WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

It would be wrong, however, to generalize that the rebels were fully successful in having
the general populace (or even themselves) believe that their own salvific take on the Revolution
was part of the Crown’s agenda. Enrique still openly adopted the same centralizing tactics that
had soured the nobility and the church over Pedro’s rule. For example, he continued to use non-
Christian, middle-class subjects as a counterbalance to ecclesiastical and secular interests at court
or at large. Following a long line of Castilian kings preceding Pedro, he refused to banish Jews
from his newly created court, and to the chagrin of his supporters, he ordered the Jewish debts
incurred during the Revolution to be paid during Castile’s war with Portugal. 291 In this, Enrique’s
policies were a more consistent protection of non-Christian interests than that of his immediate
predecessor. Just two years earlier Pedro, the accused “ennobler of Jews and Moors,” notoriously
sold entire Jewish neighborhoods into slavery as a way of alleviating the financial stress of the
Crown without demanding payment from the nobility which supported him. 292
Given the tenuous balance of power in Castile, these “hypocritical” policies by the
Trastamaran usurper were inevitable. Enrique, like most Castilian monarchs, needed the zeal
behind religious purism to rally the population to his continuous wars against not only the
Muslims but also the multiple European monarchs who bordered his realm and the nobles who,
because of Castile’s size, could easily deflect from his allegiance. However, because Muslims
and Jews were communities directly under his protection and because the Jews particularly
provided the liquid capital to finance its wars, the Castilian monarch (like his predecessors and
his successors) had a vested interest in looking after their welfare. Enrique was so adept at
protecting his interests in infidel communities that his Jewish subjects turned to him to safeguard
them from the wave of anti-Semitism which his propaganda against Pedro had inflamed. In the
291 Valdeon Baruque 331.
292 Estow 173.
173