terror of the Catholic church. But the proclamation was a political move of drama and consequence, since it restored control of the institution to Rome and so gave to the Vatican the measure of power it needed to influence politics and civil society in Spain. Sixtus, with his bull, had stopped the new Spanish Inquisition in its tracks by doing away with some of its most diabolical practices. His eloquent declaration had the potential to change the history of Spain, as it reorganized in the decades before and after the capture of Granada in 1492.

Ferdinand understood that the whole royal initiative was at risk, and he responded to Sixtus with righteous fury. He brought political pressure on the pope through key Spanish bishops. He professed amazement. He wrote that the bull could not be authentic. He claimed, falsely, that the pope had given a general pardon to conversos in Spain, whatever their offenses. He said the “concessions” offered by Sixtus were due to the “cunning persuasions” of the conversos. He flatly declared his intention to defy the bull. And he asked aggressively for the bull to be revoked and full powers over the Spanish Inquisition to be entrusted to him and his queen. An essential question of power hung in the balance. Ferdinand and Isabel had to subdue the pope or lose control of the machinery of accusation, torture, and confiscation.

The months rolled on. We will never know the full extent of the political flame-throwing, the exchange of threats and promises, private meetings and messages, and the acid tension between Rome and the Spanish Crown. In October, only five months after he asserted rightful control over the Inquisition in Spain, Pope Sixtus IV caved in. He suspended the bull. Ferdinand and Isabel had faced down the Vatican. They resumed complete control over the Inquisition in Spain. To add cream to their victory, their control was confirmed in yet another papal bull the next year, which took the definitive further step of appointing as inquisitor general the choice of Ferdinand himself, a man who had been the confessor of both Ferdinand and Isabel, Tomás de Torquemada. Working with the sovereigns, Torquemada would appoint new inquisitors, establish their duties, and create permanent courts in most major cities where conversos lived. The combination of papal blessing and royal power meant that no region could resist, though many knew well what terror was coming their way.

The Spanish Inquisition lasted until 1834, a three-hundred-and-fifty-four-year run. It is useful to reflect on what it was and what it was not. To do so is to step into the tempestuous pool of Spanish history, with its violent waves of opinion and durable scholarly animosities. But just as with the history of Al-Andalus, enough time has passed, and enough work has been done, so that the facts on the ground might be assessed more accurately.

The picture is complex. It is important, given the infernal reputation of the Inquisition, not to overstate its influence and its scope. Such is its strange power, even today, that it has been portrayed as a monolithic, pervasive force responsible for just about every atrocious event in Spain in the centuries just after the fall of Granada. It was not such a force. Some writers have put the deaths ordered by the Inquisition at sensational figures, as if it were some cosmic death squad, but the final toll of men and women burnt at the stake, after much scholarly sweat and estimation, comes in at around ten to twelve thousand. And this in a period when religious wars convulsed whole societies, with much higher death tolls. The banning of certain books, via the famous Index of Prohibited Books, was not uniquely an initiative of the Spanish Inquisition, which was following the lead of the Vatican and other Catholic countries in Europe that had published their own indices. And the institution, though it was designed by Ferdinand and Isabel to have authority throughout Spain, did not in fact have a marked and dramatic presence everywhere in the country. Some less-populated areas might go a good long while without suffering the ministrations of the Inquisition, so that its local impact was slight. For some of the years, or even decades of its existence, the auto-da-fé was not much in evidence, whether due to temporary financial difficulties of the tribunal or an unfortunate lack of new victims. When victims were available, not every one was tortured, and only a small percentage of those arrested were burnt alive. Nor was the Inquisition a universally acclaimed institution. Many Spaniards fought against it, wrote against it, and resisted its influence, often at terrible risk to themselves.

All this being the case, we need to marshal the facts and try to get a clear look at what it meant for the country that created it at the time it was created, and what it has meant since.

We must remember, first of all, the context: Al-Andalus. It cannot be repeated often enough: three great faiths lived together, studied together, did business together, made war as allies and companions of one another, and learned one another’s languages. Muslims and Jews governed together; Christian kings governed Muslim and Jewish subjects. An earlier King Ferdinand, the third, the father of Alphonso the Wise, in the thirteenth century called himself, accurately enough, the “King of the Three Religions.” At his death, his tomb in Seville bore inscriptions cut into fine marble, as befits a king. But not merely one: there are four inscriptions, in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian. The Hebrew and Arabic texts refer to Spain as, respectively, Sefarad and Al-Andalus, and use dates computed and adjusted according to Jewish and Muslim calendars. And each inscription uses the ceremonial and rhetorical language of its own religious tradition, all in honor of one of the great kings of Al-Andalus. It is one of the most moving and beautiful tributes to any man in the history of Spain.

King Ferdinand of the fifteenth century and his powerful Queen Isabel did not honor their ancestors, nor did they celebrate, conserve, and bear forward for the benefit of Spain the genius of their own people. This was a king and queen who had fallen heir to the most rich, various, and distinguished intellectual heritage in medieval Europe. They lived in the midst of the Renaissance, a cultural awakening built on the foundations provided in large part by Al-Andalus. No country in Europe was in possession of the resources of mind and wealth as Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What did they do with their inheritance, at one of the most promising moments in European history?

Ferdinand and Isabel had extraordinary political skills, organized around a central principle: the concentration of power. And that will to power, in all its skill and purposefulness, its energy and shrewd, ferocious ambition, was nowhere more evident than in their remaking of the Inquisition into their personal ministry. Recall that for these monarchs, the principal struggle was to unify Spain beneath their banner. It was a country divided by geography, language, culture, and religion, fragmented by a temperamental nobility and proudly independent regions. By what means could Ferdinand and Isabel extend, consolidate, and enrich their power? The answer, of course, was by any means possible. But they needed an institution whose writ would run throughout the country, and whose power was fierce, unquestioned, and historic, yet an institution that could be wholly subjugated to royal power. It was a political puzzle of the first order. With the Holy Inquisition, they had a robust solution. For even in those cities of Spain where the monarchs were weak, the Catholic church had a presence, power, resources, and authority. It was their main chance. Ferdinand and Isabel seized the Inquisition, held it, defended it, dominated and used it, and then left it to history and to Spain.

It was the perfect instrument. Since the accusers were secret, every man and woman was vulnerable to the most absurd and groundless denunciations. Since the accused paid for his or her own imprisonment, torture, and punishment, each of them might be confined and tormented to the limits of their wealth. Since the confiscated wealth of the accused paid for the Inquisition, with a healthy share given to Ferdinand and Isabel, it was in the interest of the church and the court to target powerful converso families with large fortunes. Since the officers and associated staff of the Inquisition were exempt from accusation, from any civil or criminal procedure in secular courts, and even from some taxation, they could, and did, engage in profiteering, fraud, larceny, and criminal assault, all while enjoying perfect legal immunity. It is hard to imagine a more masterfully designed instrument of power, and any of us reading this history would be glad to say that is the end of it.

