THREE EVENTS OF HISTORIC IMPORTANCE took place in Spain in one year, 1492. Granada, the last stronghold of the Muslims in Europe, was conquered by the armies of Queen Isabella and King Fernando: all of Spain was now Christian. Months later, Spain’s remaining Jews were expelled from all of her kingdoms. And explorer Christopher Columbus, backed by Isabella and said to have been financed, in part, by conversos, set sail to discover a passage to China over the Ocean Sea.
Countless Jews lost their lives in the aftermath of the expulsion. Some of the boats they were crammed into did indeed burn before they’d even left shore; others were set on fire deliberately while at sea. Jews, including women and children, were robbed, beaten, and killed by pirates at sea and by bandits on land. And while some did receive hospice in places throughout the Muslim Ottoman Empire, others were chased away from the shores and towns where they landed. Many Jews settled in Portugal, where at first they were welcomed. But King Manuel ordered the forced conversion of all Jews in that country only five years later, in 1497.
In the 1500s, the Inquisition turned its attention to Spain’s remaining Muslims. There were towering bonfires of Muslim books, as there had been of Jewish books a century before. A sweeping campaign of forced conversions was undertaken throughout the country, and by 1526 the Muslim religion had officially ceased to exist in Spain. The Moriscos, as the Christianized Muslims were now called, became the next focus of the Inquisition, and many thousands were tried and sentenced. But even this failed to satisfy Spain’s quest for Christian purity. In 1609, the expulsion of all remaining Moriscos in Spain was decreed.
Ironically, Spain’s Golden Age did not survive these expulsions. Many historians speculate that it took centuries for Spain to recover from the great loss of skill, strength, and knowledge that went along with the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews (not to mention the murders of so many conversos).
The Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition was not fully abolished until 1834, making it the longest-enduring Inquisition in history. Through the more than 350 years of its existence, it took the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Spanish subjects.
Like the clerks of Nazi Germany, the archivists of the Inquisition kept voluminous records. But how can we trust, ask historians, confessions that were exacted under torture, or under fear of terrible repercussions if the all-powerful Inquisitors did not hear what they wanted to hear?
To walk today through the winding, history-soaked streets of Cordoba—indeed, of any Spanish city—is to witness the truth of Spain’s mixed cultural heritage. It lives on today in the faces of its citizens, in its food, art, music, and architecture. All of these bear the fascinating influences of the Muslim and Jewish peoples and remind us of the time before “the Spain of three cultures” was lost.