the middle of the fifteenth century, the uneasy balance between acculturation and fear had reached a point of crisis. The victories of legendary kings like Fernando III were deep in the past and there had been very few sustained campaigns against Granada for two centuries. Long periods of truce (between 1350 and 1460, for instance, there were eighty-five years of truce and only twenty-five of declared war) and various forms of peaceful contact meant, in the words of one scholar, that “at times it would almost seem as if the frontier had in some ways ceased to exist.” But for many frontier nobles, the ideal of expansion remained as strong as ever and they defined this ambition in religious terms. Despite centuries of close contact with Islam, they saw war against Muslims as a sacred duty. Truces with the enemy were ignoble devices that merely delayed the inevitable. Raised in a culture that cherished the mythology of holy war, these nobles sought to live up to the ideal of their ancestors and the great heroes of the past, especially Fernán González and the Cid.29 To do so required that they insert themselves into the grand epic of Iberia’s recovery from the Muslims.
Such aspirations were particularly appealing in a Castile whose political landscape was a morass of faction fighting and competing ambitions in which there was no strong ruler able to unite all in a holy purpose. And so the constable of Castile, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, wrote to Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484)on 15 October 1471 with both despair and hope: “Most blessed Father, to whom except your Holiness can we Christians, your most faithful children, appeal? To whom shall we go when my lord the king cannot come because of his labors and duties and when his knights are even less willing, with some of them more hostile to us than to the very enemies of Christ? No longer will Charlemagne, who used to [fight the Muslims], come, nor Godfrey de Bouillon who dared to, nor our most holy kings who won this land, for they are held by death.”30 The constable directed his appeal to the pope because, as he put it earlier in the letter, the fight against Islam was a holy exercise (santo exerçiçio), which required papal authority for success. Although Miguel Lucas and his followers were willing to offer “all our possessions, our wives, our children, our freedom, our homeland, and in the end, our lives,” only a pope could offer the plenary indulgences that might inspire other Christians to join their struggle or at least make a small contribution (un poco dinero)to the cause.31
Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cáediz, petitioned a yet higher power, the Virgin Mary. In 1462, as a young man burning to prove himself in battle with Muslims, he prayed before an image of the Virgin each day until “Our Lady the Virgin Mary appeared visibly before him, and said to him, ‘Oh good knight, my devout follower, know for certain that my beloved son Jesus Christ and I have received your prayers and, as they have been so constant and expressed such a pure and heartfelt desire, we promise that you will be victorious in any battles against the Moors in which you find yourself’.”32
With talk of crusade indulgences and miraculous visitations, Miguel Lucas and Ponce de León evoked an imagined ethos of the past in which uncompromising faith had led to great victories. They brought to battle with Muslims a brutality born of righteousness. About a year before the constable’s letter to the pope, for instance, a troop of his soldiers patrolling near Jaén came upon a smaller group of almogávares (Muslim raiders). After a brief scuffle in which two of the Muslims were killed and two captured, the Christian band returned to Jaén with their captives and the severed heads of the slain. They sent a report of the encounter, along with the heads, to Miguel Lucas, who was in the nearby town of Andújar. “And when he saw [the heads] and heard the tidings, he was pleased and ordered that each of them be impaled on a raised lance, and so they were borne into Andújar. There all the children of the town dragged them through the streets, and then they left them for the dogs to eat.”33
Ponce de León showed similar disdain for the enemy in 1487. After defeating a Muslim force near Málaga, killing 320 enemies, his deputies executed all the wounded, about eighty in number, “because Don Diego [Rodrigo’s brother] and Don Alonso [his cousin] had vowed that, should God grant them a victory, they would take no one alive.” All four hundred bodies were then decapitated and the heads borne on lances for a triumphal entry into the royal camp where all “greatly enjoyed the sight.”34 Such mutilations were common, though rarely on so large a scale. Raiding parties would often return with severed heads or ears as grisly souvenirs of their successes. Indeed, the practice was even institutionalized at times. In the mid-1430s, for example, the concejo (or town council) of Murcia paid bounties of 100 mrs. each for the heads of Muslim raiders in the hope of inspiring vigilance against incursions.35
Despite complicity in such atrocities, Miguel Lucas and Ponce de León were no simple bigots with one-dimensional understandings of Islam. Both had extensive and personal dealings with Muslims, could respect them as noble and brave opponents, and even admired their culture. The ability to work with Granadans, moreover, was essential to military success on the frontier. The almogávares accosted by the constable’s men accompanied a certain Juan, a “Moor who had converted to Christianity” (vn cristiano tornadizo morisco). This man, who had been residing in Miguel Lucas’s home, was traveling to Granada in order to collect information under the pretense that he wanted to return home and again live as a Muslim.36 Ponce de León, meanwhile, owed his 1487 victory to information brought to him by a Muslim knight wishing to convert. Although initially suspicious, Ponce de León eventually concluded that the information must be reliable, as the Muslim who brought it was “such a strong knight” (cauallero tan esforçado).37
While one might dismiss such stories as ruses de guerre that imply no sincere rapport with Muslims, the point is not that these were the only times that Miguel Lucas or Ponce de León interacted with Muslims but rather that such contact was so customary that it played a role even in instances of savagery. The same Murcian concejo that paid bounties for Muslim heads in 1435 also conducted business with local Muslims that ranged from providing space within the city for their worship to contracting them as skilled masons and artisans to enforcing debts owed by Christians to Muslims.
All this took place in an atmosphere of continual physical insecurity. The Granadan frontier remained a dangerous place in the late fifteenth century. Although we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the heavy lifting of the conquest of Iberia had been accomplished two centuries earlier and that Granada’s final defeat lay only decades away, people are generally not conscious of living at the ends of eras. The many declared truces, moreover, gave little comfort to those who suffered at the hands of raiding parties who ignored them.
There was, in fact, no such thing as an effective truce.38 To get a sense of how even periods of supposed peace were dominated by the fear of war, we might look at how the concejo of the frontier city of Jaén responded to news that Castile had signed a truce with Granada. This agreement, negotiated by Abū al-Hasan ‘Alī of Granada and Diego Fernández de Córdoba, Count of Cabra, was signed in March 1475 and meant to last for two years. At the time, however, the Catholic Monarchs faced serious opposition to their succession in Castile as well as war with Portugal. Hoping for an extended period of stability on their southern flank, they sought a new, more enduring pact. This was finalized on 11 January 1476 and added an additional four years to the terms of the original accord, or until March 1481.39 The unusual duration of the truce seems to have raised expectations of stability, and the authorities in Jaén did their best to ensure that relations with Granada remained positive.
In that same month of January, for instance, the concejo agreed to pay restitution to the Muslims of nearby Cambil for an alleged theft of farm implements whose perpetrators could not be located.40 A more serious threat to the peace emerged on 21 February when word reached Jaén that the town of Huelma, to the southeast, was besieged by local Muslims. The concejo reacted with a strongly worded letter to the ruler of Granada demanding both reparations and an end to hostilities. In response, the Granadans justified their actions by contending that Diego de Viedma, alcaide of Huelma, had instigated the fight, as he “had committed many crimes against the Moors of Guadix, having taken