But it was not the end. The reputation of the Inquisition is not merely that of unspeakable injustice. It has a reputation as fiendish, and it is worth understanding why. Beyond the perfection of its design by Ferdinand and Isabel as a tool of power, they made two enduring changes in what we might call the template of hatred. First—and this is crucial—the Spanish Inquisition gave the work of hatred a deep-rooted, durable administrative form, with a considerable staff, written procedures, excellent record-keeping, close bureaucratic control, and solid government support and recognition. It was an institution built to last. And second, they made their ceremonies of humiliation and punishment into public festivals of political glamor, popular fanfare, and performance art. They were held on feast days, Sundays and holidays, so everyone could attend. Members of civil, municipal, and religious bodies were all formally invited. The ceremony was magisterial, what with the lurid costumes, the solemn pageantry, the sonorous declaration of punishments, the theatrical and remorseless condemnations, and the delivery of victims to the crown’s custody to be burned alive. The Inquisition made these events a natural part of the fabric of power in Spain. Important families vied to be seen at them; there was competition over the best seats; tailors and dressmakers were recruited to make the apparel that suited so august and celebratory an occasion. The well-connected and powerful, bedecked and bejeweled, all turned up in specially designated seats, near to the sumptuously dressed clerics. Anyone who wanted to be on the side of power, who wanted to give extra margin to their own security, or who just wanted a piece of the action needed to be present and noticed—not least by their neighbors. Tens of thousands of people attended these events, which were held in the biggest public square available. The auto-da-fé, as the decades progressed, took on more flamboyance and grandeur and came to be held in celebration of important royal events. In 1560, an auto-da-fé in Toledo was scheduled to celebrate the marriage of Phillip II and Isabel of Valois, a macabre accompaniment to nuptials if there ever was one. Phillip II went on to be a royal enthusiast, presiding over no fewer than five baroque auto-da-fé, with minutely organized pomp, Mass, and the flagrant procession of the despised and condemned. The mind reels.

Scholars have noted the perfection, if that is the word, of this calculated governmental form. It has been demonically influential. One historian, Joseph Perez, has noted an obvious modern sequel, Stalin’s technique of arrest and show trials in the Soviet Union. The similarity of key elements is there for all to see: the secret accusation, the sudden arrest and imprisonment, the use of torture, the insistence on public confession, the ruination of the family of the condemned. It is an accursed heritage. But it is only part of the story, since Ferdinand and Isabel had a comprehensive plan for power. The Inquisition should be seen not as the single tool, but one of many, the sum of which achieved for the monarchs the religious and political unity they sought. In 1481, the Inquisition had begun its persecution and burnings. In 1492, the monarchs took control of Granada, expelled the Jews from their kingdom, and flattened the Jewish quarter of the city, and then, as we have seen, they set in motion a series of laws and proclamations which taken together amounted to ethnic cleansing of the remaining Muslims. The prosperous Muslim and Jewish families who did convert to Christianity—and they were numerous—still remained in mortal peril, since they could be denounced to the Inquisition at any moment. In this way, national power and control was sustained and enforced by Christian fundamentalism.

All this accumulation of control and wealth had, of course, its costs, since Ferdinand and Isabel had to win allies among the nobility and to recruit, supply, and maintain a large standing army.

To pay these costs, the monarchs went into debt—often, in dark irony, to Jewish or converso families—with Isabel hocking her royal jewelry now and again. To pay off Christians for their political and financial support or for military exploits, and to reward the church for its partnership, they distributed land and booty from their conquests. And in all this, their actions, as they conceived them, meant something well beyond the material and political domination of Spain. They were resplendent with a meaning that lifted them onto another plane altogether, the plane of the fantastical storyline that accompanied the workings of their power. They had a prophetic mandate to dominate Spain, conquer Jerusalem, and restore the world to the True Faith. It was by such blessing that Ferdinand, as we have seen, styled himself “King of Jerusalem.” He and his queen saw resonant, singular, divine meaning in their history: they were the principal players in the last act of history. By means of their nobility, in accordance with prophecy, with the energy of destiny, they had brought salvation to Spain and would see the Kingdom of Heaven come to earth.

What were the consequences of this grandeur? It is the ideal occasion for what-if history, since at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spain looked to be at the beginning of one of most influential empires in history, with one of the most remarkable chances at knowledge and power ever presented to a country.

THE CATHOLIC MONARCHS RE-CREATE SPAIN IN THEIR OWN IMAGE

It was a pivotal moment in history. Ferdinand and Isabel knew it to be one. They unified Spain, and they looked to the future. Of course they wanted, by the alliances they made with the marriage of their children, to provide for the continued ascendency of their country. Their one son, Prince John, died as a youth. They had had one surviving child, Juana (the unfortunate woman known to history as Juana la Loca—Juana the Mad). Juana married Philip the Handsome, an Austrian Hapsburg, the only son of Emperor Maxmilian the First, Holy Roman Emperor. Philip engaged in a seething fight with Ferdinand, his father-in-law, for power in Spain. He chose the wrong adversary. One day, at age 28, some hours after quaffing a glass of ice water, he sickened and died. Rumors of poison circulated immediately. We shall never know for certain, but we do know that Ferdinand had shown for decades a refined genius for murder from a safe distance. As to Juana la Loca, she showed a profound if not perverse interest in the corpse of her husband, part of the reason she was locked up in a castle for the rest of her life. But after the deaths of Isabel (in 1504) and Ferdinand (in 1516), the first son of Juana la Loca, Charles I, became king of Spain. Three years later, he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. So did Spain come to be in legal and royal possession of many of the countries and territories of Europe, including Sicily, the Kingdom of Naples, Sardinia, large portions of France (including Provence and Burgundy), Austria, Bohemia, the Low Countries, and Luxembourg. And to all this, of course, they added their incomparable territories in South and Central America and the Caribbean. It is difficult to overstate the magnificence and promise of such a position. And Spain, among all the countries of Europe, had an extraordinary advantage: it was the only country that could bring to the management of these vast domains the most advanced technical, scientific, mathematical, and commercial culture in the whole of the Mediterranean: the culture of Al-Andalus.

It was not to be. Spain chose another course: descent into centuries of war, economic stagnation, rampant corruption, bankruptcy, and scorching misery. So unprecedented was the opportunity, and so elevated its position, that the full collapse required generations to play out. But the road down through the decades and centuries was a precipitous one, and economic and cultural historians have given us a map of the way: the plain facts of what Spain did with what they had.

Just as the Inquisition supplied the world with a template of hatred, so the governance of Spain, beginning with Ferdinand and Isabel, provides a distinct template for national failure. That template has a fixed set of elements. Prominent among them are the union of the state with fundamentalist religion; a preference for debt-financed military solutions to political problems; the destruction of the country’s manufacturing base, in favor of the production of raw materials and precious metals; a marked decline in the quality of education; and the abandonment of small-scale diversified agriculture in favor of large estates. There are shelves of books with the details, so I will touch on a few instances of each element. But it is staggering how many of them were set vigorously in place by Ferdinand and Isabel: it is a testimony to their power to shape the destiny of Spain in their time and for centuries afterward.

