Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

“Dogs of God” is a captivating historical narrative that unifies the zenith of late medievalism with the stunning realities of the newly discovered global world. I wish that sixty years ago, when I was in high school, works like our book at hand had replaced the flat textual narratives of times, dates, and places. James Reston, Jr, son of the legendary journalist Scotty Reston, is a master at connecting the dots. In “Dogs of God” he brings together all the major themes of the perfect storm that was fifteenth century Spain—the final recapture of lands seized by the Moslems centuries before, the unification of the kingdoms into the modern state of Spain, the personalities and vision of Ferdinand and Isabella, the intensification of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, and the apocalyptic vision of the crown that led to the exploration of Christopher Columbus toward a new route to the Orient.But his synthesis does not stop with 1492; this is not a dead history, but one which reaches into contemporary life, even beyond the book’s 2005 publishing date. In the past decade or more there has been considerable debate in the United States over an accurate moral assessment of the treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We see predictors of the present-day conflict over what, exactly, to celebrate on October 12—Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day—in Reston’s descriptions of Columbus’s conduct and interpretation of his discoveries. The renewal of a Crusade mentality under Ferdinand ended a period of tranquil coexistence with Muslims in Western Europe, a sea change which we live with in the present day. The Church endorsed antisemitism of the Ferdinand-Isabella regime was a major boost to a hatred that never seems to die.The charismatic center of this work is the marriage and reign of Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and Isabella, queen of Castile. Their marriage and reign [1469-1503] united the two largest kingdoms of what would become modern Spain. Isabella is portrayed as a charismatic queen, an independent and forceful figure whose intense religiosity, for better and worse, impacted Spanish identity and policy. In later years, her religion became increasingly visionary and apocalyptic, leading to more extreme policies regarding national Catholic purity at the expense of the lives and fortunes of Jews, Muslims, and heretics, while at the same time creating the impulse to spread Christianity to the East in the person of Christopher Columbus.Ferdinand was an effective king who devoted a quarter century to military campaigns fending off advances from both Portugal to the west and France from the north. His most protracted campaign was the disintegration of Islamic occupation in the south. Given that the Moors had invaded Iberia eight centuries earlier, it is not clear precisely why Ferdinand felt intensely compelled to break the enduring Islamic presence while aggressively threatened on other fronts. Conceivably, the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had stoked the old Crusade zeal of three centuries earlier in the Western Church. Ferdinand contented himself with breaking the Islamic physical hold of Spanish lands. His treatment of conquered Moors was, for the most part, temperate, and he permitted conquered Moors to receive Christian baptism.Isabella, for her part, would fall to the influence of the Inquisition, which tolerated neither heresy nor the baptism of Jews and Moors on the grounds that such conversions were advantageous and insincere. The queen, who came to see her reign in messianic color as agent of the conversion of the world to Christ, appropriated the Inquisition to this end. The author notes another reason: the Inquisition was empowered to impound the estates and holdings of suspects, and thus Inquisitorial aggressiveness became an important source of revenue for royal coffers drained by exhaustive military ventures. The tragic expulsion of Jews from Spain, followed later by the expulsion of Moors, was the sad fruit of this religious extremism.The royal couple was disturbed by the navigational successes of their enemies the Portuguese, who were well on their way to India via the route around the tip of Africa. This strategic and economic concern, coupled with the queen’s messianic vision, opened the door to Christopher Columbus and his plans for a westward expedition to Asia. Reston’s treatment of Columbus is rich and intriguing. Columbus was a man with a vision but no backers. His proposal to cross the Atlantic was not a gamble, scientifically speaking. He had already explored the Azores, the Canary Islands, and Iceland. His study of maps dating to ancient times was exhaustive. He was aware of corpses which had washed ashore in colder climes, with features entirely distinct from those of Europeans. Problems there would be, but not with the geography.Reston treats of the first journey and return in considerable detail, and he captures much of the irony of this venture, including the importation of syphilis to Europe by Columbus’s crew. No one, it seems, knew quite what to make of the discoverer’s four cross-Atlantic voyages, as Hispaniola bore no resemblance to the richness of the East described by Marco Polo and others. Columbus found no gold; those who followed would harvest the riches of the New World. And, for those who followed, there would be need for boundaries and markers.Appropriately enough, Reston’s last chapter is “The Division of the World.” The major exploratory players, Spain and Portugal, took their counsel from the pope in 1493, who happened to be the corrupt Alexander VI. Alexander’s famous “line of demarcation,” a north-south boundary just west of the Azores, has puzzled generations of school children who did not realize that Alexander thought he was dividing Portugal’s African/East Asia riches from Spain’s yet undetermined holdings claimed by Columbus. Alexander could hardly have known that he was ushering in what Reston calls in his final words, “The Age of Empire.”

