Spain Renounces Its Promise of Coexistence in Granada

Spain Renounces Its Promise of Coexistence in Granada is the reversal of a solemn pledge made after conquest: the promise that Muslims would be safe under Christian rule is abandoned in favor of forced religious uniformity. The change exposes the distance between Spain, Katherine's homeland, proclaiming just rule and practicing coercion, and becomes a lasting test of Catalina of Aragon’s inherited convictions.

The promise and its reversal

After Granada, the victors promised King Boabdil that his Muslim subjects would be as safe under their rule as Christians had been under his. The pledge of convivencia offered a vision in which Moors, Christians, and Jews could live with security and self-respect as People of the Book. Its force lay in more than words: it offered the conquered a basis for trusting the new rulers.

That trust was betrayed within three months. The policy described by Catalina makes clear that the promise was not gradually weakened but abruptly contradicted: Jews were expelled, Muslims were threatened, and everyone was required to convert to the True Faith. Those who converted could still face investigation if their belief was doubted. The Inquisition thus extended coercion beyond an order to change faith; suspicion itself could become grounds for testing a person’s religious allegiance.

Coercion as a program of rule

The palace becomes a small-scale measure of the wider transformation. Its servants are required to give outward assent to the One True Church, while the mosque’s call to prayer is silenced in the hearing of Isabella of Castile. The contrast is between a public performance of Christian conformity and the religious life that the new rulers suppress. Conquest has not simply changed who governs; it has narrowed the terms on which the governed may belong.

Isabella of Castile builds a chapel in the council chamber, displacing the Arabic inscription that had invited visitors to seek justice without fear. Catalina recalls that the old assurance of justice no longer draws people to the chamber. The alteration joins religious change to political consequence: the new faith is made visible in the seat of government, while the language of open access to justice disappears from its walls. The novel presents religious uniformity as a means of making one nation from the varied society of al-Andalus, but sets that ambition against the loss of plural life and confidence in justice.

Catalina’s later judgment

As a girl, Catalina had understood alliance with England as part of a sacred campaign against the Moors. She believed English wealth and ships could help Spain carry war into Muslim lands, including Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and feared that the conflict might have no end. That earlier certainty helps explain the intellectual distance she later travels: the policy of coercion belonged to a world in which religious difference was treated as an enemy to defeat, not a condition people might share.

Her judgment changes through experience, including the kindness of a Moorish physician when she is vulnerable. She concludes that someone capable of such compassion cannot be dismissed as a barbarian, and that the Moors must be seen as human beings: fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their own creed. She also connects the loss of medical and scholarly knowledge to the expulsion of Jews and Moors, recognizing that the policy drove valuable learning out of Spain, Katherine's homeland. Her criticism reaches her mother’s legacy: Isabella of Castile, though devoted to learning and justice, had helped banish people whose knowledge she had condemned, and had herself acted unjustly.

Catalina’s reconsideration becomes explicit in her rejection of crusade and persecution. She continues to love her mother, but no longer regards her as infallible or assumes that her mother’s judgment and God’s judgment must be one. The breach of the Granada promise thus marks more than a political reversal. It becomes part of Catalina’s separation from an inherited certainty that one faith can make a people by force.

The alternative to perpetual war

Later, after victory over the Scots, Catalina faces the same logic of triumph followed by punishment. She considers the devastation that further warfare could bring, then rejects the strategy she associates with her parents. In her reasoning, a ruined country would recover only to produce another generation of enemies; hatred would make another war inevitable. She instructs her commander to let the Scots surrender their arms and go in peace, and offers their queen peace and neighborly relations.

The scene does not undo the earlier betrayal, but it shows how Catalina has learned to judge its consequences. The conquest of Granada had been followed by a broken pledge, expulsions, threats, and a demand for religious sameness. Against that example, her response to Scottish defeat treats victory as an opportunity for peace rather than permission for savagery. The novel makes the rejected promise consequential across Catalina’s life: she comes to see that war and coercion cannot secure lasting unity, and that coexistence requires more than a pledge—it requires rulers to keep it.