Martin A. S. Hume

CHAPTER I

Proudly reared upon a lofty cliff above the trickling Manzanares, there stood the granite palace that had gradually grown around the ancient Moorish fortress of Madrid. Like an eagle from its aerie, its tiny windows blinked across the tawny plain at the far-off glittering snow peaks of Guadarrama, standing forth clear and sharp against a cobalt sky. The Alcazar had been the scene of many strange happenings in the past; and for a hundred years chivalric splendour had run riot in its broad patios, with their arcades of slender columns, and in its tapestried halls, whose carved ceilings blazed with gold and colour. Frivolous, pleasure-loving, Juan II. of Castile, grandson of John of Gaunt, had through a long reign outdone in vain ostentation the epic poems and romances of chivalry that filled his brain, and he himself, with his attendant Nubian lion slouching by his side, had stalked through the Alcazar upon the cliff, a figure more picturesque than that of Amadis or Arthur. His lavish, easy-going son, Henry IV., had followed in his footsteps, and had made his palace of Madrid a home of dissolute magnificence and humiliating debauchery, unexampled even in that age of general decadence.

But rarely had scenes at once so pregnant of evil, and yet so ostensibly joyous, been enacted in the palace of Madrid as on the 17th March 1462. Greed, hate and jealousy, raged beneath silken gowns and ermine mantles; nay, beneath the gorgeous vestments of the great churchmen who stood grouped before the altar in the palace chapel, though smiling faces and words of pleasure were seen and heard on every side. For to the King, after eight years of fruitless marriage, an heiress had been born, and the court and people of Castile and Leon were bidden to make merry and welcome their future Queen. Bull fights, tournaments, and cane contests, the songs of minstrels and plenteous banquets, had for days beguiled a populace palled with gaudy shows; and now the sacred ceremonies of the Church were to sanctify the babe whose advent had moved so many hearts to shocked surprise. The King, a shaggy, red-haired giant with slack, lazy limbs and feeble face, towered in his golden crown and velvet mantle over his nine-year-old half-brother Alfonso by his side. The child, under a canopy, was borne in state up to the font by Count Alba de Liste, and the stalwart, black-browed primate of Spain, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, who, with three attendant bishops, performed the ceremony, blessed the baby girl unctuously beneath the King’s lymphatic gaze, though he had already resolved to ruin her. By the side of the font stood the sponsors: a girl of eleven and a sturdy noble in splendid attire, with his wife. All around, the courtiers, their mouths wreathed in doubtful smiles which their lifted brows belied, glanced alternately at the little group of sponsors, and at the noblest figure of all the courtly throng: a young man glittering with gems who stood behind the King. Tall, almost, as Henry himself, with flashing dark eyes and jet black hair, a fair skin and gallant mien, this youth formed with the King, and the group at the font, the elements of a great drama, which ended in the renascence of Spain. For the young man was Beltran de la Cueva, the new Count of Ledesma, who, all the court was whispering, was really the father of the new-born Princess, and the sponsors, besides the Frenchman Armignac, were the gorged and spoiled favourite of the King, the all-powerful Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, and his wife, and the King’s half-sister, Princess Isabel of Castile. The girl had seen nothing of court life, for up to this time, from her orphaned babyhood, she had lived with her widowed mother and younger brother in neglected retirement at the lone castle of Arevalo, immersed in books and the gentle arts that modest maids were taught; but she went through her part of the ceremony composedly, and with simple dignity. She was already tall for her age, with a fair, round face, large, light blue eyes, and the reddish hair of her Plantagenet ancestors; and if she, in her innocence, guessed at some of the tumultuous passions that were silently raging around her, she made no sign, and bore herself calmly, as befitted the daughter of a long line of kings.^[1]

Seven weeks afterwards, on the 9th May, in the great hall of the palace, the nobles, prelates, and deputies of the chartered towns met to swear allegiance to the new heiress of Castile. One by one, as they advanced to kneel and kiss the tiny hand of the unconscious infant, they frowned and whispered beneath their breath words of scorn and indignation which they dared not utter openly, for all around, and thronging the corridors and courtyards, there stood with ready lances the Morisco bodyguard of the King, eager to punish disobedience. And so, though the insulting nickname of the new Infanta Juana, the Beltraneja, after the name of her assumed father, passed from mouth to mouth quietly, public protest there was none.^[2]

Already before the birth of the hapless Beltraneja, the scandal of Henry’s life, his contemptible weakness and the acknowledged sexual impotence which had caused his divorce from his first wife, had made his court a battle ground for rival ambitions. Like the previous Kings of his house, which was raised to the throne by a fratricidal revolution, and himself a rebel during his father’s lifetime, Henry IV. had lavished crown gifts upon noble partisans to such an extent as to have reduced his patrimony to nought. Justice was openly bought and sold, permanent grants upon public revenues were bartered for small ready payments, law and order were non-existent outside the strong walls of the fortified cities, and the whole country was a prey to plundering nobles, who, either separately or in “leagues,” tyrannised and robbed as they listed.^[3] Feudalism had never been strong in the realms of Castile, because the frontier nobles, who for centuries pushed back gradually the Moorish power, always had to depend upon conciliating the towns they occupied, in order that the new regime might be more welcome than the one displaced. The germ of institutions in Spain had ever been the municipality, not the village grouped around the castle or the abbey as in England, and the soldier noble in Spain, unlike the English or German baron, had to win the support of townsmen, not to dispose of agricultural serfs. But when the Moors in Spain had been reduced to impotence, and a series of weak kings had been raised to the throne as the puppets of nobles; then when feudalism was dying elsewhere, it attempted to raise its head in Spain, capturing the government of towns on the one hand and beggaring and dominating the King on the other. By the time of which we are now speaking, the process was well nigh complete; and the only safeguard against the absolute tyranny of the nobles, was their mutual greed and jealousy.

For years Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, had ruled the King with a rod of iron. The grants and gifts he had extorted for himself and his friends made him more powerful than any other force in the land. But there were those who sulked apart from him, nobles, some of them, of higher lineage and greater hereditary territories than his; and when the handsome foot page, Beltran de la Cueva, captured the good graces of the King and his gay young Portuguese wife, Queen Juana, the enemies of Villena saw in the rising star an instrument by which he might be humbled. After the Beltraneja’s birth and christening, honours almost royal were piled upon Beltran de la Cueva; and Villena and his uncle, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, grew ever more indignant and discontented. Only a fortnight after the Cortes had sworn allegiance to the new Princess, Villena drew up a secret protest against the act, alleging the illegitimacy of the child,^[4] and soon open opposition to King and favourite was declared.

There is no space here to relate in detail the complicated series of intrigues and humiliations that followed. The King on one occasion was forced to hide in his own palace from the assaulting soldiery of Villena. To buy the goodwill of the jealous favourite towards his little daughter he went so far as to agree to a marriage between the Beltraneja and Villena’s son;^[5] and more humiliating still, in December 1464, he consented to the inquiry of a commission of churchmen nominated by Villena and his friends, to inquire into the legitimacy of his reputed daughter. The inquiry elicited much piquant but entirely contradictory evidence as to the virility of the King, who, it was admitted on all hands, delighted in the society of ladies, and aroused the violent jealousy of the Queen; but, although with our present lights there seems to have been no valid reason for disinheriting the princess, the commission was sufficiently in doubt to recommend the King to make the best terms he could with the rebels. The King’s sister, Princess Isabel, who at the time lived at Court, was also used as an instrument by Henry to pacify the league against him. She had been betrothed when quite a child at Arevalo to Prince Charles of Viana, eldest son of the King of Aragon, and in right of his mother himself King of Navarre; a splendid match which, failing issue from Henry and from her younger brother Alfonso, might have led to the union of all Spain in one realm. But Charles of Viana had already in 1461 fallen a victim to the hate and jealousy of his stepmother, Juana Enriquez, daughter of a great Castilian noble, Don Fadrique, the Admiral of the realm, and Isabel became to her brother a valuable diplomatic asset. Before the storm of war burst Henry attempted to wed his sister to Alfonso V. of Portugal, his wife’s brother, and so to prevent her claims to the Castilian crown being urged to the detriment of the Beltraneja; but the match had no attraction for the clever cautious girl of thirteen; for the suitor was middle-aged and ugly, and already her own genius or crafty councillors had suggested to her the husband who would best serve her own interests. So she gravely reminded her brother that she, a Castilian princess, could not legally be bestowed in marriage without the formal ratification of the Cortes.

In September 1564 Beltran de la Cueva received the great rank of Master of Santiago, which endowed him not only with vast revenues, but the disposal of an armed force second to none in the kingdom, and this new folly of the King was the signal for revolt. A party of nobles immediately seized Valladolid against the King, and though the townspeople promptly expelled them and proclaimed the loyalty of the city, the issue between the factions was now joined. On the following day, 16th September, an attempt that nearly succeeded was made to capture and kidnap the King himself near Segovia. He was a poor, feeble-minded creature, hating strife and danger, and, though some of his stronger councillors protested against such weakness, he consented to meet the revolted nobles, and redress their grievances. In October Villena, the Archbishop of Toledo, Count Benavente, the Admiral Don Fadrique, and the rest of the rebels, met Henry between Cabezon and Cigales, and in three interviews, during their stay of five weeks, dictated to the wretched King their demands.^[6] The King was to dismiss his Moorish guard and become a better Christian: he was to ask for no more money without the consent of the nobles, to deprive Cueva of the Mastership of Santiago, recognise his own impotence and the bastardy of his daughter, and acknowledge as his heir his half-brother Alfonso, whom he was to deliver to the guardianship of Villena. On the 30th November the nobles and the King took the oath to hold the boy Alfonso as the heir of Spain; and then Henry, a mere cypher thenceforward, sadly wended his way to Segovia, where the commission to inquire into the shameful question of his virility was still sitting,^[7] and Villena and his uncle, the warlike Archbishop, were thus practically the rulers of Spain. But though Henry consented to everything he characteristically tried to avoid the spirit of the agreement. Beltran de la Cueva was deprived of the Mastership of Santiago, but he was made Duke of Alburquerque in exchange for the loss, and the poor little disinherited Beltraneja was treated with greater consideration than before.

When civil war was seen to be inevitable in the spring of 1465, Henry carried his wife and child with his sister Isabel to Salamanca, whilst the Archbishop of Toledo, in the name of the revolted nobles, seized the walled city of Avila, where within a few days he was joined by Villena and his friends, bringing with them the Infante Alfonso, who, in pursuance of the agreement made with the King at Cigales, had received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown. From the King it was clear that the nobles could hope for no more, for he had summoned the nation to arms to oppose them; but from a child King of their own making, rich grants could still be wrung, and for the first time since the dying days of the Gothic monarchy, the sacredness of the anointed Sovereign of Castile was mocked and derided. In April 1565, at Plascencia, the nobles swore secretly to hold Alfonso as King; and on the 5th June 1364, on a mound within sight of the walls of Avila, the public scene was enacted that shocked Spain like a sacrilege. Upon a staging there was seated a lay figure in mourning robes, with a royal crown upon its head; a sword of state before it, and in the hand a sceptre. A great multitude of people with bated breath awaited the living actors in the scene; and soon there issued from the city gate a brilliant cavalcade of nobles and bishops, headed by Villena escorting the little prince Alfonso. Arriving before the scaffolding, and in mockery saluting the figure, most of the nobles mounted the platform, whilst Villena, the Master of Alcantara, and Count Medillin, with a bodyguard, conveyed the Infante to a coign of vantage some distance away. Then in a loud voice was read upon the platform the impeachment of the King, which was summed up under four heads. For the first, it ran, Henry of Castile is unworthy to enjoy the regal dignity; and as the tremendous words were read the Archbishop of Toledo stepped forth and tore the royal crown from the brows of the lifeless doll: for the second, he is unfit to administer justice in the realm, and the Count of Plascencia removed the sword of state from its place: for the third, no rule or government should be entrusted to him, and Count of Benavente took from the figure’s powerless grasp the sceptre which it held: for the fourth, he should be deprived of the throne and the honour due to kings, whereupon Don Diego Lopez de ZuÑiga cast the dummy down and trampled it under foot, amidst the jeers and curses of the crowd. When this was done, and the platform cleared, young Alfonso was raised aloft in the arms of men that all might see, and a great shout went up of “Castilla, Castilla, for the King Don Alfonso,” and then, seated on the throne, the boy gave his hand to kiss to those who came to pay their new sovereign fealty. Like wildfire across the steppes and mountains of Castile sped the awful news, and Henry in Salamanca was soon surrounded by hosts of subjects whose reverence for a sacrosanct King had been wounded by what they regarded as impious blasphemy.

Both factions flew to arms, and for months civil war raged, the walled cities being alternately besieged and captured by both parties. Isabel herself remained with the King, usually at Segovia or Madrid; though with our knowledge of her character and tastes, she can have had little sympathy with the tone of her brother’s court. At one time during the lingering struggle in 1466, Henry endeavoured to win Villena and his family from the side of rebellion by betrothing Isabel to Don Pedro Giron, Master of Calatrava, Villena’s brother. The suitor was an uncouth boor, and that an Infanta of Castile should be sacrificed in marriage with an upstart such as he was too much for Isabel’s pride and great ambition. Nothing in the world, she said, should bring her to such a humiliation; though the King, careless of her protests, petitioned the Pope to dispense Don Pedro from his pledge of celibacy as Master of a monkish military order. Isabel’s faithful friend, DoÑa Beatriz Bobadilla, wife of Andres Cabrera, High Steward of the King, and Commander of the fortress of Segovia, was as determined as her mistress that the marriage should not take place, and swore herself to murder Don Pedro, if necessary, to prevent it. A better way was found than by Dona Beatriz’s dagger, for when the papal dispensation arrived, and the prospective bridegroom set out in triumph to claim his bride, poison cut short his career as soon as he left his home. Whether Isabel herself was an accomplice of the act will never be known. She probably would not have hesitated to sanction it in the circumstances, according to the ethics of the time; for she never flinched, as her brother did, at inflicting suffering for what she considered necessary ends.

On the 20th August 1467, the main bodies of both factions met on the historic battlefield of Olmedo, the warlike Archbishop of Toledo, clad in armour covered by a surcoat embroidered with the holy symbols, led into battle the boy pretender Alfonso; whilst the royal favourite, Beltran de la Cueva, now Duke of Alburquerque, on the King’s side, matched the valour of the Churchman.^[8] Both sides suffered severely, but the pusillanimity of the King caused the fight to be regarded as a defeat for him, and the capture of his royal fortress of Segovia soon afterwards proved his impotence in arms so clearly, that a sort of modus vivendi was arranged, by which for nearly a year each King issued decrees and ostensibly ruled the territories held by his partisans.^[9]

At length, in July 1468, the promising young pretender Alfonso died suddenly and mysteriously in his fifteenth year, at CardeÑosa, near Avila; perhaps of plague, as was said at the time, but more probably of poison;^[10] and the whole position was at once revolutionised. Isabel had been in the Alcazar of Segovia with her friends the commander and his wife when the city was surrendered to the rebels, and from that time, late in 1567, she had followed the fortunes of Alfonso, with whom she was at his death. She at once retired broken-hearted to the convent of Santa Clara in Avila, but not, we may be certain, unmindful of the great change wrought in her prospects by her brother’s premature death. She was nearly seventeen years of age, learned and precocious far beyond her years; the events that had passed around her for the last six years had matured her naturally strong judgment, and there is no doubt from what followed that she had already decided upon her course of action. She was without such affectionate guidance as girls of her age usually enjoy; for her unhappy widowed mother, to whom she was always tender and kind, had already fallen a victim to the hereditary curse of the house of Portugal, to which she belonged, and lived thenceforward in lethargic insanity in her castle of Arevalo. Isabel’s brother the King was her enemy, and she had no other near relative: the churchmen and nobles who had risen against Henry, and were now around her, were, it must have been evident to her, greedy rogues bent really upon undermining the royal power for their own benefit; and deeply devout as Isabel was, she was quite unblinded by the illusion that the Archbishop and bishops who led the revolt were moved to their action by any considerations of morality or religion. On the other hand, the rebellious nobles and ecclesiastics could not persist in their revolt without a royal figure head. Young Alfonso, a mere child, had been an easy tool, and doubtless the leaders thought that this silent, self-possessed damsel would be quite as facile to manage.

They did not have to wait many days for proof to the contrary. The Archbishop of Toledo was the mouthpiece of his associates. Within the venerable walls of the royal convent at Avila he set before Isabel a vivid picture of the evils of her elder brother’s rule, his shameful laxity of life, his lavish squandering of the nation’s wealth upon unworthy objects, and the admitted illegitimacy of the daughter he wished to make his heiress; and the Archbishop ended by offering to Isabel, in the name of the nobles, the crowns of Castile. The wearer of these crowns, wrested painfully through centuries of struggle from intruding infidels, had always been held sacred. The religious exaltation born of the reconquest had invested the Christian sovereigns in the eyes of their subjects with divine sanction and special saintly patronage. To attack them was not disloyalty alone, but sacrilege; and the deposition of Henry at Avila had, as we have seen, thrilled Spain with horror. It was no part of Isabel’s plan to do anything that might weaken the reverence that surrounded the throne to which she knew now she might succeed. So her answer to the prelate was firm as well as wise. With many sage reflections taken from the didactic books that had always been her study, she declared that she would never accept a crown that was not hers by right. She desired to end the miserable war, she said, and to be reconciled to her brother and sovereign. If the nobles desired to serve her they would not try to make her Queen before her time, but persuade the King to acknowledge her as his heir, since they assured her that the Princess Juana was the fruit of adultery.

At first the nobles were dismayed at an answer that some thought would mean ruin to them. But the Archbishop, Carrillo, knew the weakness of Henry, and whispered to Villena as they descended the convent stairs, that the Infanta’s resolve to claim the heirship would mean safety and victory for them. Little did he or the rest of the nobles know the great spirit and iron will of the girl with whom they had to deal. No time was lost in approaching the King. He was ready to agree to anything for a quiet life, and Alburquerque, and even the great Cardinal Mendoza, agreed with him that an accord was advisable; though it might be broken afterwards when the nobles were disarmed. Before the end of August all was settled, and the cities of Castile had sent their deputies to take the oath of allegiance to Isabel as heiress to the crown. A formal meeting was arranged to take place between Henry and his sister at a place called the Venta de los Toros de Guisando, a hostelry famous for some prehistoric stone figures of undetermined beasts in the neighbourhood. All was amiable on the surface. Henry embraced his sister and promised her his future affection, settling upon her the principality of Asturias and Oviedo, and the cities of Avila, Huete, Medina, and many others, with all revenues and jurisdictions as from the beginning of the revolt (September 1464).^[11] But by the agreement Isabel was bound not to marry without the King’s consent, and it is evident that to this condition Henry and his friends looked for rendering their concessions voidable.

The intrigues of the two parties of Castile were therefore now centred upon the marriage of the Princess. Suitors were not lacking. If we are to believe Hall, Edward IV. of England, before his marriage with Elizabeth Grey, was approached by the Spaniards, and it is certain that his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was at one time a wooer. Either of them would have suited Henry of Castile, because it would have removed Isabel from Spain. A Portuguese would have also been acceptable to the same party, because Portugal was naturally on the side of the Beltraneja and her Portuguese mother. But Isabel had other views, and the only suitors that were entertained seriously were the Duke of Guienne, the brother of Louis XI., and the young Ferdinand of Aragon, the son and heir of John II. and nephew of the doughty old Admiral of Castile, who had stood by the side of the nobles in their revolt. There was never any doubt as to which of the suitors Isabel favoured. The Frenchman was reported to her as a poor, puny creature with weak legs and watery eyes, whilst Ferdinand, a youth of her own age, was praised to the skies for his manliness, his good looks, and his abilities, by those whose judgment she trusted. It is impossible to say whether Isabel as yet fully understood what such a marriage might mean to Spain; but it is certain that the wicked old John II. of Aragon was quite aware of its advantages for his own realm.

The house of Aragon, with its domains of Sicily and Naples, and its secular ambition towards the east, had found itself everywhere opposed by the growing power of France. The Mediterranean, the seat of empire for centuries, had no finer havens than those under the sceptre of Aragon, but the Catalans were harsh and independent with their kings, and sparing of their money for royal purposes. A poor king of Aragon could not hope, with his own unaided resources, to beat France on the Gulf of Lyons, and bear the red and yellow banner of Barcelona to the infidel Levant. But with the resources in men and money of greater Castile at his bidding, all was possible; and John II., who had not scrupled to murder his first-born son for the benefit of his second, and oust his own children from their mother’s realm of Navarre, was ready to go to any lengths to bring about the union which might realise the dream of Aragon.

