Birth of Isabella of Castile
A dozen days before Christmas 1474, a 23-year-old, green-eyed woman with light auburn hair, processed in her finest clothes through the chilly, windswept streets of the Spanish city of Segovia.
A handsomely dressed gentleman walked before her with the royal sword held upright by its point.
Her dazzling clothes exuded magnificence, while the sword spoke of violence – and a willingness to use it
The young woman was Isabella of Castile.
Isabella was an ‘Iron Queen’, tough and determined. By insisting on keeping power to herself and her husband, she imposed order on a chaotic country, where previous monarchs had been weak.
Isabella got her thrills from power.
As Castile’s Muslims and Jews would learn to their cost, this she sometimes wielded in a way that, today, shocks and repels…..
Isabella was the daughter of King John II of Castile and Isabella of Portugal.
At her birth on 22nd April 1451, Isabella was second in the line of succession, following her older half-brother Henry.
She became third in line when her brother Alfonso was born in 1453.
Through her mother, Isabella was a 3x grandaughter of the English King, Edward III.
In 1454, when Isabella was only three, her father died.
Her half brother became Henry IV, King of Castile.
Henry’s first marriage ended in divorce and without children.
When his second wife Joan of Portugal, gave birth to a daughter Juana in 1462, the nobles claimed that Juana was the daughter of Beltran de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque.
An attempt to replace Henry with Isabella’s younger brother Alfonso failed, when Alfonso died in 1468, of suspected poisoning.
He had named Isabella his successor…..
Isabella was offered the crown by the nobles but she refused.
King Henry, willing to compromise with the nobles, accepted Isabella as his heiress.
Isabella married her second cousin, Ferdinand of Aragon, in October 1469 – without her brother Henry’s approval.
The cardinal of Valentia, Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, helped Isabella and Ferdinand obtain the necessary papal dispensation.
Isabella and Ferdinand had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood –
Isabella, Queen of Portugal.
A son, miscarried on 31 May 1475.
John, Prince of Asturias.
Juana, Queen of Castile.
Maria
Stillborn twin of Maria.
In anger of his sister’s defiance, Henry withdrew his recognition of Isabella as his heir.
He named his ‘daughter’ Juana as next in line to the Castilian throne.
At Henry’s death in 1474, a war of succession ensued.
The dispute was settled in 1479, with Isabella recognised as Queen of Castile.
Ferdinand by this time had become King of Aragon, and the two ruled both realms with equal authority, unifying Spain.
Among their first acts were various reforms to reduce the power of the nobility, and increase the power of the crown.
In those heady, early years, Isabella would ride for days, rushing around the country to intervene in disputes and rebellions.
One such venture cost her the loss of an unborn child.
She was no frontline warrior herself, as a traditionalist, she saw that as man’s work, but she enjoyed the challenges of warfare and became her own army’s quartermaster-general and armourer.
Isabella plotted campaigns alongside Ferdinand, and built up a contingent of artillery so powerful, that it turned the art of medieval warfare on its head.
Thick castle walls, previously a guarantee of safety, crumbled before Isabella’s cannon.
Within six years, she had defeated her enemies, and most of Spain was theirs.
No one dared challenge Isabella.
In 1480, Isabella and Ferdinand instituted the Spanish Inquisition.
The Inquisition was aimed mostly at Jews and Muslims who had overtly converted to Christianity, but were thought to be practicing their faith in secret.
Heresy became the same thing as treason, and the Inquisition eagerly sniffed out ‘secret Jews’ who were seen as heretics who rejected Roman Catholic orthodoxy.
Isabella and Ferdinand planned to unify all of Spain by continuing a long-standing effort to expel the Moors – Muslims who held parts of Spain.
Jews and Muslims were ordered to convert to Christianity or leave.
Some 20,000 Jewish families emigrated, many of them to settle in Istanbul.
Many Muslims also left, for North Africa.
Others, the Moriscos, accepted Christianity, or appeared to.
Converted Jews and Muslims were deeply suspect, and a witch-hunt began to smell out those who were not genuine.
Thousands were convicted by the Inquisition…. and the fires burned for them across Spain.
In 1492, the Muslim Kingdom of Granada fell to Isabella and Ferdinand.
That same year, Isabella and Ferdinand issued an edict expelling all Jews in Spain who refused to convert to Christianity.
Isabella and Ferdinand were given the title “the Catholic monarchs” by Pope Alexander VI in recognition of their role in “purifying” the faith.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus convinced Isabella to sponsor his first voyage of exploration.
By the traditions of the time, when Columbus was the first European to encounter lands in the New World, these lands were given to Castile.
Isabella took a special interest in the Indigenous peoples of the new lands.
When Columbus brought some enslaved Indigenous people back to Spain, Isabella insisted they be returned and freed, and be treated with justice and fairness.
During her last months, Isabella was bedridden at her palace at Medina del Campo.
She was suffering from a high fever and dropsy.
By the middle of September she was tormented by sleeplessness and thirst.
She died on a Tuesday morning, 26th November 1504, between eleven and twelve o’clock.
Isabella was 53.
She had been queen of Castile for thirty years, and joint ruler of Castile and Aragon with her husband Ferdinand for 25.
Isabella’s body was put in a plain coffin covered with leather and tied with cords.
She was carried behind a cross draped in black cloth, across the country, through torrents of rain and over flooded rivers to reach Granada.
On 18th December, she was interred in the Franciscan monastery in the Alhambra – and there Ferdinand would duly join her after his death in 1516.
On her death, Isabella’s sons, grandsons, and her oldest daughter Isabella, queen of Portugal, had already died.
This left Isabella’s only heir “Juana the Mad” who became queen of Castile in 1504 and of Aragon in 1516.
Isabella’s legacy was her grandaughter Mary, becoming Queen of England.
Her youngest daughter Katharine of Aragon, became the first wife of Henry VIII of England – and mother of the future Mary I of England.
🌹 Queen Isabella I of Castile.
Hampton Court Palace.
Royal Collection Trust
