1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Page B

took part. Outside the city of Granada the scale of the uprising was enormous. Chroniclers estimated at up to ninety-five thousand the number of troops needed to quell it. The king himself took command. Atrocities multiplied. When rebel villages refused to submit to terms that now always included the demand to accept Christianity, they were bombarded into submission and the defenders were enslaved. At Andarax the Christians put three thousand rebel prisoners to death and blew up a mosque to which hundreds of women and children had fled for refuge. The rebels dealt harshly, in their turn, with anyone in their communities who would not join them. One petitioner who survived complained to the monarchs of how the rebels burned his home and granary and carried off his wife, daughter, and livestock.
    The monarchs, still fearful of collusion with the Turks, grew alarmed when the rebels appealed to the Ottomans to help them. In 1502, after a series of measures restricted Muslims’ freedom of movement, those who refused baptism were expelled from Castile, including Granada. In acknowledgment of the fact that the economy in Valencia depended on Muslim labor, they were allowed to remain in the Crown of Aragon. The rebels’ terms of surrender show what conversion meant in real terms. Though the monarchs promised that former Muslims would have clergy to instruct them in Christianity, doctrine hardly featured: rather, the victors demanded a modified form of cultural conversion inwhich the vanquished submitted to what nowadays would be called “integration.” Their former crimes were pardoned. They could keep their traditional dress “until it wore out.” They could have their own butchers, but meat had to be slaughtered in the Castilian fashion. They could record legal transactions in Arabic, but only the law of Castile would apply in the courts. They could keep their baths. They would pay only Christian taxes, but at a special—effectively punitive—rate three times higher than that of “old Christians.” Their charitable endowments were to continue, though no longer for maintaining mosques and Islamic schools: highway repairs, poor relief, and the ransoming of captives would be the only permitted objectives. The past would be confined to oblivion, and to call someone “Moor” or “renegade” became an offense. 13
    The conquest of Granada and its aftermath changed the profile of Europe for a half a millennium. Outside the range of Ottoman conquests, no Muslim-ruled state ever reemerged in Europe. Until the creation of sovereign Albania in 1925, there was no state with a Muslim majority. It became possible—though perhaps not convincing—to claim that the culture of Europe, if such a thing exists, is Christian. The habit of identifying Europe with Christendom went almost unchallenged until the late twentieth century. Only then, with large-scale Muslim migrations and the emergence, in Bosnia, of another European state with a Muslim majority, did Europeans have to recraft their self-image to take the Muslim contribution to the making of Europe into account.
    The events of 1492 did not, however, contribute much to the making of modern political institutions. Spain did not become a modern state in any of the ways usually alleged: not unified, not centralized, not subject to absolute rule, certainly not bureaucratic or “bourgeois.” Only in one respect did Ferdinand and Isabella practice a new technique of government: they used printing to distribute their commands faster and more efficiently around their realms. In other respects, they ruled atypically chaotic, heterogeneous medieval state, in which the monarchs shared power with the “estates” of Church, nobility, and towns.
    Monarchs were “natural lords” over their people. Their leadership was as the head’s over the limbs of the human body—and everyone knew that the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Nature was a hierarchy: even the most cursory