From Isabel’s point of view, too, the match was a good one, apart from personal inclination. There is no doubt whatever that she was, even thus early, determined when her time came to crush the tyrannous nobles who had reduced Castile to anarchy and the sovereign to a contemptible lay figure. With her great talent she understood that to do this she must dispose of force apart from that afforded by any league of nobles in Castile itself; and she looked towards Aragon to lend her such additional strength. This fact, however, was not lost upon the greedy nobles, especially Villena. The turbulent leader of conspiracy already looked askance at the quiet determined girl who thus early imposed her will upon her followers, and throwing his power again on the side of the king he had once solemnly deposed, he seized the mastership of Santiago as his reward. In a panic at the fear of the Aragonese match, the king and Villena once more agreed to marry Isabel with the king of Portugal, Villena and Cardinal Mendoza being heavily bribed by the Portuguese for their aid.^[12] Isabel was at her town of OcaÑa at the time, and her position was extremely difficult and perilous when the Portuguese envoys came to her with Villena to offer her their king’s hand. As Isabel had several weeks before secretly bound herself to marry Ferdinand of Aragon, her reply was a diplomatic refusal to the Portuguese advances; and Villena, enraged, was disposed to capture her on the spot and carry her a prisoner to Court. Inconvenient princes and princesses were easily removed in those days, and Isabel’s danger was great. But she had the faculty of compelling love and admiration; she was as brave as a lion and as cunning as a serpent, and the people of OcaÑa made it quite evident to Villena that they would allow no violence to be offered to her. But clearly something must be done to prevent Isabel from becoming too strong; and as a last resort after her refusal to entertain the Portuguese match it was determined to capture her by force of arms. She was then at Madrigal, and Villena’s nephew, the Bishop of Burgos, bribed her servants to desert her in her hour of need: the King sent orders to the townsmen that no resistance was to be offered to his officers; and Cardinal Mendoza with a strong force marched towards Madrigal to arrest Isabel. But another archbishop, more warlike than he, Carrillo of Toledo, was before him. With the Admiral Don Fadrique and a band of horsemen, he swooped down from Leon and bore Isabel to safety amongst those who would have died for her, and entered into the great city of Valladolid after sunset on the 31st August 1469. No time was to be lost. Envoys were sent in disguise hurrying up to Saragossa, to hasten the coming of the bridegroom. The service was a dangerous one; for if Ferdinand had fallen into the hands of the Court party a short shrift would have been his. But the stake was great, and Juan II. of Aragon and his son, young as the latter was, did not stick at trifles. One difficulty, indeed, was overcome characteristically. Isabel was known to be rigidity itself in matters of propriety; and, as she and Ferdinand were second cousins, a papal bull was necessary for the marriage. The Pope, Paul II., was on the side of the Castilian Court, and no bull could be got from him; but Juan II. of Aragon and the Archbishop of Toledo carefully had one forged to satisfy Isabel’s scruples.^[13]

Whilst one imposing cavalcade of Aragonese bearing rich presents took the high road into Castile and occupied the attention of the King’s officers, a modest party of five merchants threaded the mountain paths by Soria, after leaving the Aragonese territory at Tarazona on the 7th October. The first day after entering Castile they rode well-nigh sixty miles; and late at night the little cavalcade approached the walled town of Osma, where Pedro Manrique and an armed escort were to meet them. The night was black, and their summons at the gates of the town was misunderstood: a cry went up that this was a body of the king’s men to surprise the place; and from the ramparts a shower of missiles flew upon the strangers below. One murderous stone whizzed within a few inches of the head of a fair-haired lad of handsome visage and manly bearing, who, as a servant, accompanied those who wore the garb of merchants. It was Ferdinand himself who thus narrowly escaped death, and a hurried explanation, a shouted password, the flashing of torches followed, and then the creaking drawbridge fell, the great gates clanged open, and the danger was over.^[14] The next day, with larger forces, Ferdinand reached DueÑas, in Leon, near Valladolid; and four days later, now in raiment that befitted a royal bridegroom, for his father had made him king of Sicily, he rode when most men slept to Valladolid. It was nearly midnight when he arrived, and the gates of the city were closed for the night, but a postern in the walls gave access to the house in which Isabel was lodged; and there the Archbishop of Toledo led him by hand into the presence of his bride, to whom he was solemnly betrothed by the Archbishop’s chaplain. It was all done so secretly that no inkling of it reached the slumbering town; and within two hours the youth was in the saddle again and reached DueÑas long before dawn.^[15]

On the 18th October 1469, four days later, all was ready for the public marriage, and Ferdinand entered the city this time in state, with Castilian and Aragonese men-at-arms and knights around him. Isabel was staying at the best house in Valladolid, that of her partisan, Juan Vivero, and the great hall was richly decked for the occasion of this, one of the fateful marriages of history, though none could have known that it was such at the time. The celebrant was the warlike Archbishop who had been so powerful a factor in bringing it about; and the next day, after mass, the married pair dined in public amidst the rejoicing of the faithful people of Valladolid. There was little pomp and circumstance in the wedding, for the times were critical, the realm disturbed, and money scarce; but imagination is stirred by the recollection of the great consequences that ensued upon it, and those who saw the event, even with their necessarily limited vision of its effects, must have realised that any splendour lavished upon it could not have enhanced its importance.

The news of the dreaded marriage filled the King and his court with dismay. Villena, in close league with Alburquerque and the Mendozas, now espoused the cause of the Beltraneja,^[16] who was declared the legitimate heiress to the Crown, and betrothed to Isabel’s former suitor, the Duke of Guienne, in the presence of the assembled nobles, at the monastery of Loyola, near Segovia. It mattered not, apparently, that the very men who now swore fealty to Juana, the hapless Beltraneja, had previously denounced her as a bastard: they wanted a puppet, not a mistress, as Isabel was likely to be, and they were quite ready to perjure themselves in their own interests. Isabel was formally deprived of all her grants and privileges, even of the lordship of her town of DueÑas, near Valladolid;^[17] where she and Ferdinand had kept their little court, and where their first child had just been born (October 1470), a daughter, to whom they gave the name of Isabel.

Ferdinand could not remain long in idleness, and was soon summoned by his father to aid him in a war with France, being absent from his wife for over a year, winning fresh experience and credit both as soldier and negotiator. In the meanwhile, things were going badly again for the Beltraneja. Her French betrothed died in May 1472; and some of the nobles, jealous of the greed of Villena, were once more wavering, and making secret approaches to Isabel. She had bold and zealous friends in the Chamberlain Cabrera, who held the strong castle of Segovia, and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla.^[18] In the last weeks of 1473, DoÑa Beatriz and her husband urged Henry to forgive and receive his sister. She was, they told him, being persecuted by the Marquis of Villena, and had meant no harm in her marriage with the man she loved. Henry was doubtful, but Cardinal Mendoza and Count Benavente had changed sides again, and now quietly used their influence in Isabel’s favour. A grudging promise was given by the King, but it was enough for DoÑa Beatriz; and, disguised as a farmer’s wife, she set forth from Segovia on a market pad; and alone over the snowy roads, hurried to carry the good news to the Princess in the town of Aranda, which had just been surrendered to her by the townsfolk. A few days afterwards, on further advice from DoÑa Beatriz, Isabel, escorted by the Archbishop of Toledo and his men-at-arms, travelled through the night, and before the first streak of dawn on the 28th December 1473, they were admitted into the Alcazar of Segovia, where no force but treachery could harm her.

Villena’s son, who, fearing betrayal, had refused to enter the city when he had come with the King weeks before, and had remained in the neighbourhood at the famous Geronomite monastery of El Parral, founded by his father, fled at the news. His father, with Alburquerque and the Constable of Castile, Count of Haro, at once met at Cuellar, and sent an insolent order to Henry to expel his sister from Segovia. It came too late, however. The King, by this time, had met Isabel, who had received him at the gate of the Alcazar, and professed her love and duty to him. In a speech full of womanly wisdom,^[19] she said she had come to pray him to put aside anger towards her, for she meant no evil; and all she asked was that he should fulfil his oath taken at Toros de Guisando, and acknowledge her as heiress of Castile. ‘For by the laws of God and man, the succession belonged to her.’ Weak Henry swayed from one side to the other like a reed in the wind, as either party had his ear; and at last Isabel took the bold course of sending secretly for Ferdinand, who had just returned from Aragon. The risk was great, but Isabel knew, at least, that she could depend upon the Commander of the Alcazar of Segovia, and Ferdinand secretly entered the fortress on the 4th January 1474. It was a difficult matter for DoÑa Beatriz to persuade the King to receive his young brother-in-law; but she succeeded at last, and when Henry had consented, he did the thing handsomely, and they all rode together through the city in state, with great show of affection and rejoicing. On Twelfth Day, DoÑa Beatriz and her husband gave a great banquet to the royal party^[20] at the Bishop’s palace, between the Alcazar and the Cathedral. Whilst the minstrels were playing in the hall after dinner, the King suddenly fell ill. Violent vomiting and purging seemed to point to poison, and the alarm was great. Prayers and processions continued night and day, and the unfortunate man seemed to recover; but, though he lived for nearly a year longer, he never was well again, the irritation of the stomach continuing incessantly until he sank from weakness.

In the interim both factions interminably worried him to settle the succession. Sometimes he would lean to Isabel’s friends, sometimes to Villena and Alburquerque, but Isabel herself, wise and cautious, knew where safety alone for her could be found, and took care not to stir outside the Alcazar of Segovia, in the firm keeping of Cabrera, who himself was in the firm keeping of his wife, DoÑa Beatriz. Once in the summer it was found that the King had treacherously agreed that Villena’s forces should surreptitiously enter the town and occupy the towers of the cathedral, whence they might throw explosives into the Alcazar and capture Isabel on the ground that she was poisoning the King; but the plan was frustrated, and Henry, either in fear or ashamed of his part of the transaction, left Segovia to place himself in the hands of Villena at Cuellar. Greedy to the last, Villena carried the sick King to Estremadura to obtain the surrender of some towns there that he coveted; but to Henry’s expressed grief, and the relief of the country, the insatiable favourite died unexpectedly of a malignant gathering in the throat on the way, and the King returned to Madrid, himself a dying man. His worthless life flickered out before dawn on the 12th December 1474, and his last plans were for the rehabilitation of the Beltraneja. He is said to have left a will bequeathing her the succession; but Cardinal Mendoza, Count Benavente, and his other executors, never produced such a document, which, moreover, would have been repudiated now by the nation at large, passionately loyal, as it already mainly was, to Isabel.^[21]

There was hardly a private or public shortcoming of which Henry in his lifetime had not been accused. From the Sovereign Pontiff to frank, but humble subjects, remonstrances against his notoriously bad conduct had been offered to the wretched King; and at his death the accumulated evils, bred by a line of frivolous monarchs, had reached their climax. There was no justice, order or security for life or property, and the strong oppressed the weak without reproach or hindrance, the only semblance of law being maintained by the larger walled cities in their territories by means of their armed burgess brotherhood. But in the disturbances that had succeeded the birth of the Beltraneja the cities themselves were divided, and in many cases the factions within their own walls made them scenes of bloodshed and insecurity. Faith and religion, that had hitherto been the mainstay of the throne of Castile, had been trampled under foot and oppressed by a monarch whose constant companions and closest servitors had been of the hated brood of Mahomet. Nobles who, for themselves and their adherents, had wrung from the Kings nearly all they had to give, and threatened even to overwhelm the cities, were free from taxation, except the almost obsolete feudal aid in spears which the Sovereign had nominally a right to summon at need. Such men as Villena, or Alvaro de Luna in the previous reign, with more armed followers than the King and greater available wealth, were the real sovereigns of Castile in turbulent alternation, and the final disintegration of the realm into petty principalities appeared to be the natural and imminent outcome of the state of affairs that existed when Henry IV. breathed his last.

All Castile and Leon, with their daughter kingdoms, were looking and praying for a saviour who could bring peace and security; and at first sight it would seem as if a turbulent State that had never been ruled by a woman could hardly expect that either of the young princesses who claimed the crown could bring in its dire need the qualities desired for its salvation. Isabel’s popularity, especially in Valladolid, Avila and Segovia, was great; and at the moment of the King’s death her friends were the stronger and more prompt, for Villena had just died, the Beltraneja was but a child of twelve, and the Queen-Mother, discredited and scorned, was lingering out her last days in a convent in Madrid.^[22] The towns, for the most part, awaited events in awe, fearing to take the wrong side, and a breathless pause followed the death of the King. Isabel was at Segovia, and under her influence and that of Cabrera, the city was the first to throw off the mask and raised the pennons for Isabel and Ferdinand, to whom, in her presence, it swore allegiance and proclaimed sovereigns of Castile. Valladolid followed on the 29th December; whilst Madrid, whose fortress was in the hands of Villena’s son, declared for the Beltraneja. The nobles shuffled again; moved by personal interest or rivalry, the Archbishop of Toledo, abandoning Isabel out of jealousy of Cardinal Mendoza; whilst Alburquerque, the supposed father of the Beltraneja, joined her opponent, and civil war, aided by foreign invasion from Portugal, was organised to dispute with Isabel and her husband their right to the crown.

By rare good fortune the young couple, who were thus forced to fight for their splendid inheritance, were the greatest governing geniuses of their age. It is time to say something of their gifts and characters. They were both, at the time of their accession, twenty-three years of age, and, as we have seen, their experience of life had already been great and disillusioning. Isabel’s was incomparably the higher mind of the two. The combined dignity and sweetness of her demeanour captivated all those who approached her, whilst her almost ostentatious religious humility and devotion won the powerful commendation of the churchmen who had suffered so heavily during the reign of Henry. There is no reason to doubt her sincerity or her real good intentions any more than those of her great-grandson, Philip II., a very similar, though far inferior, character. Like him, she never flinched from inflicting what we now call cruelty in the pursuance of her aims, though she had no love for cruelty for its own sake. She was determined that Spain should be united, and that rigid orthodoxy should be the cementing bond; that the sacred sovereign of Castile should be supreme over the bodies and souls of men, for her crown in her eyes was the symbol of divine selection and inspiration, and nothing done in the service of God by His vice-regent could be wrong, great as the suffering that it might entail. She was certainly what our lax generation calls a bigot; but bigotry in her time and country was a shining virtue, and is still her greatest claim to the regard of many of her countrymen. She was unmerciful in her severity in suppressing disorder and revolt; but we have seen the state at which affairs had arrived in Castile when she acceded to the crown, and it is quite evident that nothing but a rod of iron governed by a heart of ice was adequate to cope with the situation. Terrible as was Isabel’s justice, it entailed in the end much less suffering than a continuance of the murderous anarchy she suppressed.^[23] Her strength and activity of body matched her prodigious force of mind, and she constantly struck awe in her potential opponents by her marvellous celerity of movement over desolate tracts of country almost without roads, riding often throughout the night distances that appear at the present day to be almost incredible.

Ferdinand was as despotic and as ambitious as she, but his methods were absolutely different. He wanted the strength of Castile to push Aragonese interests in Italy and the Mediterranean; and, like Isabel, he saw that religious unity was necessary if he was to be provided with a solid national weapon for his hand. But for Isabel’s exalted mystic views of religion he cared nothing. He was, indeed, severely practical in all things; never keeping an oath longer than it suited him to do so, loving the crooked way if his end could be gained by it, and he positively gloried in the tergiversation by which throughout his life he got the better of every one with whom he dealt, until death made sport of all his plans and got the better of him. His school of politics was purely Italian; and he cynically acted upon the knowledge, as Henry VII. of England also did, that the suppression of feudalism doomed the sovereign to impotence unless he could hoard large sums of ready money wrung from subjects. In future he saw that kings would be feared, not for the doubtful feudatories they might summon, but in proportion to the men and arms they could promptly pay for in cash; and he went one better than the two Henry Tudors in getting the treasure he saw was needed. They squeezed rills of money from religious orthodoxy, and divided their subjects for a century; he drew floods of gold by exterminating a heterodox minority, and united Spain for the ends he had in view. Ferdinand and Isabel might therefore challenge the admiration of subjects for their greatness and high aims, and command loyalty by their success as rulers; but they cannot be regarded as loveable human beings.

Between two such strong characters as these it was not to be expected that all would be harmonious at first, and the married life of Isabel began inauspiciously enough in one respect. There is no doubt that both Ferdinand and his father intended that the former should be King regnant of Castile, and not merely King consort. Ferdinand indeed, through his grandfather of the same name, was the male heir to the Castilian crowns; and as the Salic law prevailed in Aragon, they assumed that it might be enforced in Castile. This, however, was very far from Isabel’s view; reinforced as she was by the decision of the Castilian churchmen and jurists, and she stood firm. For a time Ferdinand sulked and threatened to leave her to fight out her battle by herself; but better counsels prevailed, and an agreement was made by which they were to reign jointly, but that Isabel alone should appoint all commanders, officers and administrators, in Castile, and retain control of all fiscal matters in her realms.

On the 2nd January 1475, Ferdinand joined his wife in Segovia, where a Cortes had been summoned to take the oath of allegiance to them. Through the thronged and cheering street he rode to the Alcazar; Beltran de la Cueva, Duke of Alburquerque, by his side, and nobles, bishops and burgesses, flocked to do homage to the new sovereigns. Two months later the faithful city of Valladolid greeted the royal couple with effusive joy; and a round of festivities drew the lieges and gave time for adherents to come in. Both parties were mustering forces for the great struggle; and it needed stout hearts on the part of Isabel and her husband to face the future. The Archbishop of Toledo was now on the side of the Beltraneja; and so was Madrid and some of the great nobles of Andalucia; and, worst of all, Alfonso of Portugal had been betrothed to his niece the Beltraneja; and was even now gathering his army to invade Castile and seize the crown. On the 3rd April the new sovereigns held high festival at Valladolid. Isabel, in crimson brocade and with a golden crown upon her veiled abundant russet hair, mounted a white hackney with saddle cloth, housings and mane covered with gold and silver flowers. She was followed by fourteen noble dames dressed in parti-coloured tabards, half green brocade and half claret velvet, and head dresses to imitate crowns; and, as they rode to take the place of honour in the tilt yard, men said that no woman was ever seen so beautiful and majestic as the Queen of Spain.^[24] Knights and nobles flocked to the lists, and King Ferdinand rode into the yard mounted upon his warhorse to break a lance, the acknowledged finest horseman in Spain. But as he entered the populace stared to see the strange crest he bore upon his helm, and the stranger motto emblazoned upon his shield. What could it mean? asked, not without fear, some of those who professed to be his friends. The crest took the form of a blacksmith’s anvil, and the motto ran;—

which we are told was meant as a warning to those at his side that he knew they were beguiling him with such pageantry whilst they were paltering with his enemies.

It was a gay though ominous feast; but Isabel could not afford much time for such trifling, and on the second day she mounted her palfrey and rode out to Tordesillas, forty miles away, to inspect the fortifications, and then to make an attempt to win back to her cause the Archbishop of Toledo. With prodigious activity the young Sovereigns separately travelled from fortress to fortress, animating followers, and providing for defence; and Isabel was in the imperial city of Toledo late in May 1475, when the news came to her that the King of Portugal had entered Spain with a large army, had formally married the Beltraneja at Palencia, and proclaimed himself King of Castile.^[26] Without wasting a moment Isabel started on horseback for her faithful fief of Avila, ninety miles away. She was less than two days on the road, and, though she had a miscarriage on the way at Cabezon she dared not tarry until safe within the walls of the city, which she entered on the 28th May.

For some months thereafter the fate of Spain hung in the balance. Ferdinand strained every nerve, but the forces against him were stronger than his, and the Archbishop of Toledo with his wealth and following had reinforced the Portuguese. The invading army lay across the Douro at Toro, a frontier fortress of Leon of fabulous strength, and Ferdinand from Valladolid attempted to push them back and was beaten. All Leon, and the plain of Castile as far as Avila, looked at the mercy of the invaders. But the Portuguese was slow of action, and at this critical juncture the splendid courage of Isabel saved the situation.^[27] Summoning Cortes at her city of Medina, the centre of the cloth industry and the greatest mart for bills of exchange in Europe, she appealed to their patriotism, their loyalty, and their love. Her eloquent plea was irresistible. Money was voted without stint, merchants and bankers unlocked their coffers, churches sold their plate, and monasteries disinterred their hoards. Aragonese troops marched in, Castilian levies came to the call of their Queen, and by the end of 1475 Ferdinand was at the head of an army strong enough to face the invaders. Isabel took her full share of the military operations. On the 8th January 1476, she rode out of Valladolid through terrible weather, in the coldest part of Spain, to join Ferdinand’s half-brother, Alfonso, before Burgos. For ten days the Queen travelled through the deep snowdrifts before she reached the camp, to find that the city had already surrendered; and on the evening of her arrival, in the gathering dusk, she entered the city of the Cid, to be received by kneeling, silk-clad aldermen with heads bowed for past transgressions, to be graciously pardoned by the Queen. The pardon was hearty and prompt; for these, and such as these, Isabel meant to make her instruments for bringing Spain to heel.

In the meanwhile Ferdinand had marched to meet the invading army of 3000 horse and 10,000 foot which lay across the Douro at Toro. First he set siege to Zamora, between the invading army and its base, and the King of Portugal ineffectually attempted to blockade him. Failing in this, the invaders on the 17th February raised their camp and marched towards Toro again. They stole away silently, but Ferdinand followed them as rapidly as possible, and caught up with them twelve miles from Toro, late in the afternoon, on the banks of the Douro. The charge of the Aragonese upon the disorganised army on the march was irresistible, and a complete rout of the invaders ensued, no less than 300 of the fugitives being drowned in the river in sheer panic. King Alfonso of Portugal fled, leaving his royal standard behind him, and before nightfall all was over, and the last hope of the Beltraneja had faded for ever.

A month afterwards Zamora, the almost impregnable fortress, surrendered to Ferdinand; and then the King marched to subdue other towns, whilst Isabel laid siege to Toro. The Queen scorned to avail herself of the privilege of her sex, and suffered all the hardships and dangers of a soldier’s life. Early and late she was on horseback superintending the operations, and ordered and witnessed more than one unsuccessful assault upon the town. At length, after a siege of many months, Toro itself fell, the last great fortress to hold out, and Isabel rode into the starving city in triumph. Then indeed was she Queen of Castile, with none to question her right.

The waverers hastened to join the victorious side, the nobles who had helped the Beltraneja, even the Archbishop of Toledo, came penitently, one by one, to make such terms as their mistress would accord; whilst the Beltraneja herself, unmarried again by an obedient Pope, retired to a Portuguese convent, and the King of Portugal afterwards laid aside his royal crown and assumed the tonsure and coarse gown of a Franciscan friar. Never was victory more complete; and when three years later, early in 1479, the old King of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, went to his account, Isabel and Ferdinand, for ever known as ‘the Catholic kings,’ by grace of the Pope, reigned over Spain jointly from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules, one poor tributary Moorish realm, Granada, alone remaining to sully with infidelity the reunited domains of the Cross.

