The Jews are offered a merciful alternative: to be Catholic or to quit the land. Isabel argues that the _conversos_ will lose their secret virulence if they have no nourishment from open Jewish neighbors. In 1492 a goodly fraction of the Jews of Spain “exchanging a House for an ass, a Vineyard for a coat,” leave the cities where they have lived for ages. Ten years later, the Moors of the conquered kingdom of Granada, meet the same fate. Again, a host of intellectuals, artists, tradesfolk is bled away. The peasants do not stir: they become Catholic with the same inert response which had made them Moslem seven centuries before, or Arian under the Visigoths, or pagan under Rome. Isabel looks at her work--and nods--and is not satisfied. She says: “We do unto the body of our beloved land as Christ did unto the possessed: we have cast out devils. But this is not enough. True disciple of our Lord, Spain must take up her burden and go forth: must forsake comfort and family and the long-sued peace: must bring His Word to all that dwell on earth. Spain is Christ’s true apostle. France turns away in trickery and ambition. Henri IV, Louis XI--how far they are from Saint Louis! Italy is helpless. Spain is the well-beloved: Spain is Israel, and Rome’s right hand. Let my king, Ferdinand, go with his hardened troops to Sicily and Naples. “But even this suffices not. The Apostles did not stay among the Jews: they went out to the Gentile. There is more than Europe. Can this strange religious mariner, Cristobal Colón, be right?” Isabel ponders what she has heard of Columbus. He is the author of a book of _Prophecías_. He has found and plotted in the Old Testament his rationale for a westward route to the Indies. God perhaps wrote down in Isaiah, not alone Christ and the Word of Christ in Europe, but Spain and how Spain shall bring the Word to the East. Columbus a prophet? (He says there is gold in the Indies. Spain needs gold, for her crusade.) He is the friend of holy men in Spain: the Dominicans bespeak him and his cause. He has been rejected by Juan II of Portugal, by Henry VII of England, by Anne of Beaujeu, Regent queen of France. “Let Colón go westward to the heathen east,” the Catholic Kings ordain. “Let him carry the Christian word to the heathen, and bring back gold to carry the Word farther.”