The narrative is structured to culminate in three pivotal events which occupied Spain in 1492: the recapture of Spanish territories held by Moors for about 700 years, the expulsion of Jews who refused to convert, and the launching of Columbus' expeditions and subsequent discovery of America. In the process, we witness the creation of the first formidable modern state. Much is devoted to the Inquisition's role in constructing a coherent polity. We get snapshots of Vatican politics, orgiastic cardinals, fiery Dominicans, Spanish sucessional disputes, poisonings, European slave trade, Portuguese adventures, and fifteenth century "scientific" thinking. Mr. Reston has put together a very amusing read and one is not shortchanged if the general topic is of interest and this is all one expects.Indeed, Mr. Reston aims to write "popular" history, that is, plot, drama and color, emotion, sustained momentum, some intellectual stimulation but not much analysis or interpretation. More often than not he succeeds. But for me, genre success proved to be the book's shortcoming. I wanted more analysis, more probing, more competing interpretations of what now seem to us truly strange events. His point of view is of our day: post-Enlightenment, post-Einstein, post-Holocaust, post-Stalinist, post-Vietnam, post- all horrible events of the twentieth (and twenty-first?) century. To what extent is it proper to apply such prism to events which occurred over five centuries ago, to characters who lived in a world devoid of all knowledge and experience we subsequently acquired? Mr. Reston is not bashful about doing just that, passionately so at times. Perhaps such scruples are not applicable to a book aiming primarily to entertain. He certainly is not bashful in showing his outrage. One never loses awareness that the author has a point of view. What do we learn from it? We are left to draw our own conclusions, arguably with a stacked deck.On a more sober level, the topic is so ambitious, the history so complex, that the broadbrush treatment accorded here almost reduces everyone and everything to outline or caricature. To be fair, one cannot fault Mr. Reston for not writing the book that one thinks ought to be written. A good by-product is to make us realize how welcomed a more thorough treatment of the period would be. Certainly the Inquisition aspects have been well treated by Henry Kerman and Benzion Netanyahu. But we need more recent treatments in English which discuss Moorish Spain, Christian Spain as welcoming haven for Jews after their expulsion from England and France (and the irony of their subsequent expulsion from Spain itself some centuries later), the fragmentation of the Iberian peninsula and the reunification of Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand, the consolidation and centralization of power in the modern State for which Spain provided the model to be followed by the rest of Europe, Columbus, his voyages, and the rise of European hegemony. There seems to be a "black hole" in available histories from the Visigoths to the Hapbsburgs (excepting Kerman and Netanyahu).Mr. Reston writes lucidly and well. The book could use genealogical tables, more maps, and more careful editing (some pronouns are hard to trace; the same character is "explained" more than once in the text within relative proximity and without additional information given). None of this is more than a momentary annoyance but should have been corrected.You will enjoy the book taking it for what it is. If you are intellectually curious, you will probably be pleased but not satisfied. Be aware that it is not the last word on the subject, an opinion with which Mr. Reston would probably agree.

Having read most of mr. Reston's books, I have found that he knows how to turn either barely accessible or well-trodden source material into very entertaining and eminently readable books, his "Last apocalypse" and "Warriors of God" being two highly recommended cases in point.But as I have found earlier with his book on Galileo, on the other hand he sometimes turns potentially exiting source material like the Inquisition and Columbus' travels into less-than-unputdownable reading material. For those unacquainted with the Inquisition and with Columbus and his troubles finding funding and patronage for his first voyage west, this book is certainly informative and mr. Reston's narrative style makes it all easy to digest, albeit without the telling anecdotes or original insights that make the books mentioned above such compelling and fun reads. But if you are already somewhat familiar with these subjects, this book will add little to what you already knew.

I have just finished reading this book. My rating for it would have been higher but for some things that I felt were missing. The author does a great job at combining three key elements: the reconquest of Spain by the Christians (and the fall of Granada), the Inquisition and Columbus' first voyage. The book is easy to read though at times can feel repetitive (I took it more as a reminder of important names and dates so it was helpful) and some of the dates are occasionally mixed up by the author. All the while I was reading the book I felt that the authors was trying to appeal both to the "popular" reader and the more serious (or remotely serious) historian. The result is that the book somehow sits in between but not comfortably.For instance, my biggest disappointment with the book was a lack of concrete citations in the text itself. The author uses phrases such as "one scribe wrote" or "one contemporary commented" or "a notable prince of the time wrote", etc. This was very frustrating as one cannot be sure whether the author is merely conjecturing for dramatisation or was it really from a historical source. I like to have my historical references clearly noted so that I can follow them up and dig deeper into a subject. The second disappointment for me was the rather superficial treatment of the consequences of Columbus' voyages to the treatment of Native Americans and the suffering of the Moors at the hands of the Inquisition. I felt that the author had built up to these issues but then skimmed over them in the epilogue. A couple of additional chapters on these subjects would have certainly made the book more complete.Overall, I think it is well worth reading the book especially for those interested in getting an initial insight into the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the voyages of Columbus, the fall of Granada, the inquisition and so on. For those interested in a deeper treatment of the subject I suggest looking elsewhere. There is a pile of interesting sources (including some helpfully provided at the end of this book by the author).

This book was recommended to me by a friend, who suggested that I should read it during my holiday in Andalucia. It proved to be an ideal companion - entertaining, informative and not in the least boring. Reading it gave me a much better understanding of how this fantastic region was created and caused me to ponder more than once on how the policies of ethnic cleansing that were practised five hundred years ago are still having their effects today.

I live in Spain and have had the advantage of being able to visit many of the places mentioned in this engrossing book. It was a real eye-opener to read about the period immediately preceeding the rise of Ferdinand & Isabella and the effect on Jews,Christians and Moors of the rise of the Spanish Inquisition. A wonderful panorama of historical figures,Columbus,Borgia Popes, Spanish and Portuguese rulers, murderous leaders of the Inquisition, all there. Fantastic stuff.

Knowledge is power! The Moors