THE GREAT OPENING^65cenaries short on loyalty to the rulers who engaged them. Against
these stood Christian barons and bullies, given to victimizing peasants
and clerics, whom the Castilian monarch, on the understandable advice
of the Church, sent to war against the infidel. It was a repeat of the mo
tivation of the First Crusade to the Holy Land: better them than us.
Bumblers on both sides, which is why the struggle took so long. But
logistics and demography favored the Christians. "Christendom was
spreading slowly south, as if by a process of titration rather than
flood."^9
In the end, civilization succumbed and ferocity triumphed. Cor
doba, once the greatest center of learning in Europe, fell in 1236;
Seville, the great economic metropolis of el-Andalus, in 1248. Both
were taken almost in a fit of absent-mindedness: Ferdinand III of
Castile did not really think he was ready to roll up the Moors in the val
ley of the Guadalquivir. The emir made a deal to withdraw as Ferdi
nand's vassal to the tiny mountain stronghold of Granada, which hung
on by pursuing a strategy of timorous collaboration and systematic in
difference to the fate of fellow Muslims in other parts. As ye sow...
when it was Granada's turn to go (1490-92), its appeals for help went
unanswered. So the last Moorish ruler of Granada negotiated a well-
paid exit and left Spain scorned by his own mother: she knew a cow
ard when she saw one.
The victors in this reconquista were Portugal, which liberated its ter
ritory from the Muslims by the mid-fourteenth century, and Castile, an
expansionist frontier state of caballero pastoralists (what we would call
cowboys) and roughnecks and soldiers of fortune for whom the great
Moorish cities of the south, with their marble palaces and cool foun
tains, green gardens and centers of learning, were an irresistible tar
get.^10
And after reconquista, then what? Well, the land had to be grabbed
up and resetded, estates bounded and exploited, peasants (especially
Muslim cultivators) set to work for their new lords. And the kingdom
had to be Christianized, for Queen Isabella was a passionate believer.
Whatever concessions to Islam had been made by way of negotiating
the surrender of Grenada, no such commitment could long hold
against the claims of true faith. The Church, through the Holy Office
of the Inquisition, to say nothing of lay spies and snitches, kept very
busy. Converts from Judaism, most of them involuntary, hence un
trustworthy, had to be kept under close surveillance; the same for ex-
Muslims. Castilian society was afflicted with a pious prurigo, a scabies
of the spirit.