- 8 hours ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:06Here, the streets are thick with the smoke of battle.
00:13Behind the good-natured, slightly tipsy fervour of a small-town fiesta in Spain,
00:21you can smell the delirium, the fever of victory.
00:32These people are re-enacting the long battle between Christendom and Islam.
00:39This, not the Middle East, over many centuries was the final frontier
00:44between Christendom and Islam, the long war.
00:51This is the story of Spain after the fall of its Muslim Caliphate.
00:58A 400-year holy war ended with the power couple who made modern Spain.
01:06First came anarchy, then from Africa, waves of Islamic invaders,
01:11and finally the traumatic transition into a Christian kingdom,
01:14the explosive birth of Spain.
01:21It's deafening. I'll have to shout till I'm hoarse.
01:25In the north, half the country was ruled by Spanish kingdoms,
01:29like Castile and Aragon.
01:31And in the south, the emirs fought for power,
01:34in cities like Seville and Granada.
01:38It was a time of dog-eat-dog, all fought against each other.
01:44It wasn't just about Christian versus Muslim.
01:47It was also a tournament of power, a game of thrones.
01:54As I make my way as historian and traveller,
01:56I'll visit the most beautiful places in Spain and reveal their secrets.
02:02Granada and its radiant Alhambra.
02:07The Giralda in Seville.
02:09And I'll find the shocking truth about my own family hidden for centuries.
02:16That's just unbelievable.
02:18Even before the Crusades had arisen, even after the Crusades had failed,
02:24it was here that Christendom would be reawakened.
02:29Spain's Renaissance monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella,
02:32would claw the nation together in a blood-soaked embrace.
02:36They've let me in to the vault of Ferdinand and Isabella,
02:41where they're actually buried.
02:44Ferdinand and Isabella's new confidence is expressed everywhere here.
02:49Here is a huge F for Fernando with a crown over it.
02:53Over there is the Y for Isabella.
02:55They left their mark everywhere
02:58because it expressed the new power of the Spanish monarchy.
03:05This bitter victory,
03:08consolidated by blood purges of Jews and Muslims,
03:12celebrated by the dispatch of Columbus to the Americas,
03:17would turn a collection of war-torn principalities and fiefdoms
03:22into the first world empire,
03:25the champion of international Christendom.
03:41After three centuries of Muslim domination, Christendom reawakened in the 11th century.
03:48The caliphate in the south broke up into rival Muslim states.
03:52Spain was the plaything of hostile warlords.
03:58They would decide if Spain remained Islamic or join the rest of Christian Europe.
04:10in 1079, the most famous of these warlords rode into Seville on his magnificent steed.
04:20He came to collect gold, tribute from the Muslim south.
04:28His name was Rodrigo Díaz de Viva.
04:31Later, El Cid, as he became known, would be reinvented as the national hero of Spain.
04:39He was a Christian, of course, but he won almost as many battles for the Muslims as he did for
04:45the Christians.
04:45And he never lost a battle.
04:48And the clue is in his name.
04:50El Cid derives from the Arabic El Saeed, a descendant of Muhammad.
04:57It meant the boss, the commander, the big man.
05:01Or, as it says up here, El Campiador, the champion.
05:07Who, by his virile power of character, brought calamity to Islam.
05:15And, I should add, when it took his fancy to Christendom too.
05:20What?
05:25El Cid was in his ambitious, cunning prime.
05:29A noble-born knight of Castile, the largest of the Christian kingdoms emerging in the north.
05:36He came to meet Seville's Muslim emir, al-Mutamid, a very different type.
05:41A poet and a scholar.
05:43Yet, like El Cid, a pragmatic politician.
05:46He made El Cid an offer to join him in battle against the rival southern emirate of Granada.
06:00I'm travelling to that battlefield.
06:03How did El Cid's intrigue play out?
06:11I've come to the small town of Cabra.
06:13It used to be famous as the olive oil capital of the world.
06:16But now it's best known for its connection with El Cid.
06:19He fought one of his most notorious battles here.
06:22And now I'm going to go up there to find the exact site of the battle among the famous olive
06:30groves.
06:35The two armies met around here, halfway between Granada and Seville.
06:40Naturally, El Cid tipped the balance.
06:43Even though there were also fine Christian knights fighting for Granada, the other side, El Cid showed no mercy.
06:52This is said to be El Cid's sword.
06:55He had two and he gave each of them a nickname.
06:58This one he called the Poker.
07:05This one he called.
07:06Fighting for Seville, El Cid was overreaching himself.
07:10Treating captured Castilian nobles with contempt and even pocketing some of the Muslim gold paid to his own king.
07:19El Cid's flamboyance and duplicity made him many enemies at court, including his king, Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile.
07:31The battle was fought right here, above the town of Cabra.
07:36And of course, El Cid won.
07:38But this time, he'd gone too far.
07:41He was summoned to court.
07:43King Alfonso made him kneel in front of everyone and banished him with the words,
07:49May God curse Rodrigo Díaz da Viva.
07:56Alfonso warned his subjects, if anyone gave El Cid shelter,
08:00they would lose all they owned and have their eyes gouged out.