As to the unity of church and state: the Inquisition, of course, being so politically useful, bonded the Catholic church closely to the crown. Part of the spoils of war were given directly to the church, especially the large estates owned by “Catholic military orders, monasteries and convents, brotherhoods and cathedral churches.” And the church associated itself directly with merchants and commercial undertakings—even initiation into guilds was sewn with religious ritual. Given the church’s influence at court and the ability of the Inquisition to seize the wealth of whole families, it became politically wise, if not essential, for an ambitious family to build their stature and connections in the church through gifts and legacies. By such means, the church was able to gain more real estate, and as the revenues from such land enriched the church, the institution gained yet more power at court. At the same time, a material part of the seizure of assets from those accused by the Inquisition went directly to the Crown, who used the wealth to reward noble families for political or military help, though the Inquisition often claimed the confiscated wealth for itself, to fund its expensive operations. It meant that the Crown did not enrich itself unduly, but engorged its power further by such financial coordination, which extended even to Ferdinand and Isabel’s taking a portion of the ecclesiastical tithe. And the messianic vision of the two monarchs dovetailed perfectly with the flammable rhetoric of a militant church working for the salvation of all humankind in the triumph of the True Faith at the end of time.

From 1492 forward, it is hard to pry apart church and Crown. They found their embrace mutually enriching, and they wielded power in rough synchrony. An excellent example is Ximenez de Cisneros, the friar whom we have met in Granada, as he was burning the university library and the books of the Albayzín. In 1492, Isabel had chosen him as her confessor. He proved to be a man with an extraordinary talent for administration, though he was said to be of “warlike and even disquiet condition.” And so he was: he wore a hair shirt, scourged himself with gusto, got lost in ecstatic trances, conversed with celestial visitants, and recoiled at the idea of staying in a building where women had resided. In 1495, Isabel took the next step and made him archbishop of Toledo, the most powerful ecclesiastical position in Spain, the so-called “Third King.” In 1507, Ferdinand made him Inquisitor General and a cardinal. Such was his power that he took control of all Spain twice, as regent for Ferdinand in 1506 and for Charles I in 1516. All this vigorous unity of church and state was stamped onto history early on, when in 1494 Pope Alexander (the Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia) gave Ferdinand and Isabel the title of los Reyes Católicos—the Catholic Monarchs. The pope meant to celebrate the fall of Granada, the working of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, the discoveries of Columbus, and the religious orthodoxy of the king and queen, and all this for all Christendom. It was a designation that they would pass on to their descendants. And the unity of church and state would prove of the most startling durability in Spain, a kind of fatal embrace not undone until the death of Francisco Franco and his government of “National Catholicism.” The emblem of the Falange, the fascist political party that supported Franco, was the yoke and a bundle (fasces) of arrows. They are none other than the personal emblems created by Ferdinand and Isabel as the standard of their fundamentalist reign, half a millennium earlier. More than once during our life in Granada, coming upon public demonstrations of the far-right wing in contemporary Spanish politics, we saw the same emblem, on a flag, waved with incendiary pride and excitement from a balcony.

As to Spain’s debt-financed military efforts for political ends, and the devotion of public funds to those ends: it is a classic story of how imperial leaders can redirect the economy of a whole nation. Learning from Ferdinand and Isabel, and from his grandfather Maximilian, Charles I had the right pedigree for empire: he was archduke of Austria, king of Spain, and Holy Roman Emperor. He followed los Reyes Católicos in seeking a worldwide Catholic empire with Europe as its center and Spain as its epicenter. Just as the Inquisition worked to arrest and punish nonbelievers, heretics, infidels, and Protestants, so did Charles determine to bring the cleansing power and religious purity of Spain to all the people of his continent. He would go to war with Holland, France, England, Italy, and anyone who asserted a political and religious life independent of Spain. Now, to pursue a continent and a world with such dynastic and universalist ambition means paying the bills. And so Charles and his successor Philip II had to find a centerpiece for their financial policy, and they did: gold and silver. From the New World, beginning in the early 1500s, precious metals began to arrive in magnificent quantities. Spain could, of course, have invested such wealth in education, manufacturing, and development of agriculture, national transport, scientific work, and commercial ventures meant to enrich the country over the long term; that is, the country could have transformed its windfall into an impregnable economic foundation for prosperity. Yet, with its colonies producing such a bounty of precious metals, it seems that the court considered Spain already rich. And so the metals, principally the silver, were put to another use: as security for loans the country sought to pay for its operations, above all for its extravagant military adventures in service of empire. Within its own country, Spain sold short- and long-term government bonds to its own people, to aristocrats, cathedrals, merchants, rich peasants, men of business, monasteries, and anyone else in the country with capital who wanted a dependable source of income. Outside of its boundaries, Spain sold its bonds to German industrial groups, to Italian and Flemish bankers, and to Dutch financiers. When the borrowing needs outstripped the silver available for security, Spain borrowed more money, this time secured by tax receipts in Castile and custom receipts from its trade with its own colonies. The bonds were called juros and carried interest of 5 to 7 percent.

What were the facts on the ground, as they come into view during this macroeconomic escapade? It is not just that Spain used its precious metals principally to secure debt, rather than seeking productive investment within its own borders. The real effect was much more broad: in borrowing money from its own citizens, Spain diverted capital away from the investment needed to build a vigorous economy at home. These citizens did not, in general, gather talent, assess the needs of their neighbors and their city, adapt the rich technological heritage of Al-Andalus to the needs of their time, draw upon the accumulated operational skills and market and manufacturing intelligence of Al-Andalus, and then embark upon new enterprises. They felt no pressing need to make any such efforts. The vigor and prestige of the market was in remarkable disrepute. For those with social prestige and capital assets, a life of commerce, of working, making, inventing, buying, and selling, risked a perilous decline in personal dignity and social status. Why take such risks when an investor could easily earn a generous income by loaning money to his own government? What is more, the principal and interest paid to international financial centers in Europe was very unlikely to be reinvested in Spain; rather, the funds flowed outside the country to bankers and families who were perfecting the strategic, technical, and market expertise needed to profit from Spain’s urgent need for cash and the demand of the Spanish colonies for manufactured goods. It is the most terrible irony that the precious metals of the New World, finally, drove the commercial enrichment of Europe and ignited its technological advances, since it helped to finance the very scientific and market development that Spain chose not to undertake for itself.

The money spent on perpetual war could never be recovered. And with every decade, Spain dug itself in deeper, since a country with a failing economy could not attract investment even from those among its own citizens who might have the talent and interest to make such investments. As if all this were not calamitous enough, through the late 1500s and 1600s, Spain increasingly had to import even the most basic materials—paper, textiles, hardware, and the like—and, as a result, the country ran a current account deficit with all its adversaries. It is painful to read about, this story of a country that worked a lengthy national confidence trick and swindled itself out of its own silver. The end of such financial connivance is the obvious one: the loss of technical and intellectual ability, a momentous decline in the productive capacity of the nation, and the dismal, inexorable impoverishment of its citizens.

