Isabella and Ferdinand

Isabella and Ferdinand

The Catholic Monarchs

Second cousins marrying one another was not at all unusual in the fifteenth century. So, in the city of Valladolid, on October 19, 1469, a pair of teenagers were married, joining the Spanish Kingdoms of Castille and Aragon into a partnership, based solely on the union of the newlyweds. Isabella of Castille was eighteen years old; her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, was a year younger. The two met one another for the first time a mere four days before their wedding. Together, the struggles of these formidable individuals shaped the Iberian peninsula, for centuries to come; their reigns culminated in that eventful year of 1492, when they conquered the last Moorish Sultanate of Grenada, outfitted a Genoese sailor and navigator (named Cristobal Colon) with three ships for a journey into unknown western waters, and expelled tens of thousands of Spanish Jews from the peninsula, in a grim attempt at national unity through religious uniformity.
Before they came to dominate the peninsula, however, and take the first strides towards an empire, the couple first had to put their own houses in order. Their marriage was not zealously sought after by many within Spain, nor by the Kings of France or Portugal, for whom a union of the crowns would pose an obvious threat. For centuries, Spain had remained a disunited collection of kingdoms, both Christian and Muslim. Countless wars and internal rebellions had reduced the old Moorish hegemony down to a stick-thin little state of Grenada, by the late fifteenth century. In the north, meanwhile, the Christian kingdoms of old had solidified into the principal states of Castille and Aragon. Differentiating along political and mercantile lines, Castille controlled most of the geographical territory of Spain by the time of Isabella, but had fallen on hard times through civil war and the financial mismanagement of her brother, King Enrique IV. Aragon, by contrast, was a commercial power past its prime, one whose dominion stretched across the western Mediterranean. These holdings aside, Isabella and Ferdinand had to contend with opponents at home, before they could think of anything else.
Isabella inherited the crown of Castille from her brother in 1474, and immediately had to fight for it. Several nobles withdrew support, in favor of the claim of Enrique’s daughter, Joanna, who was backed by Portugal. The subsequent war was a narrow victory for Isabella and Ferdinand. The Portuguese recognized Isabella’s right to rule Castile, but won an enormous victory by blocking Spanish interference in the growing Portuguese trade on the shores of western Africa. This conundrum helped spur their outfitting of Columbus, over ten years later, in a bid to outflank the Portuguese by a route west across the Atlantic. This voyage unwittingly led to the Caribbean, and the rest is history.
Consolidating her power over Castille in the wake of the Portuguese war, Isabella valiantly brought to heel wayward cities - through charm, personality, and a brilliant strategic mind. Overcoming the natural obstacles of a ruling queen, in an age when the “general European consensus on the question of female rule was to avoid it whenever possible,” she personally took charge of peace negotiations with Portugal, while steadying Castile’s finances (which had teetered during the reign of her brother). Ferdinand, on the other hand, was busy in his own kingdom, doing battle with the French. His power in Castile was limited, as he was Isabella’s consort; in Aragon, however, he exercised his authority as its King, after the death of his father. In this realm, where Catalan and Aragonese was the lingua franca, a semi-constitutional framework of government existed. Ferdinand was King - true - but he was obliged to summon the regional Parliaments, or ‘Corts’, to vote in new laws and seek redress for grievances. In Aragon, Isabella’s power was curbed, but Ferdinand did not reign in the absolutist sense that his wife did in Castile. Married though they were, their kingdoms remained separate political entities until the early eighteenth century, although they were joined in common cause. This cause turned them towards the reduction of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain: Grenada.
Ending the Reconquista
Seven hundred years before Isabella and Ferdinand, an army of Muslim Berbers and Arabs invaded the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispana, and conquered it. The emirates that emerged from this conquest once held most of the peninsula in their grasp, but the stubborn Christian kingdoms, that surfaced in its wake, clung to their northern footholds. In the following centuries, the Emirate of Cordoba fractured into petty warring kingdoms, replaced by successive dynasties that proved unable to halt the methodical reconquest of the nascent Christian realms. The Emirate of Granada was all that remained, and Isabella and Ferdinand were determined to reduce it, and unite Spain under Catholic rule.
For ten years, the monarchs waged a methodical crusade, reducing Granadian fortresses, one by one, until they were posed to strike at Granada itself. Unable to hold out any longer, Sultan Muhammed XII surrendered his city in January, 1492. The seven hundred-year-old Reconquista was over, at last. But in the wake of their victory, Isabella and Ferdinand committed brutal acts, in their pursuit of a Catholically united Spain. In the same year, the monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree ordering, “the said Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return or come back to them or to any of them.” The purpose of the expulsion was to prevent the possibility of previously baptized Jews retrograding back into the old religion through pressure; it aligned with the earnest desires of the King and Queen to reduce Spain’s religious diversity, in the hope that a Catholic nation would breed unity and stability. Many among Spain’s Jewish elites underwent baptism in the months leading up to the deadline for removal; but upwards of forty thousand Jews, dramatically below the exaggerated numbers previously put forth, were expelled from the lands of their forefathers in one of the darkest moments in Spanish history.
The infamous inquisition was likewise formed under their auspices, subject to crown authority, rather than the Pope’s. Columbus’s voyages bore unexpected fruit, opening the floodgates to a hemisphere rich in diverse and sophisticated civilizations. The conquests that followed established Spain as a global empire and are, perhaps, the most enduring legacy of Isabella and Ferdinand - for they laid the foundations for all that came after.

Muslim armies from North Africa invaded Visigothic Spain early in the eighth century, wrestling the peninsula under its control. For the next seven hundred years, the Moorish kingdoms that emerged from this conquest grew and fluctuated. Often fighting against the Christian kingdoms to the north, and sometimes allying with them, the realm of ‘Al-Andalus’ was home to great thinkers and palaces of wonder. Life for religious minorities was - in many respects - prosperous, but also filled with persecution. Slowly, Moorish dynasties were pushed back from their deep inroads. This is called the Spanish Reconquista: a long, brutal series of wars, over seven centuries in length, that culminated in the victory of Isabella and Ferdinand before Granada, in 1492. Explain the significance of the centuries of struggle, in the formation of a dynastically united Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. For background, look here:

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