08:06Juan Cobo Avila is a local historian in Cabra who's investigated the Spanish cult of El Cid.
08:16Why were songs sung of this man? Why did he become a hero? Was it propaganda?
08:22El Cid, junto con otros personajes históricos,
08:25constituyen o forma parte de la propaganda que los cristianos tuvieron que construir
08:30para afianzar la identidad y el origen del país castellano.
08:36El Cid has often fought for the Muslims as he did for the Christians.
08:39Did you learn about that at school?
08:41El Cid, en la escuela, nos enseñaron siempre que era el defensor de los valores cristianos.
08:46Pero la realidad es que el Cid era un mercenario que luchaba al lado del que mejor le pagaba.
08:52El Cid solamente obedecía a sus intereses personales.
08:55Hay un periodo en la historia de España en la que se construyen héroes
08:59y para ello se manipula, se cambia la historia.
09:03Y dentro de ese periodo, y junto con otros personajes,
09:06encaja la figura del Cid, un personaje manipulado para afianzar
09:09los orígenes de la nación española.
09:14The reconquest of Spain started a multifaceted war
09:18with Christians and Muslims on both sides.
09:22Christian Spain would choose El Cid as its champion
09:25because there were no true heroes.
09:29And then, only a few years after Cabra, came the ideological shift.
09:35Spain's destiny changed from a tournament of power
09:39played for land and gold to a war of faith and identity.
09:47King Alfonso, who sent El Cid into exile,
09:51was an astute serpentine player, grown rich on Muslim gold.
09:55Yet now a new plan was taking shape.
09:59He would seize the most iconic city in Spain, Toledo,
10:04once the Christian capital until the Muslim conquest,
10:08a seat of Islamic scholarship.
10:12Alfonso was a Christian king who dreamed of uniting Spain
10:17and conquering the Islamic south.
10:20He set his sights on Toledo, the old Christian Visigothic capital.
10:26In 1085, he took the city.
10:29Christianity was resurgent.
10:42Toledo was a great Muslim city, and it had been for 400 years.
10:47It was full of mosques and Arab schools.
10:51Surprisingly, that suited Alfonso down to the ground.
10:56He was a cosmopolitan monarch in a cosmopolitan time.
11:01Now he declared himself emperor of the two faiths.
11:06He was right at home with Arab culture.
11:08He gloried in opening up Toledo's famed Islamic library.
11:14Its ancient Greek manuscripts, lost for centuries,
11:19now helped illuminate the dank corners
11:23of the dark and ignorant castles of Northern Europe.
11:30Yet while Alfonso grew up in a bifocal Christian Islamic world,
11:36he was now embracing a mission to reconquer all of Spain for Christendom.
11:41He was in for a big surprise.
11:44He hadn't counted on the formidable Muslim reaction.
11:52This is when the emirs of Al-Andalus put aside their differences
11:57and appealed to a new, harsh, more powerful Islamic movement.
12:05Their arrival would change everything once again.
12:09They landed here, in Gibraltar, to fight the Christians
12:13and exploit the weakness of Spain's Muslim princes.
12:17The fall of Toledo terrified the emirs of Al-Andalus.
12:22It was clear that the Emperor King Alfonso
12:25was going to roll up the cities of the Islamic south
12:29and conquer them for Christendom.
12:32They had to ask for help, and there was only one place they could look.
12:37Across these straits to Africa,
12:40where a new fundamentalist sect of Puritanical Berbers
12:43had arisen in the Atlas Mountains.
12:46The Amorovids were known as the Veiled Ones,
12:49for not just their women, but their men, soldiers and commanders alike,
12:54wore veils covering their entire faces.
12:57Only their eyes were visible.
12:59It was their trademark.
13:01For their part, they were happy to come
13:04because they were disgusted by the decadence of the emirs of Al-Andalus,
13:08who were paying tribute to Christians.
13:11In 1086, they raised an army of 15,000,
13:16and they set off from Africa in rafts,
13:20towing special boats carrying their elephants and horses.
13:24They arrived in Spain and immediately set to work.
13:31King Alfonso rushed to stop them.
13:34He mustered 2,500 troops, including 1,500 horsemen and 750 knights.
13:40It wasn't enough.
13:42The Al-Morovid leader, Yusuf ibn Tashfin,
13:45entitling himself Prince of the Muslims,
13:48fielded an army of Berbers, Africans and Senegalese cavalry on white horses.
13:54He sent a message, convert to Islam, pay us tribute or fight.
14:00The two sides met in 1086 at Sagrahas, near the Portuguese border.
14:06King Alfonso, still vibrant after his victory at Toledo,
14:11was totally routed.
14:14The ground was so soaked with Christian blood
14:17that the Al-Morovids nicknamed it the Slippery Field.
14:22And the next day, carts heaped with the heads of the Christian dead
14:28were paraded through the cities of Al-Andalus
14:32to show off and announce the Al-Morovid victory.
14:41It looked as if the never would be a Christian reconquest.
14:45The Al-Morovids didn't just delay it,
14:47they transformed it into a religious war.
14:50With Marrakesh as their imperial capital,
14:53the Al-Morovids toppled the emirs of Al-Andalus
14:56and ruled Spain directly.
