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

flesh.
    This rigorous lifestyle appealed to the fanatically religious Isabella, who in 1492 chose him to be her confessor. The fifty-six-year-old anchorite accepted this appointment as his religious duty, though his horror of the female sex was such that he refused to sleep under the same roof as women. He arrived at the Castilian court, a pallid and cadaverous figure in his monk’s habit and sandals, looking like a “desert dweller,” as Peter Martyr described him. A contemporary engraving shows the severe aquiline profile and monk’s tonsure of this intransigent cleric, who quickly proved himself to be tenacious and iron-willed in pursuit of his political objectives, insofar as these objectives reflected the interests of the Almighty.
    Cisneros soon showed his mettle when he was given the challenging task of reforming Spain’s dissolute monastic orders, many of whom had fallen so far from medieval standards of piety that they lived openly with “wives” and concubines. Personally visiting monasteries across the country on a mule, Cisneros imposed his authority on these errant monks with such force that hundreds left Spain with their female companions rather than submit to the new austerity demanded of them. Cisneros was rewarded for his efforts with promotion to the key position of archbishop of Toledo, on Isabella’s insistence. As was typical for him, he took up his new post wearing a friar’s robe and sandals, and even though he subsequently agreed to wear the customary silk and ermines at the pope’s insistence, he continued to wear the hair shirt underneath his finery.
    Such was the man whose temperament contained “more of a mania for warfare than was proper for a bishop,” in the words of his sixteenth-century hagiographer Alvar Gómez de Castro. In November, Ferdinand and Isabella returned to Seville, leaving Cisneros in the city to work alongside Talavera for reasons that remain unclear. The Toledan prelate had little enthusiasm for the evangelical methods used by his colleague to convert Granada’s Muslims and once compared his Arabic translations of the scriptures to “casting pearls before swine.” Cisneros began his own efforts by preaching to select groups of alfaquis in what Gómez de Castro calls a “soft and affable tone” and showering them with gifts of colored silk fabrics and scarlet caps in an attempt to win them over.
    He quickly lost patience with the slow rate of progress and began sending recalcitrant Muslims to prison, where they were treated with what even Gómez de Castro describes as “methods that were not correct” until they agreed to convert. One of those imprisoned was a Moorish noble named Zegrí Azaator, whom Cisneros entrusted to the care of a thuggish priest known as the Lion from his surname León. After twenty days in the harsh company of this “lion,” the humiliated and filthy nobleman was brought in chains before Cisneros and announced that Allah had commanded him in a dream to become a Christian. Cisneros immediately had Zegrí washed and dressed in a scarlet robe and whisked him off to the baptismal font, where he adopted the Christian name Gonzalo Fernandez Zegrí.
    Emboldened by this success, Cisneros intensified his efforts, boasting to Pope Alexander VI in December that three thousand Moors had been converted in a single day. The scale of conversions was so great that many Muslims were sometimes splashed with holy water instead of being led to the baptismal font. When Cisneros’s own church council in Toledo suggested that these conversions might be a breach of the Capitulation agreements, the archbishop was unapologetic, declaring that “if the infidels couldn’t be attracted to the road to salvation, they had to be dragged to it.” For Cisneros, conversion was essentially an obligation of conquest imposed on a defeated infidel enemy. In one of his letters, he told his church colleagues that Muslim religious leaders in Granada had handed him the