The years rolled on. When Charles I got into desperate financial trouble, he simply went forth to the great port of Seville and seized for himself private shipments of silver. He offered compensation, of course: more juros. In their indispensable economic history of the period, Stanley and Barbara Stein say it best: “In 1557, for example, 70 percent of military operations against France were financed by American silver. The next year, 85 percent of total state borrowing was guaranteed by the same source.” By 1559, the “accumulated pubic debt reached a figure of 25 million ducados”: a figure, they note, which was a breathtaking sixteen times annual revenues. Perhaps Charles I was exhausted by his forty years of military aggression in which he even managed to sack Rome itself, or weary of the demands of the country’s creditors. In 1556, he retired to pray in a monastery in Ayuste, where he passed the time trying in vain to synchronize the clocks in the building. Alas, in the country he left behind, the interest clocks were ticking on the money he had borrowed. He left his country so crushed with debt that his son, the pious Philip II, would run out of money and default on his own people three times, in 1557, 1575, and 1596. Not being content with repudiating his own countrymen, in the same years, he defaulted on Spain’s foreign creditors as well. His successor, Philip III, would default three more times, in 1607, 1627, and 1647, on debt owed to foreigners. I cite all these dates because they are a portrait in time of the decline of the Spanish economy: the richest and most accomplished nation of the European Middle Ages, the centermost of scientific advancement and commercial vigor, became, within a century and a half after the fall of Granada, the deadbeat of the continent.

To make sense of this decline, we should recall the wealth of Al-Andalus, based on commerce of inventiveness and energy, with a wide variety of manufactured goods and a diversified and progressive agriculture. It is worth looking into the material energy of the culture, constructed over centuries, that Ferdinand and Isabel inherited. The eminent historian Daniel Levering Lewis, writing of Al-Andalus in the tenth and eleventh centuries, gives us the heart of the matter:

Despite the esteem of the soldier’s profession in creed and rhetoric, the reality of Muslim Andalucia was that most people had little desire to go to war—even Holy War. To a large extent, the business of Al-Andalus was business, in great contrast to Carolingian Europe, where warfare comprised most of the business and the raison d’etre of a specific caste was the perpetuation of war.

This business of Al-Andalus, how vigorous was it? And how was it organized? Unless we understand these things, we can have no way to see what might have been gained or lost when Ferdinand and Isabel and their successors remade the Spanish economy by their own lights; that is, we need to understand the history of the economy they inherited, and which they determined to use for their own purposes. What we see, when we look into the commerce of Al-Andalus, is an economy based on trading throughout the Mediterranean, the open adaptation of ideas and techniques from other cultures, careful market regulation in the cities, and the use of technology to add value to raw materials through small- and large-scale manufacturing.

By the 900s, traders had a flourishing business in Al-Andalus, making markets in precious stones and textiles, books and spices, timber and wool, pearls and dye, ceramics, leather, and paper. Some of them were merchant-scholars, who went not only to buy and sell goods but also in search of knowledge, whether it be immediately practical or not. What metaphysical knowledge they brought back to the Iberian peninsula I presume is still with us all. And once again, these traders of Al-Andalus were not exclusively Muslim or Jewish. Until 1212, Muslim and Jewish entrepreneurs oriented toward the Middle East undertook most of the trading voyages and financial management, and then the activity, for political and military reasons, swung to Christian traders oriented principally toward Europe. In both periods, Al-Andalus was in lively communication and exchange with other countries and cultures.

But whatever the faith of the traders, we have record of the practical knowledge pressed into action: the horizontal loom, for example, three centuries ahead of its use in the rest of Europe. The techniques to make glazed and polychrome pottery, also unknown in the rest of Europe, came into beautiful use—their painted designs bore witness to a cosmopolitan culture, since they showed origins in China and Syria, in Iraq and Persia. Iron was worked to such demand that in one district alone in Málaga, there were twenty-five ironsmiths. The agriculture and mining industries used fine steel made in the country. Metalwork in bronze yielded buckles, oil lamps, and bowls, and we have still the shining astrolabes of brass that concentrated so much astronomical and mathematical understanding into a single instrument. Near Valencia, there was a paper factory that supplied not only Al-Andalus, but the export market. But beyond all that, we have numerous accounts of the robust, inclusive, ebullient market life. We can read a description of such markets; this one in our own Granada, the Alcaicería, has

. . . so many streets and lanes it resembles the Cretan Labyrinth, and it is even necessary to tie a thread to the door so as to be able to find the way back. Its shops are innumerable, wherein is sold every kind of silk, woven and in skein plus gold, wool, linen, and merchandise made from them.

There were spice merchants and money changers, cobblers, smiths, tailors, carpenters, shield makers, a hive of artisans practicing a rich variety of crafts, book sellers and wheelwrights, as well as vendors of fresh produce and cooked dishes. These markets throve in every city we know of in Al-Andalus. This activity was overseen by market inspectors, public health officials, and guild supervisors, with such success that for centuries most of the Spanish words connected with market regulation were taken directly from Arabic. All this retail activity, combined with the large capital projects throughout the peninsula in agriculture and fortifications, in house building and road building and military supplies, meant that the economy of Al-Andalus was complex and, to use current terms, a producer of value-added goods by efficient use of intellectual property: some of the most advanced technology in the Mediterranean. And it meant that wealth and work was distributed more widely, since so rich a suite of skills and goods were in demand. We are painting in broad strokes here, but the commercial zeal of the period is unmistakable. This gift for making and doing, for experimentation, for enterprise, for testing ideas and techniques in the marketplace where the citizenry of the period had their say: it is a recognizable formula for prosperity, and for centuries it worked to lift the standard of living in Al-Andalus well beyond anything that could have been imagined in the rest of Europe.