14:59Here in Seville,
15:00I want to find out what happened to Al-Mutamid,
15:03the city's Muslim emir,
15:05who only eight years earlier hired El Cid in battle.
15:08It was he who'd invited in the Al-Morovids,
15:11and then they swiftly deposed him.
15:15Hidden, almost forgotten and lost
15:18in the gardens of the Alcazar in Seville,
15:21is this one of the columns of Al-Mutamid,
15:24the poet king of Seville.
15:26He so loved these gardens that he writes in poetry here
15:30that at the end of the world he'd like to be resurrected
15:33and come back here.
15:35But it wasn't to be.
15:38Mutamid retired to Morocco,
15:41but he didn't regret this decision,
15:43however much of a pragmatist he'd been
15:45in his dealings with the Christians.
15:46He said, I'd rather be a camel driver in Morocco
15:50than a swineherd in Castile.
15:57The African invaders changed the game in Spain
16:00in less than a decade,
16:02yet guile and ambition still won out.
16:06Guess who came out of all this smelling of roses?
16:09Yes, the ultimate warlord,
16:12the ultimate opportunist, El Cid.
16:14He managed to conquer his own private kingdom,
16:18and he died an independent Prince of Valencia.
16:23When he passed away in his bed at 1099,
16:28the world had changed completely.
16:30For in that year, the Crusades, Christendom's own holy war,
16:35had taken Jerusalem in the Middle East.
16:39They massacred 70,000 Muslims when they took the holy city.
16:43From now on, in Spain and in the Middle East,
16:47the holy war would be a fight to the death.
16:53Over the next decades, the Almoravids grew soft,
16:58unprepared when more severe extremists arose to destroy them.
17:03A militant sect of Islamic jihadists burst fully formed
17:09from the deserts of Morocco.
17:11These Almoravids, to everyone's amazement,
17:15not unlike ISIS today, carried all before them,
17:20conquering a vast empire from West Africa to Morocco.
17:24Their founder had called himself the Mahdi, the Chosen One.
17:29But on his death, his successor declared himself the Caliph.
17:33In 1147, the new Caliph crossed the sea to take what he called
17:39the Camel's Hump of Al-Andalus, the juiciest part.
17:49The Almoravids, who made Seville their capital,
17:52proclaimed the beginning of a new order.
17:55Their outrages were fanatical, intolerant and spectacular.
18:01They favoured ostentatious atrocities.
18:04They burned Jews and Christians alive in their synagogues and churches.
18:09They ruled from fortified towers, like this one, the Toro del Oro.
18:15There were once towers on both sides of the river,
18:19and a mighty chain was stretched between the two
18:22to control and defend Seville.
18:27I'm meeting Maribel Fierro, an expert on the Almohads,
18:32to learn more about these fearsome religious fighters.
18:36Maribel, who exactly were the Almohads?
18:40How do they define themselves as different?
18:43And one of the things they did, for example,
18:46was to mint square coins.
18:49This is a typical Almohad dirham,
18:52and by minting coins which had a square format, which was unusual.
18:59Coins had been round until that moment.
19:02It was a very simple but not simplistic way of telling everybody,
19:08a new era has arrived.
19:10We are something different from what existed before.
19:13How did they enforce their new creed?
19:16Were they violent?
19:17What happened to minorities like the Jews and the Christians?
19:20This was a revolutionary movement, and as a revolutionary movement,
19:24they produced revolutionary violence.
19:27They had a charismatic leader who was proclaimed to be infallible,
19:31so they thought that they had the truth, and that the truth, having this messiah had to be acknowledged by
19:39everybody.
19:40And those who didn't want to accept it, and if they resisted or made problems, they were sometimes massacred.
19:49So, what effect did they have on Seville?
19:53Well, they made it its capital, and in order to make its capital, they had to change the layout of
20:02part of the town.
20:04Where the cathedral is now, that's where they built their mosque, which was huge by the standards, even for Almohad
20:12standards.
20:20The Almohads built this gorgeous minaret known as the Giralda, but it was so tall that their ageing muazin,
20:27who had to climb it five times a day to lead the call to prayer, asked for a change,
20:33and they specially designed a ramp inside the tower so he could ride his donkey all the way to the
20:39top.
20:39I applied to do the same, but for some reason, they wouldn't let me.
20:50The Almohads ruled for over a century, until slowly weakened by their own factional strife.
21:00In 1212, a coalition of the Christian kings of Castile, Portugal and Aragon finally defeated them.
21:08They would now swallow the Islamic cities one by one.
21:14In 1248, the King of Castile captured Seville installing Christian bells in the minaret of La Giralda.
21:25Spain's landscape was becoming Christian.
21:35In 1250, only one Islamic kingdom remained, the emirate of Granada.
21:42And that's my next stop.
21:48Granada, and much of the coast, was now ruled by the Nasrid family,
21:53who emerged after the Almohads, the last Muslim dynasty.
22:02This bathhouse, or Haman, dates back to the 14th century,
22:08a favourite hangout in Nasrid times.
22:11Muslims were expected to perform ablutions of ritual purification before prayer,
22:16though Islam in Nasrid Granada was often lax.
