Titans of History

ISABELLA & FERDINAND

1451–1504 & 1452–1516

The King of France complains that I have twice deceived him. He lies, the fool; I have deceived him ten times and more.

Ferdinand

They were probably the most successful royal partnership of their era. Isabella was the pious, solemn, red-haired, and blue-eyed queen of Castile, one of the kingdoms that made up Christian Spain, while Ferdinand was the shrewd, crafty, ambitious king of Aragon, another Spanish kingdom, and the ideal Machiavellian monarch. Their marriage in 1469 effectively created the kingdom of Spain by uniting Aragon and Castile (though actually the kingdoms remained separate units). The formation of Spain was just one of the couples’ achievements. Spain, once almost completely ruled by the Muslims, who had created a blossoming Arab-Jewish culture, had been largely reconquered by crusading Spanish monarchs in what was known as La Reconquista. As the Christians gradually reconquered Spain, many of its Jews—known as the Sepharad, the Sephardis—and indeed Muslims, had converted to Christianity, or at least pretended to do so: these converts were called conversos. Clearly some remained Jews in secret but in all likelihood many converted wholeheartedly. Yet gradually the Christian powers in Spain became suspicious of these Jews as a taint in the blood of the Christians—were they really loyal? Were they traitors? The belief that they might represent a taint in the Christian bloodstream was one of the first examples of the racial anti-Semitism that resurfaced in the late nineteenth century. The Inquisition, led by Torqemarda and backed by Ferdinand and Isabella, began its investigations and tortures.

In 1492, they completed this process when they conquered the last Islamic principality, the Emirate of Granada, a triumphant moment for the couple because they were completing the last crusade. Both regarded themselves as crusaders and indeed Isabella was accustomed to rule from a military camp. The last emir of Granada surrendered on the understanding that Muslims would have freedom of worship. The monarchs would soon go back on this promise, forcing Muslims to convert to Christianity. Then, literally days later, the two Catholic Monarchs—a title awarded them by the Pope—issued their Alhambra Decree, which ordered the Jews of Iberia to either convert to Christianity or face expulsion. Already under sustained persecution, many Jews probably did now convert, but the vast majority—somewhere between 30,000 and 80,000—had to leave Spain, beginning one of the most traumatic experiences in Jewish life between the fall of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 and the Holocaust of the 20th century. It seems that Ferdinand had calculated that the Jews would simply convert and was surprised by Jewish loyalty to their faith. Either way, Ferdinand and Isabella set off a tumultuous movement of people: they also expelled the Jews from their other kingdoms—Ferdinand ruled swathes of Italy—and other monarchs in Europe followed suit, expelling their Jews too. The Jews moved gradually eastward, thousands of them ending up in Poland—then one of the most tolerant kingdoms of Europe—in Holland, and the eastern Mediterranean, where many were welcomed by the Ottoman sultans, who settled them in cities from the capital Istanbul to Salonika. These Jews added to the growing Jewish populations of Poland and Ukraine but also became the Jewish Sephardic communities of the Arab world: they often spoke Turkish, Arabic and their own special language—Ladino, a patois of Spanish and Hebrew.

That was not the last key decision of 1492—the Catholic Monarchs next agreed to fund the expedition of Christopher Columbus that discovered the New World and began the Spanish conquest of a new continent. Thus in many ways, the couple played a key role in the creation of the modern world.

Ferdinand was also king of Sicily and Naples and spent many of his later years campaigning in Italy, but he never gave up his crusading credentials. His ultimate aim was to liberate Jerusalem and indeed he claimed the title of king of Jerusalem, one still used by the king of Spain. He launched a series of attacks along the coast of Muslim North Africa, even conquering Tripoli in today’s Libya.

The couple married their daughter Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur, son of King Henry VII of England and after the prince’s death, she married his son and heir, Henry VIII, becoming the mother of Queen Mary I. When Isabella died in 1508, she was succeeded on the Castilian throne by their daughter Juana. Juana was married to Philip the Handsome, Habsburg duke of Burgundy and son of the Emperor Maximilian and they had a son, Charles of Ghent. But Juana the Mad was unbalanced; Philip the Handsome died young and so Ferdinand ruled Castile as regent until his death when the Spanish kingdoms along with vast Habsburg lands in Germany and the Low Countries as well as the new territories of America, were inherited by Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, who in his day was the most powerful monarch in the world.