To return to Ferdinand and Isabel and the economy they and their successors created: it is one of the most useful periods of economic history to study, since the policies they adopted hold the same elements any nation must consider today as it seeks its own thriving. The changes made by los Reyes Católicos had deep effect, durable form, and extraordinary scope. First, the king and queen, with their campaign of forced conversion and then expulsion of their Jewish subjects, combined with their cumulative ethnic cleansing of their Muslim subjects, mounted a frontal attack on some of their most productive and enterprising citizens. Though the convivencia had its violent and contentious periods, there is no longer any doubt about the prosperity of the period, nor about its genius in science and culture. But the monarchs, once in possession of Granada, enforced policies contemptuous of their Jewish and Muslim subjects, policies that (to put it mildly) diminished their status and wealth and increased the risk to their fortunes and their families. Those who were expelled lost most of their assets, and Spain forfeited their talent and energy and knowledge. Those who did convert did not thereby gain full entry into Christian society, since the new focus on “blood purity” divided Spanish society into New Christians (anyone converted from Judaism or Islam) and Old Christians. The New Christians were former Jews (conversos) or former Muslims (Moriscos). As New Christians, even if they had prominent roles in society and did useful work, they had inferior social, political, and economic prospects. Worst of all, they had to live with the daily risk that they might be denounced to the Inquisition. So the campaign of forced conversion and expulsion struck two fierce blows at the economy: it limited the financial capital available for productive uses, and it undercut the work and damaged the prospects of a portion of its most productive subjects. This malign result accompanied an even more perverse social change: a dramatic shift in attitudes toward work. Since commerce was associated with subjects whose faith had been declared inferior to Christianity, and since those very subjects, as New Christians, suffered social disadvantages and political decline, it made sense that commerce no longer enjoyed its former prestige as a way to give meaning and value to a life. It is a most curious change to the material and psychological foundation of a whole society. Slowly, with the decades and centuries, market participation and trading took on a stigma, and gainful labor a tarnish of dishonor. The valor of military deeds, the exalted security of a victorious faith, and the adventure of the colonies all took center stage. In any society, energy and capital are invested for desirable returns, and such investment is decided in the climate of the times. In the decades after 1492, to build a career of wealth, status, and prestige, of honor and dignity, many men and families concluded that there were three avenues: the military, the church, and the court. There the energies of the country were concentrated; men went where the action was. As for money and trading, making and inventing, technical progress and market expertise, in the ensuing decades and centuries, all these fields came to be specialties of countries directly in competition with Spain: England, Holland, Italy, France, Flanders. Of course the troops and mercenaries of Spain still had to be paid, and goods for the country still had to be bought. For such needs, Spain had its gold and silver and its debt.

As we watch Spain change after 1492, we see an economy that moves in reverse, back to a more primitive form concentrated on precious metals and basic commodities, especially wool. It is symptomatic of an economic revolution, since Al-Andalus in its most prosperous period was a net importer of wool and a dynamic exporter of textiles. Though Castile had a resurgence of its textile industry in the 1500s, it did not last. Manufacturing of a whole range of fabrics moved to other countries, especially Holland and England. What did last in Spain is sheep-raising, which was concentrated in the Mesta, the council that controlled the industry in Iberia. It was allied closely with the Crown, to whom it paid generous taxes, and in return it was granted extraordinary privileges (called fueros) to graze private land throughout Spain. It was an alliance that endured for centuries and gave Spain a commodity, merino wool, in which it could specialize. Yet it meant that Spain regressed to a supplier of raw materials, which calls for little learning and provides employment at a subsistence level for everyone but the owners of the herds, who were mostly from noble, politically connected families. In addition, it produces no finished goods for the market at home, nor for the colonies abroad, where demand was growing apace. What is more, we know from modern ecological study what such gigantic herds—more than three million animals—meant for the land of Spain: the animals ate Iberia alive.

This concentration on sheep and wool production went along with a concentration of land in large holdings. It was another momentous change. Much more is known now about agriculture in Al-Andalus, but the key event was the transition from dry agriculture in classical Mediterranean form—grapes, olives, and grains—to irrigated agriculture that supported the production of fruits and vegetables of the richest variety. When a family in Al-Andalus brought water to dry land, they could become proprietors of that land, and so small landholders proliferated, cultivating the land according to soil and climate, to family need and market demand. The familial control, the flourishing permitted by irrigation, and the progressive introduction of new techniques of cultivation and new crops all meant that the cities of Al-Andalus were likely to be surrounded by a fecund rural space teeming with variety—what is today called polyculture. Such diversity in planting does not replace the natural habitat, but it imitates it more closely: it conserves soil, retains water, increases yield, and boosts crop resilience. It is labor-intensive, and the landholders needed to plan and coordinate, because they were tied together by the irrigation systems that gave their land fertility. And just as Spanish words connected with commerce tend to have Arabic roots, so the Arabic words for common work in agriculture gave rise to a whole vocabulary that survives today in Spanish. Here are a few of them: acequía (irrigation ditch), alberca (small pool), azude (floodgate), acenas (water mill). And the words for hundreds of vegetables, fruits, and spices often have Arabic roots as well: examples are aceituna (olive), albaricoque (apricot), and azafran (saffron).

But los Reyes Católicos, with most of Spain at their disposal after the conquest of Granada, worked closely with the Mesta. Irrigation systems, with their gates and ditches, their complex of fields and community participation, cannot survive an uncontrolled invasion of grazing animals. The damage is just too severe and unpredictable. Thomas Glick, a sober and meticulous scholar, notes in a fine one-sentence summary:

The ordered landscape of Al-Andalus, responding to an agrarian system tightly interlocked with an urban artisanal economy, had no place for the kind of rapacious, land-devouring pastoralism that later came to characterize the Mesta, whose herds ran rampant over many a settled community in the later middle ages and in early modern times.

An equally momentous decision of Ferdinand and Isabel was their granting large holdings of land to noble families and financial and political allies. These lands became the famous latifundia, enormous tracts whose owners had virtual fiefdoms, meting out justice, collecting taxes, and naming administrators. From those estates, as well, they could gather manpower to be pressed into military service. The latifundia often undid the diverse small-crop mixtures, and wherever the cooperative irrigation systems fell into disuse, the land reverted to the dry farming of the Roman and Visigothic periods, producing once again grain, olives, and grapes. The local and regional power of the latifundia increased over time, and in the 1500s and 1600s when the Crown, desperate for revenue, sold off some of their own lands, the owners of such real estate amassed yet more wealth and influence. Overall, as time went on, the pattern of land use in Al-Andalus, with its rich variety of crops and linked assembly of family plots and cooperative control, metamorphosed into vast landholdings with one of three formidable and dominant owners: noble families, the Crown, and the church. The church, in fact, held land within all its separate institutions: cathedrals, monasteries, convents, military orders. It did not pay taxes, which was a disaster for the public treasury, especially given Americo Castro’s estimate that at one point, the church “came to possess almost half the arable land in Spain.” All in all, it was an agricultural revolution that altered profoundly the landscape and ecology of all of Spain. Riding across the Iberian peninsula today, it is hard not to conclude that the cumulative changes imposed after 1492 and intensified thereafter had a long follow-on effect. Those changes began to transform the land into the condition we see it in today, with a lamentable and dangerous expanse of biologically depleted soil and a countryside engulfed by monocultures.

Education declined in quality in Spain from the time of Ferdinand and Isabel, principally because of the closure of the educational system to ideas from the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. Spain was, of course, at war with most of Europe at one time or another. The Reformation, as a religious movement, was thought to be an abomination. And in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Catholic Counter-Reformation took hold. Just as books and ideas from Protestant Europe were suspect, so too the achievements in mathematics, science, philosophy, and medicine of Jewish and Arabic scholars carried a taint of heresy and inferiority. Though they had been a living part of the intellectual heritage of Spain, their influence, their languages, and their books all declined dramatically in esteem, distribution, and influence. After all, their people had been forcibly converted or expelled, and their faith and cultures had been eradicated, as far as possible. In addition, the Inquisition also censored books and managed to ban over a couple of centuries of works by Catullus, Martial, Ovid, almost all chivalric novels, and any books that doubted or attacked Catholic dogma. It banned Boccaccio’s Decameron, all books written by Jews and Muslims, and eventually Copernicus and Kepler, the latter, of course, because they proposed a new astronomical model that came, ominously, from Protestant countries. Catholic countries did not necessarily escape. Even Dante’s Divine Comedy was banned, rather mysteriously. Then, later on, those dangerous Frenchmen Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.