22:21The Haman was also a place of architectural delights, luxury, sensuality and beautification.
22:30The Nasrids ruled the last Islamic emirate in Western Europe, with an exquisite, if frenzied, decadence.
22:40Here in the Haman baths, they continued to enjoy the traditional Arab luxuries,
22:46scented in pomegranate and amber.
22:48However, they enjoyed body washes and body lotions.
22:52Their deodorants were made of great blocks of perfume.
22:57They even used toothpaste.
22:59And here, they ruled on with an ominous and doomed splendour.
23:21The Nasrids were no empire builders.
23:24They were minor emirs, twisting and turning, compromising to survive.
23:30Yet they were the masters of one thing,
23:33the art of concealing their weakness behind a facade of grandeur.
23:39Spain's supreme example of Muslim architecture
23:43is built on a rocky outcrop to the north of the city.
23:47Originally a fortress, it was converted into a royal palace in 1333.
23:53Alhambra means the red.
23:55The name comes from the red dust that settles on the citadel.
24:02I'm standing in front of probably the most spectacular Islamic building in Spain,
24:09and one of the most famous buildings in the world.
24:11It's the Alhambra Palace of Granada.
24:14Yet it was built by the Nasrid dynasty,
24:17a family of venal, self-indulgent and feckless petty tyrants.
24:22The story of the Nasrids, played out within the Alhambra Palace,
24:28is not half as spectacular as the setting they created.
24:52There's something majestic and magnificent about this place,
24:57the very model of a powerful sultan's palace.
25:01But it was not quite what it seems.
25:04Granada was now at the mercy of the resurgent Christian kingdoms to the north.
25:10There's something of a theatrical stage set about this place,
25:15an air of artifice, a flimsiness, a frailty.
25:19This was the Indian summer of Islamic Spain.
25:24How long could it last?
25:31As the last heirs of Islamic resplendence in Al Andalus,
25:36the Nasrids tried to recreate the glories of their predecessors.
25:42And yet they built the Alhambra on the cheap.
25:45While they understood beauty and the interplay of light and shade,
25:50they had to make do with wood and stucco instead of stone and marble.
25:57The Court of Lions reflects a mathematical concept of perfection,
26:02a Muslim golden mean.
26:04Some snobbish 19th-century English travellers sneered
26:09that this was just a glorified gazebo.
26:12I'm not so sure.
26:14It's really the jewel in the crown of this amazing complex of palaces.
26:20And if you look around at this beautiful work around this courtyard
26:24where the sultan, the emir, would hold court,
26:28you can see all the eclectic influences of art
26:33across the Islamic world from Persia, from Baghdad, from Damascus,
26:38all expressed here in this perfect and exquisite carving that you see.
26:48The lion images are quite unusual
26:50because imagery was banned as idolatry in most Muslim art,
26:55but these are small enough just to get away with it.
27:09Behind the façade, the last Muslim dynasty in Spain lived in fear.
27:18This is the courtyard of the two doors because these two doors tell the story
27:23of the paranoia and instability of the Nazareth court.
27:28As you can see, this is now the main entrance.
27:31But in the Islamic world, the right-hand door was always the main entrance to the court.
27:38Now, the Nazarets were always ready for attack,
27:42and they were a lot more afraid of Muslim factions or their own family
27:46than they were of the Christians.
27:48But if you attacked this door or tried to batter it down,
27:52it would always be in vain,
27:55because it's a trompe d'oeil.
27:57There's just a brick wall behind this door.
28:00You could never get in.
28:02But this tells you all you need to know about the insecurity, fear and duplicity
28:08in the corridors of the Alhambra Palace.
28:17Amongst this palace of Islamic splendour, hidden from view,
28:22is the symbol of the woman who destroyed it all.
28:26And there you can see it, the crest of Queen Isabella of Castile,
28:32the woman who brought down the last Islamic kingdom in Western Europe.
28:41Isabella and her husband Ferdinand orchestrated the finale of the reconquest.
28:48By the 1460s, Spain's three main Christian kingdoms were weary, divided and embattled.
28:55Their courts riven by tension between over-mighty barons and ineffectual monarchs,
29:02their peoples culled by play.
29:04A final push was needed, yet the northern kings were too weak and feckless to plan a full-scale war.
29:13Isabella, the Princess of Castile, was 18, green-eyed, auburn hair, small and plump.
29:20But she was intelligent and she was ambitious.
29:24Her brother, Enrique IV, King of Castile, cut her out of the succession.
29:28Even though he tried to marry her to as many as seven other suitors,
29:33she secretly started to negotiate her own marriage.
29:36Her choice was her cousin, Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon.
29:42He was cunning, intelligent and handsome.
29:46Together they would be a formidable team.
29:48In 1469, the two of them secretly eloped and married.
29:53The marriage changed everything.
29:59Though they kept their own separate kingdoms,
30:02Ferdinand and Isabella's monarchy was the foundation of what became Spain.
30:08They were united by faith, political acumen and dynastic ambition.
30:12First they restored power over their turbulent, venal barons.
30:18Then they turned to Granada.
30:32They captured the emirate of Granada, castle by castle, town by town,
30:38and it took them over ten years.
30:41Now I'm following in their footsteps.