But the elements of aristocratic anarchy still existed, especially in Galicia and Andalucia, where certain noble families assumed the position of almost independent sovereigns, and at any time might again imperil the very existence of the State. With the great ambitions of Ferdinand and the exalted fervour of Isabel to spread Christianity, it must have been clear to both sovereigns that they must make themselves absolutely supreme in their own country before they could attempt to carry out their views abroad. The realms of Aragon offered no great difficulty, since good order prevailed, although the strict parliamentary constitutions sorely limited the regal power, and gave to the estates the command of the purse. In Castile, however, the nobles, eternally at feud with each other, were quite out of hand, and Isabel’s first measures were directed towards shearing them of their power for mischief. All the previous kings of her line—that of Trastamara—had been simply puppets in the hands of the nobility; she was determined, as a preliminary of greater things, to be sole mistress in her realm. Her task was a tremendous one, and needed supreme diplomacy in dividing opponents, as well as firmness in suppressing them. Isabel was a host in herself; and to her, much more than to her husband, must be given the honour of converting utter anarchy into order and security in a prodigiously short time.

The only semblance of settled life and respect for law in Castile was to be found in the walled towns. The municipal government had always been the unit of civilisation in Spain, and the nobility being untaxed, the Castilian Cortes consisted entirely of the representatives of the burgesses. With true statesmanship Isabel therefore turned to this element to reinforce the crown as against lawless nobles. The proposal to revive in a new form the old institution of the ‘Sacred Brotherhood’ of towns was made to her at the meeting of the Cortes at Madrigal in April 1476, and was at once accepted. A meeting of deputies was called at DueÑas in July, and within a few months the urban alliance was complete. An armed force of 2000 horsemen and many foot-soldiers was formed and paid by an urban house tax.^[28] They were more than a mere constabulary, although they ranged the country far and wide, and compelled men to keep the peace, for the organisation provided a judicial criminal system that effectually completed the task of punishment. Magistrates were appointed in every village of thirty families for summary jurisdiction, and constables of the Brotherhood were in every hamlet, whilst a supreme council composed of deputies from every province in Castile judged without appeal the causes referred to it by local magistrates. The punishments for the slightest transgression were terrible in their severity, and struck the turbulent classes with dismay. In 1480 a league of nobles and prelates met at CabeÑa, under the Duke of Infantado, to protest against the Queen’s new force of burgesses. In answer to their remonstrance she showed her strength by haughtily telling them to look to themselves and obey the law, and at once established the Brotherhood on a firmer footing than before, to be a veritable terror to evildoers, gentle as well as simple.

Isabel was no mild saint, as she is so often represented. She was far too great a woman and Queen to be that; and though for the first two or three years of her reign diplomacy was her principal weapon, no sooner had she divided her opponents and firmly established the Holy Brotherhood, than the iron flail fell upon those who had offended. In Galicia the nobles had practically appropriated to themselves the royal revenues, and the Queen’s writ had no power. That might suit weak Henry, but Isabel was made of sterner stuff than her brother had been, and in 1481 she sent two doughty officers to summon the representatives of the Galician towns to Santiago, and to demand of them money and men to bring the nobles to their senses. The burgesses despaired, and said that nothing less than an act of God would cure the many evils from which they suffered. The act of God they yearned for came, but Isabel was the instrument. Forty-seven fortresses, which were so many brigand strongholds, were levelled to the ground in the province; and some of the highest heads were struck from noble shoulders. The stake and the gibbet were kept busy, the dungeons and torture chambers full; and those of evil life in sheer terror mended their ways, or fled to places were justice was less strict.

But it is in the suppression of the anarchy at Seville that Isabel’s personal action is most clearly seen. For years the city had been a prey to the sanguinary rivalry between two great families who lorded it over the greater part of Andalucia, the Guzmans and the Ponces de Leon; and at the time of Isabel’s accession the feud had assumed the form of predatory civil war, from which no citizen was safe. The cities of the south were less settled in Christian organisation than those of the north, and their municipal governments not so easy to combine; and Isabel, in 1477, determined by her personal presence in Seville to enforce the hard lessons she had taught the rest of her realms. The armed escort that accompanied her was sufficient, added to the awe already awakened by her name, to cow the turbulent spirits of Seville. Reviving the ancient practice of the Castilian kings, Isabel, alone or with her husband by her side, sat every Friday in the great hall of the Moorish Alcazar at Seville, to deal out justice without appeal to all comers. Woe betided the offender who was haled before her. The barbaric splendour, which Isabel knew how to use with effect, surrounding her, gave to this famous royal tribunal a prestige that captured the imagination of the semi-oriental population of Seville, whilst the terrible severity of its judgments and the lightning rapidity of its executions reduced the population to trembling obedience whilst Isabel stayed in the city. No less than four thousand malefactors fled—mostly across the frontier—to escape from the Queen’s wrath, whilst all those who in the past had transgressed, either by plundering or maltreating others, and could be caught, were made to feel to the full what suffering was. So great was Isabel’s severity that at last the Bishop of Cadiz, accompanied by the clergy and notables of Andalucia, and backed by hosts of weeping women, came and humbly prayed the Queen to have mercy in her justice. Isabel had no objection. She did not scourge and slay because she loved to do it, but to compel obedience. Once that was obtained she was content to stay her hand; and before she left the city, a general amnesty was given for past offences except for serious crimes. But she left behind her an organised police and criminal tribunals, active and vigilant enough to trample at once upon any attempt at reviving the former state of things.

A more difficult task for Isabel was that of reforming the moral tone of her court and society at large. The Alcazar of Henry IV. had been a sink of iniquity, and the lawlessness throughout the country had made the practice of virtue almost impossible; whilst the clergy, and especially the regular ecclesiastics, were shamefully corrupt. Isabel herself was not only severely discreet in her conduct, but determined that no countenance should be given to those who were lax in any of the proprieties of life; and it was soon understood by ecclesiastics and courtiers that the only certain passport to advancement in Castile was strict decorum. It is probable that much of the sudden reform thus effected was merely hypocrisy; but it lasted long enough to become a fixed tradition, and permanently raised the standard of public and private life in Spain.

In all directions Isabel carried forward her work of reform. The great nobles found to their dismay, when the Queen was strong enough to do it, that she, fortified by the Cortes of Toledo, had cancelled all the unmerited grants so lavishly squandered by previous kings upon them. Some of those who had been most active in the late troubles, such as the Dukes of Alburquerque and Alba and the Admiral of Castile, Ferdinand’s maternal uncle, were stripped almost to the skin. Isabel’s revenue on her accession had only amounted to 40,000 ducats, barely sufficient for necessary sustenance; but in a very few years (1482) it had multiplied by more than twelvefold, and thirty millions of maravedis a year had been added to the royal income from resumed national grants. To all remonstrances from those who suffered, Isabel was firm and dignified, though conciliatory in manner. Her voice was sweet and her bearing womanly; she always ascribed her measures, however oppressive they might seem, to her love for the country and her determination to make it great. Upon this ground she was unassailable; and enlisted upon her side even those who felt the pinch by appealing to their national pride.

There was no one measure that added more to Isabel’s material power than her policy towards the religious orders of knighthood. These three great orders, Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara, had grown out of the long crusade against the Moors; devout celibate soldiers receiving in community vast grants of territory which they wrested from the infidel. By the time of Isabel they had grown to be a scandal, for the grandmasters disposed of revenues and forces as large as those of the crown, and were practically independent of it. Isabel’s treatment of them was diplomatic and wise as usual. As each mastership fell vacant she granted it to her husband; and thus the three most dangerous rivals to the royal authority were made thenceforward appanages of the crown, to which the territories were afterwards appropriated.^[29]

The Queen’s activity and strength of body and mind must have been marvellous. We hear of her travelling vast distances, almost incessantly in the saddle, visiting remote parts of her husband’s and her own dominions for State business, to settle disputed points, to inspect fortifications, to animate ecclesiastical or municipal bodies, and to suppress threatened disorder. No difficulty seemed to dismay her, no opposition to deflect her from the exalted purpose she had in view. For it must not be supposed that this strenuous activity was sporadic and without a central object which inspired it all. In this supreme object the key to Isabel’s life must be sought. Isabel’s mother was mad: after the death of her husband she had sunk into the gloomy devotional lunacy which afflicted in after years so many of her descendants; and in the impressionable years of Isabel’s youth, passed in the isolated castle of Arevalo, the whole atmosphere of her life had been one of mystic religious exaltation.

The Christian Spaniard of Castile had through seven centuries gradually regained for Christ his lost kingdom by a constant crusade against the infidel. The secular struggle had made him a convinced believer in his divine mission to re-establish the reign of the cross on earth. To this end saints had led him into battle in shining armour, blazing crosses in the sky had heralded victory to God’s own militia, and holy relics, miraculously revealed, had served as talismans which ensured success. Mysticism and the yearning for martyrdom was in the air in Isabel’s youth, and she, a saintly neurotic, who happened also to be a genius and a queen, shared to the full the Castilian national obsession. The man who fostered the growth of this feeling in the young princess at Arevalo might have been useful in spurring a sluggish mind to devotion; but to further inflame the zeal of a girl of Isabel’s innate tendency was unnecessary, and of this alone was he capable. He was a fiery, uncompromising, Dominican monk, called Tomas de Torquemada. The Dominicans, centuries before, had been entrusted by the Pope with the special duty to maintain the purity of the faith, and as its guardians, spiritual pride and arrogance had always been the characteristic of the order. Torquemada, as Isabel’s confessor and spiritual tutor, had abundant opportunities of influencing her, and never ceased to keep before her the sacred duty imposed upon rulers of extirpating heresy, root and branch, at any cost. Her own brother Henry had been surrounded by the hated infidel, the enemy of Christ and Spain. Failure as a king, ruin as a man, and a miserable death, had been his portion. And so the lesson was ceaselessly dinned into Isabel’s ear, that no ruler could be happy or successful who did not smite heretics, infidels and doubters, hip and thigh, for the glory of God. The Moor, she was told, still defiled in Granada the sacred soil of Spain, suffered by an unworthy Christian king to linger for the sake of the paltry tribute paid.

To establish the rule of Christ on earth, which she was taught was her sacred duty, Isabel knew that a strong weapon was needed. Only a united and centralised Spain could give her that, and Spain must be unified first of all. Her marriage with Ferdinand was a great step in advance; her suppression of the nobles and the masterships of the orders another, the submission of the country to her will and law a third, the increase of her revenues a fourth; but a greater than all was the reawakening in the breasts of all Spaniards the mystic exaltation and spiritual pride that gave strength to their arms against the Moor in the heroic days of old. The character of the Spanish people, and the state of the public mind at the time, made it easy to stir up the religious rancour of the majority against a minority already despised and distrusted. Throughout Spain there were numerous families of the conquered race nominally Christians, but yet living apart in separate quarters, and unmixed in blood with their neighbours. They were, as a rule, industrious and well-to-do handicraftsmen and agriculturists, whose artistic traditions and skill gave them the monopoly in many profitable and thriving avocations. The Christian Spaniard had not, as a rule, developed similar qualities, and were naturally jealous of the so-called new Christians who lived with them, but were not of them.

There was, however, at first but little open enmity between these two races of Spaniards, though distrust and dislike existed. It was otherwise in the case of the Jews. They, during the centuries of Moorish rule, had grown rich and numerous, and had in subsequent periods almost monopolised banking and financial business throughout Spain, marrying in many cases into the highest Christian families. As farmers of taxes and royal treasurers they had become extremely unpopular, especially in Aragon; and although, for the most part, professed Christians, they were eyed with extreme jealousy by the people at large, and on many occasions had been the victims of attack and massacre in various places.^[30] Nevertheless, so far as can be seen, the first steps towards religious persecution by Isabel and her husband do not appear to have been prompted, although they may have been strengthened, by this feeling. There had for centuries existed in Aragon and Sicily an Inquisition for the investigation of cases of heresy. It was a purely papal institution, and its operations were very mild, though extremely unpopular. In Castile, the papal Inquisition had never been favoured by rulers, who were always jealous of the interference of Rome, and at the time of Isabel’s accession it had practically ceased to exist.

When the sovereigns were holding Court at Seville in 1477, a Sicilian Dominican came to beg for the confirmation of an old privilege, giving to the Order in Sicily one-third of the property of all the heretics condemned there by the Inquisition. This Ferdinand and Isabel consented to, and the Dominican, whose name was Dei Barberi, suggested to Ferdinand that as religious observance had grown so lax under the late King Henry, it might be advisable to introduce a similar tribunal into Castile. Ferdinand’s ambitions were great. He wanted to win for Barcelona the mastership of the Mediterranean and the reversion of the Christian Empire of the East, and, as a preliminary, to clear Spain itself of the taint of dominant Islam at Granada. He understood that times had changed, and that the nerve of war was no longer feudal aids, but the concentration in the hands of the King of the ready money of his subjects. The people who had most of the ready money in Spain were the very people whose orthodoxy was open to attack, and he welcomed a proposal that might make him rich beyond dreams.

Isabel was not greedy for money as her husband was: she was too much of a religious mystic for that; but to spread the kingdom of Christ on earth, to crush His enemies and raise His cross supreme in the eyes of men, seemed to promise her the only glory for which she yearned. By her side was her confessor Torquemada, the Dominican Ojeda, and the Papal Nuncio, all pressing upon her that to strike at heresy in her realms was her duty. So Isabel took the step they counselled, and begged the Pope for a bull establishing the Inquisition in Castile. The bull was granted in September 1478, but no active steps were taken for nearly two years.

In 1480, Isabel and her husband were again in Seville, and the Dominicans were ceaseless in their exhortations to them to suppress the growing scandal of obstinate Judaism. The complaints of the clergy against the Jews were such as they knew would be supported by the populace. Amongst other things, they said that the Jews bought up and ate all the meat in the market for their Sabbath, and there was none left for Christians on Sunday;^[31] that they were hoarding coin to such an extent that there was a lack of currency; that they donned rich finery and ornaments only fit for their betters, and so on.^[32]

The various modern apologists of Isabel have striven to minimise her share in the establishment of the dread tribunal that sprang out of these and similar complaints. There seems to me no reason for doing so: she herself probably considered it a most praiseworthy act, and her only hesitation in the matter was caused by her dislike of strengthening the papal power over the church of Castile.^[33] There could have been no repugnance in her mind to punishing, however severely, those whom she looked upon as God’s enemies, and consequently unworthy of the privileges of humanity. Ferdinand added his persuasion to the clamours of the churchmen; and from Medina del Campo, Isabel, in September 1480, commissioned two Dominicans to act as Inquisitors, and to establish their tribunal at Seville.

The Jews of Seville took alarm at once, and large numbers of them fled from the city to the shelter of some of the neighbouring great nobles, who looked with dislike at this new development of priestly power. A decree of the sovereign’s at once forbade all loyal subjects to withhold suspected heretics from their accusers, and those fugitive Jews who could escape sought the safety of Moorish Granada. In the first days of 1481, the Inquisition got to work, striking at the highest first, and before the end of the year 2000 poor wretches were burnt in Andalusia alone.^[34] All Spain protested against it. Deputations from the chief towns came and demanded the abolition of a foreign tribunal over Spaniards. The Aragonese, rough and independent as usual, resorted to violence, and hunted the Inquisitors, whilst in Old Castile the tribunal could only sit, in many places, surrounded by the Queen’s soldiers. But Isabel’s heart was aflame with zeal, and Ferdinand, with gaping coffers, was rejoicing at the showers of Jewish gold that flowed to him; and all remonstrance was in vain. The Pope himself soon took fright at the severity exercised, and threatened to withdraw the bull, but Ferdinand silenced him with a hint that he would make the Inquisition an independent tribunal altogether, as later it practically became, and thenceforward the horrible business went on unchecked until Spain was seared from end to end, and independent judgment was stifled for centuries in blood and sacrificial smoke.

The heartless bigot Torquemada, Isabel’s confessor, was appointed Inquisitor-General in 1483, and he, the most insolent, because the humblest, man in Spain, became the greatest power in the land, master of Isabel’s conscience and feeder of Ferdinand’s purse. Isabel’s Spanish biographers continue to assert that she was tireless in her endeavours to soften the rigour of her own tribunal, and to intercede for her ‘dear Castilians.’ There is not a scrap of real evidence known to prove that she did so, and certainly her contemporaries did not believe it.^[35] Her administration, however, had already been extremely successful. Peace and order reigned, the pride of Spaniards, which she so sedulously fostered, had been worked up to a high pitch, the Queen herself was personally popular, in consequence of her dignity, her activity, and her patriotism; and the urban populations, who had so greatly aided her, and were now so powerful, dreaded to cause disturbance that might have thrown the country again into the clutches of the nobles. Terrible, therefore, as was the action of the Holy Office, acquiesced in by the Queen, there were many reasons why no combined opposition to it in Castile was offered, although for the first years of its existence it was bitterly hated.

To the Queen during these first few years of ceaseless activity, no other child had been born but the Infanta Isabel, the first fruit of her marriage in 1470. The constant long journeys on horseback, the hardships and risk entailed by her work, thus for eight years prevented the birth of a male heir. But during Isabel’s stay at Seville, on the 30th June 1478, the prayed for Prince of Asturias, Juan, was born. Ferdinand was away in the north at the time, but all the pomp and splendour, which Isabel knew so well how to use, heralded the birth of the Prince. On the 15th July the Queen was sufficiently well to ride in state to the cathedral from the Moorish Alcazar where she lived, and to present her first-born son to the Church. Through the narrow, tortuous lanes of the sunny city, packed with people, Isabel rode on a bay charger; her crimson brocade robe, all stiff with gold embroidery, trailing almost to the ground, over the petticoat covered with rich pearls. Her saddle, we are told, was of gold, and the housings black velvet, with bullion lace and fringe. Ferdinand’s base brother Alfonso, and his kinswoman the Duchess of Vistahermosa, followed close behind, and the Queen’s bridle was held by the Constable of Castile and Count Benavente. The merry music of fife, tabor, and clarion preceded the royal party; and behind there came on foot the nobles and grandees, and the authorities of the city. The baby Prince was borne in the arms of his nurse, seated upon a mule draped with velvet, and embroidered with the scutcheons of Castile, Leon, and Aragon, and led by the Admiral of Castile. At the high altar of the famous Mudejar Cathedral, Isabel solemnly devoted her child to the service of God, and then, with splendid largess to all and sundry, she returned to the palace.^[36]

Isabel was unremitting always in the performance of her religious duties, and wherever she stayed, endowments for purposes of the Church commemorated her visit. Her humility and submission to priests and nuns is cited with extravagant praise by her many ecclesiastical eulogists, and they tell the story of how, when Father Talavera first succeeded Torquemada as her confessor, he bade her kneel at his feet like an ordinary penitent. When she reminded him that monarchs always sat by the side of the confessor, as she had always done before, he rebuked her by saying that his seat was the seat of God, before whom all kneeled without distinction; and the Queen thenceforward kept upon her knees before the priest, whom she honoured thenceforward for what in our days we should consider unpardonable arrogance.

There was little of repose for Isabel, even after the birth of her child. To Seville came the news a few months afterwards that the old soldier Archbishop of Toledo and the Pachecos had once more persuaded Alfonso of Portugal to strike a blow for his niece and wife the Beltraneja. Raising what troops she could, Isabel rode through Estremadura at the head of her force, determined to end for good claims that she thought had already been disposed of. Ferdinand was in Aragon, where, his father having just died, his presence could not be dispensed with; but Isabel was undismayed. In vain her councillors begged her to refrain from undertaking the campaign in person. The country was devastated by famine and war, they said; pestilence prevailed in the towns, and the raids of the Portuguese and rebels would expose her to great danger. ‘I did not come hither,’ Isabel replied, ‘to shirk danger and trouble, nor do I intend to give my enemies the satisfaction, nor my subjects the chagrin, to see me do so, until we end the war we are engaged upon or make the peace we seek.’^[37] Isabel, in command of the Castilians, finally crushed the Portuguese at the battle of Albuera; and then, after reducing to submission the rebel noble fortresses, she negotiated a peace with Portugal and France at Alcantara, by which both powers were compelled to recognise her as Queen of Spain. Suppressing revolt, deciding disputes, and punishing transgressions on her way, Isabel then rode to Toledo, where Ferdinand joined her, and there her third child, Joan, was born, in November 1479.

CHAPTER II

Castile and Aragon, now being indissolubly united, and internal peace secured, it was time for the sovereigns to prepare for the execution of the great designs that had respectively moved them to effect what they had done. These designs were to some extent divergent from each other. Ferdinand’s main object was to cripple his rival, France, in the direction of Italy, and assume for Aragon the hegemony of the Mediterranean and of the sister Peninsula, of which Sicily already belonged to him and Naples to a member of his house. Castile, on the other hand, had for centuries cultivated usually harmonious relations with France, the frontiers not being conterminous except at one point, the mouth of the Bidasoa; and the ambitions of Castile were traditionally towards the absorption of Portugal, the domination of the coast of North Africa, and the spread of the Christian power generally to the detriment of Islam, its secular enemy. Its own Moorish populations were as yet but imperfectly assimilated, and the existence of the realm of Granada in the Peninsula kept hopes alive in the breasts of the Castilian Moors. The presence of many thousands of potential enemies in the midst of Christian Spain, and the wealth and number of the Jews, who, in a struggle, would probably side with the Moors, undoubtedly influenced greatly in causing the severity of the Inquisition against them and their subsequent expulsion. The first step, therefore, to be taken towards the objects either of Aragon and Castile, was to reduce to impotence any Moorish power in Spain itself that might cause anxiety to the Christian rulers whilst they were busy upon plans abroad, though this step was mainly important to Castile rather than to Aragon.

This was the state of affairs in the beginning of 1481. The Castilians were subdued and prepared to do the bidding of their Queen, but the Catalans and Aragonese, rough and independent, had to be conciliated before they could be depended upon to give their aid to an object apparently for the advantage of Castile. Isabel had summoned a Cortes of her realms to the imperial city of Toledo late in 1480, to take the oath of allegiance to her infant son Juan as heir to the throne: and thence, with a splendid train, she rode to visit for the first time her husband’s kingdoms, to receive their homage as joint sovereign. Ferdinand met his wife at Calatayud in April 1481, and there, before the assembled Cortes of Aragon, the oath of allegiance to the sovereigns and their heir was taken. The Aragonese were rough-tongued and jealous, and even more so the Catalans, dreading the centralising policy of Isabel and their assimilation by Castile; and throughout Ferdinand’s dominions Isabel was forced to hear demands and criticisms to which the more amenable Cortes of Castile had not accustomed her. It was gall and wormwood to her proud spirit that subjects should haggle with monarchs, and in Barcelona she turned to her husband, when the Cortes had refused one of his requests, and said: ‘This realm is not ours, we shall have to come and conquer it.’ But Ferdinand knew his subjects better than she, and gradually made them understand that in all he did he had their interests in view. He was forced, indeed, by circumstances and his wife to allow precedence to Castilian aims, the better to compass those of Aragon.