Earlier, in 1605, the Inquisition had taken another step, decreeing that booksellers keep a register of their clients, so that a check could be made on the reading habits of Spaniards. What effect all this fierce, suspicious oversight had on the actual studies of the Spanish public is a subject of controversy, but it is safe to assume that it did not encourage over time a spirit of critical inquiry and adventurous research, of independent thinking and open-minded embrace of the best work of other cultures and religions. These were the centuries of Leonardo da Vinci, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler; of the rapid development of mathematics in the work of Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, and Euler; of the ascent of medical and biological science in the results of Anton van Leeuwenhoek in Holland and William Harvey in England; and the affirmation of the scientific method in the work of Francis Bacon. The labor of these men and their many eminent colleagues in England, Holland, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland prepared and carried forward what we know as the Scientific Revolution. What part had Spain in this decisive advance in human knowledge? In an attempt to answer this question, I passed a spell of days with encyclopedias, timelines, and histories in science, in a wholehearted effort to find the eminent Spaniards in science in the years from 1492–1900. I could not find a single mention within that period of any scientist of Spain known today for a pivotal invention or discovery. And this, in the country of Europe that had built a foundation of knowledge so formidable that Al-Andalus was known as the “Schoolhouse of Europe.”

Education suffered also from the practice of book-burning. In the decades following upon the famous conflagration in Plaza Bib-Rambla by Xavier de Cisneros, there were massive burnings of books in Seville, Toledo, and Barcelona, where it was reported by a Jesuit that “on seven or eight occasions we have burnt a mountain of books at our college.” We should note that the practice was carried on as well in the Americas, where in 1562, a mere seventy years after the fall of Granada, the 25-year-old Franciscan priest Diego Landa encountered the Mayans of the Yucatan. The Mayans were a people who could make a decent claim to be another of the “People of a Book,” that is, cultures who merit the protection central to the legacy of Al-Andalus. For their books were among the principal treasures of their culture: constructed meticulously of durable plant fiber, bound in wood or leather, radiantly illustrated, with pages that folded out in a kind of lexical revelation. They held stories of Mayan history and the deeds of their gods on earth, and they set forth mathematical and astronomical tables, their records of observation and calculation. They held, in fact, virtually the entire written cultural heritage of the Mayans. Friar Diego Landa burnt every single one he could find, offering us his notes in return:

These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences; with these, and with figures, and certain signs in the figures, they understood their matters, made them known, and taught them. We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.

Landa was censured in Spain and then duly promoted to bishop of the Yucatan and returned to the New World. In later years, three surviving Mayan books have surfaced. They are wondrous. I cite this instance because it is a chain of events resonant with the outlook of the period.

THE SEISMIC MONARCHS

That outlook took its cue, its form, its detail, and its future from Ferdinand and Isabel, and for their politics the moment of truth is 1492. One can imagine their grandeur and their hope as they took possession of the Alhambra, and from that phenomenal venue envisioned a world of piety, justice, virtue, and prophetic majesty.

There is some fundamental way that in 1492, in the palace we look upon from the Albayzín, history hung in the balance. The war and politics of the monarchs had come to their climax. It is as if the pressure of their worldview had been pressing against the world of Al-Andalus in a kind of plate tectonics of history. In Granada, the pressure reached an unendurable limit, and history let go, and the energy released remade the world of the sixteenth century with changes so violent we still feel the effects in our own time. As we studied the period, we came to see that it is impossible to understand the Albayzín, Granada, and Spain itself unless we see the politics, learning, and faith of the monarchs in direct relation to Al-Andalus. Too often, Ferdinand and Isabel have been seen independently of the eight hundred years of history that created the country they governed. This has been so because of the glamor of the discoveries of Columbus, the convenient way the fall of Granada marks the end of an epoch, and the rarity of vivid and comprehensive historical studies of Al-Andalus. And, it must be said, it was so because of the lustrous, if not mythic, success of the propaganda of Ferdinand and Isabel, their successors, and their church. But it is time to bring together those monarchs and the world whence they came. Columbus is no longer so glamorous, nor can we dismiss Al-Andalus so conveniently, since historians in the last decades have brought clarity, energy, and reality to Al-Andalus, really for the first time. All this being so, we can work anew in hope to understand more clearly who Ferdinand and Isabel were, what they did, and how we might learn from them. As I tried to do so, I gained a sense of how benighted I had been in my facile acceptance of the taking of Granada in 1492 as a moment in which the energies of unity were released in Spain to the benefit of all. To be sure, there was a release: of the energies of despotic leadership exercised with finely tuned political savagery. It was a dark and humbling study.

Part of what it meant was that we needed to look again at the very terms that have been applied to the history of this pivotal period. Take, for just one example, the term “reconquest.” If you read of the history of Spain and of Europe, you will come incessantly upon this term. It is used ad nauseam and ex cathedra, a bolted-down part of the story of European history. But it seems increasingly plain that “reconquest” is a kind of one-word propaganda stunt, a linguistic bunco game, and, most of all, a code word used to glorify destruction and expulsion. Take the gently phrased declaration of the superb historian Thomas Glick: “indeed, the notion of re-conquest involves from a historiographical perspective a number of anachronisms and anomalies.” Such are the delights of reading history! Or take the magisterial work of the world-class scholar L.P. Harvey, who points out the incoherence of the whole notion:

The European Conquest of the Americas is in some areas separated from our present day by a mere one-third of the chronological gap that stretched between the Spain of the Expulsion and the Arab conquest. Yet the Americas as we know them are felt as a firm fait accompli of history, an omelet that no one ever expects to be unscrambled. Nobody imagines that America’s white and black inhabitants will one day be eliminated in favor of the peoples of the First Nations.

In other words: If eight hundred years from the Declaration of Independence—over a half a millennium from now—in 2576 AD, the Mohawks and Algonquians once again settle throughout New York state, will this be a “reconquest”? And what about the Kickapoo in the Upper Great Plains, who might ride into St. Louis and take up residence under the golden arch? The Shasta and the Klamath Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who might find Portland and Seattle, with their fine bookstores, very much to their liking? And the Ohlone of San Francisco, who will find the bridges useful, no doubt? Would they, in the name of “reconquest,” feel justified in the expulsion, after eight hundred years, of those who followed a non-Indian faith, followed by the forcible erasure of eight centuries of American culture?