30:44Ferdinand commanded the army, Isabella raised men and money,
30:49helped by the Pope, who granted them one tenth of all revenues
30:53from the Spanish church for their crusade.
30:58I'm standing at the very spot where in June 1491,
31:02Queen Isabella set eyes for the first time
31:06on the great prize of her entire career,
31:09the culmination of her personal Christian crusade
31:13to eradicate Islam in Spain.
31:16And there it was before her, Granada.
31:20She stood here, she looked, and then she marched down
31:23and paraded her entire army around its walls.
31:27She was tormenting the people of Granada.
31:29The women came out onto the battlements and booed and hissed,
31:32and finally the nobility could stand it no longer.
31:35The Islamic knights galloped out and attacked the parade.
31:39But they were fought off.
31:41After 14 years of long war,
31:44marshaled personally by Queen Isabella herself,
31:48at a great cost in blood and treasure.
31:51One by one the strongholds of Granada had fallen,
31:54and now she was here for the last reckoning,
31:57the final stronghold.
32:00Granada was doomed.
32:09Behind the city wall, as the Christians came closer,
32:13the Nazrids cowered, plotting against each other,
32:16as was their way.
32:20This hidden away jewel of Granada, the madrasa, an Islamic school,
32:27was built in 1349 by the greatest of the Nazrid emirs, Yusuf I.
32:33But he was murdered while praying soon afterwards by a madman,
32:37and that unfortunate death set a pattern.
32:40The Nazrids were incorrigibly, irredeemably murderous,
32:44dissolute, and treacherous.
32:47They had an expression for this.
32:48They called natural deaths a white death,
32:51and murderous deaths they called the red death.
32:55Well, of the first nine emirs of Granada in the Nazrid dynasty,
33:00one was overthrown, one died in an accident,
33:02and the rest were all murdered.
33:04The Nazrids were definitely a dynasty of the red death.
33:15Yusuf was succeeded by his teenage son,
33:18who was soon overthrown by his wicked uncle, Ismail II.
33:22His vizier and historian, Ibn Khatib,
33:26said that Ismail liked to cavort in female clothing
33:30and was a wicked, perverted and dissolute transvestite.
33:33He was soon overthrown and murdered in the dungeons of the Alhambra.
33:39Just another Nazrid.
33:44Now, within Granada,
33:46Mohammed XII, known to the Spaniards as Boabdil,
33:50was only on the throne because his mother forced him to usurp his own father.
33:55He held out against Ferdinand and Isabella for eight months,
33:59and then he started to secretly negotiate terms.
34:10On the 2nd of January, 1492,
34:13the banners of Castile and Leon were raised from the towers of the Alhambra
34:19to the cry of,
34:21Castile, Castile, for Ferdinand and Isabella.
34:25On the 6th of January, the most Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella,
34:30entered the city in formal procession through this gate
34:34to claim Granada for Christendom.
34:39That day, a 46-year-old Genoese sailor
34:43watched the Christian banners flutter on the battlements of Granada.
34:47Cristobal Colon.
34:50We know him as Christopher Columbus,
34:53an eccentric, grizzled maverick.
34:55His dreams now dovetailed perfectly with the ambitions of Ferdinand and Isabella.
35:01For him, too, this was a blessed day.
35:08The last emir, Boabdil, turned on this hill
35:12as he marched away to take up his new estates granted by Ferdinand and Isabella.
35:18He looked over the city.
35:20This was known as the Moors' last sigh.
35:25Lorca, the great 20th century Spanish poet,
35:29said that when the Moors were driven out of Spain,
35:32their freedom of spirit and their lightness of being vanished forever.
35:37Their elegant mosques were replaced by garish and ornate churches
35:42filled with blood-stained Christs.
35:53Granada Cathedral captures the blood-spattered triumphalism
35:57of Christian holy war.
36:00Here, St James the Muslim Slayer pins an Islamic soldier to the ground
36:05by the throat like a wounded animal
36:07before he brings his broadsword crashing down.
36:14Ferdinand and Isabella embraced their mission as Catholic champions
36:17with apocalyptic fervour.
36:22They regarded the capture of the city as a crusading triumph
36:26and Christopher Columbus offered them a way to combine
36:30trade, glory, empire and crusade.
36:35He would sail for the Indies, find gold along the way
36:39and a route to conquer Jerusalem from the east.
36:43Ferdinand and Isabella were dazzled and they agreed.
36:47They appointed him Admiral of the Ocean Sea,
36:50Viceroy of all he captured.
36:52And they issued this decree.
36:54We dispatch Cristobal, Cologne, Christopher Columbus
36:59with three caravels to sail across the Ocean Sea,
37:03that's the Atlantic Ocean, towards the Indies
37:06and there to fulfil an enterprise that touches on the glory
37:11of the Catholic faith.
37:13He sailed and he was away for two years.
37:20The Pope rewarded Ferdinand and Isabella with the title
37:24the Catholic Monarchs.
37:28Looking inward though, they saw their success as fragile,
37:33their sacred rule tainted and weakened dangerously
37:37by alien blood and heretical beliefs.
37:42Ferdinand and Isabella believed that their triumphs were just part
37:46of a divine and apocalyptic master plan.