The turbulent Valencians were being won to benevolence by the presence of their King and the smiles of his wife in the last days of 1481, when the news reached the sovereigns that the pretext they needed for their next great step had been furnished by the Moors of Granada. From the fairy palace of the Alhambra for the previous two hundred and fifty years, the Kings of Granada had ruled a territory in the South of Andalucia, running from fifteen miles north of Gibraltar along the Mediterranean coast two hundred and twenty miles to the borders of Murcia, and including the fine ports of Malaga, Velez, and Almeria. The industry of the people and the commerce of their important seaboard, facing the African land of their kinsmen, made the population prosperous and their standard of living high; but a series of petty despots, successively reaching the throne by usurpation and murder, had enabled the Kings of Castile, by fomenting the consequent discord, to reduce Granada to the position of a tributary. When Isabel succeeded, and the treaties between Castile and Granada had to be renewed in 1476, Ferdinand had demanded the prompt annual payment of the tribute in gold. Muley Abul Hassan had paid no tribute to Isabel’s brother, and intended to pay none to her. ‘Tell the Queen and King of Castile,’ he replied, ‘that steel and not gold is what we coin in Granada.’ From the day they received the message Isabel and Ferdinand knew that they could not wield a solid Spain to their ends until the Cross was reared over the Mosque of Granada. When, therefore, all the rest of Spain was pacified, and the sovereigns were at Valencia at Christmas 1481, the pretext for action came, not unwelcome, at least for Isabel. The Moors of Granada had swept down by night and captured the Christian frontier fortress of Zahara.^[38] Isabel and her husband had never ceased since their accession to prepare for the inevitable war. The civil conflict they had passed through had proved the superiority for their purpose of paid troops of their own over feudal levies, and already the organisation of a national army existed. The Royal Council appointed by Isabel had brought from France, Italy, and Germany the best skilled engineers and constructors of the recently introduced iron artillery; great quantities of gunpowder had been imported from Sicily, and improved lances, swords, and crossbows had been invented and manufactured in Italy and Spain.

The troops that had been expelled from Zahara, and those that at first revenged the insult by the capture and sack of the important Moorish fortress of Alhama, between Malaga and Granada, were the vassals of the princely Andalucian nobles, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the Marquis of Cadiz; but the sovereigns, hurrying from Valencia to the Castilian town of Medina del Campo, set about organising the coming war with national forces. The efficiency and foresight shown were extraordinary, and, up to that time, unexampled. Nothing seems to have been forgotten or left to chance; flying hospitals, field ambulances, and army chaplains, testify to Isabel’s personal influence. Whatever may have been the case with Ferdinand, his wife approached the struggle as to a sacred crusade. Torquemada, though not yet Inquisitor-General, was busy with the Holy Office, and had just been replaced as Isabel’s confessor by the saintly Father Talavera, whose influence over the Queen was greater still; and whose zeal for the conquest of Granada for the cross was a consuming passion, only comparable in its strength with his proud humility.^[39]

The kingdom of Granada was girt around with mountain fortresses of immense strength upon the spurs and peaks of the Sierra Nevada; and in the midst stood the lovely city, as it stands to-day, with its twin fortresses upon their sister cliffs, the Alhambra and the Albaycin, each capable of housing an army. The task of reducing the mountain realm was a great one, for the outlying fortresses had to be subdued separately before the almost impregnable capital could be attacked, whilst the long line of coast had to be watched and blockaded to prevent, if possible, succour being sent from Africa by kinsmen across the sea. In the first days of March 1482, the news of the capture of Alhama by the Andalucian nobles, and the awful slaughter of the women and children, as well as the men, who so heroically defended it, reached Isabel at Medina; and the splendid exploit and vast booty won uplifted all Castilian hearts. It is said by many historians, but is not true, that Isabel herself set out barefooted on a pilgrimage to Compostella, to thank Santiago for the victory. But though she had no time for this, she bade the Church throughout Castile sing praises for the boon vouchsafed to the Christian cause. But then came tidings less bright. The Moorish King, with all his force of 80,000 men, was besieging the Marquis of Cadiz in Alhama: the water supply had been cut off, food was scarce, and the Christians surrounded. Within a week of the news Ferdinand was on the march with his army, and the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with his 40,000 armed retainers, was rapidly approaching Alhama to succour his ancient foe the Marquis of Cadiz. The slaughter of Moors in the constant unsuccessful assaults upon Alhama had been immense; the King, Muley Abul Hassan, had bitter domestic enemies, and daring not to face the approaching Christians, he raised the siege and returned to Granada. The rich booty taken in the town by the original captors aroused the cupidity of the relieving force, and dissensions between the Christians arose over the division of the spoil. Medina Sidonia and his army marched away, and again Muley Abul Hassan beleaguered Alhama, with artillery this time, and a powerful army. Once more deeds of unheard of gallantry and hardihood were done by the Moorish chivalry; but, as before, unavailingly. By the end of March Ferdinand’s great host, with 40,000 beasts of burden carrying supplies and munitions, approached, and again Muley Abul Hassan retreated to his disaffected capital. It was a blow from which the Moorish power in Spain never recovered, and thenceforward Granada fought hopelessly with her back to the wall.

Into the fertile vega of Granada swept Ferdinand’s host in the midsummer of 1482, carrying devastation and ruin in its van. From the heights of Granada the Moors, with impotent hate and rage, saw their blazing villages, their raided flocks and herds, their murdered countrymen, and desolated fields; and yet within the fair city treason and civil discord numbed all hearts, and paralysed the warrior’s arms. For Muley Abul Hassan was fighting foes within his own harem more deadly than the Christians who raided beneath his walls; and a palace revolution led by his wife and his undutiful son, Abu Abdalla (Boabdil), was already plotting his downfall. To secure his position in the vega of Granada, it was necessary for Ferdinand to capture the frowning fortress that crowned the height of Loja, and commanded the pass into Castile. It had long been a thorn in the Christian flesh, and now Ferdinand, with all the chivalry of Spain, were pledged to capture it at any cost. Though brave and cool, Ferdinand was no great tactician, and was easily outwitted by the wily Moors, who led his forces into ambush and utterly routed the Christian host. Panic and flight ensued, with the loss of baggage, standards, and arms; and Ferdinand himself escaped only by the efforts of a small devoted band of Castilian knights. The ruin was complete, and when Ferdinand joined his heroic wife at the ancient Moorish Alcazar of Cordova, even her faith and steadfastness for a time wavered.

But not for long. Talavera, Torquemada, and Mendoza, the Cardinal of Spain, with fiery zeal for the extirpation of heresy, were at her side. Not for territory alone, but to fix God’s realm on earth freely, must sacrifice be made and final victory won: and, though Ferdinand with longing eyes towards his own aims, yearned to use his arms against France for the recapture of his own provinces of Rosellon and Cerdagne, and tried to persuade his wife that though ‘her war might be a holy one, his against the French would be a just one,’ Isabel had her way, and with unflinching zeal set about organising to snatch conquest from defeat.^[40] Muley Abul Hassan, expelled from his city of Granada, but holding his own in Malaga and the south, had been succeeded in his capital by the weak, rebellious Boabdil. The old King and his brother, El Zagal, were still fighting doughtily, and even successfully raiding the Christian land near Gibraltar; and Boabdil, jealous of their activity, determined to sally from Granada and strike a blow for his cause, at the instigation of his masculine mother. At the head of 9000 Moors, all glittering and confident, the Prince sallied out of Granada in April 1483, and, collecting the veteran guard of Loja on the way, marched towards Cordova. The Moors were undisciplined, loaded with loot, and led by a fool, when they approached the Christian Cordovese city of Lucena, and their ostentatious march into Christian land had been heralded. Their attack upon the city was repulsed with great valour, and whilst they were meditating a renewed assault, a relieving force of Christians approached. The Moors retired, but were overtaken and utterly routed. Boabdil the King, garbed in crimson velvet mantle heavy with gold, and armed in rich damascened steel, was singled out from amongst the mob of fugitives, captured by a Castilian man-at-arms, and borne in triumph by the Christian chief, the Count of Cabra, to the strong castle of Porcuna, there to await the sovereign’s decision as to his fate. Isabel and her husband were far away at the time; for, after the birth of her fourth child, Maria, in the previous summer of 1482, she and Ferdinand had travelled north to Madrid to meet the Castilian Cortes, and ask for supplies for carrying on the war. Thence, on a more questionable errand, they had moved further north. The little mountain realm of Navarre on the Pyrenees, a buffer state between Castile and France, belonged to the descendants of Ferdinand’s father by his first wife. The desire of the Aragonese King to unite Navarre to Ferdinand’s kingdoms, had removed by murder one Navarrese sovereign after another, until now, in 1482, the beautiful young half French Francis Phoebus was King. He was one more obstacle to be removed; for after him a sister would come to the throne, and she might be easily dealt with: so poison ended the budding life of Francis Phoebus—by Ferdinand’s orders, it was credibly said at the time;^[41] and Ferdinand and his wife hurried up to Vitoria, bent, if possible, upon adding one more crown to the brows of the Queen of Castile.^[42] It was a cynically clever move of Ferdinand’s, for it would bring Castile in touch with France, and thus play into the hands of the Aragonese, but the threatening attitude of Louis XI. convinced Ferdinand that he must wait for a more fitting opportunity, which he did for thirty years, when Isabel had long been dead. When the news came to Tarazona, where the Cortes of Aragon were in session, that Boabdil was captured, Ferdinand hurried south to Cordova to reap the fruits of victory, leaving Isabel in Castile.

In the great hall of the Alcazar of Cordova, Ferdinand sat in council in August 1483, surrounded by the soldiers who in his absence had overrun the vega, and two Moorish embassies claimed audience. One came from the old King, Muley Abul Hassan, in Malaga, begging with heavy bribes the surrender of his rebellious son Boabdil. This embassy Ferdinand refused to receive; but the other from the Queen Zoraya, Boabdil’s mother, with offers of ransom, submission, and obedience, was admitted. Ferdinand was the craftiest man of his age, and saw that the imprisonment of Boabdil gave unity to the Granadan Moors, whilst his presence amongst them would again be the signal for fratricidal conflict. But the King of Aragon drove a hard bargain, as he always did, and the foolish, vain Boabdil only bought his liberty at a heavy price. He was to do homage to the Christian kings, to pay a heavy ransom and yearly tribute, and give passage to the Christian armies to conquer his father in Malaga. Boabdil meekly subscribed to any terms, and then paying homage on bended knee to his master, he wended his way to Moorish land, a mark for the scorn of all men, ‘Boabdil the Little’ for the rest of time.

Anarchy thenceforward reigned through the kingdom of Granada, as Ferdinand had foreseen. I shall pluck the pomegranate, seed by seed, chuckled the Christian king. And so he did; for, although a two years’ truce had been settled with Boabdil, the civil war gave to the Christian borderers constant opportunities of overrunning the land, on the pretext of aiding or avenging one of the combatants and attacking the old King. Ferdinand would fain have attacked the new King of France, Charles VIII., but Isabel was firm; and though Ferdinand was thereafter obliged to stay a time in his own dominions to placate the discontented Catalans, Isabel was tireless in her insistence upon the Christian crusade that she had undertaken, though, for appearance sake, she consented to both wars being carried on at the same time, which she knew was impracticable.^[43] The spirit of the woman was indomitable. Travelling south towards the seat of war in 1484 with the new Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Mendoza, she herself took command of the campaign against the Moor.

It was, verily, her own war. In counsel with veteran soldiers she surprised them with her boldness and knowledge; and her harangues to the soldiery, and care for their welfare, caused her to be idolised by men who had never yet regarded a woman as being capable of such a stout heart as hers. She managed even to spur Ferdinand into leaving Aragon, and once more taking the field against the old King of Granada, and, one by one, the Moorish fortresses fell, and the Christian host encamped almost before the walls of Granada: the Queen herself, though approaching childbirth (in 1485), travelling from place to place in the conquered country, encouraging, supervising, and directing. The following year, 1486, Isabel and her husband again travelled to Cordova from Castile, and now with a greater force than ever before. For news of this saintly warrior Queen, who was fighting for the cross, had spread now through Christendom, and not Iberian knights alone, but the chivalry of France and Italy, Portugal and England, were flocking to share the glory of the struggle.

At the conquest of Loja in May 1486, Lord Rivers, Conde de Escalas, as the Spaniards called him, aided greatly with his men in capturing the place, and earned the praise of Isabel.^[44] As each church was dedicated to the true worship in the conquered towns, Isabel herself contributed the sacred vessels and vestments necessary for Christian worship; relics of the saints, and blessed banners sent by her, went always with the Castilian hosts; and soon the spiritual pride, which had been the secret of all Spain’s strength in the past, became again the overwhelming obsession, which, whilst it strengthened the arms, hardened the hearts of all those who owned the sway of Isabel.

In December 1485, Isabel’s last child, Katharine, was born at AlcalÁ de Henares, and through most of the stirring campaigns of 1486 the Queen accompanied the army in their sieges of Moorish towns, and thence rode with her husband right across Spain to far Santiago, crushing rebellion (that of Count Lemos), holding courts of justice, punishing offences and rewarding services on the way. The next spring again saw her in the field against the important maritime city of Velez-Malaga, which was captured in April; and in the autumn the great port of Malaga fell after an heroic defence. But heroism of infidels aroused no clemency in the breast of the Christian Queen. By her husband’s side, with cross borne before them, and a crowd of shaven ecclesiastics around them, they rode in triumph through the deserted city to the mosque, now purified into a Christian cathedral. Christian captives in chains were dragged from pestilent dungeons that the manacles might be struck from their palsied limbs in the victors’ presence, and when the Christians had given thanks to the Lord of Hosts, the whole starving population of Malaga were assembled in the great courtyard of the fortress, and every soul was condemned to slavery for life: some to be sent to Africa in exchange for Christian captives; some to be sold to provide funds for the war, some for presents for the Pope and other potentates and great nobles, whilst all the valuables in the wealthy city were grabbed by greedy Ferdinand, by one of his usually clever and heartless devices.^[45]

ISABEL THE CATHOLIC AT THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA.
After a Painting by Pradilla.

The want of magnanimity and common humanity to these poor people, who had only defended their homes against the invader, is usually ascribed entirely to Ferdinand; but there is nothing whatever to show that Isabel thought otherwise than he, except that she objected to a suggestion that they should all be put to the sword. She was a child of her age, an age that did not recognise the right of others than orthodox Christians to be regarded as human beings; and in Isabel all instinctive womanly feeling was dominated by her conviction of the greatness of her duty as she understood it, and the sacred mission of her sovereignty. The fall of Malaga rendered inevitable that of the city of Granada, only held, as it was, under the nominal rule of the miserable Boabdil, supported by the Christian troops under Gonzalo de Cordova. Every week his little realm grew smaller, and every hour the streets of Granada rang with Moslem curses of his name. Outside the walls rapine and war, inside treachery and murder, scourged Granada; and whilst the pomegranate was rotting to its fall, in the intervals of fresh conquests Isabel and her husband progressed through Aragon and Valencia, everywhere carrying terror to evildoers and strengthening the arm of the Inquisition. The next year, 1488, the same process was continued, and in 1489 the large cities of Baza, Almeria and Guadix were conquered from Boabdil’s rebel uncle. Baza was the strongest fortress in the kingdom, and offered a resistance so obstinate that the Christians, despairing of taking it, sent to Isabel at Jaen, asking her permission to raise the siege. She commanded them to redouble their efforts. Fresh men, money and munitions were sent to them. The Dukes of Alba and Najera, and the Admiral of Castile, were bidden to lead their men to aid Ferdinand before Baza. New field hospitals were supplied, and all the Mancha and Andalucia were swept for food and transport, no less than 14,000 mules, for the relief of the besiegers. Floods broke down the bridges and made the roads impassable, but still Isabel did not lose heart. A body of 6000 men were raised to repair the ways. The cost exhausted the Queen’s treasury, but she laid hands on the church plate and the treasures of the convents, pledged her own crown with the Jews to overcome the obstacle, and raised a hundred million maravedis for her purpose. Her ladies followed her example and poured their gold and jewels into her coffers, and yet Baza still held out, and winter was close at hand. Ferdinand was for abandoning the siege, but the stout-hearted Queen herself set out from Jaen in November, and rode undaunted through the bitter weather, night and day, to join her troops at Baza. Her presence struck the Moors with dismay, and filled the Christian hearts with confidence, for both knew that there she would stay, at any cost, until the place surrendered, as it did, to her, on the 4th December 1489,^[46] whereupon Almeria and Guadix gave up the struggle, and the Queen and her husband returned to winter at Seville, knowing now that Granada itself was theirs for the plucking when the season should arrive.

All through the year 1490 the preparations for the crowning feat went on throughout Castile. Patriotism, in the sense of a common pride of territory, did not exist in Spain; but already in the nine years that the Inquisition had been at work, and Isabel’s fiery zeal against the Moors had continued, the spiritual arrogance, always latent, had knit orthodox Spaniards together as they had never been bound before. To the majority, the persecution of a despised and hated minority was confirmation of their own mystic selection. Isabel was the personification of the feeling, and to her, as to her people now, the oppression of the unbeliever was an act that singled her out as the chosen of God to vindicate His faith. So Torquemada and the Inquisition, with the approval of the Queen, harried the wretched Jews, who professed Christianity, more cruelly every day.^[47] If a ‘New Christian’ broke bread with a Jew it was the former who was punished. If he dared to wear clean linen on Saturday, or used a Hebrew name, the Dominican spies, who dogged his footsteps, accused him, and the flames consumed his carcass whilst Ferdinand emptied his coffers. The revenue of the Jewish confiscations had provided much of the treasure needed for the constant war of the last eight years; but Ferdinand wanted more, and ever more, money before Granada could be made into a Christian city. Isabel would conquer Granada, and at any cost gain the undying glory of recovering for Christ the last spot in Spain held by the infidel. Injustice, cruelty, robbery, and the torture of innocent people were nothing, less than nothing, to the end she aimed at; and when the flames were found all too slow for feeding Ferdinand’s greed, Isabel easily consented to a blow being struck at the unbaptised Jews, in a body, whenever it was necessary to collect a specially large sum of money for her war.

In April 1491, the siege of the lovely city, set in its vast garden plain, was begun. The Moors inside were gallant and chivalrous, determined to sell their city dearly, however their spiritless King might deport himself; but their dashing cavalry sallies where almost futile against an army so carefully organised and disciplined as that of Isabel. The head quarters of the Christian Queen were about two leagues from Granada, and when Isabel joined her army the siege opened in grim earnest. The many contemporary chroniclers of the campaign have left us astonishing descriptions of the dazzling splendour which surrounded the Queen. She, who in the privacy of her palace was sober in her attire, and devoted to housewifely duties, could, when she thought desirable, as she did before Granada, present an appearance of sumptuous splendour almost unexampled. Her encampment, with its silken tents magnificently furnished, its floating banners and soaring crosses, were such as had never been since the time of the Crusades. On a white Arab charger, with floating mane and velvet trappings to the ground, the Queen, herself dressed in damascened armour and regal crimson, was everywhere animating, consoling, and directing. Cardinals and bishops, princes, nobles and ladies, thronged around her; and every morning as the sun tipped with gold the snow peaks of the Sierra, all in that mighty host, from the Queen down to the poorest follower, bowed before the gorgeous altar in the midst of the camp, whilst the Cardinal of Spain (Mendoza) performed the sacred mystery of the mass.

One night in the summer (14th July) the Queen had retired to her tent and was sleeping, when, two hours after midnight, a lamp by her bedside caught the hangings, stirred by the breeze, and in a minute the great pavilion was ablaze. Isabel in her night garb had barely time to escape, and witnessed the conflagration spread from tent to tent till much of the encampment was reduced to ruin. At the cries and bugle calls of the distressed Christians, the Moors afar off on the walls beheld with joy the discomfiture of their enemies; and if another leader than Boabdil had been in command, it would have gone ill with Isabel and her men. But there was no defeat for a woman with such a spirit as hers. The suggestions that the siege should be raised until the next year, she rejected in scorn. Once again her virile spirit had its way. More money was raised, mostly squeezed out of the miserable Jews; the army was quartered in neighbouring villages, and within eighty days a city of masonry and brick replaced the canvas encampment, and here, in the city of Santa Fe,^[48] Isabel solemnly swore to stay, winter and summer, until the city of Granada should surrender to her.

Granada was entirely cut off from the world. The coast towns were no longer in Moorish hands, and no succour from Africa could come to the unhappy Boabdil. The desperate warriors of the crescent were for sallying en masse and dying or conquering, once for all; but Boabdil was weak and incapable; and less than a month after the completion of Isabel’s new city of Santa Fe, he made secret advances to his enemy at his gates for a capitulation. The Queen entrusted the greatest of her captains, Gonzalo de Cordova, who understood Arabic, with the task of negotiation; but soon the news was whispered inside the city, and twenty thousand furious Moorish warriors rushed up the steep hill to the Alhambra, to demand a denial from the King. Seated in the glittering hall of the ambassadors, Boabdil received the spokesmen of his indignant people, and pointed out to them with the eloquence of despair the hopelessness of the situation; and the wisdom of making terms whilst they might. Stupefied and grief-stricken the populace acknowledged the truth, bitter as it was, and with bowed heads and coursing tears left the beautiful palace that was so soon to pass from them.

