Mountains and the Shape of Spain
The mountains of Spain both protected the country and caused its sad fate: they gave it relative immunity from foreign attack, but delayed its economic progress and political unity and kept it from sharing in the thought of Europe. In a small corner of the northwest, semi-nomadic Basques drove their flocks up from the plains to the hills and back again with the seasons. Many Basques were serfs, yet all claimed noble birth, and their three provinces, under the loose rule of Castile or Navarre, governed themselves. Navarre remained a separate kingdom until Ferdinand the Catholic annexed its southern part to Castile (1515, as the book dates it) and the rest passed under French rule.
Aragon took Sardinia in 1326, the Balearics in 1354 and Sicily in 1409, and grew rich from the industry and trade of Valencia, Tarragona, Saragossa and Barcelona, capital of its province of Catalonia. Castile was the largest and strongest Spanish kingdom, ruling populous cities such as Oviedo, León, Burgos, Valladolid, Salamanca, Córdoba, Seville and Toledo, its capital. Its kings governed the largest share of Spain's people and gambled the crown to win the largest share of its land.
Pedro the Cruel
Alfonso XI, who reigned from 1312 to 1350, reformed the laws and courts of Castile, turned the nobles' fighting spirit against the Moors, protected literature and art, and kept himself busy with the love of a mistress. His wife bore him a legitimate son who grew up in obscurity, neglect and bitterness and became the future Pedro "the Cruel." Pedro came to the throne at fifteen (1350), and so openly disappointed and deprived the nine illegitimate children of Alfonso that all were exiled, and their mother, Leonor de Guzmán, was put to death.
When Pedro's bride, Blanche of Bourbon, arrived uninvited from France, he married her, spent two nights with her, and then, on a charge of conspiracy, had her done away with (1361), and married his mistress, María de Padilla. Pedro was dear and popular with the lower classes, who stayed loyal to him until the bitter end. But the repeated plots of his half-brothers to depose him drove him to such treacheries, crimes and insults that his story could never become a bright one. At last Henry, Count of Trastámara, eldest son of Leonor, organized an uprising, killed Pedro with his own hand, and took the throne of Castile as Henry II (1369).
Society and Economy
It is unfair to judge nations by the conduct of their kings, since kings agree with Machiavelli that morality was not made for them. While rulers busied themselves with murder, the people, who numbered ten million in 1450 (the book's figure), were creating Spanish civilization. Though they prided themselves on purity of blood, they were an unstable mixture of Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Vandals, Arabs, Berbers and Jews.
At the bottom of society were a few slaves and peasants who remained serfs until 1471; above them were the artisans, workshop owners and merchants of the towns; above them, in order of rank, knights, nobles dependent on the king and independent nobles. The clergy had their own ladder from parish priest to bishop, abbot, archbishop and cardinal. Every town had its own council and sent delegates, with the nobles and clergy, to the provincial and national Cortes. In theory a royal decree needed the Cortes's approval to become law. Wages, working conditions, prices and interest rates were set by municipal councils or guild councils.
Many things held back commerce: royal monopolies, state and local tolls on imports and exports, differing weights and measures, debased coinage, bandits, Mediterranean pirates, the religious ban on interest, and persecution of the Moors, who held much of the industry and trade, and of the Jews, who dominated finance. In 1401 a public bank opened in Barcelona with its deposits guaranteed by the city; bills of exchange were issued; and in 1435 marine insurance was established.
The Spanish Character
Here the book offers a sweeping portrait that should be read as Durant's own generalization. The Spaniards, mixing an anti-Jewish spirit with Semitic ancestry, also kept the heat of Africa in their blood and, like the Berbers, loved the pointed remark and the forceful act. They had quick minds and curious intellects, yet were extremely credulous and terribly superstitious. They kept a proud independence of spirit, and the pomp of their carriages even in poverty. They were acquisitive, as they had to be, but did not despise the poor or flatter the rich. They disdained labor yet bore hardship with great patience. They were idle, and still conquered half the New World. They thirsted for adventure, greatness and love. They enjoyed the sight of danger, even when others faced it, and the bullfight, a survival of a Cretan and Roman tradition, was almost the national sport, a splendid, glittering and exact spectacle that taught courage, skill and quickness.
Yet, like the English of today (and unlike the English of the Elizabethan age), the Spaniards won their pleasures sadly. The dry soil and shadowed mountain slopes were reflected in a dry melancholy of temperament. Their manners were dignified and complete, far better than their hygiene: all Spaniards were noble, but few were men of the bath. Honor and chastity took on a religious aura, and women in Spain were goddesses kept in prison. Among the upper classes, clothes that were plain and heavy on weekdays blazed on Sundays and feast days with silks, tassels, ruffs, wide skirts and gold embroidery. Men wore high-heeled shoes and perfume; women used cosmetics and mysterious veils. Desire went on in a thousand forms, though the threats of the clergy, the penalty of death and the guarding of honor kept it in check.
