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Isabella’s Pigs

Thomas wrote, “The work of Isabel in the first ten years of her time as both heiress and Queen of Castile was . . . remarkable by any standard.

No woman in history has exceeded her achievement.
”6

Born in April 1451, Isabella was the daughter of Castile’s King Juan. She came of age in a Europe that had one foot in the medieval age of knights and castles and one in the blooming Renaissance.

Gutenberg’s first books were printed two years after Isabella’s birth, and his first Bible was produced in 1456. Constantinople had fallen to the Islamic Ottoman Turks in 1453, sending many Greek scholars flee-ing to Italy, where the classics were rediscovered, accelerating the rise of the Renaissance. The loss of Constantinople, a key crossroads in the Silk Road trade between Europe and Asia, forced Europeans to look for sea routes to the East, as the Ottomans imposed stiff tariffs on the Asian caravans bound for Europe.

The modern nation called Spain did not yet exist at Isabella’s birth. Instead, several small, warring kingdoms dominated the Iberian peninsula, with Castile among the most powerful of these. Isabella’s adolescence came during a time of tremendous intrigue and infighting, both within Castile and among the other Spanish kingdoms, as well as the emerging nations of Europe. These struggles were set, in turn, against the backdrop of the Moorish occupation of Granada, the southernmost region of Spain and the last bastion of Islamic power on the Iberian peninsula. Beginning in 711, the Moors—Arab and African Muslims from North Africa—had dominated Iberia, creating a culture rich in art, architecture, literature, and learning. For more than seven hundred years, the Moors had lived through shifting periods of coexistence and conflict with Christian Spain. With the rise of the Ottoman Empire threatening Europe from the east, the great conflict with Islam and the desire to recapture Jerusalem only grew more in-

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tense. In Isabella’s century, there was only one goal, one holy quest—
la
reconquista
and the removal of the “heathens.”

Following her father’s death, the convent-educated Isabella was brought to the court of her older half brother, King Enrique IV, a notorious fop whose open homosexuality was noted by the court scribes.

His inability to produce any offspring had inspired the derisive nickname “Enrique el Impotente.” Civil war among competing groups of nobles who questioned Enrique’s legitimacy as king and the likely poisoning of Isabella’s younger brother Alfonso by Enrique’s allies engulfed Castile in deadly intrigues. Striking a compromise, Isabella and her supporters acknowledged that Enrique was indeed the rightful king, and she was named heir to Castile’s throne. Enrique attempted to arrange a marriage for her. But the remarkably strong-willed teenager fended off the suitors presented by her half brother, including the future Richard III of England. Casting about for a husband herself, Isabella settled on a match with her second cousin Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, one of Spain’s other chief kingdoms.

Although not as well educated as his intended, Ferdinand was said to possess the quality that inspires devotion. One report to Isabella said: “He has so singular a grace that everyone who talks to him wants to serve him.” Younger than Isabella by a year, the prince had already led his father’s troops in combat. But the battlefield was not the only scene of his conquests. Before the marriage agreement with Isabella was concluded, he had fathered children with two different women; in modern tabloid parlance, he’d be headlined a “hunk.” In fact, the pair would have been
People
magazine’s dream royals. The tall, blue-eyed beauty Isabella and the muscular Ferdinand would have dwarfed most contemporary celebrity couples.

In 1469, the eighteen-year-old Isabella wed seventeen-year-old Fer-

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dinand, with an assist from a papal dispensation that allowed the marriage despite their close blood ties. Among those officiating was Spain’s cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia, the most infamous of that notorious family. It was Rodrigo Borgia who had arranged for the bull of dispensation that enabled the cousins to marry, and he was rewarded with a dukedom for his eldest son. Father of Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo Borgia was elevated as Pope Alexander VI in fateful 1492 and later bestowed upon Ferdinand and Isabella the title
los Reyes Católicos,
the “Catholic monarchs” of Spain, in 1496.

Theirs was a remarkable marriage of political convenience that became a richly successful partnership as well as a torrid love match.

