and her policies gained cohesion through each being presented as furthering the national mission. It shows how Isabel, both behaving as an absolute monarch and firmly believing in the propaganda she engendered, successfully presented centralizing innovation as continuity and reform as renovation. In the doing, she seamlessly linked religion and politics. So, for example, she rationalized the Inquisition and the expulsions of Jews and Muslims as eradicating impurities or stains from the social fabric.
A principal criticism of the original edition was that it relied too strongly on the writings of Isabel's chroniclers and courtiers. Since then, work in various fields of history has confirmed that such accounts, beyond being many and rich and pleasurable, can be read to provide invaluable insights into the context and narrative of a royal life and into ideologies speaking to systems of cultural belief as well. To a generation wise in the art of the spin, it is far easier to accept that Isabelline chroniclers both attest to the gap between historical reality and operative myth and to their symbiosis. The decade or so since that first edition appeared has reconfirmed that how Isabel and her publicists presented her can yield crucial evidence to her character, convictions, and purposes, as well to the ideational, religious, and political contexts of her times. Those chronicling contemporaries of hers -along with the rhetoric she and they employed and other conduits of her symbolic imagery- reveal just how Isabel appealed to, and stimulated, an ingrained militant religious faith and a belief in national mission. Moreover, she did so with telling effect on Spanish, Western, and indeed world history. The historian, José Manuel Nieto Soria, who has done much in the past dozen years to trace the two-way flow of political theology in Isabel's Spain, has put it this way: "at the end of the fifteenth century, the ideological foundations and the practice of propaganda that were consubstantial were not secondary aspects of ruling, but essential dimensions of it, in a context more or less generalized in the West and that Machiavelli left accurately defined in asserting that to govern is to make to believe."
In the years since 1992, Isabel's historical stature has if anything increased, as is reflected in a stream of Isabelline studies. This new edition has benefited from recent scholarship as well as my own further researches and reconsiderations. New monographs and the resurgence of scholarly interest in Spanish political history and in royal figures has served to confirm Isabel's power and effectiveness, illuminate her personality, times, and governance, and affirm her place as a mover and shaker in Western history. And that historians have become more concerned with religious influences on politics has served to project a queen who provides a stellar instance of counting on the interplay of the religious and the political to achieve cultural impact into even greater historical prominence. In particular, the writings of Miguel Àngel Ladero Quesada continue to illuminate ruler and period most broadly. And in the past decade, Nieto Soria has tirelessly delineated the fundamental political theory and the ideology of Isabel's dynasty and mapped out the paths of diffusion of royal ideology and its interplay with popular belief and sentiment. Citations to a number of their newer works and others appear in the endnotes here. I have also restored some annotations omitted from the first edition and corrected some errors and misprints appearing there.