By the 30th July 1492 not a professed Jew was to be left alive in Isabel’s dominions. With cruel irony, in which Ferdinand’s cynical greed is evident, the banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to carry the money abroad with them. At least a quarter of a million of Spaniards of all ranks and ages, men, women, and children, ill or well, were driven forth, stripped of everything, to seek shelter in foreign lands. The decree was carried out with relentless ferocity, and the poor wretches, straggling through Spain to some place of safety, were an easy prey to plunder and maltreat. It was a saturnalia of robbery. The shipmasters extorted almost the last ducat to carry the fugitives to Africa or elsewhere, and then, in numberless cases, cast their passengers overboard as soon as they were at sea. It was said that, in order to conceal their wealth, the Jews swallowed their precious gems, and hundreds were ripped up on the chance of discovering their riches. There was no attempt or pretence of mercy. The banishment was intended, not alone to remove Judaism as a creed from Spain—that might have been done without the horrible cruelty that ensued—but as a doom of death for all professing Jews; for Torquemada had, five years before, obtained a Bull from the Pope condemning to major excommunication the authorities of all Christian lands who failed to arrest and send back every fugitive Jew from Spain.[65] Isabel appears to have had no misgiving. Her spiritual guides, to whom she was so humble, praised her to the skies for her saintly zeal: her subjects, inflated with religious arrogance, joined the chorus raised by servile scribes and chroniclers, that the discovery of the new lands by Colon was heaven’s reward to Isabel for ejecting the Hebrew spawn from her sacred realm; and if her woman’s heart felt a pang at the suffering and misery she decreed, it was promptly assuaged by the assurance of the austere churchmen, who ruled the conscience of the Queen.
Leaving Talavera as archbishop, and Count de Tendilla as governor of conquered Granada, Isabel and her husband, with their children and a splendid court, travelled in the early summer of 1492 to their other dominions where their presence was needed. Ferdinand, indeed, was yearning to get back to his own people, who were growing restive at his long absence, and for the coming war with France, it was necessary for him to win the love of his Catalan subjects, who, at first, still remembering his murdered half-brother, the Prince of Viana, had borne him little affection. He had treated them, however, with great diplomacy, respecting their sturdy independence, and had asked little from them, and by this time, in the autumn of 1492, when he and Isabel, with their promising son, Juan, by their side, rode from Aragon through the city of Barcelona to the palace of the Bishop of Urgel, where they were to live, the Catalans were wild with enthusiasm for the sovereigns with whose names all Christendom was ringing.