THE KINGDOM OF GRANADA. 151 reasonable policy alike led the Catholic Kings to the conquest. It was impossible to allow a natural portion of their dominions to remain possessed by a people alien in language, manners, and religion, and with whom religion afforded a constant pretext for devastations of the Castilian territory. The final war was provoked by the denial of a customary tribute, and by forays upon Castilian ground in time of truce. The surrender of the capital was the mere fulfilment of a prior stipulation; the terms of its surrender were mild in the extreme, and for some years they were faithfully observed. Ferdinand, as his conduct towards Naples shows, was capable of any unprovoked and treacherous aggression; but the conquest of Granada was a worthy source of honour for the humane, the pious, the wise, the righteous Isabella. The fact was that the terms on which Granada was surrendered were, as Prescott says, so mild that they could not be observed. It was nugatory, for instance, to grant the Moors of Granada commercial privileges above other Castilian subjects, and to make Granada an asylum for runaway bondmen from the rest of Spain. Abolish slavery, by all means, but abolish it fairly throughout the whole country. The complete equality, or rather superiority, which was retained by the Moors under the capitulation, it was not in human nature to respect. Nor is it in human nature for Mahometans to remain other than unwilling subjects of any but a Mahometan government. Our own tolerant government would be driven to persecution, if Kent or Caithness were wholly inhabited by a Mussulman population. As it was, impossible terms did not continue. Good Archbishop Talavera began by preaching to the Infidels in their own tongue, and actually made some way towards their peaceful conversion. Ximenes forced Christianity upon them; rebellions arose; pretended conversions followed upon subjugation; alleged apostasy called in the agency of the Inquisition; at last, in the year 1610, the last remnant of the Moriscos were expelled with nothing but the clothes on their backs. It would have been alike more merciful and more politic, though doubtless difficult to effect, if the whole Moorish nation in Granada could have been removed to some African settlement immediately upon the conquest, with full and honourable indemnity for the property which they would have been constrained to forsake. As it was, the taking of Granada was the last act of the crusading spirit, which Spain was now beginning to exchange for the persecuting spirit. The crusading spirit has undoubtedly led to many unnecessary horrors, but, after all, the Crusader is a very superior being to the Inquisitor. The Inquisition had now commenced busy operations both in Castile and Aragon. Under the old Castilian Kings the Hebrew race appears to have flourished; at Zalacca Alfonso numbered in his army Jews and Mahometans as well as Christians; we have seen that one of the greatest crimes recorded in Spanish history is the murder by a Moslem King of a Jewish ambassador commissioned by a Christian sovereign. But now Jews, instead of filling posts of honour, were consigned to the fires of the Holy Office, which were soon extended to their circumcised brethren of the law of Mahomet. In this point the Moslem has the advantage: he fights for his religion; he cruelly punishes any insult to it; he often inflicts unprovoked wrongs upon those who dissent from it; but he does not elaborately enquire FALL OF GRANADA. 153 into men's private thoughts. One cause for this may be the absence of any organized priesthood in the Mahometan system. The doctors of the Mahometan law have often opposed themselves to cruelties beyond the letter of the Koran. In the Greek war of Independence the Sheikh-ul-Islam at Constantinople was deposed by the Sultan, another legal dignitary was murdered by the Turkish populace at Smyrna, because they steadily refused their sacred sanction to wholesale massacres of unoffending Christians. Fully to realize the feelings of Spain and of Europe at the final extinction of the Saracen power in the west, we must endeavour to place ourselves in the position of men of those times. To the Spaniard it was the last blow of a prolonged battle of well nigh eight hundred years; it was a day which kings and righteous men had desired to see and had not seen. It was the triumph alike of nationality and of religion; his race had advanced, slowly but surely, from the Pyrenees to the Alpuxarras; his faith was dominant through the whole compass of his native land; the Cross had displaced the Crescent upon the Giralda of Seville and the mighty fanes of Cordova and Granada. And through the whole struggle he had been invading no man's right; every victory did but win back his own; every step that the hostile banners receded only enabled him to take possession of another portion of the inheritance of his fathers. All was now over, 'Tis come, the dream of ages, Seen dimly from afar, The longing of thy heart of hearts, 1 See Trikoupes, Ἱστορία τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς ἐπαναστάσεως, i. 192. 2 lb. i. 289. 3 G. W. Cox. Rodrigo of Cadiz had wiped out the stain of his royal namesake of old, and rivalled the fame of the Campeador himself. Another Ferdinand had surpassed the glory of the victor of Seville; Spain was once more a Christian land; not a foot of her territory now owned any master but those who gloried in the title of the Catholic Kings. By Europe at large the triumphs of Ferdinand and Isabella were supposed to wipe out the disgrace of the general lethargy forty years earlier. The capture of Granada was supposed to make up for the capture of Constantinople; the consecrated mosque atoned for the desecrated St. Sophia; the Catholic Kings in the Alhambra counterbalanced the infidel Sultan in the palace of the Cæsars. A fallacious comparison indeed, whether for the past or for the future. A certain analogy indeed there is between the fall of the last outpost of Islam in the West and the fall of the last outpost of Christendom in the East. In each case we can mark the gradually receding boundary of the isolated realm, surrounded by advancing enemies, till "the Roman world is contracted to a corner of Thrace," and the vast empire of the third Abdalrahman is represented by the single province of Granada. But, as the disciple of the Prophet might blush to compare the wretched Boabdil to the heroic Constantine, so the Christian historian must confess that in mere military prowess the last Spanish Moors had not degenerated like the last Byzantine Romans. They were weakened by luxury and division; but in mere fighting they do not seem to have at all gone back since the days of Tarik or Mahomet Almansor. And the parallel fails in the fact that the Castilian 1 Gibbon, cap. lxiv. (xi. 443.) GRANADA AND CONSTANTINOPLE. 155 was only winning back his own, the Ottoman was advancing on another man's possessions. That Spain should be other than a Christian and European country was an anomaly on the face of things. It was a pleasing delusion to suppose that the removal of this anomaly at all atoned for the appearance of the Infidel on the Bosporus and the Danube. The conquest of Granada was a mere honorary triumph for Christendom; the conquest of Constantinople was the most practical of all the victories of Islam. The presence of the Arab at Granada was an anomaly on the map of Europe and a practical evil to the inhabitants of the Castilian frontier. But he was in no way formidable to Europe, or even to Spain. He was as little likely to threaten Toledo or Lisbon as to appear again upon the field of Tours. The Ottoman had yet to conquer Hungary, to bombard Vienna, to subdue Crete and Cyprus, to spread his dominion over Syria and Egypt, and to extend his supremacy almost within sight of the new conquests of Ferdinand and Isabella. I have reserved for this point of our subject, that of the final extinction of the most civilized and magnificent of Mahometan powers, such consideration as I am able to give to the subject of Arabian literature, art, and science. It is but a very feeble consideration that I can give to them. The excellence of the Arabs lay mainly in the cultivation of a native literature, and in the prosecution of physical and metaphysical science. On these points I am a very poor judge; I am ignorant of the Arabic language, and I am quite unfit to appreciate physical or metaphysical works in any language. The architecture of the Alhambra and the mosque of Cordova I may be better qualified |