Convivencia

Convivencia is the ideal of people of different faiths living together in safety and mutual respect, and in the novel it becomes both a broken political promise and a moral standard against which rule is judged. After Granada’s surrender, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon promise Boabdil that Muslims will be as safe under Christian government as Christians had been under his. The promise is abandoned within months. Its collapse shapes Catalina’s growing distrust of religious persecution and, later, her refusal to make victory an excuse for renewed war.

The promise of living together

The novel presents convivencia as more than a convenient settlement after conquest. The agreement offers the prospect of a society in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews may live quietly and with self-respect as “People of the Book.” Its force lies in the reciprocity of the pledge: Granada’s Muslim population is promised safety under new rulers, just as Christians had been safe under Boabdil. The promise asks the victors to govern people of another faith without making their conversion the price of security.

That political ideal exists alongside the conquerors’ profound dependence on the culture they have defeated. The narrator describes Christians learning from Muslim scholars and physicians, using their numbers, studying the stars they named, and enjoying the fruits, gardens, and aqueducts they made. The palace’s architecture is admired as beauty that the newcomers inhabit but do not fully understand. In the narrator’s formulation, “We are the victors, but they have taught us how to rule.” The contrast sharpens the meaning of convivencia: cultural inheritance crosses the boundary of conquest, even as political power tries to enforce a single religious identity.

Renunciation and religious coercion

The promise does not survive the consolidation of Christian rule. Within three months, the Jews are expelled and the Muslims threatened; people are told to convert, leave for Africa, or face the Spanish Inquisition. Religious difference, once covered by a solemn guarantee, is recast as a danger to national unity. The rulers’ stated rationale is that one faith is the only way to make one nation and one people from the diversity of al-Andalus, the Moorish lands. The novel thus places the language of unity beside the actual methods used to pursue it: expulsion, compelled conversion, and suspicion backed by inquisitorial testing.

The transformation appears in the palace as well as in policy. A chapel is built in the council chamber where an inscription had once invited people to seek justice. The Arabic words are displaced by Christian prayer, and, the narrator observes, no one comes for justice anymore. Yet the palace’s old sense of peace cannot simply be stamped out by soldiers’ feet on its marble floors. The contrast is not a claim that beautiful surroundings undo political violence; rather, the enduring place makes the betrayal more visible. The ideal remains legible in the setting even after its rulers have repudiated it.

Catalina’s change of judgment

For Catalina, convivencia becomes personal when she remembers the kindness of a Moorish physician who treated her in secret. His compassion forces her to revise the inherited category of the Moor as barbarian, savage, or merely heretical. She recognizes in him a person capable of tenderness, belief, hope, and reason, and begins to see the same human fallibility and fidelity across religious difference. This is not a rejection of her Christian faith: she says that her faith returns unshaken. What changes is her conviction that faith entitles one community to condemn or persecute another.

That reassessment widens into a judgment of her mother’s rule. Catalina sees the expulsion of Jews and Moors not only as religious policy but as the destruction of knowledge: Spain has driven away physicians, scientists, scholars, skills, and gifts. She concludes that a ruler who admired learning and fought for justice could nevertheless act unjustly. Though she continues to love her mother, she no longer treats her as infallible or assumes that her mother’s understanding and God’s will are one. The ideal of convivencia therefore works in the novel as a test of authority: inherited piety and royal certainty do not exempt rulers from moral judgment.

From Granada to a policy of peace

The lesson reaches beyond Granada when Catalina confronts the prospect of continuing a war after a decisive victory over the Scots. She considers the immediate advantage of pursuing a defeated enemy, but rejects devastation as a means of securing lasting safety. A conquered people’s children would inherit the hatred and renew the fighting; victory would begin another turn of the same conflict. Her conclusion echoes the failure of convivencia: force may impose submission, but it cannot make religious or political difference disappear or produce durable peace. “War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.”

Catalina orders the Scottish soldiers to surrender their arms and go in peace, and intends to promise peace to the Scottish queen if she will be a good sister and neighbor. This is not presented as a restoration of the Granada agreement or as proof that every conflict can be settled by a single gesture. It is a choice to make restraint, rather than humiliation or further destruction, the consequence of victory. The novel’s closing reflection similarly frames convivencia as a historical possibility worth recovering: a land where Jews, Muslims, and Christians could live side by side in respect and peace as “People of the Book.” By linking that ideal to Catalina’s changed convictions and her conduct after battle, the novel makes coexistence both a memory of what was promised and a principle by which the use of power can be judged.