THE V\'ESTERN MEDITERRANEAN KINGDOMS 1200-15001486, he was merely doing what earlier kings had promised
to do. Ferdinand had no intention whatsoever of suppress-
ing the traditional liberties of the Catalans and of impos-
ing Castilian hegemony over Aragon.^29 Union with Castile
went little further than the appearance of the effigies of
both king and queen on the coinage of their various realms;
on the other hand, Ferdinand took care to strengthen his
influence in Castile by taking control of the major Military
Orders, and by involving himself directly in such prestigious
operations as the conquest of Muslim Granada (1492) and
the extension of Castilian (but not Aragonese) authority in
the New World.
There is little reason to doubt that Ferdinand shared
with his wife the formulation of the policies that resulted in
the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The expulsion
followed a century of erosion of the Jewish communities,
which had greatly accelerated after the pogroms of 1391 and
the mass conversions that followed; the Catholic Monarchs
took the view that the time had come to tell the Jews to
convert, leave or die. The order of expulsion, signed at con-
quered Granada in 1492, was extended to the Italian islands
as well. Behind the wish to rid Spain of its productive com-
munities of Jews, who had played so significant a role in the
transmission of Islamic learning to the west, was the view
propounded by the Inquisition that observant Jews were
leading astray those of their brethren who had earlier con-
verted to Christianity. Indeed, the primary function of the
lnquistion, which began to operate in the 1480s through-
out Spain under royal patronage, was the suppression of
'judaising' tendencies among the converso population (or,
equally, 'islamising' ones among those of Muslim descent);
that some conversos continued to practise their faith in secret
is certain, but there is considerable disagreement about the
scale of crypto-:Judaism in Spain. So too are the numbers of
those who left in 1492 uncertain, with estimates of 100,000
not uncommon; it is evident, however, that Castile suffered
a greater population loss than Aragon, whose Jewish com-
munities had withered away more rapidly in the years after
1391, though the expulsion of Jews from Aragonese Sicily
- Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 70; P. Freedman, The origins of peasant servi-
tude in medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 188-94.