The negotiations were protracted, for Granada was divided and might still have held out, and the Moors begged hard for at least some vestige of independence as a State. But at last, on the 28th November 1491, the conditions were agreed to. The Granadan Moors were to enjoy full liberty for their faith, language, laws and customs; their possessions and property were to be untouched, and those who did not desire to owe allegiance to Christian sovereigns were to be aided to emigrate to Africa. The tribute to be paid was the same as that rendered to the Moorish King, and the city was to be free from other taxation for three years; whilst Boabdil was to have a tiny tributary kingdom (Purchena) of his own in the savage fastnesses of the Alpujarra mountains, looking down upon the splendid heritage that had been his. The terms were generous to a beaten foe, and their gentleness is usually ascribed to Isabel. Since, however, they were afterwards all violated with her full consent, it matters little whether the Queen or her husband drafted them. But mild as the conditions of surrender were, many of the heartbroken Moors of the city were still for fighting to the death in defence of the land of their fathers and their faith; and Boabdil, in deadly fear for his life, begged the visitors to hasten the taking possession of the city. On the last day but one of the year 1491, the Christian men-at-arms entered the Alhambra; and on the 2nd January 1492, a splendid cavalcade went forth from the besieging city of Santa Fe to crown the work of Isabel the Catholic. Surrounded by all the nobles and chivalry of Castile and Aragon, the Queen, upon a splendid white charger, rode by her husband’s side, followed by the flower of the victorious army. Upon a hill hard by the walls of the city, Isabel paused and gazed upon the towers and minarets, and upon the two fortresses that crowned the sister heights, for which her heart had yearned. This must have seemed to her the most glorious moment of her life: for the last stronghold of Islam was within her grasp; and well she must have known that, capitulations notwithstanding, but a few short years would pass before the worship of the false prophet would disappear from the land where it had prevailed so long.

At a signal the gates of the city opened, and a mournful procession came towards the royal group upon the rise. Mounted upon a black barb came Boabdil the Little, dusky of skin, with sad, weeping eyes downcast. His floating haik of snowy white half veiled a tunic of the sacred green, covered with barbaric golden ornaments. As he approached the group upon the mound, the conquered King made as if to dismount, and kneel to kiss the feet of the Queen and her husband. But Ferdinand, with diplomatic chivalry, forbade the last humiliation, and took the massive keys of the fortress, whilst Boabdil, bending low in his saddle, kissed the sleeve of the King as he passed the keys to the Queen, who handed them to her son, and then to the Count of Tendilla, the new governor of the city. Four days later, Granada was swept and garnished, purified with holy water, ready for the entry of the Christian Sovereigns.^[49] The steep, narrow lane leading to the Alhambra from the Gate of Triumph was lined by Christian troops, and only a few dark-skinned Moors scowled from dusky jalousies high in the walls, as the gallant chivalry of Castile, Leon, and Aragon, flashed and jingled after the King and Queen. As they approached the Alhambra, upon the tower of Comares there broke the banner of the Spanish Kings fluttering in the breeze, and at the same moment, upon the summit of the tower above the flag, there rose a great gilded cross, the symbol of the faith triumphant.

Then, at the gates, the heralds cried aloud, ‘Granada! Granada! for the Kings Isabel and Ferdinand;’ and Isabel, dismounting from her charger, as the cross above glittered in the sun, knelt upon the ground in all her splendour, and thanked her God for the victory. The choristers intoned Christian praise in the purified mosque, whilst the Moors, who hoped to live in favour of the victors, led by the renegade Muza, added the strange music of their race to the thousand instruments and voices that acclaimed the new Queen of Granada. Amidst the rejoicing and illuminations that kept the city awake that night, Boabdil the beaten was forgotten. When he had delivered the keys of the Alhambra, he had refused to be treated by his followers any longer with royal honours, and had retired weeping to the citadel, soon to steal forth with a few followers and his masculine mother to the temporary shelter of his little principality.^[50] When the sad cavalcade came to the hill called Padul, ‘The last sigh of the Moor,’ thenceforward tears coursed down the bronze cheeks of the King as he gazed upon the lost kingdom he was to see no more. ‘Weep! weep!’ cried his mother, ‘weep! like a woman for the city you knew not how to defend like a man.’

Throughout Christendom rang the fame of the great Queen, whose steadfastness had won so noble a victory; and even in far-off England praise of her, and thanks to the Redeemer whose cause she had championed, were sung throughout the land. For the conquest of Granada marked an epoch, and sealed with permanence and finality the Christianisation of Europe, the struggle for which had begun eight centuries before, from the mountains of Asturias. The imagination of the world was touched by the sight of a warrior-crusading Queen, more splendid in her surroundings than any woman since Cleopatra, who yet was so modest, meek, and saintly in the relations of daily life, so exemplary a mother, so faithful a wife,^[51] so wise a ruler; and the cautious, unemotional Ferdinand, whose ability as a statesman was even greater than that of his wife, was overshadowed by her radiant figure, because she fought for an exalted abstract idea, whilst his eyes were for ever turned towards the aggrandisement of himself and Aragon. She could be cruel, and deaf to pleas for mercy, because in her eyes the ends she aimed at transcended human suffering; he could be mean and false, because his soul was baser and his objects all mundane.

In the Christian camp before Granada there had wandered a man who was not a warrior, but a patient suitor, waiting upon the leisure of the Sovereigns to hear his petition. He was a man of lofty stature, with light blue eyes that gazed afar away, fair, florid face and ruddy hair, already touched with snow by forty years of toil and hardship. He had long been a standing joke with some of the shallow courtiers and churchmen that surrounded the Queen, for he was a dreamer of great dreams that few men could understand, and, worst offence of all, he was a foreigner, a Genoese some said. He had followed the Court for eight long years in pursuit of his object, the scoff of many and the friend of few; but the war, and the strenuous lives that Isabel and Ferdinand lived, had again and again caused them to postpone a final answer to the prayer of the Italian sailor, who had, to suit Spanish lips, turned his name from Cristoforo Colombo to Cristobal Colon.

At the end of 1484,^[52] the man, full of his exalted visions, had sailed from Lisbon, disgusted at the perfidy of the Portuguese, who had feigned to entertain his proposals only to try to cheat him of the realisation of them. His intention was first to sail to Huelva in Spain, where he had relatives, and to leave with them his child Diego, who accompanied him, whilst he himself would proceed to France, and lay his plans before the new King, Charles VIII. Instead of reaching Huelva, his pinnace was driven for some reason to anchor in the little port of Palos, on the other side of the delta, and thence the mariner and his boy wended their way to the neighbouring Franciscan Monastery of St. Maria de la Rabida, to seek shelter and food, at least for the child. Colon, as we shall call him here, was an exalted religious mystic, full of a great devotional scheme, and himself, in after years, wore a habit of St. Francis. It was natural, therefore, that he should be well received by the brothers in that lonely retreat overlooking the delta of the Rio Tinto; for he was, in addition to his devotion, a man of wide knowledge of the world as well as of science and books, and in the monastery there was an enlightened ecclesiastic who had known courts and cities, one Friar Juan Perez, who had once been a confessor of Queen Isabel. With him and the physician of the monastery, Garcia Hernandez, Colon discussed cosmogony, and interested them in his theories, and the aims that led him on his voyage. The mariner needed but little material aid, two or three small ships, which could easily have been provided for him by private enterprise. But his plans were far reaching, and well he knew that to be able to carry them out, the lands he dreamed of discovering could only produce for him the means to attain the result he hungered for, if a powerful sovereign would hold and use them when he had found them.^[53]

There was a great magnate within a few days’ journey of the monastery, who himself was almost a sovereign, and not only had ships in plenty of his own, but could, if he pleased, obtain for any plan he accepted the patronage of powerful sovereigns. This was the head of the Guzmans, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Andalucian noble who controlled the port of Seville and the coasts of the south. It must have seemed worth while to Colon to address himself to this neighbouring noble before setting out on his long voyage to France; for he journeyed from La Rabida towards Seville, leaving his child, Diego, to be educated and cared for by the friars of the monastery. He found the Duke of Medina Sidonia irresponsive to his approaches, and was again thinking of taking ship to France, when he was brought into contact, by what means is not known, with another great noble almost as powerful as the head of the Guzmans, the Duke of Medina Celi, who, from his palaces at Rota and Puerto de Santa Maria, on the Bay of Cadiz, disposed of nearly as many sail as Medina Sidonia.

The magnate listened, often and attentively, to the eloquent talk of the sailor seer whom he lodged in his house: how, far away across the western ocean, beyond the islands that the Portuguese had found, lay Asia, the home of gems and spices rare, now only reached painfully across the forbidden lands of the infidel and by the Levant Sea, or perchance, though that was not sure, around the mighty African continent; that wealth untold lay there in pagan hands, awaiting those who, with cross and sword, should capture it, and win immortal souls for Christ, and so eternal glory. He, Colon, was the man destined by God to open up the new world foretold to Saint John in the tremendous dream of the Apocalypse, for some vast object of which he yet refrained to speak. Books, Seneca, Ptolemy, and the Arab geographers, the Fathers of the Church, legends half forgotten, the conclusions of science, the course of the stars, and the concentrated experience of generations of sailor men, were all used by the Genoese to convince the Duke. The prospect was an attractive one, and Medina Celi promised to fit out the expedition.

In the building yards of Port Santa Maria the keels of three caravels were laid down to be built under Colon’s superintendence. They were to cost three or four thousand ducats, and be fitted, provisioned and manned, for a year at the Duke’s expense; and Colon must have thought that now his dream was soon to come true, and that his doubt and toil would end. But for the inner purpose he had in view beyond the discovery of the easy way to Asia, he needed a patron even more powerful than Medina Celi; and it may have been the discoverer who took means to let the Queen of Castile know the preparations that were being made, or, as Medina Celi himself wrote afterwards, the information may have been sent to Court by the Duke, fearing to undertake so great an expedition without his sovereign’s licence.^[54] In either case, when Isabel was informed of it in the winter of 1485, she and her husband were in the north of Spain, and instructed the Duke to send Colon to court, that they might hear from his own mouth what his plans were.

The mariner arrived at Cordova on the 20th January 1486, with letters of introduction from the Duke to the Queen and his friends at court. The sovereigns were detained by business in Madrid and Toledo for three months after Colon came to Cordova; but his letters procured for him some friends amongst the courtiers there, with whom he discussed the theories he had formed, especially with the Aragonese Secretary of Supplies, the Jewish Luis de Sant’angel, who, throughout, was his enlightened and helpful friend. Most of the idle hangers-on of the court at Cordova, clerical and lay, made merry sport of the rapt dreamer who lingered in their midst awaiting the coming of the sovereigns. His foreign garb and accent, his strange predictions, absurd on the face of them—for how could one arrive at a given place by sailing directly away from it?—all convinced the shallow pates that this carder of wool turned sailor was mad.

When Isabel and Ferdinand at last arrived at Cordova, on the 28th April 1486, the season was already further advanced than usual to make preparations for the summer campaign: and there was little leisure for the sovereigns to listen to the vague theories of the sailor. But early in May Colon was received kindly by Isabel and her husband, and told his tale. Their minds were full of the approaching campaign, and of the trouble between Aragon and the new King of France about the two counties on the frontier unjustly withheld from Ferdinand; and after seeing Colon for the first time Isabel instructed the secretary, Alfonso de Quintanilla to write to the Duke of Medina Celi that she did not consider the business very sure; but that if anything came of it the Duke should have a share of the profits.

In the meanwhile Ferdinand and his wife were too busy to examine closely themselves into the pros and cons of Colon’s scheme, and followed the traditional course in such circumstances, that of referring the matter to a commission of experts and learned men to sift and report. The president of the commission was that mild-mannered but arrogant-minded confessor of the Queen, Father Talavera; the man of one idea whom the conquest of Granada for the cross blinded to all other objects in life. With him for the most part were men like himself, saturated with the tradition of the church, that looked upon all innovation as impiety, and all they did not understand as an invention of the evil one. So, when Colon sat with them and expounded his theories to what he knew were unsympathetic ears, he kept back his most convincing proofs and arguments; for his treatment in Portugal had taught him caution.^[55] There were two, at least, of the members of the commission who fought hard for Colon’s view, Dr. Maldonado and the young friar Antonio de Marchena, but they were outvoted; and when the report was presented it said that Colon’s project was impossible, and that after so many thousands of years he could not discover unknown lands, and so surpass an almost infinite number of clever men who were experienced in navigation.^[56]

Hardly had Talavera and his colleagues assured the sovereigns that the whole plan was impossible and vain, unfit for royal personages to patronise,^[57] than Ferdinand again took the field (20th May), and once more Cristobal Colon was faced by failure. But he was a man not easily beaten. During his stay at Cordova he had made many friends, and gained many protectors at Court. First was his close acquaintance, Luis de Sant’angel, by whose intervention he was so promptly received by the sovereigns after their arrival at Cordova; but others there were of much higher rank: the great Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Mendoza, the tutor of the Prince Don Juan, Friar Diego Deza, Friar Juan Perez, who had first received Colon at La Rabida, and was now at court, Alonso de Quintanilla, the Queen’s secretary, Juan Cabero, the intimate Aragonese friend and chamberlain of the King; and one who probably did more in his favour quietly than any one else, that inseparable companion of Isabel, Beatriz de Bobadilla, now Marchioness of Moya.

But it was weary waiting. As we have seen, the energies of the sovereigns were absorbed in the war. Ferdinand, moreover, was desperately anxious to finish it successfully, and get to Aragonese problems that interested him more directly; the intended war with France and that world-wide combination he was already planning, by which not the strength of Spain alone but that of all Christendom should be at his bidding, to humble his rival and exalt Aragon in Italy, the Mediterranean and the East. It was too much to expect that Ferdinand would welcome very warmly any project for frittering away in another direction the strength of the nation he was hungering to use for his own ends. Isabel, on the other hand, would naturally be inclined to listen more sympathetically to such a project as that of Colon. Here was half a world to be won to Christianity under her flag, here was wealth illimitable to coerce the other half, and, above all, here was the fair-faced mystic with his lymphatic blue eyes, like her own, showing her how the riches that would fall to his share were all destined for a crusade even greater than that of Granada, the winning of the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel, and the fixing for ever of the sovereign banner of Castile upon the country hallowed by the footsteps of our Lord. To Isabel, therefore, more than to Ferdinand, must it be attributed, that when the campaign of 1486 was ended the Italian mariner was not dismissed, notwithstanding the unfavourable report of Talavera’s commission.

The sovereigns were obliged to start out to far Galicia, as has been related on page 64; but before they went they replied to Colon that, ‘though they were prevented at present from entering into new enterprises, owing to their being engaged in so many wars and conquests, especially that of Granada, they hoped in time that a better opportunity would occur to examine his proposals and discuss his offers.’^[58] This answer, at all events, prevented Colon’s supporters in Spain from despairing; and whilst the monarchs were in Galicia in the winter of 1486, the Dominican Deza, the Prince’s tutor, who was also a professor at Salamanca, conceived the idea that an independent inquiry by the pundits of the university might arrive at a different conclusion from that of Talavera’s commission, and undo the harm the latter had effected. Though there is no evidence of the fact, it is certain that Deza, who was a Castilian and a member of the Queen’s household, would not have taken such a step as he did without Isabel’s consent. In any case, Colon travelled to Salamanca; and there, as the guest of Deza in the Dominican monastery of Saint Stephen, he held constant conference with the learned men for whom the famous University was a centre.

Isabel and her husband themselves arrived at Salamanca in the last days of the year 1486, and heard from Deza and other friends that, in the opinion of most of them, the plans of Colon were perfectly sound. The effect was seen at once: the mariner accompanied the Court to Cordova in high hopes, no longer an unattached projector of doubtful schemes, but a member of the royal household. Before once more taking the field in the spring of 1487, the Queen officially informed Colon that ‘when circumstances permitted she and the King would carefully consider his proposal’; and in the meantime a sum of 3000 maravedis was given to him for his sustenance, a grant that was repeated, and sometimes exceeded, every few months afterwards. In August 1487, Colon was summoned by the sovereigns to the siege of Malaga, probably to give advice as to some maritime operations; but thenceforward he usually resided in Cordova, awaiting with impatience the convenience of the Queen and King.

During the heartbreaking delay he entered again into negotiation with the Kings of Portugal, France, and England, but without result; and it was only when the city of Granada was near its fall, and the end of the long war in sight, that Colon, following the sovereigns in Santa Fe, saw his hopes revive. Now, for the first time, he was invited to lay before them the terms he asked for if success crowned his project. Isabel had been already gained to Colon’s view by the transparent conviction of the man and his saintly zeal. His friends at Court were now many and powerful, and Ferdinand himself had not failed to see that the promised accession of wealth to be derived from the discovery would strengthen his hands. Perhaps he, like Isabel, had been dazzled with Colon’s life dream of the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; for that would, if it were effected, tend to realise the highest ambitions of Aragon. But Ferdinand, as a prudent man of business, never allowed sentiment, however exalted, to override practical considerations. When, therefore, the terms demanded by Colon were at length submitted to him and the Queen, he unhesitatingly rejected them as absolutely out of the question. Much obloquy has been heaped upon Ferdinand for his lack of generosity in doing so; but a perusal of the conditions, with a consideration of the circumstances and ideas of the times, will convince any impartial person that Ferdinand’s first rejection of them was more to his credit than his subsequent acceptance with the obvious intention of violating them.

They were, indeed, extravagant and impracticable to the last degree. The title of Admiral had only been given in Spain to nobles of the highest rank and greatest possessions. The office, usually hereditary, carried with it seignorial rights over the coasts and ports that were practically sovereign, as in the case of the Enriquezs in Castile and of Medina Sidonia in Andalucia. And yet Colon, a plebeian Italian sailor, dropped as if from the clouds, made as his first demand, that he should be recognised as ‘Admiral of all the islands and continents that may be discovered or gained by his means, for himself during his life, and for his heirs and successors for ever, with all the prerogatives and pre-eminences appertaining to such office, as they are enjoyed by Don Alonso Enriquez, your Admiral of Castile.’ The Admiral of Castile was Ferdinand’s uncle, and the second person in realm after the blood royal; and, although the office was hereditary in his house, the sovereigns of Castile had never surrendered the power of withdrawing the title if they pleased, whereas the Italian mariner demanded that for ever he and his should be practically independent of the sovereigns. The second condition was, that Colon was to be Governor and Viceroy of all islands and continents discovered, with the right of nominating three persons for each sub-governorship or office from which the sovereigns were bound to choose one. This latter condition was also an infraction of the right of the kings to choose their own officers freely. The discoverer claimed for himself and his heirs for ever one clear tenth of all merchandise, gold, gems, pearls, and commodities of every sort, bought, bartered, found, gained, or possessed, in the territories discovered. It was just, of course, that Colon should be splendidly rewarded if success crowned his efforts, but the imagination reels at the idea of the stupendous wealth that would have been his by virtue of such a claim as this. But this was not all. Colon claimed the right, if he pleased, of taking one-eighth share in every expedition and trading venture leaving Spain for the Indies, and, to crown all, if any dispute arose with regard to the discoverer’s rights and profits, under the capitulation, he and his nominees were to be the sole judges of the case.

Most of these demands could not be legally granted under the laws of Castile, and it is no wonder that when Colon refused to modify them, he was curtly dismissed by Ferdinand, and told to go about his business and propose his plans elsewhere. There is no reason to doubt, in spite of romantic legends unsupported by evidence, that Isabel acquiesced in this action of her husband. She was, it is true, strongly in favour of the proposed undertaking; but she was a greater stickler than Ferdinand for her regal prerogatives, and it is unlikely that she would have lightly surrendered them thus any more than he. In any case, Colon, in high dudgeon, left Santa Fe with the intention of offering his plans to France. First visiting in Cordova the lady with whom he had lived, he proceeded on his way to La Rabida, where his son Diego was still living, thence to embark for France. In the monastery there he again met the guardian, Fray Juan Perez, the Queen’s confessor, to whom he told his tale of disappointment; and the physician, Hernandez, was summoned to the conference.

Colon, with his earnestness and eloquence, impressed them more than ever with the glowing prospects of wealth unlimited for Spain, and glory undying for the Christian Queen, who should bring pagan Asia into the fold of the Church; and, unknown to the explorer, Juan Perez sent post haste by a trusty messenger a letter to the Queen urging her not to let Colon go elsewhere with his plans. It is well-nigh two hundred miles, and a bad road, from Palos to Granada, and Isabel was in the midst of taking possession of the conquered city; but yet she found time to send back an answer within a fortnight to Perez, who, by one pretext or another, had detained Colon in the monastery, bidding her late confessor himself to come and see her without delay, that she might discuss with him the subject of his solicitude. Perez lost no time; for at midnight the same day, without a word to Colon, he rode out of La Rabida towards Granada.

What arguments he used to Isabel we do not know, probably he told her that Colon was inclined now to modify his pretensions. In any case, the good friar hurried back to the monastery with the cheering news that the Queen had promised to provide three caravels for the expedition, and summoned Colon to court again, sending him, in a day or two, two thousand maravedis to buy himself some new clothes, and make him fit to appear before her. It is extremely unlikely—indeed impossible—that Isabel should have taken this step without Ferdinand’s consent. She was the stronger vessel, and may have won him over to her way of thinking, aided probably by the representations of Juan Perez, that Colon’s terms would be modified.

The explorer arrived at Granada shortly after the triumphal entry of the conquerors, and saw Isabel (and presumably her husband) on several occasions at their quarters at Santa Fe. To Ferdinand’s annoyance he found that Colon still insisted upon the same impracticable conditions as before. Talavera, the new Archbishop of Granada, full of zeal for the Christianisation of his new diocese, frowned at all suggestions that might divert attention to another direction; and finally, the King and Queen decided to dismiss Colon for good as impossible to deal with. Rather than bate a jot of his vast claims, for, as he solemnly asserted afterwards, he needed not the wealth for himself, but to restore the Holy Land to Christendom, he wended his way heartbroken towards his home at Cordova; his red hair now blanched entire to snow. The glory for Spain of discovering a new world for civilisation was trembling in the balance. The great dreamer, hopeless, had turned his back upon the court after seven years of fruitless waiting, and Ferdinand, this time, had no intention of recalling him.

