From ascending the throne in 1474 to her death in 1504, Isabella of Castile transformed her homeland, a “fractious, ill-disciplined nation” into a European powerhouse. Intense, devout and single-minded, she “did more than any other monarch of her time” to reverse the decline of Christendom. Her achievements are “not just remarkable because of her sex, merely more so”.
Forever throwing herself into military preparations, and always thrilled by victory in war, Isabella “stepped outside the limits of traditional womanly behaviour, provoking both perplexity and admiration”.
An outstanding military planner, Isabella pioneered front-line medical treatment and, at Granada, oversaw the construction not just of a camp, but also of a small fortified town for her besieging armies.
Her peripatetic court had its own hospital for the poor, augmenting her popularity as she traversed her realms. She held that “monarchs who wish to govern must also work”.
Giles Tremlett is good at conveying Isabella’s essential steeliness, the motor silently driving the whole story. This is exemplified from the outset by the way in which she cut through “the snake’s nest of the Castilian succession” to assert her own (doubtful) claim. She imposed rough justice on the grasping nobles who had allowed criminality to run loose. Greater peace, political stability, a growing economy and a rising population ensued.
The other key to understanding her reign, Tremlett argues, is Isabella’s partnership with Ferdinand of Aragon. The dual monarchy was “grounded in absolute trust and confidence in each other’s abilities”. This was “15th-century love at its best”: that is, it was “mostly a question of respect”.
It is an appealing story: Ferdinand disguised himself as a servant for two days, serving meals and looking after horses for his companions, when travelling through danger to Valladolid in order to marry Isabella. Their relationship was based on “an intelligent division of labour”. Isabella was “the bigger risk-taker”. Through arranged marriages, she deployed her beloved children around the courts of Europe in the fraught, cold-blooded game of alliance and empire-building.
A joint gamble on Columbus ushered in a new era of Spanish imperialism and European expansion to the west – and with it the miseries of the Atlantic slave trade.
The bloodstains on Isabella’s record retain their power to shock. She didn’t, of course, create the sink-or-swim world she found herself in, in which brute force and bloody-mindedness were everyday tools of government, and the spirit of adventure was as yet inseparable from a spirit of violence. As Tremlett puts it, the “line between strong rule and tyranny was wafer thin, and there is no doubt that Isabella crossed it”.
This is the queen who set in motion the Inquisition and who held the expulsion of Jews and Muslims to be a necessary step in “constructing a religiously pure, homogenous and ordered society”, one that would be “a shining example to Christendom and Europe”. Despite having previously stood firm as the protector of Castilian Jews, “the price, in terms of human suffering and lives lost, did not trouble her greatly”. But why?
Yes, Christianity was right and true in her eyes and could not be allowed to fail. But why exactly did Isabella conclude that total religious uniformity, ruthlessly imposed, was the only route to survival and success? Outright religious fanaticism? Medieval racism? A misdirected concern for souls? Grim, unflinching realism?
Knowing perhaps that plunging into these waters would draw him away from his principal tasks as a biographer, Tremlett leaves us wondering. But when Columbus reports encountering gentle, smiling people who “love others as they love themselves”, it sounds as if one had to cross the ocean in the late 15th-century to find Christians in spirit and deed, if not in word and belief.
The Church depicted in these pages does not make a pretty picture, stacked from top to bottom with chancers and nepotists. But Tremlett credits Isabella and her handpicked monkish advisers with reforms that helped Spain resist the Reformation when it eventually arrived.
He occasionally overdoes it when striving to make history not simply more compelling or accessible, but also glitzier and more novelistic. His relentless digs at the chronicler Alfonso de Palencia for being judgmental and censorious sound like churlish virtue-signalling down the centuries: the early chapters would be slim pickings without Palencia to draw on.
These are small grumbles, though. Giles Tremlett has served up a pacey, engrossing study of a defining figure in European history, topped off by a deft afterword capturing her enigmatic legacy.
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