37:50Before Judgment Day, the hidden one, or the bat,
37:55would swoop down on Spain and cleanse it of Jews, Muslims and locusts.
38:01Meanwhile, Christopher Columbus would find the gold
38:06and the route to conquer Jerusalem from the east.
38:10In preparation for all this, Ferdinand and Isabella
38:13would cleanse the kingdom.
38:15They would create a pure Christian Jerusalem within Spain itself.
38:23They were considering a solution to a long-standing problem,
38:27a people rooted in Spain since Roman times,
38:30now the enemy within.
38:33On the 31st of March 1492, the monarchs published their decree,
38:39which read,
38:40as the Jews daily continue their evil and their harm,
38:44the only remedy is to expel them from our kingdoms.
38:48The Jews were given three months to sell everything,
38:52collect their belongings and leave forever,
38:54or convert to Christianity.
38:57Chillingly, the monarchs chose the 9th of Ab,
39:00the day in the Jewish calendar,
39:02when the Jews remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem
39:05as the very date of their deportation.
39:09Out of 300,000 Jews, about half did convert,
39:13and the rest, around 150,000,
39:17departed forever from Spain on this perilous journey.
39:21The 9th of Ab was appropriate,
39:24because this was the greatest trauma in Jewish life
39:27between the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem
39:30and the Holocaust in the 20th century.
39:50I'm visiting one of Spain's few remaining synagogues.
39:55In 1492, hundreds of synagogues were destroyed,
39:59and all of Spain, only three survived from that time.
40:05And yet, ironically,
40:0720% of Spaniards have Jewish blood today.
40:11As for this synagogue,
40:12it only survived because it was converted into a hospital,
40:16and after 400 years,
40:18it was only discovered to be a synagogue
40:21when the plaster fell off the walls
40:23to reveal this beautiful decoration.
40:26It was only discovered to be a sacred decoration.
40:28MUSIC PLAYS
40:31MUSIC PLAYS
40:45Spanish Muslims were Isabella's next target.
40:50Her chief advisor was Cardinal Francisco de Cisneros,
40:54the Archbishop of Toledo.
40:58He came down here to Granada and purged Muslim culture.
41:03The bathhouses were closed,
41:04Islamic dress was banned,
41:06and he came here to the madrasa,
41:09the old Islamic school,
41:11and cleared out all the Muslim books,
41:14which he claimed encouraged indecency, infidelity and sorcery.
41:19He had them taken outside to the square
41:21and systematically burned.
41:23A thousand years of Islamic scholarship went up in smoke.
41:31I'm in the village of Churiana.
41:34It's just outside Granada.
41:36This is where the Muslim and Christian delegates
41:39signed the surrender terms of the city.
41:42And at first, they offered openness of worship and culture.
41:47Isabella was generous because she believed that the Muslims
41:51would convert en masse.
41:53Her bishops descended on Granada
41:55in a triumphant frenzy of missionary optimism.
42:04Some refused to convert.
42:07Others, known as Moriscos, meaning Moorish,
42:10did become Christian.
42:12Their artisans kept up Muslim traditions.
42:16This is a beautiful ceiling carved for the Christians
42:20by Morisco Workman.
42:27After Muslim unrest, in 1502, Isabella cancelled her promised toleration.
42:34She banned Islamic practices,
42:36claiming her new Christian subjects might be false converts.
42:41Trying to convert Muslims to Catholicism,
42:44Archbishop Cisneros told the Queen
42:46was like throwing pearls at swine.
42:58I'm in Seville.
42:59Here, a holy office was set up
43:02to eliminate the bacteria of heresy
43:05and impure blood within the body of Spain.
43:08The Inquisition lacked the scale or efficiency
43:11of a 20th century terror state,
43:14yet it was based on the same public frenzy,
43:16suspicion, repression.
43:18In 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella came here to Seville
43:23to establish the Tribunal of the Holy Office,
43:28the Spanish Inquisition.
43:30And they gave them this, the castle of St George, as their headquarters.
43:36There's not much left of it.
43:37There's just this wall and the dungeons inside.
43:40But this was the working heart, the workhouse,
43:44the gruesome centre of the Inquisition machine.
43:47From here, inquisitals, led by the first leader of the Inquisition,
43:52Torquemada, rode out on their mules to search for victims,
43:57assisted by their special faith police force, the Familiars.
44:02Their aim was to enforce a united Catholic Spain.
44:10False converts, known as the conversos,
44:13were investigated in secret sittings
44:15and tortured to secure forced confessions.
44:19While many Moriscos were hunted down,
44:22the primary targets were the Jews.
44:26The Inquisitors and their pure-blood-and-faith police,
44:31the Familiars devised increasingly ingenious ways
44:35to smoke out the crypto-Jews, whom they called Muranos, or pigs.
44:42First, they claimed that Jews smell differently
44:45because of their secret Judaic cooking practices.
44:49Some say that tapas was created
44:52as a way of surreptitiously testing conversos
44:56to see if they would eat ham or other non-kosher dishes.
45:01But they really did check that conversos
45:04hung at least two hams outside their doors
45:08to show that they were eating non-kosher food.