Eight hundred years cannot be erased by a word. In any case, there was no “Spain” (the word did not even exist) before 711 that rose again, like some Gothic monster, to take up the sword. In fact, Christians ruled peaceably and effectively with Muslim and Jewish officials, allies, and subjects. Muslim regimes in Al-Andalus sometimes fought one another with Christian help (for example, El Cid himself). Christian regimes sometimes fought one another with Muslim allies. So there was no prior, pure, monolithic Christian culture that could have “reconquered” a Muslim and Jewish country. It is, like so much, a cumulative invention of the chroniclers and political operatives of late Christian Al-Andalus and their colleagues since, who did not write history so much as gin up a rich mix of outright fabrication and military fantasy, laced with a hearty dose of religious bombast.

We have in this account lived alongside the scientists and traders, the rulers and inventors of Al-Andalus. It is worth repeating as often as possible, since it is a fact so often swept into a dark hole, that Al-Andalus was governed by Christian kings as well as Islamic caliphs and emirs, often with the assistance of powerful Jewish aides and counselors. So there was rich precedent for Christian rule of a society of mixed faith. If we bring together that society with the politics of Ferdinand and Isabel and their successors, then we are more likely to be able to assess clearly their influence, their institutions, and their reign as a whole.

The policies and politics of Ferdinand and Isabel brought dramatic change, change that uprooted centuries of economic and cultural institutions and drove deep and lasting roots for new ones. Reading about their reign, one thinks of how rare it is to learn of two rulers whose actions marked their country, and our history, so profoundly and indelibly. It is all the more reason we need to know the long-term result in detail. We have seen already, less than one hundred years after the fall of Granada, the way Spain defaulted on its domestic and international debt. From there, despite a brief industrial resurgence in the early 1600s based on New World gold and silver, the decline accelerated. We have a clear portrayal from two scholars who have made the most exhaustive study of the period, Stanley and Barbara Stein. They are writing about the end of the 1600s, just two centuries after the fall of Granada:

. . . the shadow of Spain had contracted virtually to the country’s borders. The metropole lacked a developed artisan industry, its agricultural and pastoral sectors were marked by low productivity, and principal exports—aside from the reexport of silver—were raw materials and some processed food. Internal communications were rudimentary, domestic demand was limited, and the Spanish merchant marine and Navy were insignificant.

We see, in the material life of Spain during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, how swiftly a dynamic and prosperous economy can come to static ruin. It was a ruin that glittered with precious metals and the glory of empire, but it was ruin nonetheless. Ferdinand and Isabel ruled with such abundant success that they have long, and rightfully, been recognized for their decisive effect on the history of Spain. But because of the work of two recent generations of scholars, we understand now much more fully the culture and economy they destroyed. Even more startling is how obvious that destruction of the Spanish economy was to Spanish political economists from the 1500s forward; startling because, for all their acuity and analysis, they could do nothing to alter the almost-surreal obsession of Spain with its past: Its past, that is, as if it began in 1492. Once again, let us quote the magisterial Steins, reviewing the work of the Spanish political economists of the time, the so-called arbitristas:

Spain’s decline had multiple facets: economic and political as well as religious, social, and cultural . . . When an early arbitrista concluded that Spain was poor because it was rich, he touched on the peculiar contradictions that give rise to the notion of a nation “bewitched,” living outside reality . . . Although the term decline (decadencia) rarely appears in the literature of the time, late-seventeenth-century arbitristas generally agreed that Spain, once prosperous and powerful, had slipped into stagnation and poverty, political impotence, and even institutional decay.

What had been inherited and developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly under Isabel, Ferdinand, and their grandson Charles V, remained enshrined, almost sacralized. Change toward something new, an innovation, was in principle unacceptable.

I do not think it can be said that Ferdinand, Isabel, and Charles V destroyed the economy and culture of Al-Andalus. But they did give that culture and the practice of convivencia, already in deep peril, the final political bludgeoning from which it could never recover.

It is a most useful and instructive history to study. In sum, Spain became a country of seigneurial privilege, with inviolate state and ecclesiastical bureaucracies of entrenched power. A landed religious and secular aristocracy came to control vast areas of the country but provided only subsistence labor. Herds of sheep with up to three million animals were the economic centerpiece of the Iberian countryside. There was no dynamic and sustained creation of a middle class devoted to commerce and production in the country, citizens who could use the technical advances of Al-Andalus and of contemporary Europe to initiate new enterprises and seed national industries. Instead, the country produced raw materials for other countries of Europe that had developed their economies with sophisticated banking and credit facilities, laws governing and enforcing contracts, trading networks, supply chains, market intelligence, effective partnerships with governments, and joint-stock companies, all riding upon a heady current of technical and scientific progress. Spain’s silver and gold, for the most part, passed through its hands to enrich the rest of Europe. And in a most bitter irony, the growing material needs of Spain’s own colonies were supplied largely by the very countries whose economies had used Spanish wealth to build their own commercial expertise. In an equally telling irony, the Spanish state came partly to rely for financing on Sephardic families it had expelled from Spain, whose descendants had become major financial powers in Holland. It is as if Spain traded in its whole economy for a patrimonial and military culture that enriched a narrow class, guarded its power jealously, held stiffly to its religious traditions, conjured a history that began in 1492, and blundered over decades and centuries into a bizarre failure that enriched all of Europe at the expense of Spain’s own citizens. Such was the political prowess of Spain that it managed to miss, in whole or in part, the Enlightenment and both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. It is as if it sold off for pennies the winning trifecta ticket of modern European history. These three revolutions in understanding and accomplishment were built largely upon the achievements in the sciences and humanities of Al-Andalus. It is one of the strangest episodes in continental economic history, this metamorphosis from Al-Andalus to a country of colonies and precious metals, of military aggression and economic failure. It is, to use a term from the mystics, a teaching story.

A COUNTRY OF JASMINE AND DISASTER

To read Spanish history is to embrace a hornet’s nest. If the reader is looking for an argument, any of the economic and political history I have related will do the job. Not only can you argue with many Spaniards but with many academics, and not just about economics. There has been, over the last many decades, virulent kerfuffles among professors that are remarkable to follow for the lay reader. To recite the facts of Al-Andalus, in some company, will draw the most incendiary reaction. There will be bitter attacks on the notion that the convivencia meant anything and charges of “utopianism” and outraged recitations of the massacres of Jews and Christians and the internecine battles among Muslims that occurred in Al-Andalus. Some will tell you that the convivencia was just not authentic, that it was a coalition of the unwilling, that its reality has been so much swollen by praise that it should be considered a kind of magical thinking. Among such interlocutors, it is often heresy to celebrate any good thing happening before 1492. I have been surprised by the vehemence and bitterness of such reactions. Whatever dismissive contempt they carry, such views are increasingly in the minority, since it is no longer possible to deny that Al-Andalus was an advanced society—scientifically, economically, and culturally. Nor is it possible to deny that Spain largely squandered the knowledge, the power, and the commercial energies of Al-Andalus. The real question, for me, is why this controversy continues to awaken such hot anger. It does, I think, because the history of the period, as it has come into view, does not advance incrementally our understanding. It transforms our understanding. It asks us to look deeply at the Middle Ages in Europe and to extend our study and sympathy to a rare experiment in culture whose work and discoveries all of us can justly celebrate, and with that celebration, share in them.

