alongside Ferdinand. She built up a contingent
of artillery so powerful that it turned the art of
medieval warfare on its head. Thick castle
walls, previously a guarantee of safety,
crumbled before her cannon.
On 2 January 1492, the last Nasrid king
Boabdil was forced to leave the Alhambra,
leading his family through what is still known as
the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh. The Christian world
was delighted. In London, Henry VII ordered a
hymn of praise at St Paul’s. In Rome, a Spanish
cardinal called Rodrigo Borgia (father to the
infamous Cesare and Lucrezia) organised
bullfights and processions. Eight months later,
Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, putting a
Spaniard in the Vatican.
The remarkable year of 1492 brought yet
another move of momentous import. For
seven years, a colourful Genoese sailor called
Christopher Columbus had been in and out
of Isabella’s court, hawking plans for a
voyage into the unknown – by sailing west
across the ocean to what he assumed would
be the coast of Asia. He was turned down
several times but, apparently at Isabella’s
behest, there was a change of tack. He
needed only a modest sum of money for his
three small boats, and promised huge
returns. Instead of finding Asia, Columbus
bumped into the Caribbean islands. He was
not the first European to reach the Americas
(Nordic sailors had done so before), but
Isabella was the first monarch to claim landand order that it be colonised.
Columbus brought back tobacco and
hammocks, but also indigenous Taino
islanders – a people who would be wiped out
by disease, hunger and war. Isabella at first
approved of his plans to fund further
discoveries with slavery. But she was troubled
by whether – under church law – people from
the Eden-like islands that she now ruled could
be treated like black Africans, whom she had
no qualms about enslaving. It was one of the
few moral issues to weigh on her conscience.A QUEEN IN DECLINE
As Spain’s power increased and large parts of
Italy fell under its control, Isabella’s personal
and family problems grew. Her only son Juan
(“my angel”) died aged 19.
Her beloved first daughter, Isabella, died in
childbirth, leaving a baby grandson whom shecherished, but also watched die. Her three
other daughters were sent abroad (with
Catherine of Aragon marrying first Arthur,
Prince of Wales, and then his brother,
Henry VIII). The eldest of these – Juana ‘The
Mad’ – fought with her mother and looked set
to turn the crown of Castile over to her
Habsburg husband, Philip the Handsome,
Duke of Burgundy.
Yet, by the time she lay on her deathbed in
November 1504, Isabella knew that Castile
and Spain were transformed. “Everyone
agrees that the greater part of it all should be
attributed to her,” the Florentine ambassador,
and historian, Francesco Guicciardini
commented a decade later. Spain was
becoming Europe’s new superpower, to the
fury of France. Soon it would have the first
empire of lands on which, as England’s lord
high chancellor Francis Bacon commented,
“the sun never sets... but ever shines upon
one part or other of them: which, to say truly,
is a beam of glory”.
The focus of world power, trade and
technological progress moved slowly to the
Atlantic rim. The fortunes of what would
become known as western civilisation had
been turned around by Isabella, surely
Europe’s greatest ever queen. ßIsabella and Ferdinand conquer the Moorish fortress of Almeria, as depicted in a early 20th-century ceramic.She built up a
contingent of
artillery so powerful
that it turned the art
of medieval warfare
on its head
Giles Tremlett is author of Catherine of Aragon:
Henry’s Spanish QueenHISTORY