Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain by Matthew Carr

the summer of 1495, the royal secretary, de Zafra, expressed satisfaction at this exodus and claimed that “all the rest are on their way out, and not on account of any harsh treatment they have received, for never were people better treated.” 5 On September 22 of that year, he reported, “These Moors are all very quiet, and entirely at the service of your Highnesses. . . . However, I would rather there were not so many of them, not because I have any grounds for suspicion, thank God, but with an extra turn of the screw the person of least importance whom your Highnesses have in your kingdoms might expel them.” 6 There is no indication that Ferdinand and Isabella had any such intention at this stage, beyond some tentative attempts to stimulate emigration among the Muslim elite, but the fact that many Moorish nobles continued to leave certainly suggests a diminishing confidence in their future under Christian rule.
    In the same period, Christian immigrants were flowing into the city of Granada, encouraged by tax exemptions and other inducements, from urban artisans and small farmers to middle-class bureaucrats looking for positions in the new administrative machinery that was being established in the new kingdom. Many of these immigrants had little sympathy with the model of coexistence enshrined by the Capitulations or the moderation shown by their archbishop to a population they regarded as conquered infidels. Contact between these immigrants and the local Muslim population was frowned upon by religious leaders of both faiths, who regarded their proximity as a potential scource of conflict—and contagion. In March 1498, Talavera banned Christians from renting property to Muslims, wearing Moorish clothing, visiting bathhouses, or buying meat from Muslim butchers.
    These regulations were followed by a mutual agreement to divide the city into two separate zones, with the Muslim population concentrated mostly in the upper area around the Albaicín. And in the summer of 1499, the Catholic Monarchs returned to the scene of their greatest triumph to see the city for themselves, and they would shortly bring with them the man who would do more than any other single individual to bring the Capitulations to an end.
     
    Ferdinand and Isabella’s arrival in Granada after a seven-year absence was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, including thousands of Muslim women whose white almalafas , according to the chronicler Alonso de Santa Cruz, presented a spectacle “worthy of great admiration.” It is difficult to believe that the conquerors of Granada would have been similarly impressed by the public expressions of Islamic worship that they would have seen and heard as they looked out on the Albaicín quarter from the Alhambra.
    That autumn, Ferdinand and Isabella were joined in Granada by the archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. Born in 1436, Cisneros was one of the most emblematic and dominant figures of his age, whose career straddled politics, religion, and military conquest. Like Talavera, he was a former confessor to the queen and a man of great personal piety, whose religious zeal was infused with a ruthlessness and inflexibility that did not lend itself to compromise. Cisneros came to public life relatively late. After studying law at the University of Salamanca, he entered the Church and appeared to be destined for high ecclesiastical office, when he was imprisoned because he took an appointment for a position that one of his superiors had promised to someone else. Cisneros served a prison sentence for his defiance and subsequently decided to become a Franciscan monk and withdraw completely from worldly affairs. For some years, he lived as an anchorite in the woodlands of a religious retreat near Toledo in a makeshift hermitage barely large enough to lie down in. Living on plants and wearing nothing but a hair shirt, he devoted his days to prayer, spiritual contemplation, and the mortification of the