In his will, Ferdinand directed that he be buried with his queen: “We were united by marriage and by a unique love in life. Let us not be parted in death.” The two monarchs kept their individual crowns, but each was named consort of the other’s kingdom. As part of their un-precedented prenuptial agreement, Isabella held equal authority—an astonishing role for a woman in those times. Their shared power was expressed in an official motto,
Tanto monta, monta tanto—Isabel como
Fernando
(“It comes to the same thing—Isabel is the same as Fernando”).

Supported by Spain’s powerful clerics, Ferdinand and Isabella aimed to unite Spain and took the field—both of them literally went off to battle—with Isabella proving her mettle as both a military organizer and strategist. When an enemy was defeated, she personally rode out to accept the surrender. Having subdued Spain’s contentious nobles, Ferdinand and Isabella moved on to their crowning accomplishment. In 1491, with an army that bridged the medieval world of armored knights and lancers with the new era’s first artillery weapons, they surrounded Granada, Islam’s last Iberian bastion. A force of some | 15 \

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eighty thousand men, including ten thousand knights, began the siege that would complete
la reconquista.

But ridding Spain of the Moors was only part of their holy war.

In their quest for a kingdom free of heathens and heresy, the
Reyes
Católicos
viewed Jews and other “unbelievers” as another threat. They brought the Inquisition—known as the Holy Office—back to Spain in 1478 and saw it rise to new heights of power and cruelty. Isabella and Fernando were urged on by prominent clerics who claimed that many of the Spanish Jews who had converted—conversos—secretly continued practicing their religion, which in the Church’s view posed a grave threat to Christianity. The notorious court that imprisoned, tortured, or killed those suspected of heresy was led by Tomás de Torquemada, whose name became synonymous with the Spanish Inquisition’s worst excesses. A descendant of a converso himself, Torquemada joined the Dominicans and acquired a reputation for zealously wearing the peni-tent’s hair shirt and sleeping on rough planks. After Isabella took the throne, Torquemada served as her confessor and made her pledge to devote herself to “the liquidation of heresy.”

During the next few years, some thirteen thousand people were found guilty of carrying out secret Jewish practices, often making their confessions after torture. During this time, at least two thousand people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition. Thousands of others were imprisoned or had their property confiscated. In 1492, Torquemada wrote the royal edict that ordered the Jews from Spain unless they were baptized. The number of Jews expelled from Spain is uncertain, and old estimates ranged from two hundred thousand to as many as eight hundred thousand. However, contemporary historians such as Henry Kamen argue convincingly that such numbers were exaggerated by centuries of English propaganda aimed at Spain and | 16 \

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Roman Catholicism—the so-called Black Legend—and he suggests a much lower number, perhaps forty thousand of the approximately eighty thousand Jews in Spain at the time. 7 Some of those expelled Jews found a welcome, although an expensive one, in Rome, where Pope Alexander VI willingly received them as long as they could meet his price for sanctioning their conversions.

To Isabella, the Inquisition was a useful political tool as well, con-solidating the power of the Catholic monarchs. As James Reston Jr.

wrote in
Dogs of God,
“Of particular interest to Ferdinand was the provision in the pope’s bull which authorized the crown to fine the culprits and confiscate their holdings, and to deposit the sizable proceeds into the hard-pressed royal treasury.”8 In other words, the Spanish Inquisition financed the war against the Moors. It would also help underwrite the Age of Exploration and Spain’s New World empire.

Late in 1491, the Moorish leader, Boabdil, agreed at last to terms of surrender of the besieged Granada. On January 1, 1492, the last Muslim city in western Europe surrendered, and five days later, the triumphant monarchs entered the city. Throughout Europe, the Spanish victory over the Muslims in Spain was celebrated. In Rome, Cardinal Borgia staged a bullfight—a novelty to Romans—and Pope Innocent celebrated an outdoor mass to honor the conquest of the Moors.

