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A shrinking world within? Jews, Muslims, Conversos, and the Spanish Inquisition, ca 1480-1512 When Columbus left Portugal and arrived on the coast of Andalusia in 148S, the Iberian Peninsula contained five states, or even seven by some counts. There was Portugal itself. Andalusia was part of the Peninsula's biggest state, the kingdom of Castile. In 1469, Castile's queen, Isabel,1 had married Prince Ferdinand, king from 1479 of the lands of the crown of Aragon, but Castile and the crown of Aragon maintained their separate constitutional identities, and did so for another two hundred years. The crown of Aragon consisted of three states with separate identities: the kingdom of Aragon itself, that of Valencia, and the principality of Catalonia. Straddling the Pyrenees, under constant pressure from its great neighbours, the litde kingdom of Navarre had another thirty years to run before it went under, divided between Castile and France. In an age when the whole Iberian Peninsular was known to those who lived there as Espafia, the collective political term commonly in use was las EspaHas, the Spains.2 And there is still another to add to the list: far bigger and stronger than Navarre, but with even less time to run, was the last Muslim state in the Iberian world, the kingdom of Granada. W h e n Columbus arrived in Andalusia, Granada was four years into the war with Castile that was to be the last it would ever fight. As was the rule in Muslim states, Judaism was a permitted religion in Granada, and so was Christianity—war with a Christian state did not change that. This was not tolerance in the full sense of the term: both communities were subjected to special taxes and humiliating restrictions that were intended to highlight their religious impurity, their inferiority to True Believers. Much the same had been the case for Jews and Muslims living in Castile and the other Christian states of the Peninsula, but there the destruction of the traditional pattern of co-existence had already begun. When Columbus arrived in Cordoba in 1485, the Jewish community there, 1 Isabella is not a Spanish name. In contemporary Spanish documents her nam was usually spelt with a y, Ysabel. 2 See J. A. Maravall, El Concepto de Espafia en la Edad Media, 3rd edn, Madrid, 1981, passim. P A R E R G O N ns 12.2 (January 1995) 42 G. B. Harrison once one of the largest, wealthiest and most cultured in Europe, was eit on the point of vanishing, or had already done so. It had been under great pressure for well over a century, with its numbers heavily reduced by conversion, forced or otherwise, to Christianity. O n 1 January 1483, all Jews living in the dioceses of Seville, Cadiz, and Cordoba were ordered to prepare to leave their homes and settle elsewhere in Castile. In the April of 1485, there were still some Jews on the lists of taxpayers in the town of Moguer and in C6rdoba, but in 1486 their names no longer appear.3 O n 31 March 1492, three months after the surrender of Granada, Isabel and Ferdinand published edicts ordering all Jews to leave both Castile and the crown of Aragon within four months, to which was later added another nine days. Those who chose to convert could stay, for officially, Jews were defined as such by their profession of faith, not by ancestry.4 A month after that edict was published, the long negotiations between Columbus and the crown of Castile for a voyage to the West were concluded; a week before the first day on which it was a capital offence to profess Judaism in Aragon or Castile, which now included Granada, Columbus led his three ships into the Atlantic. The entry of Isabel and Ferdinand into the city of Granada on 2 January 1492, was peaceful. The capital had not been stormed; it had surrendered on terms that had been common for centuries in warfare between Christian and Muslim states in the Hispanic world. Muslims would have to get used to being second class subjects, but they would retain their religion, their 3 On...

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