Then the keen business prescience of the Jew Secretary of Supplies, Luis de Sant’angel, pained that such bright hopes should be carried to other lands, took what, for a man of his modest rank, was a very bold step. He was a countryman of Ferdinand, and in his confidence, but it was to Isabel he went, and with many expressions of humility and apology for his daring,^[59] urged her not to miss such a chance as that offered by the Genoese. Sant’angel appears to have been under the impression that the main reason for Colon’s dismissal was the difficulty of the Castilian treasury providing the money he asked for, as he offered to lend the million maravedÍs necessary. It is quite likely, indeed, that he did not know the details of the explorer’s demands as to reward. Isabel appears to have thanked Sant’angel for his offer and opinion, with which she said she agreed; but asked him to defer the matter until she was more at leisure.

This was something gained; but the principal difficulty was to persuade Ferdinand. Another Aragonese it was who undertook it; that inseparable companion of the King, the Chamberlain, Juan Cabero. What arguments he employed we know not, but he was as astute as Ferdinand himself, and probably we shall not be far from the truth when we presume that he and his master agreed that, since the Queen was so bent upon the affair, it would be folly to haggle further over terms, which, after all, if they were found inconvenient, could be repudiated by the sovereigns, and it is probable that Isabel may have been influenced by the same view. So, a few hours only after Colon had shaken the dust of Santa Fe from his feet, a swift horseman overtook him at the bridge of Los Pinos, and brought him back to court.

Again he stood firm in his immoderate pretensions, and the chaffering with him was resumed, for it must have been evident to Ferdinand that the terms could never be fulfilled. It must not be forgotten that Colon had come with a mere theory. The plan was not to discover a new continent: there was no idea then of a vast virgin America, but only of a shorter way to Japan and the realms of the great Khan. Such a project, great as the profit that might result, would naturally loom less in the sight of contemporary Spaniards than the Christianisation of Granada, and it is unjust to blame Ferdinand for holding out against terms which were even a derogation of his own and his wife’s sovereignty. Isabel, far more idealist than her husband, was ready to accede to Colon’s demands, and her advocacy carried the day. Possibly, to judge from what followed, even she assented, with the mental reservation that she, as sovereign, could, if she pleased, cancel the concessions she granted to Colon if she found them oppressive.

The terms demanded, however, were not the only difficulty in the way. There was the question of ready money; and the war had exhausted the treasury. It is an ungracious thing to demolish a pretty traditional story, but that of Isabel’s jewels, sacrificed to pay for Colon’s first voyage, will not bear scrutiny.^[60] As a matter of fact, her jewels were already pawned for the costs of the war, and although Las Casas, Bernaldez, and Colon’s son Fernando, say that the Queen offered to Sant’angel to pawn her jewellery for the purpose, and it is probable enough that in the heat of her enthusiasm she may have made such a suggestion figuratively, it is now quite certain that the money for the expedition was advanced by Luis de Sant’angel, although not as was, and is, usually supposed, from his own resources, but from money secretly given to him for the purpose from the Aragonese treasury, of which he was a high officer.^[61]

The agreement with Colon was signed finally in Santa Fe on the 17th April 1492, and at the end of the month the great dreamer departed, this time with a light heart and rising hopes, to Palos and La Rabida to fit out his caravels, and sail on the 3rd August 1492 for his fateful voyage. With him went Isabel’s prayers and hopes; and during his tiresome and obstructed preparations at Palos, she aided him to the utmost by grants and precepts,^[62] as well as by appointing his legitimate son, Diego, page to her heir, Prince Juan, in order that the lad might have a safe home during his father’s absence. Although Isabel’s action in the discovery may be less heroic and independent of her husband, than her enthusiastic biographers are fond of representing, it is certain that but for her Ferdinand would not have patronised the expedition. Looking at the whole circumstances, and his character, it is difficult to blame him, except at last for agreeing to terms that he knew were impossible of fulfilment, and which he probably never meant to fulfil. But Isabel’s idealism in this case was wiser than Ferdinand’s practical prudence, so far as the immediate result was concerned, and to Isabel the Catholic must be given the glory of having aided Columbus, rather than to her husband, who was persuaded against his will.

Granada was conquered for Isabel, and it was now Ferdinand’s turn to have his way. For years Aragonese interests had had to wait, though, as Ferdinand well knew, the unifying process, which he needed for his ends, was being perfected the while. Under the stern rule of Torquemada the Inquisition had struck its tentacles into the nation’s heart, and, crazy with the pride of superiority over infidels, the orthodox Spaniard was rapidly developing the confidence in his divine selection to scourge the enemies of God, which made the nation temporarily great. Isabel was the inspiring soul of this feeling. A foreigner, visiting her court soon after Granada fell, wrote, as most contemporaries did of her, in enthusiastic praise of what we should now consider cruel bigotry. ‘Nothing is spoken of here,’ he says, ‘but making war on the enemies of the faith, and sweeping away all obstructions to the Holy Catholic Church. Not with worldly, but with heavenly aim, is all they undertake, and all they do seems inspired direct from heaven, as these sovereigns most surely are.’^[63]

This eulogium refers to the plan then under discussion for ridding Isabel’s realms of the taint of Judaism. We are told that to the Queen’s initiative this terrible and disastrous measure was due. ‘The Jews were so powerful in the management of the royal revenues that they formed almost another royal caste. This gave great scandal to the Catholic Queen, and the decree was signed that all those who would not in three months embrace the faith, were to leave her kingdoms of Castile and Leon.’^[64] Ferdinand was quite willing, in this case, to give the saintly Queen and her clergy a free hand, because, to carry out his world-wide combination to humble France, he would need money—very much money—and the wholesale confiscation of Jewish property that accompanied the edict of expulsion was his only ready way of getting it. On the 30th March 1492, less than three weeks before the signature of the agreement with Colon, the dread edict against the Jews went forth. Religious rancour had been inflamed to fever heat against these people, who were amongst the most enlightened and useful citizens of the State, and whose services to science, when the rest of Europe was sunk in darkness, make civilisation eternally their debtor. They were said to carry on in secret foul rites of human sacrifice, to defile the Christianity that most of them professed, and Isabel’s zeal, prompted by the churchmen, was already climbing to the point afterwards reached by her great-grandson, Philip II., when he swore that, come what might, he would never be a king of heretic subjects.

By the 30th July 1492 not a professed Jew was to be left alive in Isabel’s dominions. With cruel irony, in which Ferdinand’s cynical greed is evident, the banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to carry the money abroad with them. At least a quarter of a million of Spaniards of all ranks and ages, men, women, and children, ill or well, were driven forth, stripped of everything, to seek shelter in foreign lands. The decree was carried out with relentless ferocity, and the poor wretches, straggling through Spain to some place of safety, were an easy prey to plunder and maltreat. It was a saturnalia of robbery. The shipmasters extorted almost the last ducat to carry the fugitives to Africa or elsewhere, and then, in numberless cases, cast their passengers overboard as soon as they were at sea. It was said that, in order to conceal their wealth, the Jews swallowed their precious gems, and hundreds were ripped up on the chance of discovering their riches. There was no attempt or pretence of mercy. The banishment was intended, not alone to remove Judaism as a creed from Spain—that might have been done without the horrible cruelty that ensued—but as a doom of death for all professing Jews; for Torquemada had, five years before, obtained a Bull from the Pope condemning to major excommunication the authorities of all Christian lands who failed to arrest and send back every fugitive Jew from Spain.^[65] Isabel appears to have had no misgiving. Her spiritual guides, to whom she was so humble, praised her to the skies for her saintly zeal: her subjects, inflated with religious arrogance, joined the chorus raised by servile scribes and chroniclers, that the discovery of the new lands by Colon was heaven’s reward to Isabel for ejecting the Hebrew spawn from her sacred realm; and if her woman’s heart felt a pang at the suffering and misery she decreed, it was promptly assuaged by the assurance of the austere churchmen, who ruled the conscience of the Queen.

Leaving Talavera as archbishop, and Count de Tendilla as governor of conquered Granada, Isabel and her husband, with their children and a splendid court, travelled in the early summer of 1492 to their other dominions where their presence was needed. Ferdinand, indeed, was yearning to get back to his own people, who were growing restive at his long absence, and for the coming war with France, it was necessary for him to win the love of his Catalan subjects, who, at first, still remembering his murdered half-brother, the Prince of Viana, had borne him little affection. He had treated them, however, with great diplomacy, respecting their sturdy independence, and had asked little from them, and by this time, in the autumn of 1492, when he and Isabel, with their promising son, Juan, by their side, rode from Aragon through the city of Barcelona to the palace of the Bishop of Urgel, where they were to live, the Catalans were wild with enthusiasm for the sovereigns with whose names all Christendom was ringing.

Ferdinand nearly fell a victim to the attack of a lunatic assassin in December, as he was leaving his hall of justice at Barcelona, and during his imminent danger Isabel’s affection and care for him gained for her also the love of the jealous Catalans.^[66] Throughout the winter in Barcelona Ferdinand was busy weaving his web of intrigue around France and Europe, to which reference will presently be made, and in March 1493 there came flying to the court the tremendous news that Colon had run into the Tagus for shelter after discovering the lands for which he had gone in search. No particulars of the voyage were given; but not many days passed before Luis de Sant’angel, the Aragonese Treasurer Gabriel Sanchez, and the monarchs themselves, received by the hands of a messenger sent by the explorer from Palos, letters giving full details of the voyage.^[67] No doubt as to the importance of the discovery was any longer entertained, and when the Admiral of the Indies himself entered Barcelona in the middle of April, after a triumphal progress across Spain, honours almost royal were paid to him. He was received at the city gates by the nobles of the court and city, and led through the crowded streets to the palace to confront the sovereigns, at whose feet he was, though he and they knew it not, laying a new world. With him he brought mild bronze-skinned natives decked with barbaric gold ornaments, birds of rare plumage, and many strange beasts; gold in dust and nuggets had he also, to show that the land he had found was worth the claiming.

Ferdinand and Isabel, with their son, received him in state in the great hall of the bishop’s palace; and, rising as he approached them, bade him to be seated, an unprecedented honour, due to the fact that they recognised his high rank as Admiral of the Indies. With fervid eloquence he told his tale. How rich and beautiful was the land he had found; how mild and submissive the new subjects of the Queen, and how ready to receive the faith of their mistress. Isabel was deeply moved at the recital, and when the Admiral ceased speaking the whole assembly knelt and gave thanks to God for so signal a favour to the crown of Castile. Thenceforward during his stay in Barcelona, Colon was treated like a prince; and when he left in May to prepare his second expedition to the new found land, he took with him powers almost sovereign to turn to account and bring to Christianity the new vassals of Queen Isabel.

It is time to say something of Isabel’s family and her domestic life. As we have seen, she had been during the nineteen years since her accession constantly absorbed in state and warlike affairs; and the effects of her efforts to reform her country had already been prodigious, but her public duties did not blind her to the interests of her own household and kindred; and no personage of her time did more to bring the new-born culture into her home than she. She had given birth during the strenuous years we have reviewed to five children. Isabel, born in October 1470; John, the only son, in 1478; Joan in 1479, Maria in 1482, and Katharine at the end of 1485: and these young princesses and prince had enjoyed the constant supervision of their mother. Her own education had been narrow under her Dominican tutors, and that of Ferdinand was notoriously defective. But Isabel was determined that her children should not suffer in a similar respect, and the most learned tutors that Italy and Spain could provide were enlisted to teach, not the royal children alone, but the coming generation of nobles, their companions, the wider culture of the classics and the world that churchmen had so much neglected. And not book learning alone was instilled into these young people by the Queen. She made her younger ladies join her in the work of the needle and the distaff, and set the fashion for great dames to devote their leisure, as she did, to the embroidering of gorgeous altar cloths and church vestments, whilst the noble youths, no longer allowed, as their ancestors had been, to become politically dangerous, were encouraged to make themselves accomplished in the arts of disciplined warfare and literary culture.

Isabel, like all her descendants upon the throne, set a high standard of regal dignity, and in all her public appearances assumed a demeanour of impassive serenity and gorgeousness which became traditional at a later period; but she could be playful and jocose in her family circle, as her nicknames for her children prove. Her eldest girl, Isabel, who married the King of Portugal, bore a great resemblance to the Portuguese mother of Isabel herself, and the latter always called her child ‘mother,’ whilst her son Juan to her was always the ‘angel,’ from his beautiful fair face. She could joke, too, on occasion, though the specimens of her wit cited by Father Florez are a little outspoken for the present day; and her contemporary chroniclers tell many instances of her keen caustic wit. Her tireless and often indiscreet zeal for the spread of the faith has been mentioned several times in these pages; but submissive as she was to the clergy, she was keenly alive even to their defects, and the laxity of the regular orders, which had grown to be a scandal, was reformed by her with ruthless severity. Her principal instrument, perhaps the initiator, of this work was the most remarkable ecclesiastical statesman of his time, and one of the greatest Spaniards who ever lived, Alfonso Jimenez de Cisneros.

A humble Franciscan friar of over fifty, living as an anchorite in a grot belonging to the monastery of CastaÑar, near Toledo, after a laborious life as a secular priest and vicar-general of a diocese, would seem the last man in the world to become the arbiter of a nation’s destinies; and yet this was the strange fate of Jimenez. When Talavera was created Bishop of Granada, Isabel needed a new principal confessor; and, as usual in such matters, consulted the Cardinal Primate of Spain, Mendoza, who years before had been Bishop of SigÜenza, and had made Father Jimenez his chaplain and vicar-general, because his rival archbishop, that stout old rebel Carrillo, had persecuted the lowly priest. Mendoza knew that his former vicar-general had retired from the world, and was living in self-inflicted suffering and mortification; and he was wont to say that such a man was born to rule, and not to hide himself as an anchorite in a cloister. When, after the surrender of Granada, a new royal confessor was required, Jimenez, greatly to his dismay, real or assumed, was at the instance of the Cardinal summoned to see the Queen. Austere and poorly clad, he stood before the sovereign whom he was afterwards to rule, and fervently begged her to save him from the threatened honour. In vain he urged his unfitness for the life of a court, his want of cultivation and the arts of the world; his humility was to Isabel a further recommendation, and she would take no denial.

Thenceforward the pale emaciated figure, in a frayed and soiled Franciscan frock, stalked like a spectre amidst the splendours that surrounded the Queen; feared for his stern rectitude and his iron strength of will. His mind was full, even then, of great plans to reform the order of Saint Francis, corrupted as he had seen it was in the cloisters; and when the office of Provincial of the Order became vacant soon afterwards the new Confessor accepted it eagerly. Through all Castile, to every monastery of the Order, Jimenez rode on a poor mule with one attendant and no luggage; living mostly upon herbs and roots by the way. When, at last, Isabel recalled him peremptorily to her side, he painted to her so black a picture of the shameful licence and luxury of the friars, that the Queen, horrified at such impiety, vowed to sustain her Confessor in the work of reform. It was a hard fought battle; for the Priors were rich and powerful, and in many cases were strongly supported from Rome. All sorts of influences were brought to bear. Ferdinand was besought to mitigate the reforming zeal of Isabel and Jimenez, and did his best to do so. The Prior of the Holy Ghost in Segovia boldly took Isabel to task personally, and told her that her Confessor was unfit for his post. When Isabel asked the insolent friar whether he knew what he was talking about he replied, ‘Yes, and I know that I am speaking to Queen Isabel, who is dust and ashes as I am.’ But all was unavailing, the broom wielded by Jimenez and the Queen swept through every monastery and convent in the land; the Queen herself taking the nunneries in hand, and with gentle firmness examining for herself the circumstances in every case before compelling a rigid adherence to the conventual vows. When Mendoza died in January 1495, the greatest ecclesiastical benefice in the world after the papacy, the Archbishopric of Toledo, became vacant. Ferdinand wanted it for his illegitimate son, Alfonso of Aragon, aged twenty-four, who had been Archbishop of Saragossa since he was six. But Toledo was in the Queen’s gift, and to her husband’s indignation she insisted upon appointing Jimenez. The Pope, Alexander VI., who had just conferred the title of ‘Catholic’ upon the Spanish sovereigns, was by birth a Valencian subject of Ferdinand; and there was a race of the rival Spanish claimants to win the support of Rome. But Castile had right as well as might on his side this time, and, again to his expressed displeasure, Jimenez became primate of Spain, and the greatest man in the land after the King who distrusted him.^[68]

From their births Ferdinand had destined his children to be instruments in his great scheme for humbling France for the benefit of Aragon; and Isabel, in this respect, appears usually to have let him have his way. It was a complicated and tortuous way, which, in a history of the Queen, cannot be fully described. Suffice it to say that when Ferdinand found himself by the fall of Granada free to take his own affairs seriously in hand, he had for years been intriguing for political marriage for his children. First he had endeavoured to capture the young King of France, Charles VIII., on his accession in 1483, by a marriage with Isabel, the eldest daughter of Spain. Charles VIII. was already betrothed to Margaret of Burgundy, but Anne of Brittany, with her French dominion, was preferred to either, and then (1488) Ferdinand, finding himself forestalled, betrothed his youngest daughter, Katharine, to Arthur, Prince of Wales, to win the support of Henry Tudor in a war against France,^[69] to prevent the absorption of Brittany. All parties were dishonest; but Ferdinand outwitted allies and rivals alike. Henry VII. of England was cajoled into invading France; whilst Ferdinand, instead of making war on his side as arranged, quietly extorted from the fears of Charles VIII. an offensive and defensive alliance against the world, with the retrocession to Aragon of the counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne; and England was left in the lurch.

There is no doubt that the object of the King of France in signing such a treaty was to buy the implied acquiescence of Ferdinand in making good his shadowy claims to the kingdom of Naples, then ruled by the unpopular kinsman of Ferdinand himself. As was proved soon afterwards, nothing was further from Ferdinand’s thoughts than thus to aid the ambition of the shallow, vain King of France in the precise direction where he wished to check it. But in appearance the great festivities held in Barcelona on the signature of the treaty in January 1493, heralded a cordial settlement of the long-standing enmity between the two rivals. Isabel took her share in the rejoicings; and rigid bigots appear to have written to her late Confessor, Archbishop Talavera, an exaggerated account of her participation in the gaiety. Isabel, in answer to the letter of reprimand he sent her, defended herself with spirit and dignity, after a preface expressing humble submission. ‘You say that some danced who ought not to have danced; but if that is intended to convey that I danced, I can only say that it is not true; I have little custom of dancing, and I had no thought of such a thing.... The new masks you complain of were worn neither by me nor by my ladies; and not one dress was put on that had not been worn ever since we came to Aragon. The only dress I wore had, indeed, been seen by the Frenchmen before, and was my silk one with three bands of gold, made as plainly as possible. This was all my part of the festivity. Of the grand array and showy garments you speak of, I saw nothing and knew nothing until I read your letter. The visitors who came may have worn such fine things when they appeared; but I know of no others. As for the French people supping with the ladies at table, that is a thing they are accustomed to do. They do not get the custom from us; but when their great guests dine with sovereigns, the others in their train dine at tables in the hall with the ladies and gentlemen; and there are no separate tables for ladies. The Burgundians, the English and the Portuguese, also follow this custom; and we on similar occasions to this. So there is no more evil in it, nor bad repute, than in asking guests to your own table. I say this, that you may see that there was no innovation in what we did; nor did we think we were doing anything wrong in it.... But if it be found wrong after the inquiry I will make, it will be better to discontinue it in future. The dresses of the gentlemen were truly very costly, and I did not commend them, and, indeed, moderated them as much as I could, and advised them not to have such garments made. As for the Bull feasts, I feel, with you, though perhaps not quite so strongly. But after I had consented to them, I had the fullest determination never to attend them again in my life, nor to be where they were held. I do not say that I can of myself abolish them; for that does not appertain to me alone, nor do I defend them, for I have never found pleasure in them.^[70] When you know the truth of what really took place, you may determine whether it be evil, in which case it had better be discontinued. For my part all excess is distasteful to me, and I am wearied with all festivity, as I have written you in a long letter, which I have not sent, nor will I do so, until I know whether, by God’s grace, you are coming to meet us in Castile.’^[71]

This letter gives a good idea of Isabel’s submission to her spiritual advisers, as well as of her own good sense and moderation, which prevented her from giving blind obedience to them. Another instance of this is seen by Isabel’s attitude towards the chapter of Toledo Cathedral after the death of her friend Cardinal Mendoza (January 1495), the third King of Spain, as he had been called. The Queen travelled from Madrid to Guadalajara to be with him at his death, and tended him to the last, promising, personally, to act as his executor, and to see that all his testamentary wishes were fulfilled. Amongst these was the desire of the prelate to be buried in a certain spot in the chancel of the cathedral. To this the chapter had readily assented in the life of the archbishop, but when he had died they refused to allow the structural alterations necessary, and the matter was carried to the tribunals, which decided in favour of the executors. The chapter still stood firm in their refusal, and then the Queen, as chief executrix, took the matter in her own hands, and herself superintended the necessary demolition of the wall of the chapel at night, to the surprise and dismay of the chapter, who no longer dared to interfere.^[72]

On leaving Aragon after the signature of the hollow Treaty of Barcelona (1493), Isabel and her husband took up their residence in the Alcazar of Madrid, where, with short intervals, they remained in residence for the next six years. During this period, spent, as will be told by Ferdinand, in almost constant struggle for his own objects in Italy and elsewhere, Isabel was tireless in her efforts for domestic reform. The purification of the monasteries and convents went on continually under the zealous incentive of the new Archbishop of Toledo, Jimenez: the roads and water-sources throughout Castile were improved; the municipal authorities, corrupt as they had become by the introduction of the purchase of offices, and the effects of noble intrigue, were brought under royal inspection and control; and this, though it improved the government of the towns, further sapped their independence and legislative power. The Universities and high schools, which had shared in the universal decadence, were overhauled, and a higher standard of graduation enforced: the coinage, which had become hopelessly debased, in consequence of the vast number of noble and municipal mints in existence, was unified and rehabilitated: sumptuary pragmatics, mistaken as they appear to us now, but well-intentioned at the time, endeavoured to restrain extravagance and idle vanity: measures for promoting agriculture, the great cloth industry of Segovia and oversea commerce, and a score of other similar enactments during these years, from 1494 to the end of the century, show how catholic and patriotic was Isabel’s activity at the time that Ferdinand was busy with his own Aragonese plans. The annals of Madrid at this period give a curious account of Isabel’s prowess in another direction. The neighbourhood of the capital was infested with bears, and one particular animal, of special size and ferocity, had committed much damage. By order of the Queen a special battue was organised, and the bear was killed by a javelin in the hands of Isabel herself, upon the spot where now stands the hermitage of St. Isidore, the patron of Madrid.^[73]

Ferdinand’s marvellous political perspicacity, and the far-reaching combinations he had formed, now began to produce some of the international results for which he had worked. The Treaty of Barcelona had bound Ferdinand to friendship with France, and abstention from marrying his children in England, Germany or Naples, and implied the leaving to Charles VIII. of a free hand in Italy: but no sooner had Ferdinand received his reward by the retrocession of Roussillon and Cerdagne to him, than he broke all his obligations under the treaty. Charles VIII. had marched through Italy, to the intense anger of the native princes, and took possession of Naples, and then Ferdinand, in coalition with the Valencian Pope, Alexander VI., formed the combination of Venice, and Spanish troops under the great Castilian, Gonzalo de Cordova, expelled the French from Naples, and set up the deposed Aragonese-Neapolitan king, until it should please, as it soon did, Ferdinand to seize the realm for himself.