45:11As you can see, I think this guy would pass the test.
45:14But more than that, behind the righteousness of the Inquisition
45:18there was big business and there was greed.
45:21Fortunes were confiscated.
45:22Great sums were made by the Crown and the Inquisitors,
45:27some of whom were actually prosecuted for extortion.
45:31Faith and avarice dovetailed immaculately.
45:39From 1492 to 1530,
45:4215,000 Spaniards were locked
45:45in the torture chambers of the Inquisition.
45:482,000 were executed.
45:5290% of those murdered were found guilty of having Jewish blood.
46:07I'm right here in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
46:13And one can almost feel here the terrible crimes
46:18that were committed inside these cold walls.
46:21Tens of thousands of crypto-Jews or conversos
46:25or people usually totally innocent
46:27who were denounced for impurity of blood
46:30were brought here, kept here for years
46:33and tortured to confess, to repent
46:36or to denounce other traitors.
46:40Most of them, of course, were simply descendants
46:43of Jews from many, many generations ago.
46:45But anyone could be accused of impurity of blood.
46:50Really, the Inquisition was often used to settle
46:53personal scores and rivalries.
46:56Like every Inquisition or terror,
46:58it soon started to consume its own.
47:02Professors were denounced by rival professors
47:05for ludicrous crimes such as studying the Hebrew
47:08instead of the Latin Bible.
47:09A bishop and minister of the crown
47:12was denounced and investigated for many years.
47:19As the Inquisition gathered pace,
47:22even devout Christians were accused of heretical tendencies.
47:30One typical victim, a Christian victim, of the Inquisition
47:34was kept in these very dungeons.
47:36Her name was Maria Lopez
47:39and she was a blind visionary who claimed to be the Virgin Mary.
47:44She was accused of having sex with her jailers,
47:47but she certainly asked them to whip her naked
47:50while she was held in these cells.
47:52In the end, she was found guilty.
47:55She was taken out to be burned, but repented.
47:59And, as a result, before the flames were lit,
48:03she was given the great honour of being garrotted.
48:07Then she was burned.
48:08Such was the mercy of the Inquisition.
48:20I'm off to Cordoba now to find out more
48:23about the Jewish victims of the Inquisition.
48:31While most conversos gave up their Jewish faith and became devout Catholics,
48:37some secretly kept their Judaism alive at great personal cost.
48:43This is the Casa de Sepharad in Cordoba,
48:46the house of the Spanish or Sephardic Jews.
48:51These Jewish prayer books show how secret Jews practice their faith in private.
48:57They have Latin on the outside, Hebrew on the inside.
49:01In Spain, the distant past still has the power to spring terrible surprises.
49:08As a historian of Sephardic Jewish descent, I thought I knew everything about my own family's story.
49:16Turns out I was wrong.
49:20Alex Teller is one of the research team here who have looked back 12 generations into my family.
49:27I didn't know that we came from Spain, nor that we served the Spanish kings in Mexico.
49:34Alex, you've been doing some research into my family, I understand.
49:38Show me what you found. I'm fascinated.
49:40This is a part of the two-volume collection of volumes belonging to the national pilots of Mexico,
49:46because they went to Mexico.
49:48What? Show me. I've never heard that before.
49:51When they were the governors of an area of Mexico, another part.
49:55So, wait a sec. So, the Caravals, I'm descended from this family, the Carvajal.
50:00Yeah. They pretended to convert, or they did convert to Christianity.
50:03They pretended to convert. They convert officially, and they practice Christianity officially,
50:08but at home, secretly, they practice Judaism.
50:10You were fake Christians.
50:12I don't mind being descended from fake Christians at all. I'm proud that they kept it going.
50:17No, of course. It's a reason to be proud.
50:18Yeah. So, they were kind of, there were secret Jewish governors of these colonies.
50:23When you said you had something about my family, I expected some sort of,
50:25some very vague distant thing that I would, you know, but this is, this is actually,
50:30this is the direct descent of the family from these people I've never heard of.
50:34And the straight branch, actually, yeah.
50:36Yeah.
50:37So, you've got the brother, Luis, who's pretty young, actually. Well, he's about 30.
50:44And you've got Leonora de Andrade. Andrade, yes. Andrade, who is his sister.
50:49Exactly. Luis de Carvajal got a fight with one of the important figures of the city,
50:53and this man denounced the family to the Inquisition because of this.
50:58Oh, my gosh.
50:58In this, in this document, which is the auto de fe, the document, the judgment, the trial,
51:04he was accused of being a traitor and for being, as well, a, a heretic.
51:09This is, is this his death sentence?
51:12Exactly, the death sentence.
51:13They're hunted down by the Inquisition, and they're basically wiped out by the Inquisition.
51:19I mean, the brother, first of all, Luis is, Luis and Leonora are killed and burnt to death.
51:25Almost the same time, yeah.
51:26Almost the same time, maybe even in the same auto de fe, the same burning in the square of Mexico
51:31City.
51:32I mean, that's heartbreaking enough to die, brother and sister.
51:35In the case of Leonor de Andrade, Leonor, she was proud of being a, of being what she was,
51:42of practicing Judaism at home, secretly.
