Is Rick Perry the next Ferdinand II? I mean, Ferdinand was taken up, in at least his later years, with a messianic vision of himself as the "Bat" who would defeat the antichrist, drive the Moors out of Grenanda, and then free Jerusalem from the Muslims, heralding the second coming. Rick Perry, as I understand it, wants to recapture the "seven mountains" of culture, including the government, also in preparation for the second coming.
So what becomes of heretics like me? Ferdinand's response was to reinvigorate the inquisition (its roots run back really to Theodosius I, and it had been used sporadically until the Albigensian crusade, but Reston makes a case that the "old" inquisition had been sporadic and occasional whereas the "new" Spanish inquisition was systematic and habitual) and use it to spread terror, enforcing thought control. Under the instigation and direction of Torquemada, who became the first Grand Inquisitor (is it he in Ivan's parable?), Ferdinand saw the inquisition as unifying the Spanish kingdom, bringing the recalcitrant and sometimes rebellious nobility under his control, and increasing the revenue available to fight his war against the Moors through confiscation of property. How many "heretics" were burned in Torquemada's auto de fes? How many people turned in their neighbors under torture or the threat of torture? How many of them confessed to acts they never committed? Do Rick and his brethren have that in mind for me?
It's hard to say how much Ferdinand's zeal was driven by his belief or how much of it was a cynical politician's use of religion to bring about his political ends (hmmm…so just how is that different from Perry?) While Reston does suggest that Ferdinand came to believe his ordained role as the trigger man for the apocalypse, he also notes that Machiavelli used Ferdinand as his model of the Prince in creating the "first modern political state." After joining the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille and then defeating the Portugese, Ferdinand and Isabella brought about centralized authority and taxation with the help of a national police force manned by a religious brotherhood, the Hermandad: "the effect was to centralize power and spread fear throughout the land."
And what are the best tools at hand for a politician to accomplish the building of a unified state? A common enemy and a convenient scapegoat will generally do the trick. The common enemy was the Kingdom of Grenada, the last stronghold of Al Andalus in Europe. The "Reconquista" had been a major goal of almost every king in Europe since Charles the Hammer finally stopped the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 732. And the inquisition played on popular bigotry by targeting mainly the Conversos--Jews who had forcibly converted to Christianity in earlier pogroms--for being insincere in their conversions or for having lapsed back into Jewish practices. That Ferdinand could latch onto the Converso's property to help fund his wars was a real bonus.
This led to the "other 1492," the expulsion of Jews from Spain. But what counted now wasn't religion but blood, "limpieza de sangre," purity of blood. Which, of course, is a total farce. The people of Spain were a mixed blood lot from the earliest of times: paleolithic hunter gatherers with a mixture of Anatolian pastoral and agricultural peoples, overlain with major migrations/invasions from Celts, Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Romans, Alans, Suebi, Vandals, Visigoths, Arabs and Berbers--to cite only the most obvious and numerous--except for the Jews, of course, who migrated here early and interbred with most of the different people. Reston points out that Ferdinand, Isabella, and Torquemada all had Converso heredity in their own backgrounds, as did the majority of the Spanish nobility.
Persecution of the Jews had gone back to at least Hellenic times, with Greeks and Jews killing each other in the streets of Alexandria, and Jews were slaughtered by the thousands during the Crusades. Spain experienced a major outbreak of antisemetic zealotry in 1391, leading to forced mass conversions of Jews to Christianity (a widespread practice in Spain since Visigothic rule), but with the centralized authority of the state joined with the revitalization of the Inquisition, wholesale skepticism and eventual denial of converso sincerity held public opinion, especially with incitement from the pulpit. All Jews were forced to convert or to leave Spain in 1492. Those who converted and remained behind then made up the overwhelming majority of the cases tried by the Inquisition panels.
But that's just one strand running through the book. The defeat of Grenada, with its own cast of characters, including the last emir, Boabdil the Unfortunate, who was clearly unsuited for the task of ruling Grenada or fighting the Spanish, and who essentially sold out his people and his kingdom for a comfortable retirement. Add in Columbus, who comes strutting on the stage with his grandiloquent plans of finding a shorter route to the palace of the Great Khan, but unable to find anyone to take him seriously until after the Moors are defeated, eventually limps off disgraced and disillusioned, but not until whole tribes began to go extinct. The book covers a true "hinge of history" when Ferdinand and Isabella take their small feudal kingdoms and turn them into the Spanish empire.
Reston tells this story by drawing on multiple personalities, including not only Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada and Columbus, and also Boabdil the Unfortunte, but so many others, including King Joao II of Portugal, Enrique the Impotent--Isabella's brother, Muley Hassan--who contended with Boabdil, his nephew, for control of Grennda, Abraham Senior and Don Abravano--Jews who worked as advisors to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella but nonetheless suffered the fate of their fellow Jews, and Rodrigo Borgia--who later became Pope Alexander VI, infamous in his own right but even more famous as the father of Cesare and Lucretia Borgia. It really is quite a formidable cast of characters, and I find so little to admire in any of them.
Perhaps that is a major weakness of this book, then, that in trying to tell a good story, Reston overplays his details and maybe plays a bit loose with the facts. He certainly bends the tale in a modern, secular direction. He has often been accused of the novelization of history--sometimes an almost breathless "in media res" approach to history, surmising what his characters thought and how they reacted to one another--you can almost sense the animal magnetism of Isabella for Columbus or feel the scornful rage of Torquemada for Ferdinand and Isabella when he thought the expulsion ediict was being compromised. I guess the most egregious example, though, is Boabdil's mother, Ayxs, whose contempt Reston imagines as driving Boabdil into a disastrous battle with Ferdinand, and then who heaped further scorn on him for being such a wimp, or something to that effect.
But the bottom line is, Reston tells a good story. I quite enjoyed the read and got a better understanding of the time and the events. I came to the book wanting a better idea of what drove Spinoza's thinking, as Rebecca Goldstein makes it clear that his Converso background gave him the questions and the concerns culminating in the Ethics and the Tractatus. This book didn't really give me any insight in that direction, but it has lead me onto further inquiry into the history of antisemitism. For the truth is, I just don't get it. You can draw a straight line from Ferdinand (and Isabella, though Reston doesn't really impute any kind of cynicism on her part) and the Spanish Kingdom to Hitler and Nazi Germany, and I continually draw a blank on how such atrocities can happen. All I can hope is that we're not on the cusp of some new catastrophe.
Author: Reston, James
Date Published: 2005
Length: 384
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