This war was an awakening to all Europe that a new fighting nation had entered into the arena. Already the proud spirit of superiority by divine selection was being felt by Spaniards as a result of the religious persecution of the minority, and the devotional exaltation inspired by the example of the Queen: and under so great a commander as Gonzalo de Cordova Spanish troops for the first time now showed the qualities which, for a century at least, made them invincible.^[74] Whilst this result attended the policy of Isabel and her husband in religious affairs, their action in another direction simultaneously, whilst for the moment seeming to give to Ferdinand the hegemony of Europe, really wrought the ruin of Spain by bringing her into the vortex of central European politics, and burdening her with the championship of an impossible cause under impossible conditions.

Amidst infinite chicanery and baseness on both sides the marriage treaty of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine, with Arthur, Prince of Wales, had been alternately confirmed and relaxed, as suited Ferdinand’s interests. But he took care that it could be at any time revived when need should demand it. This made Ferdinand always able to deal a diverting blow upon France in the Channel. But Ferdinand’s main stroke of policy was the double marriage of his children, Juan, Prince of Asturias, with the Archduchess Margaret, daughter of Maximilian, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire; and of Joan, Isabel’s second daughter, with Philip, Maximilian’s son, and, by right of his mother, sovereign of the dominions of the Dukes of Burgundy with Holland and Flanders; whilst Isabel’s eldest daughter, already the widow of the Portuguese prince, Alfonso, was betrothed to his cousin, King Emmanuel. Imagination is dazzled at the prospect opened out by these marriages. The children of Philip and Joan would hold the fine harbours of Flanders, and would hem in France by the possession of Artois, Burgundy, Luxembourg, and the Franche ComtÉ; whilst their possession of the imperial crown and the German dominions of the house of Habsburg would identify their interests with those of Ferdinand in checking the French advance towards Italy. On the other side of the Channel the grandchildren of Ferdinand and Isabel would rule England, and hold the narrow sea; whilst the friendship between England and Scotland, prompted by Ferdinand, and the marriage of Margaret Tudor with James IV., deprived France of her ancient northern ally. The King of Aragon might then, with the assurance of success, extend his grasp from Sicily to the East, and become the master of the world. The plan was a splendid one; and for a time it went merry as the marriage bells that heralded it. With his family seated on the Portuguese throne, Ferdinand had, moreover, no attack to fear on that side from French intrigue, such as had often been attempted; and for a brief period it seemed as if all heaven had smiled upon the astute King of Aragon.

Isabel had always been an exemplary mother to her children, who, on their side, were deeply devoted to her. She had rarely allowed them to be separated from her, even during her campaigns; and had herself cared for their education in letters, music, and the arts under the most accomplished masters in Europe.^[75] When they had to be sacrificed one by one for the political ends of their father, Isabel’s love as a mother almost overcame her sense of duty as a queen, and in the autumn of 1496 she travelled through Spain with a heavy heart to take leave of her seventeen-year old daughter, Joan, for whom a great fleet of 120 sail was waiting in the port of Laredo, near Santander. The King was away in Catalonia preparing his war with France; the times were disturbed, and a strong navy with 15,000 armed men were needed to escort the young bride to Flanders, the home of her husband, Philip of Burgundy, heir of the empire, and to bring back to Spain the betrothed of Prince Juan, Philip’s sister, Margaret, who, in her infancy, had been allied to the faithless Charles VIII. of France. For two nights after the embarkation Isabel slept on the ship with her daughter, loath to part with her, as it seemed, for ever; and when, at last, the fleet sailed, on the 22nd August 1496, the mother, in the deepest grief, turned her back upon the sea, and rode sadly to Burgos to await tidings of her daughter.

Storms and disasters innumerable assailed the fleet. Driven by tempest into Portland, one of the largest of the ships came into collision and foundered; and though the young Archduchess received every courtesy and attention from the English gentry, she was not even yet at the end of her troubles; for on the Flemish coast another great ship was wrecked, with most of her household, trousseau, and jewels. Eventually the whole fleet arrived at Ramua, sorely disabled, and needing a long delay for refitting before it could return to Spain with the bride of Isabel’s heir.^[76] Whilst Joan was being married, with all the pomp traditional in the house of Burgundy, to her handsome, good-for-nothing husband, Philip, at Lille, Queen Isabel, at Burgos, in the deepest distress, was mourning for the loss of her own distraught mother, as well as for her daughter.^[77] Every post from Flanders brought the Queen evil news. The fleet that had carried Joan over, and was refitting to bring Margaret to Spain, was mostly unseaworthy: Philip neglected and ill-treated his wife’s countrymen to the extent of allowing 9000 of the men on the fleet at Antwerp to die from cold and privation, without trying to help them; already his young wife was complaining of his conduct. Her Spanish household were unpaid; and even the income settled upon her by Philip was withheld, on the pretext that Ferdinand had not fulfilled his part of the bargain, which was, of course, true.

At length, after what seemed interminable delay, the Archduchess Margaret arrived at Santander early in March 1497. Ferdinand, with a great train of nobles, received his future daughter-in-law as she stepped upon Spanish soil, and a few days later Queen Isabel welcomed her in the palace of Burgos, where, with greater rejoicing than had ever been seen in Castile, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabel was married to gentle Margaret, one of the finest characters of her time. Seven months afterwards the Prince of Asturias, at the age of twenty-one, was borne to his grave, and his wife gave birth to a dead child.^[78] The blow was one from which Isabel never recovered. Juan was her only son, her ‘angel,’ from the time of his birth; and the dearest wish of her heart had been the unification of Spain under him and his descendants. The next heiress was Isabel, her eldest daughter, just (August 1497) married to King Emmanuel of Portugal, and the jealous Aragonese and Catalans would hardly brook a woman sovereign; and, above all, one ruling from Portugal, when Ferdinand should die.^[79] Hastily Cortes of Castile was summoned at Toledo, and swore allegiance to the new heiress and her Portuguese husband as princes of Asturias in April 1498, but she, too, died in childbed in August, when the heirship devolved upon her infant son, Miguel, who, if he had lived, would have united not only Spain, but all the Iberian Peninsula under one rule. But it was not to be, and the babe followed his mother to the grave in a few months.

Troubles fell thick and fast upon Isabel and her husband. Death within three years had made cruel sport of all their plans; and the support of England, long held in the balance by Ferdinand, to be bought when it was worth the price demanded, had now to be obtained almost at any cost. The price had increased considerably; for Henry Tudor was as keen a hand at a bargain as Ferdinand of Aragon, and closely watched events. With the usual grasping dishonesty on both sides, the treaty for the marriage of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine, to the heir of England was again signed and sealed, and the young couple were married by proxy in May 1499. But Katharine was young. Her mother could hardly bring herself to part with her last-born, and send her for ever to a far country amongst strangers; and she fought hard for two years longer to delay her daughter’s going, with all manner of conditions and claims as to her future life. At length Henry of England put his foot down, and said he would wait no longer; and, worse still, he hinted that he would marry Arthur elsewhere, and throw his influence on the side of Philip of Burgundy, Ferdinand’s son-in-law, in the struggle that was already looming on the horizon. Isabel and her daughter both knew that the latter was being sent to serve her father’s political interests against her own sister and brother-in-law; but, from her birth, Katharine had been brought up in her mother’s atmosphere of uncompromising duty, surrounded by the ecstatic devotion which demanded serene personal sacrifice for higher ends; and, on the 21st May 1501, the Princess of Aragon bade a last farewell to her mother in the elfin palace of the Alhambra, to see her no more in her life of martyrdom.^[80]

Isabel’s health was already breaking down with labour and trouble. Disappointment faced her from every side, and as tribulations fell, bringing her end nearer, and ever nearer, the stern religious zeal that inflamed her grew more eager to do its work in her day. She had never been a weakling, as we have seen. From her youth the persecution of infidels had been as grateful to her sense of duty, as the crushing of her worldly opponents had been satisfying to her love of undisputed dominion. In all Castile, no man but her confessor, and he at his peril, had dared to say her nay; but at this juncture, when health was failing and her strength on the wane, there came to her tidings from across the sea that turned her heart to stone. Joan, her daughter, had always been somewhat wayward and rebellious at the gloomy, devout tone that pervaded her mother’s life, and Isabel had coerced her, on some occasions by forcible means, to take her part in the religious observances that occupied so large a share of attention at the Spanish court.^[81]

Joan was young and bright: the life in her palace at Brussels was free from the gloom that hung over crusading Castile. Philip, her husband, cared for little but pleasure, and, though he was but a faithless husband, she was desperately in love with him. The new culture, moreover, which had even found its way, with Peter Martyr, into Isabel’s court, had, in rich, prosperous Flanders, brought with it the freedom of thought and judgment that naturally came from the wider horizon of knowledge that men gained by it, and doubtless the change from the rigid and uncomfortable sanctimony of her native land to the gay and debonair society of Flanders had seemed to Joan like coming out of the darkness into the daylight. The Spanish priests who surrounded her sounded a note of warning to Isabel only a few months after Joan had arrived in Flanders. She was said to be lax in her religious duties: her old confessor, who continued to write to her fervent exhortations to preserve the faith as it was held in Spain, could get no reply to any of his letters, and he learnt that the gay Parisian priests, who flocked in the festive court, were leading Joan astray.

Isabel sent a confidential priest, Friar Matienzo, to Flanders to examine and report on all these, and the like accusations. He saw Joan in August 1498, and found her, as he says, more handsome and buxom than ever, though far advanced in pregnancy; but when he began to press her about religion, though she had plenty of reasons ready for what she did, she was as obstinate as her mother could be in holding her own way. She refused to confess at the bidding of the friar, to accept any confessor appointed by her mother, or to dismiss the French priests who were with her, and the friar sent the dire news to Isabel that her daughter had a hard heart and no true piety.^[82]

This was bad enough, but on the death of the Queen of Portugal, Isabel’s eldest daughter and heiress, leaving her infant son as heir to the united crowns, Philip assumed for himself and his wife, Joan, the title of Prince and Princess of Castile. This was a warning for Ferdinand.^[83] Already Philip and his father, the Emperor Maximilian, had shown that they had no idea of being the tools of Ferdinand’s foreign policy, but if Philip of Burgundy successfully asserted Joan’s right to succeed her mother as Queen of Castile, then all Ferdinand’s edifice of hope fell like a house of cards, for most of Spain would be governed by a foreigner, with other ends and methods, and poor, isolated Aragon, by itself, must sink into insignificance.

When the infant Portuguese heir, Miguel, died, early in 1499, the issue between Ferdinand and his son-in-law was joined. Isabel was visibly failing, and it was seen would die before her husband, in which case Joan would be Queen of Castile, in right of her mother. Philip, her husband, with the riches of Flanders and Burgundy, and the prestige of the empire behind him, would come, perhaps in alliance with the French, and reduce greedy, ambitious Ferdinand to the petty crown of Aragon. Thenceforward it was war to the knife between father and son-in-law, who hated each other bitterly; and Isabel’s distrust of her daughter Joan grew deeper as religious zeal and ambition for a united Spain joined in adding fuel to the fire. With true statesmanship Isabel, under the great influence of Jimenez, clung more desperately than ever to the idea of a Spain absolutely united. Ferdinand’s object in working for the consolidation of the realms had always been to forward the traditional objects of Aragon in humbling France, but those of Isabel and Jimenez were different. To them the spread of Christianity in the dark places of the earth, for the greater glory of Castile, was the end to be gained by a united Spain, and for that end it was necessary that the people should be unified in orthodoxy as well as in sovereignty. The cruel and disastrous expulsion of the Jews^[84] served this object in Isabel’s mind, though to Ferdinand its principal advantage was the filling of his war chest. The squandering of Castilian blood and treasure in Naples and Sicily was to Isabel and Jimenez a means of strengthening the Spaniards in their future Christianisation of north Africa, whilst to Ferdinand it meant the future domination of Italy, the Adriatic, and gaining the trade of the Levant for Barcelona.

When Isabel and her husband went to Granada, after a long absence, in 1499, with the all-powerful Jimenez in his dirty, coarse, Franciscan gown, the difference of view of the husband and wife was again seen. The Moors of Granada had lived, since their capitulation, contented and prosperous in the enjoyment of toleration for their customs and faith under the sympathetic rule of the Christian governor, the Count of Tendilla, and the ardent, but always diplomatic, religious propaganda of Archbishop Talavera. If these two men had been allowed to continue their gentle system for a generation, there is no doubt that in time Granada would have become Christian without bloodshed, even if it had retained its Arabic speech. But Jimenez and the Queen could not wait, and determined upon methods more rapid than those of Talavera. In the seven years that had passed since Granada surrendered to Isabel, the crown of Spain had become much more powerful. The prestige and wealth of the sovereigns had been increased; the discovery of America had considerably added to the importance of Castile, whilst the expulsion of the French from Naples had magnified Aragon. The Jews had been expelled from Spain, and, above all, the Inquisition, under the ruthless Torquemada, had raised the arrogance both of people and priests on the strength of the stainless orthodoxy of Spain.

Jimenez doubtless felt that the circumstances demanded, or at least excused, stronger measures towards the Moslems in Granada. He soon persuaded or stultified Talavera, and set about converting the Moors wholesale. Bribery, persuasion, flattery, were the first instruments employed, then threats and severity. Thousands of Moors were thus brought to baptism, with what sincerity may be supposed. Jimenez, a book lover himself, and afterwards the munificent inspirer of the polyglot Bible in his splendid new University of AlcalÁ, committed the vandalism of burning the priceless Arabic manuscripts that had been collected by generations of scholars in Granada. Five thousand magnificently illuminated copies of the Koran were cast into the flames, whilst many thousands of ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic texts were sacrificed to the blind bigotry and haste of Jimenez and Isabel, who, even in learning, drew the line at Christian writings. From sacrificing books to sacrificing men was but a step for Jimenez. Isabel and her husband had sworn to allow full toleration to the Moors, but what were oaths of monarchs as against the presumed interests of the faith? Soon the dungeon, the rack, and the thumbscrew came to fortify Jimenez’s propaganda, and, though the Moslems bowed their heads before irresistible force, they cursed beneath their breath the day they had trusted to the oath of Christian sovereigns.

The absence of Ferdinand and Isabel in Seville early in 1500, gave to Jimenez full freedom; and soon the strained cord snapped, and the outraged Moors rebelled. Like a spark upon tinder an excess of insolence on the part of one of Jimenez’s myrmidons set all Granada in a blaze; and the Primate was besieged in his palace, in imminent danger of death. He acted with stern courage even then, and refused to escape until Count de Tendilla with the soldiery dispersed the populace, and drove them into their own quarter, the Albaicin. There they were impregnable, and Tendilla, who was popular, with Talavera, even more beloved, took their lives in their hands, and unarmed and bareheaded entered the Albaicin to reassure the Moors. ‘We do not rise,’ cried the latter, ‘against their highnesses, but only to defend their own signatures,’^[85] and the beloved Archbishop and Governor, who left his own wife and children in the Albaicin as hostages of peace, soothed the Moors into quietude almost as soon as the storm had burst.

The news flew rapidly to Seville, though Jimenez’s version was not the first to arrive, and when he heard it, Ferdinand turned in anger to Isabel. ‘See here, madam,’ he said, handing her the paper, ‘our victories, earned with so much Spanish blood, are thus ruined in a moment by the rashness and obstinacy of your Archbishop.’^[86] Isabel herself wrote in grave sorrow to Jimenez, deploring that he had given her no proper explanation of what had happened; and after sending his faithful vicar, Ruiz, to placate the monarchs somewhat, the Archbishop himself appeared before the Queen and her husband. He was a man of tremendous power. Over Isabel his religious influence was great, and he proved now that he knew how to get at the weak side of Ferdinand. The Moors, he urged, had been converted by thousands; and so far, his work had been successful. But rebellion on the part of subjects could never be condoned, no matter what the cause, and he appealed to both sovereigns only to pardon Granada for its revolt on condition that every Moor should become a Christian or leave Spain. It was a shameful violation of a sacred pledge given only seven years before, but the rising of the Albaicin was the salve which Jimenez applied to the wounded honour of his Queen and King.

To Granada he returned triumphant, with the fell decree in the pocket of his shabby grey gown. More converts flocked in than ever when the alternative was presented to them. But up in the wild Alpujarras, the Moslem villagers and farmers looked with hatred and dismay at the lax townsmen abandoning Allah and his only prophet at the bidding of a ragged, sour-faced priest who broke his monarch’s word. Like an avalanche the mountaineers swept down from their fastnesses upon Malaga, beating back the Christian force from Granada which came to rescue the city. But Ferdinand from Seville and the greatest soldier in Europe, Gonzalo de Cordova, hastened with an army to crush the desperate handful who had defied an empire; and every Moor in arms, with many women and children, were pitilessly massacred. The repression was carried out with a savage ferocity and heartlessness only equalled by the despairing bravery of the insurgents; but at last, by the end of 1500, the few who were still left unconverted were brought to their knees: all except the fierce mountaineers of Ronda, a separate African tribe, notable even to-day for their lawlessness and indomitable independence. From their savage fortress over the gorge they repelled one Christian force after another, until Ferdinand himself, with vengeance in his heart against all rebels, came with an army strong enough to crush them. A ruinous ransom and instant conversion were dictated to them, and confiscation and death, or deportation to Africa, for those who hesitated.

Then came the turn of Granada itself. Jimenez and the new Inquisitor-General, Deza, the friend of Colon, demanded of Isabel and Ferdinand the establishment of the Inquisition in the city. This was considered too flagrant a violation of all promises; but what was refused in the letter was granted in the spirit; and the Inquisition of Cordova was given power to extend its operations over Granada. What followed will always remain a blot upon the name of Isabel, who with Jimenez was principally responsible. In July 1501, she with her husband issued a decree forbidding the Moslem faith throughout the kingdom of Granada, on pain of death and confiscation; and in February 1502, the wicked edict went forth, that the entire Moslem population, men, women, and all children of over twelve years, should quit the realm within two months, whilst they were forbidden to go to a Mahommedan country. Whither were the poor wretches to go but to Africa, opposite their own shores? and some found their way there. This was a pretext a few months afterwards for prohibiting any one to emigrate from Spain at all; and such Moors as still remained in Spain had only the alternatives of compulsory conversion or death.^[87] By the end of 1502 not a single professed Moslem was left in Spain; and Isabel, with saintly joy in her heart, could thank God that she had done her duty, and that in her own day the miracle had come to pass: the Jews expelled, the Moors ‘converted,’ the Inquisition scourging religious doubt with thongs of flame; all men in very fear bowing their heads to one symbol and muttering one creed. This was indeed a victory to be proud of, and it made Spain what it was and what it is.

To Isabel, in broken health and sad bereavement, it was the one ray of glory that gilded all her sorrow. Not the least of her troubles were those arising from her new domain across the sea. The impossible terms insisted upon by the discoverer had, as we have seen, been accepted with the greatest unwillingness by Ferdinand, and probably with no intention of fulfilling them; and when Colon began to prepare his second expedition on a great scale, and thousands of adventurers craved to accompany him, the King realised the danger that threatened his own plans in Europe if such an exodus continued; and, at the same time, the tremendous power that this foreign sailor, now Admiral of the Indies and perpetual Spanish Viceroy, with riches untold, would hold in his hands. So the process of undermining him began. The Council of the Indies was formed to control all matters connected with the new domain, and the priests that ruled it obstructed and thwarted the Admiral at every turn. Isabel was mainly concerned in winning her new subjects to Christianity; and four friars went this time in the fleet to baptise. All of them but his friend Marchena were disloyal to the chief, and so were the crowd of Aragonese who accompanied the expedition. Of the fifteen hundred adventurers who at last were selected, the great majority were greedy, reckless men whom the end of the Moorish war had left idle.

At first the news from Colon on his second voyage were bright and hopeful. New lands, richer than ever, were discovered, and the prospects of coming wealth from this source, whilst delighting the King, only made the downfall of the Admiral more inevitable. But soon the merciless violence of the colonists provoked reprisals, and every ship that returned to Spain brought to Isabel bitter complaints of Colon’s rapacity and tyranny; whilst he, on his side, denounced the want of discipline, of industry, and of justice, on the part of those who were rapidly turning a heaven into a hell. At length the complaints, both of friars and laymen, against the high-handed Admiral of the Indies, became so violent that the sovereigns summoned him to Spain to give some explanation of the position. Colon saw the Queen at Burgos in 1496, and found her, at least, full of sympathy for him in his difficulties, and still firmly convinced that his golden hopes would be fulfilled. But the reaction had set in against the extravagant expectations aroused by his second expedition. The idlers, many of them, had come back disappointed, fever-stricken and empty-handed, and had much evil to say of the despotic Italian who had lorded over land granted by the Viceregent of Christ at Rome to the Spanish sovereigns; and though Isabel herself, full of zeal for winning all Asia, as she thought, for the faith, did her best, the treasury was empty after the wars of Granada and Italy, and the heavy expense of the royal marriages then in progress.

