Religious coercion in Spain

Religious coercion in Spain is the novel’s account of how a pledge of coexistence after the conquest of Granada gives way to forced religious uniformity. The policy is presented as a means of making one nation and one people, but its consequences expose the cost of that project: expulsion, pressure to convert, religious surveillance, and the exclusion of knowledge and expertise. Catalina of Aragon’s later reconsideration makes the policy a measure of her growing independence from her mother’s convictions.

From a Promise to Its Reversal

After victory, the rulers promise King Boabdil that Muslims will be as safe under their rule as Christians had been under his. They offer convivencia: a way of living together in which Moors, Christians, and Jews, as People of the Book, might live quietly and with self-respect. The promise makes the later reversal especially stark. Within three months, the Jews are expelled and the Moors threatened; the truce is not honored.

The narrative presents religious unity as a deliberate instrument of state-making. Its rulers insist that everyone must convert to the True Faith and that any doubt or suspicion may be tested by the Spanish Inquisition. They justify this coercion as the only way to make one nation out of the varied society that had been al-Andalus, the Moorish lands. The state’s desired unity is thus defined not by continued coexistence but by a single authorized faith and the means to enforce it.

Coercion in Everyday and Public Life

The policy reaches into palace life as well as the wider population. Every palace servant is required to give lip service to the One True Church, while the mosque’s call to prayer is silenced in the hearing of Catalina’s mother. Those who disagree face a stark choice: leave for Africa, convert, or risk the Inquisition. Religious conformity is therefore shown not simply as an official declaration, but as a demand imposed on speech, worship, and residence.

A change in the council chamber gives the policy a public and institutional form. Catalina’s mother builds a chapel there; the Arabic inscription that had invited people to seek justice is displaced by prayer to a stricter God. The narration links this religious transformation to a loss of access to justice: no one comes to seek it anymore. The contrast is between a space once marked by an invitation to ask and a new order in which religious authority no longer promises the same welcome.

Catalina’s Reassessment

Catalina’s later experience unsettles the judgments she inherited. Remembering the Moorish physician who treated her with compassion, she concludes that his people cannot simply be dismissed as barbarians or savages. She allows that he may be mistaken in his faith while recognizing his right to reach his own conclusions; she also sees Moors as people who, like Christians, are fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their creed.

Her reassessment extends from individuals to her mother’s policies. Catalina connects the persecution of Jews and Moors with the loss of their skills, scholarship, and medical knowledge, and recognizes the contradiction in her mother’s commitment to learning and justice while banishing people associated with both. She still loves her mother and retains her faith in God, but no longer believes her mother infallible or assumes that her mother’s judgments are identical with God’s. Catalina consequently rejects crusade and persecution, rather than abandoning Christianity.

Narrative Significance

The policy’s arc runs from a solemn assurance of safety to coercive uniformity, and from Catalina’s inherited certainty to a judgment shaped by compassion and experience. The contrast does not treat the promise of coexistence as a lasting settlement: its breach becomes evidence against the claim that a single faith is the only basis for a united people.

By linking religious enforcement to the silencing of worship, the changed purpose of the council chamber, and the loss of scholarship and medicine, the novel presents persecution as both a political and intellectual narrowing. Catalina’s dissent is personal as well as ethical. She questions the convictions of a mother she once regarded as unquestionable, and the policy’s consequences help mark her emergence as an independent moral observer.