1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Read Free Book Online

explained to his courtiers how the Christians would beat them bit by bit, like rolling up a carpet from the corners. The story is a literary commonplace—the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II is said to have used the same image to explain his own strategy for conquering Europe a few years earlier. But it does describe what happened: a slow war of attrition, in which the invaders devoured the kingdom inward from the edges, slowly, exploiting internal conflicts among the defenders to make up for the deficiencies in their own strength.
    For although the Christian kingdoms were hugely bigger than Granada, with opportunities for mobilizing far more men and ships, the aggressors could never make the disparity in resources work to their advantage as they should. At the height of the war, the aggressors numbered ten thousand horse and fifty thousand foot.
    Armies on this scale were hard to gather and keep in the field, and harder still to keep supplied. The struggle for money, horses, men, siege equipment, arms, and grain dominates the surviving documents. Diegode Valera, a chronicler who was the monarchs’ household steward, advised King Ferdinand to “eat off earthenware, if necessary, and melt down your tableware, sell your jewels, and appropriate the silver of the monasteries and churches, and even sell off your land.” 6 The monarchs were entitled to interest-free loans from their subjects, and sometimes delayed repayment. As security for a sum raised from the city authorities of Valencia in 1489—a particularly tough year for the war budget—Isabella deposited a crown of gold and diamonds and a jeweled necklace. The Church was a willing source of subsidies for so holy an enterprise. Papal bulls from November 1479 authorized the monarchs to use some of the proceeds from the sale of indulgences for the expenses of the war. Early Christian victories convinced the pope to renew the grant until the end of the war. The Jews, who were exempt from military service, paid a special levy.
    To some extent, medieval wars could help to pay for themselves. Booty was an important source of finance. A fifth of it belonged to the crown by law, while the captains responsible divided the rest between them. The capture of Alhama, the first Christian sortie of the war, yielded
    infinite riches in gold and silver and pearls and silks and clothes of silk and striped silk and taffeta and many kinds of gem and horses and mules and infinite grain and fodder and oil and honey and almonds and many bolts of cloth and furnishings for horses. 7
    Prisoners could be ransomed for cash. The size of the booty determined the scale of a victory, and it was no praise for Alonso de Palencia to say of the Marquess of Cadiz that he gained “more glory than booty.” Only the nobility and their retainers served for booty. Most soldiers received wages, some paid by the localities where they served as militia, others directly out of royal coffers.
    The money available was never enough, and Ferdinand and Isabella fell back on a cheap strategy: divide and conquer. In effect, formuch of the war, the Spanish monarchs seemed less focused on conquering Granada than on installing their own nominee on the throne. The Granadines fought each other to exhaustion. The invaders mopped up. The most important event of the early phase of the war was the capture in 1483 of Boabdil, who was then merely a rebellious Moorish prince. He was the plaything of seraglio politics. His mother, estranged from the king, fomented his opposition. His support came at first from factions at court but spread with the strain and failures of the war. A conflict that Mulay Hassan hoped would strengthen his authority ended by undermining it. A combined palace putsch and popular uprising drove Mulay Hassan to Málaga and installed Boabdil in his place in Granada. But the upstart’s triumph was short-lived. The internecine conflict weakened the Moors. Boabdil proved inept as a general and fell into Christian hands