Read 1492: The Year Our World Began for Free Online Page A

almonds and olives—were bountiful, and increasing demand for silk in Europe boosted the economy. About a tenth of the population lived in the capital, served by the 130 water mills that ground the daily millet.
    The kingdom of Granada represented a source not only of revenue but also of patronage. Many of the nobles who fought for Ferdinand and Isabella in the civil war that inaugurated their reign remained inadequately rewarded and potentially restive. The royal patrimony hadshrunk, and the monarchs did not wish to relinquish more of it to already overmighty subjects. The towns of the kingdoms had resolutely opposed attempts to appropriate their lands. Acquisition of Granada would solve the monarchs’ problems. According to the laws, rulers were not allowed to alienate their inherited patrimony but could do what they liked with conquered lands. By the end of the conquest of Granada, more than half the surface area of the kingdom would be distributed among nobles.
    Thanks to Granada’s economic boom, the Moors’ strength to defy and attack their Christian neighbors was greater in the late fifteenth century than for a long time previously. The lords of neighboring lands responded with mingled fear and aggression. But the war was not only a matter of frontier security or territorial aggression. It has to be considered in the context of the struggle against the rising power of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, whom the Spanish monarchs perceived as their most formidable enemies in the long run. The pressure of Islam on the frontiers of Christendom had mounted since the midcentury, when the Turks seized Constantinople. The loss of Constantinople ratcheted up the religious content of Christian rhetoric. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, launched a huge naval offensive, invaded Italy, and developed relations with Muslim powers in North Africa and with Granada itself. Ferdinand was not just the ruler of most of Christian Spain. He was also heir to wider Mediterranean responsibilities as king of Sicily, protector of Catalan commerce in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, and hereditary stakeholder in the legacy of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. He was apprehensive of the Ottoman advance and eager to clear what seemed like a Muslim bridgehead from Spain.
    Meanwhile, each side in the potential conflict over Granada was succoring the other’s enemies. In the 1470s, rebel refugees from Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s vengeance took shelter at the court of the ruler of Granada, Mulay Hassan, while Ferdinand encouraged and negotiated in secret with dissidents in Granada. For Mulay Hassan’s crown, too, was disputed. Doubts of the propriety of his accession (for the rules of succession in Granada were never clearly defined) disturbed the scruples of members of his dynasty. Court intrigue and seraglio conspiracies bedeviled the throne, and rebellions were common.
    Finally, among the causes of the conflict, Ferdinand and Isabella hoped that war would distract their nobles from their own squabbles and bring internal peace to Castile. Although, in the opinion of at least one chronicler, Christians who made allies of the Moors “deserved to die for it,” and although the law expressly forbade it, the practice was common, and the private wars of the aristocracy in regions bordering Granada thrived on the exotic diet of infidel support. As a device for getting Spanish nobles to cooperate against a common enemy, the war worked. Once the fighting began, such inveterate foes as the Marquess of Cadiz and the Duke of Medina Sidonia—“my enemy incarnate,” as Cadiz called him—joined forces and exerted themselves in each other’s support. Isabella’s secretary reminded her that Tullius Hostilius, one of the legendary kings of ancient Rome, had made unprovoked war merely in order to keep his soldiers busy. The enterprise against the Moors would “exercise the chivalry of the realm.” 3
    The war fed on religious hatreds and