Amidst infinite obstruction from the Council of the Indies, and with little but frowning looks from Ferdinand, Colon’s third expedition was painfully and slowly fitted out. Few adventurers were anxious to go now; and condemned criminals had to be enlisted for the service; but, withal, at length in May 1498, the Admiral sailed on his third voyage to his new land. When he arrived at his centre, the isle of Hispanola (Haiti), he found that a successful revolt of the lawless ruffians he had left behind had overturned all semblance of order and discipline. The mines were unworked, the fields untilled, the natives atrociously tortured, and violence everywhere paramount. Isabel’s verbal instructions to the Admiral when she took leave of him had been precise. Her first object, she said, was to convert the Indians to Christianity, and to carry to them from Spain, not slavery and oppression, but the gentle, Christian, virtues. This doubtless to some extent was the desire of Colon himself, with his mystic devotional soul, though wholesale slavery of natives was part of his system, and he set about his work of the reconciliation of the Indians, whose horrible sufferings had driven them to armed opposition or flight. The undisciplined Spaniards had the whip hand, and the Admiral could only with much diplomacy, and perhaps unwise concessions to them, at length bring some semblance of peace and order to the colony. But mild as his methods were on the occasion, they were bitterly resented by arrogant Spaniards, indignant that a foreigner should wield sovereign powers over them in their own Queen’s territory.

Complaints and accusations more bitter than ever came to the King and Queen by every ship. The men who returned to Spain assured Ferdinand that Colon was sacrificing every interest to his own insatiable greed; and Isabel, favourably disposed as she was to the discoverer generally, at length lost patience when she found that he was shipping cargoes of Indians to Spain to be sold for slaves. To enslave infidels was not usually held to be wrong, and Colon considered it a legitimate source of profit: but Isabel’s new subjects, mild and gentle as they were, had been looked upon by her as actual or potential Christians, and her indignation was great when she saw that Colon was treating them indifferently as chattels of his own.^[88] At length it was decided to send an envoy to Hispanola, with full powers to inquire into affairs and to take possession of all property and dispose of all persons in the new territories. The man chosen thus to exercise unrestrained power was Francisco de Bobadilla, probably a relative of the Queen’s great friend, Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya; but in any case an intolerant tyrant, who considered it his business, as, by Ferdinand, it was probably intended to be, to degrade the Admiral in any case. With unexampled insolence and harshness, he loaded the great explorer with manacles almost as soon as he arrived in Hispanola; and then, whilst Colon lay in prison, the whole of the charges against him were raked together, and, without any attempt to sift them judicially, were embodied in an act of accusation, and sent to Spain by the same caravel as that which carried in chains the exalted visionary, whose dream had enriched Castile with a new world.

The shameful home-coming of Colon in December 1500, struck the imagination and shocked the conscience of the people; and Isabel herself was one of the first to express her indignation. She and Ferdinand were at Granada at the time, and sent to the illustrious prisoner a dignified letter of regret, ordering him at once to be released, supplied with funds, and to present himself before them. The Queen received him in her palace of the Alhambra, and as he stood before his sovereign, with his bared white head bowed in grief and shame for the insult that had eaten into his very soul,^[89] Isabel lost her usual calm serenity and wept, whereupon the Admiral himself broke down, and he cast himself at the foot of the throne that he had so nobly endowed. The title of Admiral was restored to him: though in his stead as Viceroy was sent out Nicolas de Ovando, with thirty-two vessels and a great company of gentlemen. But disaster overtook the fleet; and, though Ovando arrived, most of the ships and men were lost, and thenceforward Isabel’s zeal for maritime adventure grew cooler.

The cost and drain of men for the enterprise had been very great. The fame of the discovery had rung through the world, and had exalted Isabel and Castile as they had never been exalted before, but up to this period the returns in money had been insignificant, whilst the unsettling influence of the adventure upon the nation at large had been very injurious. Ferdinand, for reasons already explained, always regarded it coldly; and the loss of Ovando’s fleet seemed to prove him right. When, therefore, Colon begged for the Queen’s aid to sail with a fourth expedition early in 1502, she was unwilling to help; though she was sufficiently his friend still to prevent others from hindering him; and he sailed for the last time in March 1502, to see his patroness no more; for when he came back, two years and nine months later, broken with injustice, and with death in his heart, Isabel the Catholic was dead.

Even greater sorrows than those of America came to Isabel in her last years, troubles that stabbed her to the very heart, and from which one of the great tragedies of history grew. From Flanders came tidings of grave import for the future of the edifice so laboriously reared by Ferdinand and Isabel. The heiress of Spain, the Archduchess Joan, with her cynical, evil-minded husband, Philip the Handsome, were daily drifting further away from the influence of Joan’s parents. Dark whispers of religious backsliding on the part of the Court of Brussels were rife in the grim circle of friars and devotees that accompanied Isabel. It was said that Joan and her husband openly slighted the rigid observance of religious form considered essential in Spain, and that the freedom of thought and speech common in Flanders was more to the taste of Joan than the terror-stricken devotion of her Inquisition-ridden native land. Isabel had dedicated her strenuous life and vast ability to the unification of the faith in Spain. She had connived at cruelty unfathomable, and had exterminated whole races of her subjects with that sole object. Throughout her realms and those of her husband no heresy dared now raise its head, or even whisper doubt; and the thought that free-thinking, mocking Burgundian Philip, with his submissive wife, so alienated from her own people that she refused to send a message of loving greeting to her mother, should come and work their will upon the sacred soil of Castile, must have been torture to Isabel. To Ferdinand it must have been as bad; for it touched him, too, in his tenderest part. His life dream had been to realise the ambitions of Aragon. For that he had plotted, lied, and cheated; for that he had plundered his subjects, kept his realms at war, bartered his children and usurped his cousin’s throne. But it would be all useless if Castile slipped through his fingers when his wife died, and his deadly enemy, his son-in-law, became king of Castile in right of his wife Joan.

The difficulty became more acute when Joan gave birth to her son at Ghent in February 1500, because, according to the law of succession, the child christened Charles, a name unheard of in Spain before, would inherit, not Castile and Leon alone, but Aragon as well, with Flanders, Burgundy, Artois, Luxembourg, the Aragonese kingdoms in Italy, and, worst of all, Austria and the empire. Where would the interests of Aragon, nay, even of Spain, be amongst such world-wide dominions; and how could such a potentate devote himself either to aggrandising Aragon, or to carrying the Cross into the dark places of Moorish Africa? What added to the bitterness in Ferdinand’s case was, that Philip was even now intriguing actively with the Kings of France, Portugal, and England against Aragon; and was, with vain pretexts, evading the pressing invitations of his wife’s parents to bring her to Spain, to receive with him the oath of allegiance as heirs of the realms.

It was necessary somehow to conciliate Philip and Joan before they went too far; for Philip’s plan, to marry the infant Prince Charles to a French princess, struck at the very root of Ferdinand’s policy. Envoy after envoy was sent to Flanders to expedite the coming of Philip and Joan, if possible, with the infant Charles; but the Archduke had no intention of becoming the tool of his astute father-in-law, and was determined to be quite secure before he placed himself in his power. He was anxious enough to obtain recognition as heir of Castile jointly with his wife, but desired to leave Spain immediately afterwards, which did not suit Ferdinand, who wished to have time to influence him towards his policy, and alienate him from his Flemish and French favourites.^[90] Joan herself flatly refused to come without her husband; of whom, with ample reason, she was violently jealous; and neither would allow the infant Charles to come without them. At length, after Joan had been delivered of her third child, a daughter named Isabel, the prayers and promises of Queen Isabel and her husband prevailed, and the Archduke and Archduchess consented to come to Spain. But it was under conditions that turned the heart of Ferdinand more than ever against his son-in-law. They would travel to Spain through France, and ratify in Paris the betrothal of their one-year old son Charles, heir of Spain, Flanders, and the empire, with Claude of France, child of Louis XII. Philip went out of his way during the sumptuous reception in Paris to show his submission to the King of France; and even did homage to him as Count of Flanders; but Joan, mindful for once, at least, that she belonged to the house of Aragon, and was heiress of Spain, refused all tokens implying her subservience.

On the 7th May 1502, Joan and her husband entered the imperial city of Toledo with all the ceremony that Castile could supply. At the door of the great hall in the Alcazar, Isabel stood to receive her heirs. Both knelt before her and tried to kiss her hand, but the Queen raised them, and embracing her daughter, carried her off to her private chamber. Soon afterwards the Archduchess and her husband took the oath as heirs of Castile in the vast Gothic Cathedral; and the splendid festivities to celebrate the event were hardly begun before another trouble came in the announcement of the death of Arthur, Prince of Wales, husband of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine. The event immediately changed the aspect of the game. The next heir of England was a boy of eleven, who might be married to a French princess, and thus cause one other blow to Ferdinand’s carefully arranged schemes. This made it more necessary than ever that Joan and Philip should be brought into entire obedience to Spanish views. War broke out between France and Spain at once, and strenuous efforts were made by Ferdinand to expel from Spain the councillors of Philip, who were known to be in the French interest.^[91] The Archduchess and her husband were then taken to Aragon, to receive the homage of the Cortes there as heirs of Ferdinand, and then Philip, in spite of all remonstrance, hurried back again to his own country. Isabel gravely took her son-in-law to task when he announced his intention to return to Flanders by land through France whilst Spain was at war. It was, she said, his duty to recollect, moreover, that he was, in right of his wife, heir to one of the greatest thrones in the world, and should stay at least long enough in the country to know the people and their language and customs. To her entreaties the Archduchess, now far advanced in pregnancy, and unable to travel, added her prayers and tears. But all in vain; Philip, against the respectful protest even of the Cortes, would go, and insisted upon travelling through France, the enemy of Spain.^[92] So, almost in flight, Philip of Burgundy crossed the frontiers of his father-in-law, leaving his wife Joan and their unborn child in Castile, in December 1502.

Never in their lives had Ferdinand and Isabel suffered such a rebuff as this. That the man, who on their death would succeed them, was a free-living German Fleming, who cared nothing for Spain, to promote whose glory they had lived and laboured so hard, was bitter enough for them. But that he should be so lost to all duty and respect towards them and to their country as to leave them thus, to rejoice with the enemy in arms against them, convinced them that under him and his wife Spain and the faith had nothing to expect but neglect and sacrifice for other interests. Isabel’s frequent conversations with her daughter Joan, during the months she had been in Spain, had more than confirmed the worst fears she had formed from the reports sent to her from Flanders. Joan, though of course a Catholic, obstinately refused to conform to the rigid ritual of Castile; and, both in acts and words, showed a strange disregard of, and, indeed, captious resistance to, her mother’s wishes. She was inconstant and fickle; sometimes determined, notwithstanding her condition, to go and rejoin her husband, sometimes docile and amiable.

It had become evident to Isabel and her husband not many weeks after Joan and Philip’s arrival, that these were no fit successors to continue the policy that was to make Spain the mistress of the world and the arbiter of the faith; and to the Cortes of Toledo, which took the oath of allegiance to Philip and his wife, it was secretly intimated that the Queen wished that, ‘if, when the Queen died, Juana was absent from the realms, or, after having come to them, should be obliged to leave them again, or that, although present, she might not choose, or might not be able to reign and govern,’^[93] Ferdinand should rule Castile in her name. This was a serious departure both from strict legality and from usage, and has been considered by recent commentators to indicate that, even thus early, Isabel wished to exclude her daughter from the throne, either for heresy or madness, or with that pretext. That Joan was hysterical, obstinate, and unstable, is evident from all contemporary testimony, and that she defied her mother in her own realm is clear from what followed; but it seems unnecessary to seek to draw from these facts the deduction that Isabel at this juncture meant to disinherit her daughter in any case. Philip’s flagrant flouting of what Isabel and her husband considered the best interests of Spain, and his laxity in religion, as understood in Castile, furnished ample reason for the desire on the part of Isabel, when she felt her health failing, to ensure, so far as she could do it, that the policy inaugurated by her and her husband should be continued by him after her death, instead of allowing Spain to be handed over by an absentee prince to a Flemish viceroy. The suggestion that Joan might not be able to govern, even if she was in Spain, was not unnatural, considering that her conduct, as reported to Isabel from Flanders, had certainly been strangely inconsistent, whilst her behaviour since she had arrived in Spain had not mended matters.^[94]

Joan gave birth in March 1503 at AlcalÁ de Henares to a son, who, in after years, became the Emperor Ferdinand; and immediately after the christening in Toledo Cathedral the Archduchess declared that she would stay in Spain no longer, but would join her husband in Flanders. Isabel humoured her as best she could, persuading her to accompany her from AlcalÁ to Segovia, on the pretext that it would be more easy to arrange there the sea voyage from Laredo. The Princess was held in semi-restraint under various excuses for a time, but at last she extracted from her mother a promise that she would let her go by sea (but not through France, with which they were still at war), when the weather should be fair, for it was still almost winter.

From Segovia the Queen took her daughter to Medina del Campo, as she said, to be nearer the sea; but there the worry of the situation threw Isabel into some sort of apoplectic fit, and for a time her life was despaired of. Ferdinand was with his successful army on the French frontier; and the physicians, in their reports to him of his wife’s illness, attribute the attacks she suffered entirely to the life that Joan was leading her. ‘The disposition of the Princess is such, that not only must it cause distress to those who love and value her so dearly, but even to a perfect stranger. She sleeps badly, eats little, and sometimes not at all, and she is very sad and thin. Sometimes she will not speak, and in this, and in some of her actions, which are as if she were distraught, her infirmity is much advanced. She will only take remedies either by entreaty and persuasion, or out of fear, for any attempt at force produces such a crisis that no one likes or dares to provoke it.’^[95] This trouble, the doctor adds, together with the usual constant worries of government, is breaking the Queen down entirely, and something must be done. The Secretary, Conchillos, writing at the same time, gives the same testimony. ‘The Queen,’ he says, ‘is better, but in great tribulation and fatigue with this Princess, God pardon her.’^[96]

Isabel soon had to travel to Segovia, after praying her daughter not to leave Medina until her father returned. But she took care to give secret instructions to the Bishop of Cordova, who had charge of Joan, ‘to detain her, if she tried to get away, as gently and kindly as possible.’ Nothing, however, short of force would suffice to prevent Joan from joining her husband, who, on his side from Flanders, constantly urged her coming, and protested against delay.^[97] At last Joan became so clamorous that a message was sent to her from her mother, saying that the King and herself were coming to see her at Medina, and ordering her not to attempt to leave until they arrived. Joan seems to have taken fright at this, and, horses being denied her, she attempted to escape alone and on foot from the great castle of La Mota, where she was lodged. Finding when she arrived at the outer moat that the gates were shut against her by the Bishop of Cordova, she fell into a frenzy and refused to move from the barrier where she was stayed. All that day and night, in the bitter cold of late autumn, the princess remained immovable in the open, deaf to all remonstrance and entreaty, refusing even to allow a screen of cloth to be hung for her shelter. Isabel was gravely ill at Segovia, forty miles away, but she instantly sent Joan’s uncle, Enriquez, to pacify the princess and persuade her at least to go to her rooms again. But neither he nor the powerful Jimenez, Cardinal Primate of Spain, could move her, and at last Isabel, sick as she was, had to travel to Medina, and prevailed upon her daughter again to enter the castle, where she remained on the assurance of the Queen that she should go and rejoin her husband in Flanders when the King arrived.

In the meanwhile peace was made with France, and Isabel and her husband tried their hardest to persuade Philip to send the infant Charles to Spain to replace his mother. Promise after promise was given that Charles should go to his grandparents; but Philip had no intention of entrusting his heir to Ferdinand’s tender mercies, and all the promises were broken. Isabel’s death was seen to be approaching, and already a strong Castilian party, jealous of Aragon and of the old King, was looking towards Isabel’s heiress in Flanders and drifting away from Ferdinand. The detention of Joan against her will at Medina was regarded sourly by Castilians generally, and at length the scandal had to be ended. In March 1504, the princess therefore was allowed to leave her place of detention at Medina, and after two months further delay in Laredo, took ship for Flanders, to see her mother no more.

No sooner was she safe in her husband’s territory than the plot that had long been hatching against her father came to a head. In September 1504 Philip, his father Maximilian, Louis XII., and a little later the Pope, joined in a series of leagues, from which Ferdinand was pointedly excluded. It was intended as a notice to Ferdinand, that when his wife died he would no longer be King of Spain, but only King of Aragon, unable to hold what he had grasped; and, though the wily King fell ill and was like to die at the news, he was not beaten yet, and in time to come was more than a match for all his enemies. But Isabel was sick unto death. A united orthodox Spain had been her life’s ideal. With labour untiring she and her husband had attained it, and now she saw the imminent ruin of her work through the undutifulness of her daughter’s foreign husband. It was no fault of Isabel’s, for she had been single-minded in her aims; but Ferdinand had been brought to this pass by his own overreaching cleverness. In yoking stronger powers than himself to his car he had enlisted forces that he could not control, and which were now pulling a different way from that in which he wanted to go. Those that he depended upon to be his prime instruments had been removed by death, whilst those who he had hoped to make subsidiary factors in his favour were now principals and against him.

The accumulating troubles at length, in the autumn of 1504, threw Isabel into a tertian fever, which was aggravated by the fact that Ferdinand, being also ill in bed, could not visit his wife. Isabel’s anxiety for her husband was pitiable to witness; and though her physicians assured her that he was in no danger, his absence from her bedside increased the fever and threw her into delirium. Symptoms of dropsy, and probably diabetes, since constant insatiable thirst and swelling of the limbs are mentioned as symptoms, ensued, and for three months the Queen lay gradually growing worse and worse. Rogations for her recovery were offered up in every church in Castile, but by her own wish, after a time, this was discontinued, and the heroic Queen, strong to the last, faced death undismayed, confident that she had done her best, yet humble and contrite. When the extreme unction was to be administered she exhibited a curious instance of her severe modesty, almost prudery, by refusing to allow even her foot to be uncovered to receive the sacred oil, which was applied to the silken stocking that covered the limb instead of to the flesh.

To the last she was determined that, if she could prevent it, Joan and her husband should not rule in Castile as absentee sovereigns whilst Ferdinand lived. Her will, which was signed in October, is a notable document, showing some of Isabel’s strongest characteristics. She would be buried very simply, and without the usual royal mourning, in the city of her greatest glory, the peerless Granada; ‘but if the King, my lord,’ desires to be buried elsewhere, then her body was to be laid by the side of his. Her debts were to be paid, and many alms distributed and religious benefactions founded, and all her jewels were to be given to Ferdinand, ‘that they may serve as witness of the love I have ever borne him, and remind him that I await him in a better world, and so that with this memory he may the more holily and justly live.’ What does not seem so saintly a provision was, that all the royal grants she had given, except those to her favourite Beatriz de Bobadilla, were cancelled on her death. With a firm hand she signed this will later in October 1504, providing in it also that her daughter Joan should succeed her on the throne of Castile:^[98] but before she died, almost indeed in the last act of her life, her fears for Spain conquered her love for her daughter. In a codicil signed on the 23rd November, three days before her death, she left to Ferdinand the governorship of Castile in the name of her daughter Joan; and enjoined him solemnly to cause the Indians of America to be brought to the faith gently and kindly, and their oppression to be redressed.

With trembling hands and streaming eyes she handed the codicil to Jimenez, solemnly entrusting him with the fulfilment of all her wishes, a trust which he obeyed far better than did her husband, and then Isabel the Catholic had done with the world. Thenceforward she was serene; eyewitnesses say as beautiful as in youth. ‘Do not weep,’ she said to her attendants, ‘for the loss of my body; rather pray for the gain of my soul.’

And so at the hour of noon, on the 26th November 1504, the greatest of Spanish queens gently breathed her last, a dignified, devout, great lady to the end. Days afterwards, when Ferdinand was busy plotting how he could oust his daughter from her heritage, the body of Isabel was carried across bleak Castile, with soaring crucifixes and swinging censers, by a great company of churchmen to far away Granada, there to lay for all time to come, under the shadow of the red palace that she had won for the cross. As the velvet hearse with the body of the Queen of Castile, dressed in death as a Franciscan nun, wound its way over the land she had made great, the wildest tempest in the memory of man roared her requiem. Earthquake, flood and hurricane, scoured the way by which the corpse was borne: skies of ink by night and day for all that three weeks’ pilgrimage lowered over the affrighted folk that accompanied the bier, convinced that heaven itself was muttering mourning for the mighty dead. But it is related that when at last Granada was reached, and the Christian mosque received the corpse of its conqueror, the glorious sun burst out at its brightest for the first time, and all the vega smiled under a stainless sky.

Isabel the Catholic was a great queen and a good woman, because her aims were high. She was not tender, or gentle, or what we should now call womanly. If she had been, she would not have made Castile one of the greatest powers in Europe in her reign of thirty years. She was not scrupulous, or she would not have been so easily persuaded to displace her niece the Beltraneja. She was not tender-hearted, or she would not have looked unmoved upon the massacre or expulsion, in circumstances of atrocious inhumanity, of Jews and Moors, to whom she broke her solemn oath upon a weak pretext. She was none of these pleasant things; nor was she the sweet, saintly housewife she is usually represented. If she had been, she would not have been Isabel the Catholic—one of the strongest personalities, and probably the greatest woman ruler the world ever saw: a woman whose virtue slander itself never dared to attack; whose saintly devotion to her faith blinded her eyes to human things, and whose anxiety to please the God of mercy made her merciless to those she thought His enemies.