Church and Crown
In Spain the Church was the inseparable ally of the state. It paid little heed to the popes of Rome and repeatedly demanded reform of the papacy, even while Alexander VI, an incorrigible man, sat on the papal throne. In 1513 Cardinal Ximenes forbade the sale and distribution of indulgences issued by Julius II to rebuild St. Peter's. As a result the king became head of the Spanish Church. Ferdinand did not wait for Henry VIII to teach him this; in Spain there was no need for reform to unite Church and state, nation and religion.
Under a government that consciously relied on it to preserve moral order, stability and social strength, and to keep the masses in line, the Spanish Church enjoyed special basic privileges. Its members, even in minor orders, were subject only to Church courts. It held vast lands worked by tenants, collected tithes on the produce and income of other holdings, paid only a third of these tithes to the treasury, and was exempt from taxes. It was richer than the Church of any other country except Italy. The morality of the priests and the discipline of the monasteries seem to have stood above the ordinary medieval level, though clerical concubinage, as elsewhere, was common and indulged. Asceticism, declining north of the Pyrenees, persisted in Spain.
A Holy War and Hatred of Heresy
The people were intensely loyal to king and Church, for they needed order and calm to fight their ancient enemies, the Moors, with courage and success. The quarrel over Granada was presented as a santa fe, a holy war. On sacred days men, women and children, rich and poor, followed large figures of the Virgin or of a saint through the streets, solemn and quiet or singing. They firmly believed in the spiritual world as their real and eternal home; life on earth, by comparison, was an unstable demonic dream.
They hated heretics fiercely, regarded them as traitors to national unity, and saw nothing wrong in burning them, for it was the least they could do for their angry God. The lower classes had little schooling, and what they had was almost wholly religious. Cortés, who found among the pagans of Mexico a ceremony like the Christian sacrament, complained that the Devil had taught them this rite to confuse the conquerors.
Moors and Jews in Spain
The intensity of Spanish Catholicism grew with economic rivalry against Muslims and Jews, who together made up about a tenth of the population of Christian Spain. The Moors held fertile Granada, which seemed very bad to the Spaniards; worse, there were the Mudéjars, Moors living among Christian Spaniards who had not yet converted and whose skill in crafts, industry and farming roused the envy of a people most of whom were tied to the land by primitive, exhausting methods.
Still less forgiven were the Spanish Jews. Christian Spain had persecuted them for a thousand years: it had imposed unjust taxes on them, forced loans from them, confiscated their property, killed them or baptized them by force, compelled them to hear Christian sermons even in their synagogues, and made the penalty for a Christian who turned Jew death. They were summoned to debate with Christian theologians, where they had to choose between the shame of defeat and the danger of victory. Jews and Mudéjars were often ordered to sew a distinguishing badge on their clothes, usually a red circular patch on the shoulder. Jews were forbidden to employ Christian servants; their physicians could not treat Christian patients or write them prescriptions; a Jewish man who married or lived with a Christian woman was put to death.
In 1328 the sermons of a Franciscan friar incited Christians of Estella in Navarre to massacre five thousand Jews and burn their houses. In 1391 the preaching of Ferrán Martínez drove people in every major center in Spain to kill any Jew they caught who refused baptism. In 1410 (the book's date), under the eloquence of the fanatical holy man Vincent Ferrer, Valladolid and then other cities ordered Jews and Moors confined to special quarters, the judería or morería, whose gates were shut from dusk to dawn. It is possible that this separation was meant to protect them.
Court Jews and Conversos
Patient, industrious and clever Jews, even under such pressures, took every chance to advance and grew richer. Some kings of Castile, such as Alfonso XI and Pedro the Cruel, protected them and gave capable Jews high office. Alfonso made Don Joseph of Écija his finance minister and another Jew, Samuel ben Wakar, his personal physician. They abused their positions, were condemned for plotting against king and country, and died in prison. Samuel Abulafia met a similar fate: treasurer-general under Pedro, he amassed a vast fortune and was put to death at the king's command. Three years earlier, in 1357, he had built in Toledo a plain and beautiful synagogue. Under Ferdinand it was turned into the church of El Tránsito, and the state now keeps it as a monument of Spanish Hebrew-Moorish art.
Pedro's protection of the Jews brought them misfortune: when Henry of Trastámara deposed him, the victorious soldiers killed 1,200 Jews (Toledo, 1355, as the book dates it). When Henry brought the "Free Companies," hired by Du Guesclin from the lower classes of France, into Spain, worse massacres followed. Thousands of Spanish Jews chose baptism over the terror of ill treatment and planned slaughter.
These "New Christians," legally Christians, climbed the economic and political ladder and reached high posts in government and even in the Church. Some became prelates; others the king's counselors. Their talent for finance gave them prominence in collecting and arranging state revenue, and roused envy. Some immersed themselves in aristocratic ease; some flaunted their wealth offensively. Angry Catholics gave the converts the insulting name "Marranos" (swine). Even so, Christian families that valued lineage over wealth, or respected Jewish ability, intermarried with them, and so the blood of the Spanish people, especially of its upper classes, mixed with Jewish blood. Ferdinand the Catholic and Torquemada, the inquisitor, had Jewish strands in their ancestry. Pope Paul IV, during his war with Philip II, called him and the Spaniards a tainted brood of Jews and Moors.