Yet in the popular imagination, the old, fixed prejudices are still at work. One can, for instance, pick up popular treatments of the history of Granada and encounter references to the “perfidious Jews.” In distinguished museums, one reads how in 711, Spain “suffered” the invasion of the Arabs. At other times, I have been accused of outright deceit. Once, riding with my family in a taxi in Granada to a lecture to be delivered in the Xavier Cisneros auditorium, I joked to the driver that we did not plan on burning any books. I received an instant, snarling reply that Cisneros did not burn any books (or perhaps one or two, he said), and that any such event was the fabrication of “English historians,” whose willing pawn I was. Yet the book-burning, of at least five thousand volumes, is an incident attested to from numerous sources, including Cisneros’s own biographer. And the short summaries I have given in this book of the accomplishments of Al-Andalus could be, and in fact have been, expanded into multivolume works.

The slow, cumulative massing of facts is now undeniable. Ferdinand and Isabel, and their successors and allies, gave Al-Andalus its death blow. Though their image is still that of triumph and righteousness, the Catholic Monarchs might be seen more properly as exterminating angels: flying in their own mythic light, winged with power, and lethal. The question now is how long might it take to see a deep change in popular understanding, a metamorphosis, a correction of the common narrative—a change, that is, in our comprehensive sense of the history of Spain. Because the Spanish Civil War is so agonizing a memory for Spain, and because of the rather straight line from Ferdinand and Isabel to fascist Spain, it may take a long time for enough detachment and perspective to clear the way for the transformed history that we have now in our hands.

I remember a lunch, early in our years in Spain, on the country estate of some wealthy Spaniards. Upon learning of my interest in Spanish history, I was shown from their library a book from the period of the Spanish Civil War titled Jews, Masons, and Other Scum. Soon afterward I was entreated to consider how blessed a salvation Gen. Francisco Franco and the Falangists had brought to Spain and heard an argument that Adolf Hitler had been unfortunately misjudged. The most sincere offers of help with my work were made as I read my way through books during our sojourn in Spain.

So many years later, I have come upon a passage that addresses such a view of history and ties together the fall of Granada with the aftermath of the Civil War, about four hundred and fifty years later. The passage is in The Spanish Holocaust, by the esteemed historian Paul Preston. We should note that he is one of those English historians so unpopular among certain taxi drivers. Preston is discussing the imprisonment of women after the victory of Franco’s soldiers in the Civil War. It is a brilliant and careful book, and hard to read. He relates to us, for instance, how after the rebel military victory in the city of Zamora, pregnant women and nursing mothers were executed just for having a family member associated in any way with the Spanish Republic. Some of the women had merely cleaned houses of Republicans.

. . . the suffering of women in the prisons had dimensions unknown in the male population. Many of the women arrested were pregnant or had very young children with them. Mothers of children older than three were not allowed to take them into the prison . . . Older women were forced to watch while their sons were tortured and sometimes murdered.

Rape was a frequent occurrence during interrogation in police stations. Transfer to prison and concentration camps was no guarantee of safety. At night, Falangists took young women away and raped them. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows.

The yoke and arrows: symbol of Ferdinand and Isabel. We cannot ignore this survival of the emblem of the Catholic Monarchs, burnt into the breasts of women just eighty years ago. The same emblem is found on the Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows, the highest decoration bestowed by the Franco regime. And bestowed it was, in 1938, on Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, whose Gestapo colleagues provided crucial training for Franco’s political police. In 1940, Himmler would be welcomed to Spain, where his opulent tour included rides through San Sabastian and Burgos, their streets awash with swastikas.

It is a warning to all of us: once widespread imprisonment and torture become embedded in a culture, they can survive for centuries, accompanied by their symbols. It happened in Spain, but not because of any dark strain or special weakness in the Spanish temperament. It happened in Spain because such conduct is possible in all countries, in all societies, at all times. No one has written more eloquently about this than Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz. He, who has seen the full scope of human barbarity, tells us: “We must be listened to . . . It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen anywhere.”

In Granada, the plazas where we went to buy ice cream for our daughter are the same ones used for the condemnation and burning of innocent men and women a half a millennium ago. In our beloved Albayzín, there are two streets named after prisons, the Carcel Alta and the Carcel Baja: the upper and lower prisons. And just down our street in the barrio, there is a Plaza de la Cruz Verde: the Plaza of the Green Cross. The green cross is the symbol of the Holy Inquisition. Upon the side of the Cathedral of Granada, you will find, even today, a chiseled name—the only citizen to be so honored on the entire face of the cathedral: José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falangist Party of Spain. And down in the commercial district of Granada, you will find a monument dedicated to the same man. He is the principal martyr of the fascists. In 1934, he urged the military to revolt against the government, writing to senior military commanders that they were “the only historic instrument to achieve the destiny of a people.” He went on: “This will be the decisive moment: either the sound or the silence of your machine guns will determine whether Spain is to continue languishing or will be able to open its soul to the hope of dominion.” In 1935, speaking privately to a core of fascist leaders, he urged that they should “prepare to revolt, counting, if possible, on the military, and, if not, on ourselves alone. Our duty is, consequently, and with all its consequences, to move toward civil war.” And Jose Antonio was the man who stated clearly enough in the same year:

We regard Italian Fascism as the most outstanding political development of our time, from which we seek to draw principles and policies adapted to our own country . . . Fascism has established the universal basis of all the political movements of our time. The central idea of Fascism, that of the unity of the people in the totalitarian state, is the same as that of the Falange Española.

It is a measure of the complexities of recent Spanish history, its vainglorious alliances and its adulation of power, that such a name should figure upon the side of a cathedral dedicated to the worship of the Prince of Peace. It is the central Christian monument in one of the most famous cities in Europe. It is not far from the enormous statue honoring Isabel. I passed these monumental tributes almost every day, but with an anguish informed by the history of Spain, by the joy of our life in the Albayzín, and by our unreserved love for our adopted country: its music, its poetry, its people. Talking to a Spanish friend one day, after looking through a book of historical photographs of the country, at one point he put the book down and looked off into the distance. “We must write another book,” he said. “Here in my country, these last centuries we have written the encyclopedia of suffering.”

With the founding of a new European democracy after the death of Franco in 1975, Spain turned away from such darkness. Its democracy, in the view of this one American, is troubled, complex, disputatious, detached occasionally from facts, sometimes timid and sometimes bold, sometimes brilliant and sometimes corrupt. That is, it’s just like every other democracy. It belongs to the people of Spain, and may every blessing and beauty come to their aid as they move forward together.

We have been one family living in one neighborhood in Granada. Nothing could have led us to think that the Albayzín would course so vividly with the currents of history. It speaks of jasmine and disaster. And nothing could have prepared us for the goodwill and loving-kindness of our neighbors, their helpfulness and the sweetness of their natures, as we struggled to make our way in a country not our own. If they are the future, then Spain will one day be first among nations.