 civil conflict and then in a religious war. She gained the crown on her own terms, surrounded herself with able administrators, evoked awed respect from her subjects, and forged powerful alliances. She built a state and led her country into international preeminence and toward world empire. She was also fortunate in that, marrying sight unseen, she shared a remarkable lifelong love and working partnership with an equally strong king, Fernando of Aragón, whose temperament and skills complemented hers. A reigning queen, she was the mother of notable queens, as well as of a unified Spain. That said, there remains the infamous Isabel who instituted the Spanish Inquisition and gave Jews and Muslims the choice of conversion or expulsion from their native land.
The original edition of this book pried apart the jointness of the dual reign and established the authority and something of the personality of Isabel. There I was swimming against a tide of interest in social and regional Spanish history to look again at a political figure. Nonetheless, reconsidering a ruling queen provided new insight in social and cultural phenomena — for instance, shedding light on her important royal role in the Inquisition and in promoting or inhibiting violent outbreaks against Jews, as well as in the lead-up to their expulsion. I also then sought to overturn two dismissive verdicts on Isabel, to establish that she was neither simply a woman of saintly piety nor a religious fanatic. In the doing, the range of imagery and symbols she employed to advertise herself and her program became apparent and highly important. Yet questions have lingered: Her ideology unpacked, how effective was it? How much of it did she herself take to heart? And how did an intrepid but obscure young princess become so formidable a monarch? This edition responds to those questions. It looks harder at Isabel's character and her acute sense of what was expected of her as a Spanish ruler, as well as at her determination to meet the highest of those expectations. It more clearly charts the evolution of her personality, intellect, and goals in interaction with events. Some revision and rearrangement of certain chapters, for example, builds on what was initially presented as background information in discussing how importantly history and tradition figured in her thinking and self-representation.
Reflection has confirmed that Isabel was highly intelligent, courageous, and politically astute. Developed and underscored in this edition is her demonstration of several outstanding traits: she was possessed of great moral conviction, she was ambitious, and she was literal-minded. She had a strong sense of reality, and her own reality included a huge legacy of myth -myth interwoven with and construed as history, and that history as divinely inspired and as sacrosanct tradition. Upon gaining the crown, she committed herself wholeheartedly to fulfilling the traditional aspirations of her nation and its greatest rulers as she understood them. Isabel believed fervently that Spain's ruler was preeminent on earth and divinely charged with leading an ongoing Spanish mission that in time was to culminate universal history, and that central to that mission was Christian advance against infidel and heretic. She was now that ruler. Moreover, she recognized that to reign successfully required the monarch be seen as imbued with virtues considered royal, the foremost of them being prudence, and she strove both to cultivate and personify those virtues.
This book tells how Isabel, displaying moral conviction and unflinching moral certitude, turning ideology into Spanish destiny, gained immense popularity. It looks at how she and her adherents widely disseminated her stance -through histories, architecture and iconography, drama, poems, and ballads, and songs and sermons. And it traces how what she stood for struck responsive chords in popular belief. Clearly, however disparate her policies, in carrying them out she translated aspirations commonly understood as Spanish ideals into anticipated reality; 