swords can be useful things. While preparing an invasion of Muslim-ruled Granada in 1407, the Castilian prince and regent Fernando “de Antequera” made his headquarters in the city of Seville. During his stay, he visited the cathedral of Santa María la Mayor and gazed on the funeral effigy of King Fernando III, a hero of the “reconquest” who had captured the city as well as much of the rest of Castilian Andalucía from the Muslims in the thirteenth century. A fourteenth-century description of this effigy noted that “in the right hand is a sword, said to be of great virtue, with which [Fernando III] conquered Seville…. And whoever desires protection from evil, let him place a kiss on the sword and he will be sheltered thereafter.”1 It was perhaps with this in mind that the later Fernando took the sword from the effigy’s hand in a solemn ceremony viewed by many of his retainers. After private prayer before an image of the Virgin Mary, Fernando bore the sword in a mounted procession through Seville before taking it with him into battle. Over the next few years, he “borrowed” the sword several more times. Only after his campaigns culminated in the conquest of Antequera in 1410 did he finally return the sword to the cathedral once and for all.
According to the contemporary chronicler Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, none of this was Fernando’s idea. Seville’s concejo, or municipal council, had originally offered him the sword, and he decided to parade it about the city only after one of his nobles convinced him to do so.2 Pérez de Guzmán’s reasons for telling the story in this way are straightforward enough: he hoped to portray Fernando not as a grandstander who went about appropriating sacred weapons but as a pious man whose merit was recognized by others. It seems unlikely, however, that Fernando needed any prompting. He was aware of the symbolic import of the sword and knew full well that taking it would encourage his soldiers and embellish his reputation.
To an extent, Fernando’s audience consisted of the “knights, counts, and rich men” who joined him in the cathedral and on the procession.3 They, like the regent, had been raised and educated in a chivalric culture that lionized fallen heroes; to truly excel and win fame, a knight must prove himself worthy of the past and of his lineage.4 As warrior, king, and saint, Fernando III was a particularly powerful exemplar. His significance for fifteenth-century Castilian knights is perhaps best expressed in a chronicle written a few decades later and dedicated to another proponent of holy war, Rodrigo Ponce de León:
Oh, what relief it would be to be counted among the most holy and illustrious kings of glorious memory and the very noble and virtuous knights, who shine before the order of God, having defended and held up the holy Catholic faith against the Muslims and infidels, enemies of the faith of Jesus Christ! Just as the magnificent king don Fernando, who took Seville on the day of San Clemente. On the evening before that feast day, Our Lady the Virgin Mary appeared to him and placed the keys to the city in his hand and took him inside [the walls of Seville]. And that holy king, having there knelt before her image with devoted prayers, forgot his sword upon his departure. The next morning, the Muslim king sent it to him, asking that he spare their lives by the mercy of Her Highness, because Her Highness had vowed to put them all to the sword.5
For Ponce de León, as for Fernando and his followers, the sword of the saintly king was more than a protective object; it encapsulated their personal and collective aspirations. By publicly but reverently co-opting this history, Fernando inspired his knights in a manner that engaged deeply held beliefs about themselves and their society. There is no reason to assume that his motives were cynical. Fernando’s devotion to the Virgin Mary was lifelong and his crusading credentials were already established. A few years earlier, for instance, he had founded the chivalric Order of the Jar and the Griffin, dedicated to Mary’s purity and the ultimate defeat of Granada.6
His own knights were not Fernando’s only audience, however, and much of the population of Seville had little interest in chivalrous ambitions or the swords of dead kings. His plans for a campaign against Granada had earned a lukewarm response from the local nobility and populace. Despite rhetoric about unending hostilities between Christians and Muslims, war with Granada was hardly constant, and Seville’s residents made effective use of a nearly uninterrupted series of truces from 1350 to 1450 to establish lucrative trading partnerships with their putative religious enemies across the border. The proximity to Granada that permitted this commerce, however, also meant that any renewal of fighting put the city and its environs in danger. Fernando’s campaign was a response to a series of raids in central Andalucía, especially near Jaén and Baeza. Seville was not threatened, but that could change if its role as base for the regent’s army made the city a target for Granadan reprisals. As happened often on the frontier, therefore, many people were disinclined to take decisive action. Sevillanos did not openly object to Fernando’s plans. Many sincerely supported his plan for an invasion of Granada, in theory at least. But concerns about the practical and near-term implications of his ambitions meant that they did not actively or eagerly support him.
By taking up the sword, Fernando claimed its protective qualities and declared that he enjoyed the special attentions of the Virgin. By bearing it in procession through Seville, he extended that protection to encompass all those who lived there, thus relieving their anxiety about potential Granadan retaliation. Fernando’s decision to take up the sword thus was a response to practical political concerns as much as anything, one meant to act in concert with other efforts to win over the people of Seville, such as the prominent role Fernando accorded to the banners of Seville and Saint Isidore in the vanguard of his army. Fernando’s approach was not particularly innovative—rulers had long used pageantry and symbolic objects to their benefit and his great-grandfather Alfonso XI had employed Fernando III’s memory in 1327—but it was fruitful.7 He managed to bring a sustained campaign against Granada to a successful conclusion, a feat that had not been achieved for more than a century and would not be again until the 1480s. To do so, he had needed to appeal simultaneously to multiple constituencies. His claiming of Fernando III’s sword, although not the sole reason for his victory, indicates his sensitivity to the Sevillan perspective and an understanding of the power of symbols.
Fernando’s campaign illustrates several key aspects of politics in late medieval Castile. Leaders who hoped to wage war against Granada had to win a broad base of support. It was especially vital for them to ensure that noncombatants living near the frontier supported these military endeavors. Frontier dwellers bore the majority of the costs of holy war as well as the risks of retaliation. Frontier attitudes regarding putative religious enemies, moreover, were often more complex than those held by people who had little direct or regular contact with members of other religious groups. To effectively wage war against Muslims, elites had to adjust their public personae and messages in order to fit local sentiments. This was not only a question of Christian ideas about Islam; rather, the borderlands were marked by often contradictory sentiments about a range of religious communities, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, and recent converts. Ultimately, many Christians in Castile disagreed on the fundamental nature of their society: was it or should it be an exclusively Christian community? Or should non-Christians and converts play full and equal roles in a hybrid society? Such questions, combined with a constant sense of physical insecurity, caused a great deal of anxiety, one result of which was a turn to extreme and seemingly contradictory behaviors. These included unrestrained violence toward non-Christians as well as rejections of fixed religious identities; conversions to Islam, to give one example, were numerous. Such responses were often incomprehensible to those who lived away from the frontier, in places where they were free to consider issues of religion and identity in absolute terms and without the troubling presence of non-Christians.
In 1391, a few years before Fernando’s sojourn in Seville, for instance, the city was the epicenter of a series of brutal assaults that decimated one of the most populous Jewish communities in Iberia. Several decades later, in 1449, plague broke out in Seville and local church authorities responded with penitential processions. Soon thereafter, or perhaps at the same time, Seville’s Jews conducted their own procession, which apparently imitated a number of features of the Christian