51:46At the, at the moment of the, of the trial, she was cited a poem she wrote in which she
51:52asked for,
51:53for the help of the Messiah, of the king of the Jews.
51:57Do you, do you have that somewhere?
51:59Yes, I got some verses of the poem in Spanish.
52:02Cantemos como esperando el Sancto rey Jorafat.
52:06Por piedad afirmando en tiempos de adversidad.
52:11Envíole dios un profeta que a los niños diome.
52:16I think this is the saddest cut of all.
52:19Yes, she's, she's actually asking for, for a sweet death, for a sweet end, to God.
52:25So this girl in her twenties, who, who is literally, you know, minutes or hours later,
52:32going to be burned naked to death in the, in the square of Mexico City probably,
52:38is, is asking for a, for a sweet, for an easy death in the flames.
52:43Exactly. That's a, that's the point of this poem.
52:46That's unbelievable.
52:50Amazing.
52:55I'm usually dubious of the lacrimose fashion for televised family revelations from history.
53:02Yet this has surprised and moved me.
53:05My direct ancestors were secret Jews, royal civil servants in colonial Mexico,
53:11hoping to avoid the Spanish Inquisition.
53:14They were betrayed and sent to their deaths.
53:17We know for sure one child escaped.
53:21Joseph Leon, son of Leonora.
53:24Only by fleeing to Tuscany and changing his name there to Montefiore,
53:28did the family find safety.
53:35I'm in Granada, where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried,
53:39in the royal chapel here at the cathedral.
53:42Their actions in war and in peace changed Spain forever.
53:48Yet when Isabella died in 1504, there was unfinished business.
53:54For all her success, her family was unlucky.
53:57Her sons died young and her elder surviving daughter was no Isabella.
54:13They've let me in to the vault of Ferdinand and Isabella,
54:18where they're actually buried.
54:20In many ways this is the secret heart, not just of Granada,
54:24but of Spain itself.
54:27And it's usually closed to the public.
54:29But here lie the two great Catholic monarchs.
54:33Great most successful king and queen of their era, but at what a cost.
54:39And when they died, they lay buried here.
54:42Over there you can see their crown and their scepter and Christ,
54:47which sums up their rule.
54:53They were succeeded by their daughter Juana, who lies over there.
54:58She was married to Philip the Handsome, the Habsburg Duke of Burgundy.
55:05When he died, his body lies over there.
55:09She refused to bury him.
55:11She carried his body round and round Spain for months and years,
55:15as he rotted, bloated and putrefied.
55:19They realised, of course, that she was mad.
55:21She's known to history as Juana La Loca, Juana the Mad.
55:30In 1516, Juana the Mad was deposed in favour of her son, Charles.
55:37He was the dutiful and shrewd heir to vast Habsburg lands.
55:42Arts Duke of Austria, King of Spain and soon Holy Roman Emperor too.
55:50Charles V came to Spain to claim his new kingdom
55:55and win over his dubious subjects.
55:58In March 1526, he stayed for months here at the Alhambra
56:02with his new young wife.
56:04It was his honeymoon.
56:08Most royal marriages are miserable, but Charles got lucky.
56:12He fell passionately in love with his bride,
56:14Princess Isabella of Portugal, who was beautiful and intelligent.
56:20They were married in Seville,
56:21but they came here to Granada for their honeymoon.
56:24They were so happy that Charles built this extraordinary palace,
56:29square on the outside,
56:31but with this surprising circular courtyard in the middle.
56:35But Charles went away to war.
56:38Isabella died tragically young.
56:41And Charles never came back.
56:49Charles' sprawling territories meant never-ending wars
56:53from one end of Europe to the other.
56:55And there was more, a greater empire to come.
56:58Columbus never reached Jerusalem, yet he found the Indies.
57:02It took a generation of adventurers blessed by Charles V
57:06to turn a geographical discovery into a world empire.
57:12Those ferocious Spanish conquistadors, Cortes and Pizarro,
57:17were conquering new territories, Mexico and Peru, in the Americas.
57:22And they sent back enough gold to fund Spain's Catholic mission,
57:28and to make Spain the dominant military power in Europe for almost a century.
57:36Their ambitions were boundless.
57:39Their resources seemed endless.
57:42They were doing God's work.
57:45Who could stop them?
57:49Next time, Spain at its zenith.
57:53Philip II, a colossus.
57:55A new capital, Madrid, flourishes.
57:59Napoleon invades.
58:02And, in a bloody civil war,
58:04Hitler and Stalin duel for Spain, leaving a cruel dictatorship.
58:12I wouldn't have been surprised
58:14if the four horsemen of the apocalypse had clattered into the hall.
58:24If this story has inspired you, and you'd like to find out more,
58:29go to the address given on screen
58:31and follow the links to the Open University.
58:38You can catch up with Simon Reeves' journey round the Emerald Isle.
58:41Ireland is available now on BBC iPlayer.
58:45We're tracing the history of space exploration here on BBC4 tomorrow
58:48and looking out into what was the future in a Horizon special from 1984 at 9.
58:54Coming up tonight though, Ian Hislop goes off the rails next.
59:01The End
59:02The End
59:03The End