In the Santa Fé camp, awaiting their entrance into Granada, the monarchs listened to Columbus’ magical vision of an oceanic empire, and Ferdinand as the Last World Emperor and King of Jerusalem. While the Portuguese were coining gold in Guinea, Isabella had only the Canaries. The monarchs were minded to back Columbus, but the expulsion of the Moors encouraged a radical solution to the Jewish problem, which may have been Ferdinand’s idea. They asked Torquemada to draft an order of expulsion for all Jews. The spirit was not entirely new: the Crusades had launched a spree of Jewish massacres. English, French and Austrian Jews had already been expelled. The plague had unleashed a spasm of anti-Jewish violence, and there had been a Castilian massacre in 1391. But Spain was home to the world’s biggest Jewish community.
‘Why do you act in this way against your subjects?’ asked their Jewish courtier Abravanel. ‘Impose strong taxes on us!’
‘Do you believe this comes from me?’ protested Isabella. ‘It is the Lord who put this idea into the king’s heart.’ The Jewish leaders tried again with Ferdinand, who blamed God and wife. ‘We worked hard without success,’ recalled Abravanel. ‘It was the queen who stood behind him and hardened his resolve.’ He offered 30,000 ducats in return for withdrawing the expulsion decree.
‘Judas once sold the son of God for thirty pieces of silver,’ cried Torquemada, laying a crucifix before the monarchs. ‘Your majesties think of selling him for a second time for 30,000! Well, here he is, sell him!’
On 31 March 1492, just after the monarchs had taken up residence in Granada’s Alhambra Palace, they issued their decree ‘send[ing] all Jews out of our kingdoms’ and ordering that they should ‘never return’. Either they must convert or they must leave, without exception, in four months’ time. Confronted by the most traumatic experience in Jewish history between the fall of the Jerusalem Temple and the Holocaust, many Jews including their leader Seneor chose to convert. But tens of thousands (including the family of this author) refused to betray their faith, first losing all their property – either it was stolen or they were forced to sell – then leaving el-Sefarad, their homeland for over a thousand years. Some, suffering the predations of people smugglers who prey on migrants, embarked on voyages to Islamic Morocco or to the mercantile cities of Italy and Flanders. But they found the greatest safety in two eastern kingdoms: in Poland–Lithuania, which, due to its own spirit of idiosyncratic tolerance, starting with the Statute of Kalisz back in 1264, was now the freest country in Europe, and in the Ottoman sultanate, Mehmed having already invited Jews to settle in Constantinople. His son welcomed the Sephardi Jews. ‘You call Ferdinand a wise ruler,’ observed Bayezid II, ‘but he’s impoverished his own country and enriched mine.’ Thousands settled in Constantinople and Thessalonica. But initially many Jews, including this author’s ancestors, tramped across the border to Lisbon, paying a tax to João.
Exhilarated by this stringent anti-Jewish action, on 17 April the monarchs recalled Columbus, who after praising them for expelling ‘the Jews from all of your kingdoms’ and unleashing the Inquisition, again proposed his voyage. Finally he was commissioned to sail, receiving 10 per cent of revenues in perpetuity and the titles admiral of the Ocean Sea, viceroy and governor of any lands he might discover, all hereditary because he hoped to found a dynasty. After the death of his wife, he brought up his son Diego, but his new teen girlfriend Beatriz Enríquez also delivered a son, whom they named Fernando after the king.
On 3 August, Columbus set sail in three little ships with ninety sailors of many races, including Pedro Alonso Niño, a free African, an experienced pilot. On 12 October, they struck land in the Bahamas, then sailed on to Cuba and Haiti, where Columbus encountered local peoples: friendly and peaceful ones whom the Spanish called Taínos, and hostile and martial ones whom they called Caribs. The admiral was convinced this was the Indies and so called all the inhabitants
