Isabel the Queen
Life and Times
Peggy K. Liss
2004 | 496 pages | Paper $28.95
Biography | History
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface to the Revised Edition
The Royal Relationships of Isabel of Castile
Prologue: An Embassy to Egypt: 1502
PART I. PRINCESS
1. Walls and Gates: Castile, 1451
2. The Wrong King: 1461-1467
3. The Right Marriage: 1467-1469
4. To the Crown: 1469-1474
5. A Royal Heritage: Perception and Reality
PART II. LA REINA
6. Contests: 1475
7. Resolutions: 1475-1477
8. To the Sea: 1477-1478
9. Signs and Revelations: 1478
10. Inquisition: 1478-1485
11. Readying: 1478-1481
12. The Queen's War I: 1482-1485
13. The Queen's War II: 1486-1492
PART III. TOWARD EMPIRE
14. The View from Granada: The Grand Design,1492
15. The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492
16. Christopher Columbus and the Queen: To 1492
17. Isabel and the Indies: 1492-1504
18. The Catholic Kings: 1492-1499
19. The Queen and Her Daughter: 1499-1504
Epilogue: "A Queen Has Disappeared ..."
Excerpt [uncorrected, not for citation]
Anniversaries, like family gatherings, have a way of exploding conventional truths. This book originally appeared in 1992, during the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in America on a voyage commissioned. by Isabel. By that year's end, Columbus had been demoted from discoverer to invader, his future status in the history books under siege.
And now in 2004, what of Isabel, on this, the 500th anniversary of her death? I can only conclude that, whatever the fate of Columbus, Isabel stands firm; she is a major historical figure of the Western world. Her sponsoring of a voyage linking Europe and America and setting the initial nature of encounter remains one reason why. Another is her stature has never been solely based upon a positive assessment of what she did and why she did it. Within Western history, she has no pedestal to crash down from.
Nonetheless, Isabel was a force, personally and politically: she threaded her way through conspiracies, faced down adversaries, triumphed in a 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 mo