The Conquistadors Read Online Free

thousand. This city, which fell after a three months’ siege, was given vicious treatment as a warning to others. The whole population, assembled in the courtyard of the great fortress overlooking the sea, was informed that one-third would be sent to Africa in exchange for Christian prisoners, one-third sold into slavery to pay for the war, the rest allocated as slaves abroad in return for help received. Having announced this sentence to the entire city, Ferdinand offered them an alternative, an enormous ransom to be paid within nine months. The wretched Moors had no hope of raising such a sum, but it had the effect intended, every family revealing their hidden wealth in the hope that by so doing they could buy themselves out of slavery. It was a clever device to be repeated later in far-off Peru.
    The treatment of Baza was very different. This stronghold was invested byFerdinand’s army, now nearly a hundred thousand strong, in May 1489. It did not surrender until December 4 of that year, and then on the most generous terms, the population being given the chance of retiring into Granada with all their chattels or remaining as subjects of the Spanish crown. Cidi Yahye, the man who had directed the defence, was encouraged to enter the service of his conquerors. This again was a shrewd move. A visit to his kinsman, El Zagal, resulted in the cities of Almeria and Guadix being surrendered on the terms Baza had accepted. Extreme severity, followed by the most liberal treatment of cities subsequently surrendered, had the effect of weakening Granada’s will to resist when the main fortress and capital of the Moors was finally invested in April 1491. Backed by the mountain barrier of the Sierra Nevada, Granada was a formidable fortress, its bastions facing across the vega. The siege had a strangely unreal quality. There was a tournament atmosphere on the surface, the Moors sallying out, singly or in groups, to engage in knightly combat, and the whole scene made splendid through the hot summer by the luxurious state maintained by the Spanish sovereigns and their grandees. The surface, however, was deceptive. The determination of the Spaniards was made abundantly clear when they converted their camp into a solidly constructed city. Santa Fe was completed in three months, and its construction did more than any assault to undermine the resistance of the Moors. Negotiations for surrender began in October, and on January 2, 1492, the city opened its gates to the Spaniards on even more liberal terms.
    Barely four months later, popular clamour and the representations of Torquemada resulted in the publication of an edict expelling all Jews. Such total proscription was harsh retribution for the failure of the Jews to integrate, but it was no more than other European countries did with less excuse, and the mood of the people probably made it inevitable. The crusading enthusiasm of the Spaniards was at its peak when Granada finally fell, and their hatred of heretics had been inflamed for several years by the proceedings of the Inquisition and the public demonstrations of the
auto de fe.
To this was added the intolerance of a new-found national unity. The Jews fled in their thousands, to Portugal, Africa, Italy, Turkey and the Levant; and Spain herself was the loser, for they represented the most cultured, industrious and knowledgeable section of the community.

2
Birth of an Empire
    This then was the world into which the conquistadors were born: a world of religious and racial intolerance, of crusading knights and marching armies, of war and devastation and change. The atmosphere in which they were brought up was entirely dominated by a sense of crusading fervour and of the invincibility of Spanish arms. Santiago and the Virgin – what more did a man need to sustain him as his horse thundered into battle? The two greatest of the conquistadors both came from the same province, Estremadura; Hernán Cortes being born in 1485 in the