Spain’s Catholic religious-unity policy

Spain’s Catholic religious-unity policy is the coercive program through which the promise of a shared life among Christians, Moors, and Jews gives way to enforced religious conformity. In the novel, it is justified as a means of making one nation from the diversity of al-Andalus, but its consequences expose the cost of that unity: broken assurances, persecution, and the loss of learning that Catalina eventually recognizes as a moral failure.

From promised coexistence to betrayal

After the Christian conquest, the victors promise Boabdil that Muslims will be safe under their rule, as Christians had been under his. The promise is presented as Convivencia: Christians, Moors, and Jews might live quietly and with self-respect as People of the Book. Catalina’s sister Juana, however, declares that Allah has deserted the Alhambra and that Isabella of Castile’s arrival means the greater power is replacing the lesser. Madilla’s quick response, invoking God’s protection of the queen and her own familiarity with Isabella, briefly complicates that confident division between conquerors and conquered.

The assurance of coexistence does not last. Within three months, the policy repudiates it: Jews are expelled, Muslims are threatened, and everyone is required to convert to the Catholic faith. A person’s professed conversion offers no security, since even a shadow of doubt or suspicion can bring their faith before the Spanish Inquisition. The reversal is not merely a change in tone. The promise had invited trust; the policy makes religious identity a test of submission and turns that trust into vulnerability.

How religious unity is enforced

The novel shows coercion reaching into both public worship and the daily life of the palace. Servants must give lip service to the Church’s beliefs, while the mosque’s horns are silenced and no call to prayer is permitted within Isabella’s hearing. Those unwilling to conform must leave for Africa, convert, or face the Inquisition. Religious uniformity is thus enforced through a combination of compelled profession, suppression of worship, expulsion, and judicial suspicion.

The change also marks the palace as a place where the meaning of justice has been displaced. In the council chamber, a chapel replaces an Arabic inscription inviting people to enter and seek justice. Catalina recalls that nobody comes for justice anymore. The contrast makes the policy’s effects legible in the very rooms where rule is exercised: the new faith claims the space, but the old words of welcome are gone, and with them the assurance that people of different beliefs can appeal to a common standard.

A kingdom made one by faith

The policy’s stated logic is nation-building. The diversity of al-Andalus is treated as an obstacle to making one people, and religious uniformity as the means to overcome it. Yet the novel sets that ambition against Isabella of Castile’s own appreciation of Moorish knowledge and culture: Christians learn from Muslim scholars and doctors, use their mathematics, admire their architecture, and enjoy the gardens and waterworks they have inherited. Conquest has not erased dependence on the conquered people’s achievements. The victors, Catalina observes, have been taught how to rule by those they defeated.

Religious consolidation is therefore bound to a wider crusading outlook. As a girl, Catalina believes that her marriage to Arthur serves God by securing an alliance between Spain and England, bringing English wealth and ships into a campaign against Muslim powers in Africa and Turkey. Her early understanding makes warfare and religious duty appear inseparable. The policy that demands one faith at home belongs to the same conviction that Christian victory should extend outward, though the novel later gives Catalina grounds to reject that conviction.

Catalina’s changed judgment

The decisive reassessment comes through Catalina’s encounter with a Moorish physician. His compassion toward her in vulnerability makes it impossible for her to dismiss the Moors simply as barbarians or enemies. She comes to see them as people who, like Christians, are fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their own creed. This recognition leads her beyond sympathy for an individual: she questions the religious persecution itself and the authority of the convictions that had taught her to approve it.

Catalina also connects the policy to the expulsion of knowledge. In retrospect, she condemns the way Isabella of Castile’s campaign drove Jews and Moors from Spain along with their skills, scholarship, and medical learning. Because she has had to seek a physician secretly, the consequences are personal as well as political: the prohibition on relying on those whom the regime calls heretics has made useful care difficult to obtain. She can still love her mother, but no longer regards her as infallible or assumes that her mother’s judgment and God’s are one. By the time Catalina rejects a crusade against the Moors and opposes persecution and cruelty, religious unity has become, in her eyes, an unjust policy whose pursuit damages both its victims and the society that imposes it.