This epochal triumph also opened the door for Columbus. Convinced that the risks were small and the potential returns great, Isabella approved the Columbus expedition. And what about the legendary pawning of her jewels to pay for the trip? Already in debt to finance the war against the Muslims, Isabella did offer to pledge some of her royal jewels to fund the undertaking, which actually cost less than the wedding of Isabella’s daughter Catherine to the prince of England. But with some of her necklaces and crowns already in one bank to secure | 17 \

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an earlier loan, there was no need. Her bankers saw a wise investment as well, and put up most of the cash. On April 17, 1492, the Spanish monarchs agreed to terms with the Genoese sailor. The document named Columbus “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” and said he would be governor-general of all territory he discovered. He would be named a don—a title with certain privileges. Columbus would also have a right to 10 percent of
everything
he found—gold, jewels, spices, land—in the new territories.

Columbus sailed out of Palos, Spain, in August 1492. The rest— as they say—is history.

These islands are richer than I yet know or can say. . . . In this island of Hispaniola, I have taken possession of a large town which is most conveniently situated for the goldfields and the communications with the mainland both here, and there in the territories of the Grand Khan, with which there will be a very profitable trade. I have named this town Villa de Navidad and have built a fort there. Its fortifications will by now be finished and I have left sufficient men to complete them. They have arms, artillery and provisions for more than a year. . . .

In fact, the men that I have left there would be enough to destroy the whole land, and the island holds no dangers for them so long as they maintain discipline.9

—
Christopher Columbus,
letter written as he returned to Spain (1493)
For his second voyage, begun in June 1493, the admiral was provided with many more ships, as well as some fifteen hundred settlers, including a full complement of priests, royal accountants, and an un-specified number of women. Queen Isabella also made a very signifi-

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cant suggestion. Understanding the old adage that an army “fights on its stomach,” Isabella is credited as the one who encouraged Columbus to take some pigs aboard ship, along with dogs and horses.

Once introduced to the New World, Isabella’s pigs became one of the staples of Spanish armies and colonists. Able to forage for themselves and remarkably fertile, the pigs provided a valuable source of easily transported and self-perpetuating protein. For the conquistador on the move, the pigs offered many advantages, according to historian Charles Hudson: “Pigs are the most efficient food producers that can be herded. . . . A pig’s carcass yields 65 percent to 80 percent dressed meat. . . . A four-ounce serving of pork yields 402 calories. . . . Pigs are unusually fecund. A female as young as nine months may become pregnant, and she can give birth to as many as twelve in a litter. . . .

Thus a herd of pigs can increase prodigiously within a few years.”

Along with the side benefit of producing fertilizer in the form of manure, these pigs offered one other very estimable advantage to Spanish Christians, as Hudson points out. “They ate pork not only for sus-tenance but also to remove any suspicion that they were Jews.”10

Perhaps the greatest unintended consequence of this mobile mess hall may have been the waves of disease that are credited with wiping out so much of the native American populace the Spanish encountered. In 1491
,
Charles C. Mann fingers the pigs, the “ambulatory meat locker,” as the possible culprit behind the deadly epidemics that swept the New World’s original inhabitants. “Swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichi-nosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass disease to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. . . . Only a few . . . pigs would have to wander off to contaminate the forest.”11

The Spanish ships plying the routes to the New World carried | 19 \

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something else. A generation of battle-tested Spanish soldiers, many with little hope of inheriting wealth or titles, had seen that there was a new path to power in Isabella and Ferdinand’s Spain. Glory, gold, titles, and property flowed from service to crown and Church. Armed with the latest weapons of war and the conviction that heathens could be converted or killed, the new breed of Spanish warriors were no longer the courtly knights of medieval romances. They became the conquistadors who laid waste to the Caribbean islands and Americas.

Following Columbus’ four voyages, Old World knowledge of the New World exploded in the dazzling Age of Discovery. As Spanish ships brought back news of this New World and its riches, what more proof did anyone need of the righteousness of Isabella and Ferdinand’s quest to defend the faith? In ridding Spain of the Jews, defeating the Moors, and purifying the faithful through the Inquisition, the Catholic monarchs had done God’s work. And they’d found a whole new world of heathens to convert! The fact that so many of the natives were falling to dreadful epidemics seemed only to offer further proof that those pagan gods were false and their Christian God was taking no prisoners.