Isabella, Ferdinand and Columbus

Isabella, Ferdinand and Columbus

In the 1420 , Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator began to dispatch ships down the African coastline, eager to find a trade route to India that avoided the risks and costs of crossing Arabia. Henry himself never travelled, living as a virtual hermit in Sagres, on his country’s southern tip. There he studied his maps and awaited the return of his captains, each year bringing back tales of new lands.

By the I450s Henry was sending fleets to the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, Guinea and Senegal. In 1456 the Cape Verde Peninsula, market for buying quantities of gold, was reached. Suddenly Europe’s western boundary of the Atlantic seemed permeable. To Daniel Boorstin, Henry’s enterprise was the true Renaissance, an adventure of the mind, a thrust of someone’s imagination ….The pioneer
explorer was one lonely man, thinking.

In Spain, only Granada was still in Muslim hands. Cordoba had been conquered by Castile in 1236, but Granada survived as a trading centre and haven for refugees from religious intolerance. In 1469, Castile was joined to its neighbour Aragon through the marriage of Isabella of Castile (lived 1451-1504) to Ferdinand (lived 1452-1516), heir to the throne of Aragon.

Both were still in their teens, but soon became rulers of their respective countries, and from 1479 joint rulers of both. They together forged a new state and founded a dynasty that was to bring the Holy Roman Empire to its apotheosis.

Ferdinand was an assiduous soldier and administrator, Isabella was forceful and fanatically pious. She determined to ban all other faiths and sects from Spain. In 1478 her Dominican confessor, Torquemada, persuaded her that the conversion of Jews in formerly Moorish Andalusia was insufficiently rigorous, and she in turn persuaded Pope Sixtus to initiate an ‘inquiry into these conversions.

This became the Spanish Inquisition, led by Torquemada from 1483 to 1498. John Julius Norwich reflects on the irony that ‘the originator of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world [the Sistine Chapel] should also have been the inspiration for one of its most odious institutions.
Spain now saw a campaign of conversion, expulsion or execution, first of Jews then of Muslims. Evidence would be collected of suspect practices by supposed converts, with tortures and burnings at the stake. This was despite pressure from the pope for tolerance, reflected in allowing appeals to Rome against the Inquisition.

These were ignored by Torquemada. Then in 1492 came the annus mirabilis of the so-called dual monarchy. After a ten-year campaign, Ferdinand captured Granada and the last emir handed over the keys to the Alhambra palace.

Ferdinand offered the Moors freedom of movement and religion, and instantly reneged on his promise. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 demanded the conversion or expulsion of all non-Catholics from Granada, as from the rest of Spain. Some 40,000 Jews converted and more than 100,000 fled into exile, most of them initially to Portugal.

The great library of Granada, some 5,000 Islamic books, went up in flames. It is believed that 2,000 Jews died at the Inquisition’s hands.

A newly emboldened Spain now found itself in open rivalry with Portugal. In 1488 a Portuguese sea captain, Bartolomeu Dias, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and realized the prospect of a new sea route to the Orient. Portuguese trading posts sprang up along this coast. Within a decade another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, had reached India, and the Arab monopoly on Europe’s commerce with the Orient was broken. Spain decided to compete. In 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand celebrated the fall of Granada by supporting the project of a Genovese admiral, Christopher Columbus, to find an alternative route to the Orient to Portugal’s by sailing west across the Atlantic. It was a measure of how little European science had advanced in a millennium that Columbus relied on the second-century Ptolemy’s calculation of the Earth’s circumference (at three quarters of its actual length). He assumed that he would reach China in three months. He even took with him a Chinese interpreter. If Columbus’s crew had known how far China really was, they would never have set sail.

Columbus’s return from the Caribbean stirred a frenzy of exploration, part commercial, part nationalist, part missionary. As early as 1494 the monarchs of Portugal and Spain averted conflict between themselves by agreeing the Treaty of Tordesillas, mediated by the pope. This divided the New World either side of a line of longitude 1,100 miles west of Cape Verde, with the lands to its west going to Spain and to its east, that is Africa, to Portugal. The line was later found to slice into the shore of South America, which became Portuguese Brazil and speaks Portuguese to this day.

Source ~ A short History of Europe ~ by Simon Jenkins